Chaos
Poko Server.
I won't drag this out.
It was a Minecraft war server that the Pocotin crew ran for a short stretch. The operating window was so brief that Rena-ttang even allowed dual-server participation alongside Rena World. But anyone who knew anything knew the real story — just how moody and petty Rena-ttang could be. One of the small-time virtual streamers who'd joined Poko Server back then managed to get on her bad side for no good reason, and when she later returned to Rena World, she got snagged over some trivial excuse and became the first person ever force-kicked from the server.
Honestly, that's the first bomb right there. I'd love it if Blueby got on her bad side and got kicked too.
I'd love that — but the odds were vanishingly low. Rena-ttang had at least enough political sense to read the room; she didn't just boot people at random. The small-time virtual streamer who'd been kicked had a legitimate pretext hanging over her. She'd been given advance notice and a deadline to build a personal house, and the build quality was lacking — no bed inside, among other things — so there were plenty of handles to grab. That was why Rena-ttang could boot her without worrying about public opinion.
Blueby, though, wouldn't be that sloppy. If something like that came up, she'd at least put together a clean house.
Anyway, what I'm really after is the second effect.
No need for a long explanation. Poko Server was a failed server. There was even talk that the Pocotin crew — who'd been doing about as well as Decrescendo — had started to wobble because of it, and the problems ran deep. The core issue was server management.
Running a server is not easy. First, there's the money. Development costs, wages for ops and management staff, server machines and all the other overhead. Just thinking about how a server that only ran for a week burned through more than five million won was enough to make your head hurt. And even after pouring that much money and effort in, the returns were anything but guaranteed. Even Rena World — widely considered the most successful Minecraft server in Pangea TV history — had its host Rena-ttang getting flamed the entire time it ran. That's just how game ops work. A balance that makes a hundred percent of people happy simply doesn't exist.
Server management was already hard enough, and the problem was that the Pocotin trio had been far more green than anyone expected. With problems erupting left and right, they should have been calmly soothing the participants — instead they picked fights, posted announcements, and even sniped specific people.
I only heard this secondhand from the Pan-beo-gal old-timers, so I don't know every detail.
But one thing was certain. Joining Poko Server offered zero upside and was nothing but a waste of time. And shoving Blueby into Poko Server came with one extra benefit.
Poko Server is a war server, and on top of that people clump into teams. Meaning there's no bandwidth left for anything else. It'd be a burden on her teammates, so she'd have to focus entirely on Poko Server.
While Blueby was stuck in Poko Server, I and the rest of our crew could solidify our foundation in Rena World and start writing our own story. In other words, we'd get to enjoy first-mover advantage.
And that is a massive deal. On servers where people get immersed through story, the broadcast you first latch onto is often the one you keep watching — because of narrative continuity.
Being able to seize the story early in Rena World was a huge merit. And I already knew Rena World's future and direction. I could maximize that first-mover effect even further.
Honestly, the Wooga-dol audition is just a stepping stone. The real leap is Rena World.
More than a few streamers had bulked up their weight class through Rena World. To survive the increasingly cutthroat competition in the virtual scene, we absolutely had to make the most of this opportunity.
Which means competitors need to be pre-emptively cut out or nipped in the bud. Blueby, for example…
Thinking of the trap I'd prepared for her, I quietly smiled.
Monday, November 21st.
The start of a new week. And today, once again, Pangea TV was burning spectacularly bright.
First up, the endlessly plunging stock price had people desperately praying for the return of "Seo-a, Goddess of Stocks." Not a chance. Pangea TV's stock was going to keep falling. If I remembered right, the decline ran all the way through the first trading day of 2023, didn't it? Buy then and you'd get nearly a full month of steady gains — serious profit.
I need to pile up capital until then so I can really hit it big.
The bigger the principal, the more the returns would compound. So I needed to have enough funds ready before January. And conveniently, I already had a clean pretext that wouldn't sour the viewers.
December has That Day, after all. Namely—
December 25th. Christmas. The day that makes couples' hearts flutter and sets solo hearts on fire… I'd heard from the social butterflies that when this day rolls around, short-stay motel rooms become basically impossible to book (distant stare).
For the heartbroken singles, I would gladly hit the Go Live button. They'd find comfort in my stream, and I'd run a perfectly legal "Hand over the money!" routine and fatten my wallet. What a beautiful win-win!
Huh? I'm trash?
…Anyway, if I scored big at Christmas and poured it into stocks, I'd be sitting pretty. As long as I didn't suddenly lose my mind and start daydreaming about buying motion-capture gear or building a dedicated studio, money wouldn't be tight for a while. And January was Rena World's golden age, wasn't it? Park Na-na joining the first million-candy club among virtual streamers, four virtual streamers clearing eight hundred thousand candy… the entire server going completely feral.
Pangea TV stock would climb all through January anyway, so if I invested every won I earned, I might actually escape this cramped little place and move. The scarier part was that it wasn't a joke. Before the regression, there really had been virtual streamers who hit it big off Rena World, took out loans, and even bought houses.
Enough about stocks. The next mess belonged to Rena Universe.
Between Friday and the weekend, Rena-ttang had put on her withdrawal-and-reversal show. The escalating conflict with the company had finally hit its limit. For now the crack looked sealed, but I knew better. Before December arrived, Rena-ttang would cross a river she couldn't come back from. After she left, Rena Universe would even change its name trying to survive — and ironically, the thing that cut its lifeline was the Minecraft server called Rena World. Rena World vacuumed up every scrap of Pangea TV's attention and buzz, and the virtual streamers who couldn't get into that server got "slow-dried."
Huh? What's "slow-drying"? Ugh! You boomers don't even know that? It means they slowly withered away and died.
In the end, Rena Universe faded into the back pages of history, and its members scattered to fend for themselves. A lonely final image, nothing like the flashy debut as Pangea TV's first corporate-style crew. Not that it was particularly special. Rena Universe was just the first — after that, countless virtual crews on Pangea TV would wither the same way.
The next issue to blow up was Freeca's Na-ro-si. This was a butterfly effect I hadn't seen coming. I'd eliminated Kyurings, who would have been a massive obstacle to Freeca's future — only for problems to crop up with Na-ro-si, who'd taken that spot instead.
The issue itself was simple. Back when she'd streamed on Rabbit TV, Na-ro-si had used a feminist-related term. The whole thing started in one of those toxic galleries that never hesitated to dig into streamers' pasts, and someone quietly dropped the material on FM Community and detonated it. Controversy around a Freeca member caught fire in an instant. The streaming scene's audience was overwhelmingly male, so anything touching feminism was always going to be a powder keg.
Na-ro-si went live with Ssa-yo and tried to face it head-on. The explanation was that the screenshots and community posts had been maliciously edited, and that at the time she had no idea the word was feminist terminology. Someone in chat back then had goaded her into typing it, and she'd fallen for it.
Reactions split right down the middle. Fans trying to protect Freeca believed Na-ro-si; the antis called it a false excuse and demanded proof of whoever had supposedly goaded her. Unfortunately, the broadcast was so old that no VOD remained. Na-ro-si was backed into a corner, and Freeca's antis tore into her like they'd been handed a golden opportunity.
Tsk. Karma. Pure karma. This is why you don't make enemies carelessly.
Most of Freeca's antis had been created while Ssa-yo ran the Wooga-dol audition — the cutting remarks and behavior that wounded contestants, plus the shady-looking winner selections during the performances. They'd been circling, waiting for any chance to sink their teeth into Freeca. With a chance this good, there was no way they'd let go.
Private-message harassment and mid-stream chat attacks were the bare minimum. They infiltrated Freeca's fan cafe, flooded the YouTube channel with toxic comments, and even got their hands on Namuwiki to maliciously inflate the controversy. Under that full-court press, cracks started forming inside Freeca itself. As the scandal and the damage piled up, fans of the other members started venting their frustration. From the outside, the antis; from the inside, even other members' fans. Na-ro-si finally couldn't hold on. After a public apology, she left Freeca and chose to step back for a while.
Is there seriously something wrong with Ssa-yo?
Even before the regression, a lot of the members he'd passed had problems — and now even Na-ro-si, picked in place of Kyurings, had ended up like this. Freeca was down to a four-person crew. On the other side of the screen, Ssa-yo was pouring his heart out.
"I will… I will never give up. Something like this will never happen again, and through this, Freeca will only grow stronger."
Yeah, no. There's still one more left.
I was already previewing Ssa-yo's miserable future.