Life Running at Full Tilt
While we were laughing our way through cheerful crew content, the virtual scene on Pangea TV was plunging into a period of upheaval.
Rena-ttang of the Rena Universe and Ori-koong of the Pocotin crew had both announced, around the same time, that they were planning Minecraft servers.
Rena-ttang went first, pointing out that she had already run a Rena Universe Minecraft server on Rabbit TV and confidently promising quality content. The problem was that constant infighting and internal strife had left the Rena Universe in tatters. Companies, streamers, and even the fans who had followed them over from Rabbit TV were all shaken — so Rena-ttang's plans barely drew any interest.
Ori-koong's announcement, on the other hand, was a different story entirely.
Pocotin was the only virtual crew that could currently stand toe-to-toe with Decrescendo. Naturally, fans and virtual streamers alike paid close attention, and Ori-koong laid out her blueprint with absolute confidence.
"What I'm planning isn't your ordinary Minecraft server," she declared. "It's a Minecraft war server — guns and blades flying everywhere!"
The truth was, most Pangea TV viewers didn't know Minecraft at all. At best, they thought of it as a game for little kids. Despite that perception, the carefully prepared PPT and promotional video Ori-koong had put together did their job. She managed to convince the audience that the game had far more spectacle than they'd imagined.
And the advantages of the Poko Server didn't stop there. A short one-week runtime was a considerable draw, and on top of that, there was prize money on the line.
"Right now I've put up one million won of my own money, and I've already secured fifty thousand Candies in funding pledges. We'll be accepting Poko Server championship funding donations through the end of this month, so please show us plenty of support."
I remembered the final prize pool settling around sixteen million won. Sixteen million just for grinding a game hard for a single week. How could anyone not salivate over that? And personal streaming revenue during that period was a completely separate matter anyway.
For those reasons, a huge number of small-time virtual streamers with neither name recognition nor income scrambled to apply. But Ori-koong wasn't satisfied with that alone. She knew perfectly well that pulling even one properly recognized virtual streamer onto the server would have far more impact than ten or twenty no-names.
So she quietly reached out to Decrescendo. If she could get even a single member to join, the Decrescendo fandom would naturally take interest, and the Poko Server's odds of success would climb.
Looking at everything that came after, Ori-koong was a streamer with truly massive ambitions. From the early days of the 720p crisis, after transferring to Pangea TV, she never stopped making moves — founding a company, releasing albums, collabing with game studios, virtual concerts, offline concerts, the works. For someone like her, the Poko Server was the starting gun. This project had to succeed if she was going to keep charging forward with confidence.
The unfortunate part was that her ability simply couldn't keep pace with her ambition. On top of that, she had piled up far too much bad karma back on Rabbit TV. So when the major-agency virtual streamers migrated to Pangea TV after Rabbit TV shut down its Korean service, she withered away exactly as she was. That was the brutal future waiting for Ori-koong.
Of course, I couldn't be certain that history would repeat itself this time around. There was a variable now — me — currently shaking up the entire virtual scene.
For now, I don't care about the rest. I just hope Blueby joins the Poko Server.
I hadn't been sitting idle, either. The moment Ori-koong made her announcement, I casually nudged Lucy and reminded her that this was the second Minecraft server I'd mentioned before. I talked up its advantages over and over — the short runtime, the prize money — so Lucy would form a favorable impression of the Poko Server. That way, she'd pass plenty of good words along to Blueby.
Nobody knew it at the time, of course. That running the Poko Server would be hell.
Maybe it was inevitable. Just looking at the ages of the three Pocotin members told you everything. Leader Ori-koong was born in 2001 — twenty-two years old. Yami and Hiyori were even younger; both were still minors. How skilled an operation could you really expect from kids like that? Most of the participants were older than them. So power struggles flared constantly, and things eventually escalated to the point where participants and the server admin were sniping at each other publicly.
Just imagining it made my head hurt. No matter how fat the prize money was, the smartest move was to have absolutely nothing to do with a server that deep and that controversy-prone.
And if you join the Poko Server, you get marked. Rena-ttang has one hell of a temper.
It was a well-known incident even in the communities — Rena-ttang had once messaged a half-Korean, half-Japanese member of the old Rena Universe, telling them not to get close to Ori-koong. Advice wrapped around the warning that Ori-koong's past was filthy, so stay as far away as possible… Knowing that side of Rena-ttang's personality, I absolutely needed to keep my focus on Rena World.
I need to stay in the mix all the way through Rena World 2. I cannot afford to get on her bad side.
Call me a sycophant if you want. Playing it this way was a hundred times, a thousand times better than going down in flames. And now I wasn't just carrying myself — I had the entire crew's fate on my shoulders. I had to be even more careful.
Speaking of which… there's really not much time left.
December 2nd — the Rena World open date — was genuinely close. I'd been preparing all sorts of things so I could hit the ground running from day one, but the truth was, there was still more I hadn't decided than I had. What line should I take once the major streamers poured into Rena World?
If I only thought about immediate profit, the best play was to hold out and then latch onto Park Bong-sik's coattails. He was the major streamer most capable of raining down benefits, and we already had a connection through MCK. The problem was that the relationship could become far too subordinate.
No matter how hard I fly and crawl, once I get properly tangled up with him, a hierarchy locks into place. Park Bong-sik has that kind of weight class.
As a streamer specialized in playing the boss, that kind of dynamic formed inevitably. If that bothered me, the right call was to steer clear of him.
Honestly, even if we're not in the same guild, we can hang out just fine as long as we dodge the busiest periods. I'll think on it a bit more. It's not just me I have to consider — the crew members matter too.
The truth was, even setting Rena World aside, my current situation was complicated beyond belief. The side effects of growing too fast, maybe? I'd only been streaming for a little over two months. My name recognition was already on par with the well-known small-timers, I could hold three or four hundred viewers without even running content, and most importantly — as of November, I was sitting at number one in Candy donations among virtual streamers. The gap with second-place Park Na-na wasn't huge, but first place carried a symbolism all its own.
And with that, the toxic types had started latching on from every direction. Probably fans of other virtual streamers who felt threatened now that I was carving out a serious chunk of the virtual pie. Sending insults and hate mail from alt accounts was the baseline; they were even attempting to manipulate public opinion against me in the unmanaged toxic galleries. Back before the regression, watching other virtuals go through this had left me speechless. Now that I was the one on the receiving end, it was downright nauseating. What the hell did these people get out of living like that?
It made me furious, but there was no clean solution at hand. The toxic galleries made IP tracking impossible, so lawsuits were useless. In the end, the only path forward was to keep my head down carefully and keep winning.
It's so unfair it makes my blood boil, but every other streamer is in the same boat…
For all I knew, fans of my own stream were hiding behind anonymity in those same galleries right now, tearing someone else apart. Truly chilling. When you considered how routinely this kind of thing happened, internet broadcasting was clearly not a job just anyone could do.
The toxic types are just like that. But these days, the streamers themselves are a mess too.
The second source of chaos in my life was the streamers. Ever since I'd dropped out of the Wooga-dol audition, the contact relay from other streamers had been nonstop. Small-time streamers were literally swarming, and even among the named ones, there were quite a few. The nickname that stood out most among them was, of course, Oh Yeong-jun.
The streamer I'd done my very first collab content with, back in my debut days. The truth was, I knew Oh Yeong-jun reasonably well. In Rena World he'd wielded influence on par with the major streamers, and he'd kept inserting himself into the virtual scene long after. His activity level was so high that even Lucy had gotten tangled up with him on a Minecraft server that opened after Rena World 2.
In a way, a connection with Oh Yeong-jun might actually be better than one with a major streamer.
Whatever else you said about him, Oh Yeong-jun was the type who truly took care of his people. He'd stuck with the virtuals he'd formed deep bonds with in Rena World all the way to the end. On top of that, his network was solid, and he never hesitated when it came to spending money or sharing the wealth — nobody lost out by staying close to him.
He must have seen the PUBG Kindergarten.
The message from Oh Yeong-jun was a collab proposal. He'd locked onto a format similar to Oh-ha's. The streaming scene always stampeded after whatever was trending, after all. The game was different, though. Oh-ha's main was PUBG; Oh Yeong-jun's was League of Legends — so the choice was natural.
Nothing wrong with it on paper, but I'm passing for now. With this many toxic types aiming at me, I need to be careful. Oh Yeong-jun's image isn't exactly great either.
The fallout from the incident he'd caused in the StarCraft scene was still hanging over him. He'd only get a proper image wash after spreading his wings of revival in Rena World. Looking forward to that day, I sent back a reply that left the door open.
Toxic scopes locked on me. Relationships with other streamers… there's really a lot to manage.
And on top of all that, I still had to handle my solo streams and the crew. Even ten bodies wouldn't be enough. But what choice did I have? Success demanded every ounce of effort I could give.
Today, once again, a regressor's life ran at full tilt.