How to Enjoy Viewer Participation Matches
Placement Matches — Temporary Tier [Gold 1]
1 Win, 0 Losses
[ O / _ / _ / _ / _ ]
“I thought I wouldn’t feel a thing, so why does this make my heart race?”
After I racked up 32 kills and 3 deaths and came back to the room, the mailbox icon was blinking.
When I clicked it, I found out there were separate rewards just for ranked play.
So that existed? I had no idea.
“Arena currency? Oh, there’s a dedicated shop? I can trade it too? Could I sell this and make some ssalmeok money?!”
When I checked the info, it said you got 1 coin by default for each ranked match, 2 more for a win, and an extra 3 for MVP.
So in my case, I’d just earned 6.
I browsed the shop to see what I could buy.
(Exclusive weapon parts)
[Laser Scope - 100 coins]
[Magazine Unit - 100 coins]
[Gun Frame - 200 coins]
[Engraving Core - 500 coins]
(Part plating — 200 coins each)
[Bronze]
[White Silver]
[Gold]
[Black Iron]
[Abyss]
[Crimson]
[Aurora]
“Hiiiii? Why is everything so damn expensive?”
No, seriously. If you could only make up to 6 coins a match, how many straight wins would it take to buy even one thing that cost 100?
Suddenly every quick match I’d played up to now felt painfully wasteful.
Back then I never paid attention to this stuff, so of course I didn’t know...
Was it because I’d gotten hooked?
For some reason, I was serious about cosmetic stuff now, too.
I’d even dressed up my character with rabbit ears.
The best part was how they flapped every time I jumped.
Which meant—
“I want it... so bad....”
I had saved up every penny of my allowance and bought expensive exclusive weapons.
A Win34 for 20,000 won and an MF5 for 10,000 won.
Honestly, the AWR was better than the Win34 among sniper rifles, but 30,000 won was a little steep, so I compromised.
They were both guns I liked, so whatever.
And the precious leftover 10,000 won? I spent it on snacks with Si-hyeon!
Anyway, I should grind ranked and buy some cosmetics.
If I’d known this would happen, I should’ve started ranked way earlier.
Once I’d bought everything I wanted, maybe I could sell the leftover arena coins and make some ssalmeok money?
I hadn’t checked yet, so I didn’t know, but it might end up being surprisingly lucrative.
“Heh-heh.”
What would I do if I made money?
Buy a ton of cards again?
While I was happily imagining my future riches, I returned to the lobby before long.
Since I wasn’t playing alone, I couldn’t keep people waiting forever.
So in what felt like less than a minute, I’d left the room and come back out.
“Huh?”
Where’d she go?
Kim Eunha had disappeared from the ranked game room.
She left without saying anything? Where did she run off to?
I hurriedly turned the sound back on for the broadcast I’d muted.
“——It’s the first time I’ve seen that person today. They said they were new to ranked, so we only played one match.... No, I’m not a queen bee. I was doing viewer participation content and I didn’t even know....”
Huh?
The room that had only had two people when I entered had somehow swollen to 400 viewers.
She was mumbling in a way that sounded vaguely wronged.
She looked so flustered it was almost pitiful.
Good grief.
So this girl had done something bad, huh?
In the age of the internet, one mistake and they dig everything up.
You have to be careful.
Still, since we’d played together, I resolved not to throw any stones myself and started reading the mood in chat.
-I told you idiots not to say anything to her. Get out.
-You didn’t even think to check K/D before the game started? LMAO.
-??? : Bro, we’re screwed. Let’s act like today was the first time we met.
-Hello, I’m Fabre. I’m here to expose a queen bee.
The chat was moving so fast that whenever I tried to read it carefully to figure out what was happening, it just shot upward in a blur.
So this was why streamers hated long chat messages.
Spam and walls of text were a real pain.
After about five minutes of listening and reading through the chat, I finally got the gist.
“Hmm.”
I was sweating.
“This....”
Was this because of me...?
I was the cause.
In other words, people had come at her as some nasty streamer who was getting boosted by a high-tier viewer’s alt account to climb ranks.
I’m not even high-tier, and I’m not even an alt account....
This is my main character, the one with my dad’s resident registration number attached to it 100 percent for real!
Anyway, while you’re climbing tiers, the matchmaking gets unbalanced, so wouldn’t it naturally end up being games against similarly skilled players?
Maybe after one or two matches, duo or solo wouldn’t matter much anyway... unless you were queuing together for ten games or something.
And sure, I’d estimated that my skill probably wasn’t low-tier.
But I’m not a god. How would I know exactly? On a first match, maybe you just wanted to test the waters and play comfortably for a bit.
“Hmph.”
I just wanted to try viewer participation, too.
I felt wronged and sulky, and my brow wrinkled all by itself.
I was annoyed, but there was nothing I could do, so I just sat there and fidgeted my feet in my chair.
...I guess this person got dragged into trouble because of me.
Looks like he’d poked a fairly famous person.
There were already more than 400 people watching the spectacle.
From the names that kept getting mentioned in chat, I guessed the streamer’s name was Duriheok.
I wondered what on earth he was doing to make the crowd keep growing, so I switched over to his stream.
He had a whopping 6,000 live viewers.
“See? I told you. He got hit right in the bullet path. This insane bastard makes no sense. If you make eye contact with him, you’re dead in four shots. That has to be a Beryl, right? The recoil should be horrible—how the hell is he shooting that accurately from so far away?”
He’s praising me.
If it had been any other day, I would’ve been thrilled, but it didn’t sound like he was admiring my play so much as explaining, “See, that’s why she’s an alt!” and my eyes only narrowed more and more.
“No, I’m an alt too. You can tell at a glance. Damn, look at this bastard. You an alt too? What tier’d you come from? But after taking fire from him, I get it. This guy’s above me!”
He was an alt, too.
Unbelievable.
I’m the main account, you little punk.
“At least Master, I’m telling you. Yeah. Team diff was huge, too. Team Deathmatch is always team-dependent, after all. Ah, my editor hyung said let’s just run one duo match, so we did, and then I got hit by a truck.”
So even this was a duo?
What, his duo was here too? Then what the hell?
“Shiiit.”
My insides were boiling.
Someone else was getting unfairly cursed out, while he just laughed and had a grand old time.
Fine, Duriheok hadn’t ordered his viewers to “go bully Kim Eunha and her duo!”
With that many people around, the malice would’ve formed naturally.
That much I could let slide.
But still.
This was my first time doing viewer participation, and it had been weird in a fun way.
It was enjoyable....
I hadn’t even gotten to see Kim Eunha’s pure reaction to my skill.
“Ah, I should probably go play my main account. And let me say this again, everyone—don’t go harassing other streamers. Viewer participation always attracts all kinds of people, so it can’t be helped. She said you were a first-time viewer. These crows just keep coming. Get lost already.”
Now he’s acting nice?!
The more I watched, the less I liked him.
“Main account solo queue, let’s go~ Time to hit Diamond~”
As soon as Duriheok entered on his main account, the status window that appeared showed [Platinum 2 – 79 points].
Platinum 2?
My temporary tier was Gold 1, so that was pretty close.
If I won a few in a row, we’d be about the same.
I sat there and thought it over.
“Heh.”
My cheeks, which had puffed up indignantly a moment ago, had already gone back to normal, and the corners of my mouth twitched upward.
I’ve decided.
Since you ruined my viewer participation session....
I’d better do some illegal viewer participation with you, too.
***
“Let’s gooooooo!!”
Duriheok was on a four-win streak and had reached the brink of promotion.
“Told you I had to shake off the bad luck first.”
-Facts
-You got smacked hard in the first match, so it was actually a good thing, right?
-Aw, damn, it’s only fun if you lose.
-Lame, lame
“Screw you. I’m a Diamond-bred man.”
In chat, they spammed yeah, eternal Platinum scrub, but Duriheok didn’t care one bit.
Now he was truly just one step away from the Diamond placement matches he’d dreamed of.
One of the four wins had come against an enemy team that included a subscriber, and because that person had totally face-planted, it had been an easy win.
“Hey now, don’t do that. It makes the game lame~” he’d said, but the huge smile plastered across his face made the words carry zero sincerity.
The viewers’ heckling?
It all meant nothing once he hit Diamond.
Duriheok confidently hit queue.
And the match they got was Saber Base.
It was an objective battle in which you captured safe zones inside an abandoned air force base.
The key chokepoints were the long, open runway and the underground hangar.
The runway was an open field for snipers.
The hangar, tangled with containers and equipment, was the main stage for rifles.
“Ahhh, let’s pray. Please let our team have one crazy sniper!”
The moment Saber Base came up, Duriheok clasped his hands and prayed.
Saber Base was a map where a sniper’s skill shone more brightly than on any other map.
That was because while you could jump down into the underground from the runway above, you couldn’t climb back up from the hangar.
If a sniper took control of the runway, the people in the hangar were left in a disaster of a situation, never knowing where the enemy might appear from.
“Saber Base is all about momentum. If we break into the hangar right away, our sniper up top can breathe easier. Let’s jump now.”
While Duriheok was giving instructions to the riflemen on his team in in-game chat—
-lol, betting this stream’s no chivalrous warrior again?
-Huh? The other team has that girl from before.
-Who?
-Aw shit, is it another chivalrous warrior?
-Nope, the first-match alt was a woman. The one who hard-carried solo: WoniWoni>.<
Too focused on the game to check the enemy team, Duriheok frowned when he saw chat suddenly speed up.
“What? WoniWoni? Who’s that... Ah!! Son of a bitch.”
That girl was ridiculously good!
As the saying went, the one who’s been hit knows best, and he could still feel the wall she’d put up in front of him.
Like he’d lose ten out of ten fights against her.
-Did she snipe you?
-LOL
-Did she follow you here because you’re annoying?
-HAHAHAHAHA, damn.
“Damn....”
Duriheok was the kind of guy who got sniped so often he even had a separate list of major snipers who targeted him.
The nature of being in that awkward middle-high tier was this: there weren’t many users overall, but if you looked around your neighborhood, there were always more than you expected.
That meant even if the total number of snipers was small, their success rate was extremely high, to the point that he recognized their nicknames by heart.
But WoniWoni was an ID he’d never heard before today.
-I forgot to mention it earlier, but that person also sniped Momozi and Jeong Taeyeon lol.
-Really? Isn’t Jeong Taeyeon insanely good?
-Maybe she’s a famous sniper lol.
-Hey, you’re screwed. Seems like you kicked a hornet’s nest.
-lol bye-bye
“Ah, shut up. The team diff was insane earlier. You don’t know until you try.”
Duriheok swallowed hard.
She picked up a sniper?
Before, she’d clearly been running around drilling heads with a rifle.
Of course, based on how she’d played, she was probably more than decent with a sniper too.
A man always has to show off in front of women!!
If it were him, he’d definitely choose something he was good at when streaming in front of a female streamer.
So maybe WoniWoni was the same.
If I stay calm, pick up the sniper, and push hard right away, I can still win this!
The moment the match started, Duriheok aggressively surged forward.
Whether that bold push was the right call or just dumb luck—
Rat-a-tat-tat-!
[LinkSmerDuriheok ︻╦╤─ ManchesterSleeper]
He quickly seized the best position in the hangar.
If we win the hangar, we can win the whole thing!
His team had three snipers, while the enemy only had two.
If they could beat the fewer enemy rifles in the hangar, then the upper level team only had to hold half and half without overextending.
No matter how important the runway was, the point of capture was still here in the end.
The snipers only had to hold the line through their numerical advantage—
Fwoosh—!
[WoniWoni>.< ︻デ═一 ILEuui]
[WoniWoni>.< ︻デ═一 HeroLover]
“Huh...?”
After two kills happened in an instant—
[WoniWoni>.< ︻デ═一 GoldenWave]
a despairing full wipe log appeared for the sniper line on the runway.
And then, a little later.
Thud-thud-thud— patter-patter-patter—
The enemy team’s footsteps, as they dominated the upper level, tangled together and made sound play difficult.
With enemies who could drop down at any moment, he had to keep watch in every direction.
“Huff, huff, come on in, you son of a bitch.”
Just as his breathing turned ragged—
Whoosh—! Clack—!
Something fell from the sky.
“Aaaagh! Shit!”
Rat-a-tat-tat—!
He sprayed wildly at the enemy who’d appeared behind him, but—
[WoniWoni>.< -I═> LinkSmerDuriheok]
He couldn’t dodge WoniWoni’s rage-fueled knife stab.
---