The Ranking Upheaval
Antares, who until now had held the undisputed number-one spot, plummeted to fourth. Betelgeuse, who had been grinding through a miserable existence, shot all the way to first.
On top of that, a bizarre phenomenon unfolded in which the rankings of every other established "clan leader" ranker rose all at once.
[Screenshot of the ranking upheaval announcement.jpg]
What even is the criteria for this? Grand Cross kill-steal farming?
Rankings just randomly flipped out of nowhere lmao
Look, if it was only the top 10 shifting around like that, I wouldn't even say anything
[Before the event, sitting inside the top 500.jpg]
[After the event, after the ranking rewrite, completely vanished from the top 1,000.jpg]
But why the hell did MY ranking disappear too?
[Screenshot of the ranking announcement.jpg]
I'm not joking — something is seriously off right now
Even looking at Betelgeuse, the amount of damage she personally put into the Grand Cross was tiny
She was busy commanding from the rear, so Betelgeuse and her officer-tier people basically put out almost no DPS
But if you look at the rankings now, every single Loki Clan officer shot up the board
Meanwhile Antares personally led Yormungand-class ships straight into the fight and hammered the Grand Cross with insane damage — and his rank dropped instead
And it's not just that. Everyone knows Snow Leopard and Raksha went absolute dual-headed chaos mode in the Central Zone
But when the rankings dropped, Raksha, who was sitting at second, vanished entirely, while Snow Leopard — who mostly just barked orders and chipped in with scrap damage — went up
The userbase began pouring out an enormous amount of complaints about the ranking situation that had, quite literally, undergone a cataclysmic upheaval out of nowhere.
And it wasn't only the solo players and clan "member" users who had mass-dropped off the rankings and were now boiling over with resentment.
The clan leaders and so-called "commander-type" users who had abruptly skyrocketed up the board were every bit as confused.
[Screenshot from some clan's chat room of the clan leader grumbling that this is completely insane.jpg]
fr
He's saying all he did was sit there and watch the clan members shit themselves fighting, so what the hell is this
[Screenshot of celebrating clan members and Arcadia spamming nothing but question marks in chat.jpg]
You can tell from stuff like this
It's less pure celebration and more everyone going, "Wait, why me?"
Some people say otherwise, but most of what I saw was exactly that
And so the gallery kept spitting out all kinds of scattered talk, the back-and-forth over the rankings never quite dying down.
Of course, as is always the way of the world, once enough time passed and the users' excitement began to cool…
[Screenshot of the ranking announcement.jpg]
Once my head cooled off a bit, if you try to quantify the command side of things, it roughly lines up
Plus someone mentioned this, but honestly it feels like the order people helped drive off the Grand Cross got factored into the rankings to some degree too?
Looking at it that way
It actually seems pretty fair overall
You could ask what happens to solo players, but except for a few of the old solo rankers, basically everyone else already joined a clan
So maybe those users' performances got rolled into clan or zone results and then piled onto the clan leader users, y'know
[Image of a toad with a cigarette clamped in its mouth letting out a huge sigh]
The gallery went nuclear over our ranking formula
Then it turns out the judgment was actually extremely fair, so they just evolved into burning themselves down on their own?
Are you people idiots or what?
They talked it out among themselves — "So basically it's roughly like this!" — arbitrarily decided they understood reality, and the mood settled down.
But no sooner had the atmosphere cooled than a second message appeared before our users' eyes…
And it was a message no one had expected in the slightest.
Commander Icarus has single-handedly captured the Level 9 stronghold Daedalus Research Fortress in the Central Zone!