Those Bastard Operators
"You absolute bastards!!!!!"
At my sudden roar, Jessica — who'd been about to get on with her usual work — and every last mob NPC scattered around the command center all turned to stare at me in shock.
But the operators' little habit of dumping their own screw-ups on the players had me genuinely, sincerely pissed.
And I wasn't the only one feeling it.
Wanting to share the rage, I opened the gallery window — and the second I stepped inside:
— Euthanasia for the players… the only salvation…(58,618)
The gallery's on absolute fire.
What I was looking at was a completely different level of meltdown from last time — a full-blown grill with the heat cranked all the way up.
Of course, the people actually losing their minds were still only a portion of the userbase. There was always the chance that this flood of posts and comments was just shitposting trolls running wild again, same as before.
So I grabbed a few posts at random and checked them.
Posts ripping into the operators made up the vast majority of the gallery page, just like I'd expected…
But separately from that, the players who'd been grinding trust scores from the start were doing the opposite of the angry mob — they were out here praising the operators' decision.
What the hell is even going on.
And there was plenty more where that came from. The whole thing was pure chaos, so I scrapped my plan to share my irritation and just sat there for a moment, watching the players fire off every meme in the book.
Why is it that nothing I know ever lines up properly?
At this rate, players who didn't know me would keep calling me a hardcore veteran or whatever. But as I'd already admitted to myself last time, the only reason my ranking was absurdly high was pure luck — stumbling into Marianne, the real Pirate Empress, during the "Pirate Raid" event, then petting her into devotion until the rewards rolled in.
Bluntly speaking, if you stripped away everything else and measured pure player-versus-player fleet strength, I was sitting somewhere around the rank 20,000–30,000 range.
If a real hardcore veteran ever came after me — even with the pirate fleet on permanent standby to protect my base — some fossil who'd been stacking intel in this game for years would show up, analyze my fleet and supers down to the bone, and counterpick me into oblivion. Those spine-ripping old-guard veterans would ravage my precious fleet and base without a second thought. That much was a given.
I sat there turning it over for a long while, and eventually I reached a firm conclusion.
Living off low-tier quest clears alone is over. I have to raise my trust score, no half-measures.
And while I was at it, keep cussing out the operators under my breath.
These bastards. Now, of all times, they decide to drop a "normal" update and call it a day.
A little later.
"This really isn't easy, Commander."
"You too, huh? Yeah, me too."
Starting with Jessica's one-line verdict after she'd heard why I'd been screaming, the two of us put our heads together and kept grinding through the problem of raising trust scores and securing reward points.
But no matter how hard we thought, nothing resembling an answer came out of it. As I'd mentioned earlier, the root of every problem was that I simply had too few supers and too few ships.
In terms of raw performance, my supers were right up there with the absolute top of the gacha pool. So despite all my whining a moment ago, actual combat wasn't the real issue.
The problem was that I only had four of those absurdly strong supers.
"And that's not the only problem, is it, Commander?"
"Yeah. Aside from the Overseer, every last ship is a standard model…"
I nodded heavily at Jessica's point that the ship pool was a disaster too.