Many Resolutions
Wednesday, December 28th.
There wasn't much left of 2022.
The Christmas carols that had been ringing through the streets were fading, gradually giving way to the thick atmosphere of year-end.
Still, relative to the time remaining, plenty still awaited us.
The 29th is the final Best Streamer selection of the year. Then the 30th is the Pangea TV Year-End Awards, and the 31st is the last day of the year.
Every single one of them was a major event I couldn't afford to miss.
Especially tomorrow's Best Streamer selection — that was critical.
Next month, in January, an all-time candy donation party was going to break out in Rena World. If I failed to pin on a Best Streamer badge on the 29th, every candy donated in January would have to be cashed out at an extra 10% loss.
People sometimes asked whether you could just apply for cash-out after becoming a Best Streamer, but the candy exchange rate applied based on the moment the candy was donated.
That meant any candy received before earning the Best Streamer badge would all convert at the 60% rate.
A 10% difference might look trivial, but using Park Na-na — the first virtual streamer to join the million-candy club in January — as a benchmark, you'd be watching seventy million won shrink into sixty million. A sight that made your blood run cold.
That was how massive a 10% gap really was.
And on the 29th, the two from our V-Live crew challenging for Best Streamer were Miho and Lucy.
Unfortunately, our youngest, Mayo, still hadn't hit the 500 broadcast hours required for Best Streamer eligibility, so she had to swallow her tears.
"Mayo is being bullied inside the crew. Mayo will expose this fact on stream, pull aggro, and use it as the springboard for Mayo's rise to glory — that is so."
"Mayo, want me to smack you with a mayonnaise lid until you come to your senses?"
Our Mayo, suffering not from middle-school syndrome but high-school syndrome.
With the new year about to dawn, the thought that Mayo would still be a minor next year made me realize just how absurdly talented she was for her age.
What the hell had I even been doing at eighteen?
Anyway, on the 29th I'll just do a solo stream, then hop into their rooms and fire off some celebration candy once the two of them get their Best Streamer badges. On the 30th we can do a group watch of the Pangea TV Year-End Awards.
The real key was the 31st.
The final day that would close out the year.
If you just let a day like that slide by, the fans would inevitably feel shortchanged.
Especially early in a crew's formation. A good analogy would be… like a couple that just started dating?
Everyone's been there, right?
That sweetness of early romance.
Couples who treat the 22nd and the hundred-day mark as absolute basics, then go on to celebrate every single anniversary under the sun — Valentine's, White Day, Pepero Day, the works.
In a way, the early days of a crew were similar.
A period when streamers and fans alike were bursting with energy, shouting that together they could accomplish anything.
With that blazing passion, they tried to cover everything and take on every challenge.
In that sense, the first year-end after forming a crew was a day of real significance.
Well… you've got to make the most of it while you can. This too will dull eventually.
In the end, streaming was just like dating.
As you grew familiar with each other, the heat cooled off, replaced by a sense of stability and comfort.
Fans and streamers alike naturally settled into that.
Which was why new blood was absolutely essential if a stream was going to last long-term.
Fresh newbies improved the water quality and injected new life into things.
That's way too far off for now, though. That's a worry for year two or three of streaming at the earliest.
Anyway, better take care of the present before fretting about the future.
So what content would actually suit a year-end crew stream?
To be honest, I already had something in mind.
I wasn't a regressor for nothing.
Looking ahead into the future, there were a few year-end broadcast concepts other crews had rolled out.
If I just copy-copy-room-room the good ideas from those, something usable would materialize in an instant.
When the crew members saw my proposals, they raved that I was a walking idea bank.
Honestly, it stung my conscience a little. Made me a bit embarrassed.
Of course, as a thoroughly corrupted working adult, that kind of conscience was none of my damn business.
The truth was, most internet broadcast content had already shown up on TV programs first.
The entire streaming industry was basically one giant copy-copy-room-room operation.
Yeah. That was how I thought about it as I threw myself into preparing the year-end content.
"Yes, hello. This is Seo Min-ah speak— Ah! Yes, yes. I'm the streamer Seo-a. Pardon? Really?"
A call had come in from Pangea TV.
Even before my regression, virtual streamers who had received calls from Pangea TV weren't unheard of.
Take Park Na-na of the Decrescendo crew, for example.
Seeing her thrive without any support, on a level that rivaled Freeca, Pangea TV had reportedly approached her with something resembling an MCN contract.
It had been a solo offer, and she'd refused unless the entire crew was included.
Beyond Park Na-na, quite a few virtuals had received one proposal or another from Pangea TV's side.
Especially once Rabbit TV Korea shut down its service and the Great Migration era began, the platform had actively courted the heavier-hitting virtual streamers.
Of course, the new competing platforms had done the same — but the point was, they had an aggressive sales mindset.
Still, I never expected the same kind of offer to come my way.
Ah — of course, there was one other piece of good news besides that particular offer, but that one was a secret for now.
A solo MCN contract… the exact same proposal they made to Park Na-na before my regression.
Once the call ended, the first thing that hit me was pride.
So this was how much recognition I'd earned from Pangea TV.
Sure, by crew average we still couldn't match Decrescendo or Freeca — but looking at streamers as individuals, my current weight class ranked among the top five across all virtuals.
And now my name recognition was even starting to edge past Freeca. Rena-ttang still held first place, but I'd firmly locked down second in favorites across the entire virtual scene.
Favorites — one of the key metrics for a streamer's name recognition.
I'd already reached 8,500.
As the admin of Rena World, Rena-ttang had been making massive waves lately. She'd become the first virtual streamer to break 10,000 favorites, and now sat at 14,700, so the gap had widened enough to dim my achievement a little — but second place was still a hell of an accomplishment.
Come to think of it, Rena-ttang had quietly racked up a lot of "first" titles.
She'd go on to more or less abandon virtual streaming, which made it a bit of a mixed bag, but she was also the first virtual to hit 100,000 favorites, and she even earned a Partner Streamer badge.
Considering that even through 2025, no virtual outside the major corporate virtual crews on Rabbit TV had ever received a Partner Streamer badge, that was a genuinely staggering achievement.
That was how highly Pangea TV valued Rena World's contributions.
After the Wooga-dol audition, the virtual scene on Pangea TV had been wilting again for lack of new momentum.
On top of that, the platform still carried a deep-seated culture of shunning no-cam streamers.
Rena World had solved both problems at once.
Looking at a track record like that, few people had ever been handed as many opportunities as Rena-ttang.
Before Freeca and Decrescendo, the one that had briefly dominated Pangea TV's virtual scene was the old Rena Universe.
More than twenty virtual streamers had poured in all at once and opened the eyes of natives who'd never even heard of virtual streaming.
Then came the conflict with the company.
And in the name of protecting her own pride, she'd torn it all down.
Her trajectory after Rena World was the same story.
She'd pinned on a Partner Streamer badge and gained a level of name recognition no other virtual streamer could touch.
But a string of verbal missteps and assorted karmic debts steadily eroded public goodwill.
She only held on as long as she did because she was the server admin. The real problem came the moment even that server's success started to fail…
The overture to that collapse was Rena World 2.
It had clearly succeeded in the early hype phase, but complaints about sluggish content updates and poor management kept boiling over, balance issues flared up, and viewership shriveled to a pathetic fraction of what it had been.
Park Bong-sik — a man who could pull 30,000 viewers just by turning on his stream — had watched his numbers drop into the mid-10,000s while running Rena World 2. You can imagine the backlash.
And the result of that was Rena World 2.5.
Accumulated grievances exploded, and most of the streamers defected to a rival server.
Rena-ttang finally lost even the "server admin" title that had been protecting her all that time.
And so she spent a stretch in freefall. That's the thing about people — the higher you climb, the more you need to stay humble.
Without the server admin title, Rena-ttang lost not only her external influence but saw her personal streams collapse as well.
Gritting her teeth for a comeback, she'd even briefly joined a crew that ran "Excel" broadcasts — but the effect was basically nonexistent.
In Excel streams that judged appearance, dance, and charisma, the harsh reality was that a woman in her late thirties simply had no competitive edge.
The place was packed with beautiful female streamers in their early-to-mid twenties. The outcome was inevitable.
Just when it seemed like that was the end of the road, our Rena-ttang had no word for "quit" in her dictionary.
Amazingly, after nearly half a year of silence, she'd clawed her way through underwater and planned yet another Minecraft server.
Rena World 2.5 Reboot.
That kind of tenacity and obsession made me want to applaud despite myself.
And on the other hand, it made me think.
Rena-ttang was the perfect cautionary example for every virtual streamer.
Always watch your mouth — and outside of stream angles, always stay humble…
Today, once again, I made many resolutions for success.