A Delightful Sub-Mod Salary.jpg (Part 1)

Ever since the gacha system was introduced to the marketplace, the board's refresh rate had gone through the roof. The vast majority of posts revolved around rolling the lottery, likely fueled by the fact that I had seeded the prize pool with unlisted marketplace goods that no one had ever seen before.

I hadn't dialed the drop rates to be utterly atrocious either. A single pull cost the equivalent of ten thousand won in modern currency, while a ten-pull ran for ninety thousand won. To make it fair, I created distinct rarity tiers and generously stuffed the pool with intermediate prizes.

The variety was expansive, too.

“All I have to do is grab thirty-thousand-won items from the store and slot them into the mid-tier pool.”

Red ginseng gift sets, assorted tea bag collections, and even sturdy metal school chairs were added into the mix. In this otherworldly setting, each of those items commanded exorbitant prices for wildly unpredictable reasons, which kept the hype train endlessly fueled instead of fizzling out as a passing fad.

Even my sub-moderators showered me with glowing praise. There was a reason modern capitalist societies milked this model dry to the very bone marrow; to medieval denizens starved of dopamine, the gacha was nothing short of the ultimate devil's temptation.

“Wait... this is bad.”

The problem was that it had literally become the devil's snare. Within a single day—no, in barely half a day—users thoroughly wrecked by gambling addiction began crawling out of the woodwork. If this kept up, the rift beasts would be cheering and throwing a standing ovation. Without a moment's hesitation, I hammered out an official announcement.

Normalization of the gacha system. With those safeguards in place, the frequency of draws steadied, and the tragic posts about users bankrupting their entire livelihoods vanished from the board.

“It’s not like I’m hurting for Dango anyway.”

I had plenty of other revenue streams besides the gacha. Having set reasonable boundaries, I assumed the lottery craze would gradually simmer down. But just as the flames began to subside, a brand-new log was tossed straight onto the fire...

“Why the hell is she doing that?”

My sub-mod had fallen hopelessly into the gambling trap.

The users dove headfirst into the marketplace's updated system. And right alongside them, charging at the very forefront, was our proud, long-eared assistant moderator.

Full-Health Elf was hopelessly, thoroughly hooked. I had figured she would tap out after one or two tries, but she stubbornly ground her way up to nine consecutive ten-pulls. The outcome was a total, unmitigated trainwreck.

I stepped in and dropped a comment to talk her down, but Full-Health Elf had already tossed her reason out the window.

She ruthlessly exhausted her daily allowance, maxing out all ten sessions to rack up a staggering one hundred pulls in total. And then...

She actually pulled it off.

It was a legendary spectacle on par with an underdog nation clawing its way into the World Cup semifinals. For that fleeting moment, users set aside their petty jealousy and erupted into genuine, roaring applause. But the celebration didn't last long before friction naturally began to stir across the gallery.

The conspiracy theorists had arrived right on cue, insisting that I had rigged the backend to grant Full-Health Elf her jackpot on her final pull. And that wasn't the only angle being pushed.

The sentiment rapidly morphed into resentment, complaining that someone who already received extravagant perks was stealing opportunities right out of the mouths of ordinary users.

In the blink of an eye, the entire gallery plunged into utter bedlam. Under normal circumstances, faced with backlash of this magnitude, an ordinary community manager would have panicked, unsure of how to stem the bleeding. Had it been the Full-Health Elf of the early days, she might have crumbled under the pressure. But having weathered countless Tactical Nukes of grotesque internet horror, she had evolved into a hardened veteran.

Her strategy was sheer, unadulterated contempt and mockery. And why wouldn't it be? She didn't receive a single copper of a salary in the first place.

She was merely an unpaid indentured servant, drafted against her will to wrestle day in and day out with eye-searing shock content. The sum total of her miserable, blue-badged existence amounted to occasionally wheedling a can of Coca-Cola or a bottle of soju out of me.

Naturally, the gallums flatly refused to believe it. And why would they? Who in their right mind would believe that someone would voluntarily purge explicit dwarf porn memes and grotesque nude beast pictures completely free of charge? It defied every shred of common sense.

The kicker was that whether they believed it or not, it was the stone-cold truth.

As the chilling realization slowly set in, a stunned murmur rippled through the forum. And just as predictably, the crosshairs of outrage immediately pivoted away from the sub-mod and aimed straight at me—the one who had appointed her.

“Hmm.”

To be fair, it wasn't like I hadn't thought about it myself. This wasn't some casual neighborhood board; it was a colossal, world-spanning gallery, and there were only two assistant moderators keeping the floodgates shut. There obviously had to be some form of compensation.

“Giving them hard currency is out of the question, though.”

The instant money changed hands, it would cease to be an authentic internet forum. To the sub-mods, it would stop being a voluntary pastime and transform into an actual job. People didn't warn against turning hobbies into labor for nothing.

“Still, leaving them with nothing feels wrong too...”

After agonizing over the dilemma, a brilliant flash of inspiration struck me.

Come to think of it, there was one more assistant moderator. Vampire Till I Die had been uncharacteristically silent throughout the entire controversy. Was it because she was the ancient mistress of a desolate castle, rolling in Dango, and simply couldn't care less?

That assumption, however, proved to be completely wrong.

Gotjukheup had succumbed completely to the gambling bug. She had long since burned through her daily allowance, and on top of that, blown through all one hundred draw tickets I had handed out as compensation. The outcome, of course, was an absolute, unmitigated catastrophe.

Having squandered her entire stack down to a final bottle of 500ml water, Gotjukheup broke her prolonged silence in the chat.

I recalled hearing somewhere that among hardcore gambling addicts, there were those who tracked down game developers in real life with murder in their eyes.

“Uh-oh.”

A sudden, icy chill crept slowly down my spine.