Dopamine Overflowing
At last, the Poko Server shut down.
Virtual streamers cried out for freedom in voices drained to the bone. Team 6 claimed the final victory, but what did that even mean? Teams 1, 4, 5, and 6 had formed an alliance to take the win — the whole thing fizzled out without any real punch.
On Pan-beo-gal, the Poko Server remained a punching bag right to the bitter end. Over on the FM Community, people seemed to want the whole mess scrubbed from their memory; a handful of posts about the winning team trickled up, and then the subject vanished entirely.
But when the shadows deepen, the light stands out all the sharper. The Poko Server's collapse funneled every scrap of remaining attention straight into Rena World — the only server left standing. For the V-fans especially, there was nowhere else to go. Their only option was to swarm in and pray their main streamer got picked as one of Rena World's new residents.
And it wasn't just the V-fans pouring in. Heavy hitters like Mist, Haisu-ya, and Dananyang joined Rena World as well. Their fans followed, of course — and once the viewership numbers started looking respectable, even the high-end floating audience began to take notice. The constant viral buzz on the FM Community didn't hurt either. Rena World had become a hot topic not only among casual viewers but among streamers themselves.
Rena-ttang wasn't about to let an opportunity like that slip. She shoveled fuel onto the fire with both hands and stoked the flames higher.
"We're recruiting new residents. Drop a comment, everyone. And partner streamers — there's a VIP track for you, so feel free to leave a private message. No pressure."
Streamers stampeded into the comments. Rena-ttang had well and truly caught her wave.
Ah. So Rena World has finally locked itself in as a fixture.
She announced that this Saturday would host an expanded second Purge Day — and in the same breath, she brought up expulsions. Every resident of Rena World, she declared, was required to own a house. Anyone who failed to meet that standard would be kicked out.
"I'll give you one week. That should be plenty, right? I'm not asking for anything unreasonable…"
Viewers hungry for dopamine swarmed in to back her up. Wait — you still don't even have a house on the server? Residents with no love for the place can get out!
That was the moment the first true server dogs were born — a pejorative for the toxic viewers who fixated on a server itself rather than any individual streamer. Later on, they would sink their teeth into the Minecraft server Yu Seona opened and refuse to let go. Maybe no one can resist the dopamine hit that comes from a civil war.
Come to think of it… how is V-topia doing?
Wait — today's the final audition?
I'd been so buried in the Poko Server and Rena World that I hadn't paid it any attention at all. All right then. Today's the day.
A fresh hit of dopamine had just arrived.
There was a reason V-topia generated so little buzz among the V-fans. Even among streamers who all looked like small-time nobodies from the outside, a strict hierarchy still existed — the same way every Wooga-dol audition contestant got stamped with a permanent label. First-round reject. Second-round reject. Third-round reject. Final-stage participant.
By that metric, the V-topia contestants — a handful of exceptions aside — had almost no name recognition. A fair number of them had already washed out of the Wooga-dol audition in round one. And as I'd mentioned before, launching so late as a second-wave project was another major handicap. The virtual pie was already thin, and Freeca, Decrescendo, and the rest had carved off a substantial chunk of it. What remained wasn't much.
Just hearing the situation was enough to make your stomach drop. But who had planned V-topia in the first place? Yu Seona — one of Pangea TV's solid mid-tier veterans, a streamer with deep connections across the big-name corporate talent. To break through this crisis, she decided to play a cheat code.
She brought in Park Bong-sik as a final-round judge. And she didn't stop there — she handed him a free-pass ticket, planting pure immersion bait for his entire fandom. It was a bold move, the kind of risk that set her apart from Ssa-yo, who preferred to keep every variable under his own control.
The moment the stream went live, Park Bong-sik's fandom ballooned the viewer count past ten thousand. The problem was that — unlike the Wooga-dol audition — the overwhelming majority of those viewers were fans of human streamers. From the jump, toxic chatters started trash-talking virtual streamers, demanding to know why Park Bong-sik was even participating in content like this. Only after the mods started mass-banning people did the chat quality start to look halfway decent.
"Aigoo, good to see you. Good to see you."
The camera came on to reveal Park Bong-sik strolling in at his leisure with a coffee in hand, while Yu Seona was already seated and waiting. A quick round of greetings. Since Park Bong-sik had an afternoon schedule, they agreed to keep things moving.
"So I actually did some homework on V-topia before coming."
"What? You actually studied?"
"Yep, yep. Looked into the people who made it to the final round. By the way — how many people applied to V-topia total?"
"Total applicants? I checked and even I was shocked. A hundred and forty people applied."
"Whaaaat!? A hundred and forty?"
Park Bong-sik's signature over-the-top reaction detonated on cue. The chat flooded with laughter.
Highlighting that massive applicant pool right from the start — it was clearly a deliberate move to pump up V-topia's prestige.
"Wait, there are that many virtual streamers on Pangea TV? A hundred and forty?"
"I was surprised too, but there are even more than that. I checked online — around six or seven hundred right now? But Rabbit TV supposedly has close to four thousand, so by comparison we're still just learning to walk."
"Whoa, the virtual market is actually insane. Oh, and among the applicants, there was someone I'd done a CK with before. Choi Eun-bin, right? I think she was basically the first one to cross over into virtual."
"That's right. She really cashed in on that first-mover advantage."
"No, seriously, I nearly had a heart attack. I'm browsing streams and suddenly a virtual pops up with five, six thousand people watching — I thought I'd wandered onto the wrong platform."
Talk about big-name streamer polish. His banter never hit a snag. And he wasn't just freestyling either — he casually slipped in promotional beats for V-topia, then leveraged his "homework" to spotlight the contestants' strengths. Damn. So this was the power of connections? Pulling this much lip service out of the man they called the King of Pangea TV.
"But Seona noona — what made you start V-topia in the first place? Huh? Does virtual actually make money?"
"It's not about the money. If you really dig into it, I started out as a no-cam streamer myself. A Dullahan, they call it — just slap a drawn character on screen and go live. Back then there was no virtual tech, so I didn't have a choice. I've been interested for a while, but I couldn't exactly just show up one day going, 'Hey, it's me, Seona-jjang~' and start virtual streaming, you know?"
"Yeah, fair."
"So I figured I'd build a virtual crew, get everyone tangled up and mixed together, and my fans would get used to virtual that way. And once I get older and start aging out, I can rebrand the nickname and switch over to virtual."
"Whoa! You're painting that big a picture? Seona noona's got a plan for everything, doesn't she? A plan for everything."
Park Bong-sik clapped over and over, looking genuinely impressed.
"There's one more thing I'm curious about, though. I've done a few CKs with virtual streamers, right? So why is everyone's candy power so ridiculous? Huh? The funding just pours out. You know who I mean — Seo-a, Ori-koong, all of them."
"Bong-sik, I've been watching virtual streams too, and I noticed something. Those people broadcast exactly the way we did in our early days."
"Our early days?"
"Yeah. They treat every single fan like they're precious, and they take care of them accordingly."
"Whoa, so that's why the fans get so invested. They're dumping funding just to prop up their main streamer's pride."
"Exactly, exactly. That's how I see it too."
"That kind of beginner spirit and sincerity really does matter. Look at us now. Even a hundred-candy or thousand-candy donation and we just half-stand up and go, 'Aigoo, thank you,' and call it done. Anyway, so that's the deal, huh? Guess I need to do more CKs with virtual streamers."
"Me too, me too. Last time with Ori-koong was great. We cooked through forty thousand candies twice."
"Damn! I remember that. Ori-koong is the absolute best. She's the Koongmin Bank, the Koongmin Bank. I lost almost a hundred thousand candies to Seo-a, but I took eighty thousand off Ori-koong. Speaking of which, what's Ori-koong up to these days? I kinda want to do a CK with her again."
Out of nowhere, Ori-koong was getting publicly roasted on V-topia's final audition stream. The audition hadn't even started yet — and already the dopamine was overflowing.