Compensate! Compensate!
Among the viewers who drifted in after the dark age of Knight Rise, a few of them always end up nursing the same question. How did a streamer with this much talent fail to blow up for an entire year?
She's funny. Her mechanics are there. Her voice is good. She even has the looks. Was Knight Rise really so dull that none of that could matter? Judging by the edited videos up on YouTube, it doesn't seem remotely that bad.
But the old salts know. They remember what Marchen looked like in those days—the scraps of that era she has barely shown anyone since Knight Rise shut down.
The moment the true shape of Knight Rise's final endgame content went public, the player base cursed it into the ground. The difficulty was enough to make even launch players who had poured serious money into the game click their tongues, and a single run devoured an absurd amount of time without being particularly fun in the first place.
It took a month before that universally reviled final content had its difficulty adjusted. In that month, the number of people who cleared it could be counted on one hand—and one of those few who cleared the pre-nerf final content was Marchen herself.
To beat content that demanded you grind your hours into paste, she devoted most of every stream to the final content. Viewers? Ground down and gone, obviously. Donations? They crawled in, if they came at all. Even so, Marchen had exactly one reason to keep throwing herself at it.
Competitive pride. The very same venomous, vicious streak a veteran viewer had named in a donation, back when Marchen succeeded at the full-clear mission for the mint-choco tarantula-fry Powerade rice bowl.
The engine is a nightmare to turn over. The conditions for it catching? Even Marchen herself doesn't really know. Situations that look identical at a glance will sometimes catch and sometimes won't, depending entirely on the mood of the moment. But the instant that engine turns over, nobody can stop it. Competitive pride, once it catches fire, is viciously, stubbornly hard to put out.
And to the profound regret of the Marchen diehards, whenever she was playing Knight Rise, the engine on that competitive pride caught disturbingly well. The combination of that pride and Knight Rise became a splendid blender that chewed every incoming viewer to paste. Spend day after day repeating something with hardly anything worth watching, and how are the new viewers supposed to survive?
“Aaaah!! A crit, of all places, right there?! I was almost done!!!”
And now that new-viewer blender was trying to roar back to life. Of course, this time it wasn't paired with Knight Rise but with a game still eating well and living easy into its fourth anniversary, so the performance had been downgraded—
Even downgraded, it was apparently plenty for viewers who had never known the Marchen of that era.
And so the No-Spend Special Training, hijacked out of nowhere by a flare of competitive pride, came—against everyone's expectations—to shimmer right on the verge of success.
…Of course, if you considered that the ultimate purpose of this training had been to cultivate a satisfaction ability, then this particular session had to be judged a complete failure.
An overwhelming gap in specs.
An SRPG where my superior mechanics—me, holder of a Raider closed-beta boss First Clear and a hidden clear of Witch and Tentacle Princess on Purgatory difficulty—got no chance to show off at all. A genre where the only thing you can contest is big-brain play.
Even so, at the end of nine hours of struggle.
“I wonnnnn!!!!!”
On a starter character, against enemies sitting on a brutal spec gap, and even after slamming into the daily growth cap the company had built to keep the content from running dry—unable to grow another inch today.
Even so.
“I did ittttt!!!!!”
“What?! Trash at games? Then prove it if you're so mad?! Did you see that? Did you see?! Mechanics, and then the big brain on top of them—I ‘proved’ both, perfectly, didn't I? From now on, anyone who calls me trash at games is getting their entire argument ground to dust!!!!!! If you want to argue, go clear it under conditions way worse than mine and come back!!!!”
“Thank you for the retraction! And thank you for the compliment. Anyway, I proved it, and the No-Spend Special Training is a success too!”
An extremely satisfying result. If you set aside the fact that that damned competitive pride had dragged me into an extension stream that was never on the schedule. …Tomorrow morning was as good as deleted.
I was thinking that, and had just started getting ready to end the broadcast, when it happened.
……Huh?
Wait. That's right, isn't it?
“There was no rule like that! Honestly, if you ask whether I achieved the goal, then no, I didn't—but even so, this is too far! I clearly said the penalty was for when I spent 220,000 won or more! If I pulled something like this, you people would be foaming at the mouth and seizing! This is a double standard!!!!”
In the end, after a fierce back-and-forth, I went and changed the stream title.
Honestly, I'm not entirely in the clear either. I didn't break the rules, but there's still such a thing as an unspoken rule, right?
For all the viewers memeing it into a viral bit, the heart of this content was me thrashing around, trying to feel as satisfied as possible on a free-to-play account. The moment it suddenly mutated into Kyeonwang content—a marathon streamed until the clear—I had well and truly fallen off that heart.
“So I'm willing to take about one step back and compromise. But I think the Bunny Boing is too much. I didn't spend a single won!”
Saying that, I fired about four rounds of desk shotgun. Not keyboard shotgun.
Hmm.... Too cold to swat them all down flat.
Today's content had pulled in quite a bit more cash than usual. Even after it mutated into a Kyeonwang, I'd made a cozy sum off video donations. But eating the penalty in full when I hadn't even failed still wasn't to my taste. So then....
“...If I hit 150,000 subscribers, I'll make a pledge for the 150k celebration: I'll wear bunny pajamas and sing a bunny nursery rhyme. Deal?”
These people were having the time of their lives. Absolutely living.
“Anyway, agreement reached! Bang, bang, bang! It's late, so I'll be heading off! See you tomorrow!!!”
And that was that.
For the first time in my life, I had made a promise pegged to a subscriber goal.