Episode 105: The Newbie Guide (Reality)
(A Kwitch staffer who showed up on Eunha's stream)
A Kwitch manager came by to ask Eunha to please check her email. Last time, too, she never looked at her mail, so the exhibition offer reached her straight through her manager.
People are guessing it's the same kind of thing again.
Conclusion = this season's Newbie Guide lead is Eunha.
Barely a month left before the season ends, and the gallery won't shut up about who headlines this Newbie Guide. Most of you are on KZ's Foxy or P1's Seya.
I'll give you that. Those two are the best Jett players in Korea. Even among first-division pros, there isn't a Jett on Foxy's or Seya's level.
The problem is they're close enough that you can barely split them. Head-to-head, sure, Foxy's record is crushing — but Foxy's team is KZ. Come on.
Count only the performances they've actually shown and their individual skill, and Foxy and Seya belong on the same line. So Rioat's stuck too.
Book Foxy and Seya's fans blow up. Book Seya and Foxy's fans blow up. I don't see either side dodging the mess.
Best fix is to just call a streamer the general public already knows.
More new players come in off streams than off tournaments, so it fits what the video is even for.
And the person who fits that best is none other than Eunha. She just took exhibition-finals MVP, and her read on Jett looks seriously high.
If I were Rioat, Eunha would feel like the bigger upside than Foxy or Seya.
1. This Newbie Guide's agent is Jett, and from Rioat's side, calling Foxy or Seya means sweating a fan war.
2. It's a video for incoming new players anyway, so call a popular streamer and that worry goes away.
3. Eunha, who just made her name and proved her skill in the exhibition, is the best fit.
"Hmm..."
No matter how I turned it over, this wasn't a mail that should have landed with me. What it was offering was nothing other than an agent guide for Project A newcomers — the Newbie Guide, for short.
It goes up on the official channel on K-tube at the end of every Project A season: a video for new players, where they bring in a master of one agent and have them pass along how that agent is played, and the tips that go with it. Taken only that far, there was nothing especially strange about me receiving an offer. I'd just proved what I could do, all the way to exhibition-finals MVP.
Put plainly, among people who stream Project A for a living, there isn't one who can say they play Jett better than I do. The audience would probably say the same.
The reason I'd thought the mail was a mistake sat somewhere else. Every master the Newbie Guide had invited, up to now, had been a pro gamer.
It didn't look like a wrong send, though. The people behind these mails were the managers at Rioat Korea and at Kwitch. Rioat, who barely knows me, might slip. Kwitch wouldn't. And since the offer had come in through that same Kwitch, it really was meant for me.
Rioat had never put out a notice that the Newbie Guide's lead had to be a pro, either. Every master invited so far had simply been one, and people had filled in the rest — oh, so only pros go on that show. Which meant there was nothing strange at all about me being asked to appear.
"But this is definitely..."
They were giving me the place and the time. The shoot wasn't going to be online, the way the exhibition had been. And the Newbie Guide runs like a talk show, which means the cast's faces actually make it onto the screen.
Pros have their faces out from the start, so it doesn't matter to them. I am a no-cam streamer, full stop. A promise with my father means I can't show my face, and I can't stand in front of a camera besides. Even if I wore a mask, whether he would allow it was an open question — and the odds he'd say no were much higher.
If I went on, it would also be the first time the Newbie Guide seated a streamer as the master instead of a pro. Leave standout pros on the bench and bring in a broadcaster, and the talk that followed wouldn't be kind. Whichever way I looked at it, the offer had more to lose than to gain.
Refusing really was the smarter—
"Haa..."
I don't know why I chose what I chose. Maybe I wasn't in my right mind, that close to sleep. The mail I sent Rioat wasn't a hard no. It asked them for time to think.
In the reply, Rioat wrote that I was the only right person for the video, with the clear sense that they would accommodate me as far as they could, and that I only had to decide by seven days before the season ended.
Small mercy that I hadn't fired off a mail grabbing the yes on the spot. I didn't even have my father's permission yet. If I had, even I would have caught serious hell. Father hates a broken promise more than anything, and on the subject of promises he turns severe.
The truth is, I can guess well enough why I did it. This wasn't the first time I'd been offered the Newbie Guide.
Back when I was Galaxy, Rioat asked me to come on as the Jett master, and it hadn't looked bad to me, so I'd meant to do it. I'd just won a domestic event for the first time, in the stretch when people were calling me the best Jett in Korea.
The mood then — and it hasn't changed — was that if you appeared on the Newbie Guide, then for that one agent, you were No. 1. My appearing in the Jett video would have been taken as proof that I was the No. 1 Jett among Korean pros. I was full of confidence in my own skill in those days, and I'd quietly wanted exactly that.
The international schedule pushed the shoot back. Then I lost an international event on a blunder that cut to the bone, and the way Project A fans felt about me turned seriously bad. After I talked it through with the coach, we decided to cancel. Rioat respected the choice, and the Jett Newbie Guide was put off to a later season.
The video that should have been shot on Jett was replaced by a different pro shooting a guide for a different agent. And the Jett video never got filmed — not right up to the day I retired.
Maybe I'd never let go of the Newbie Guide shoot I didn't get to do.
"What did I just do..."
If that wasn't it, there was no explaining why I couldn't turn the offer down flat.
"What did you do?"
I was muttering at empty air when a voice came in from beside me, out of nowhere. I'd been through it once already, so I wasn't especially surprised. Of course it was Han Seongun.
"Something came up."
"Yeah? You didn't even jump this time."
It had happened before. Jump again and I'd be the idiot. He was looking at me like he was sorry it hadn't worked, and I swallowed the urge to thump him before I asked.
"Prep going all right?"
I didn't say what I meant. Someone might be listening. No one at school knows that I'm Eunha, or that Han Seongun is Nebula. It has to stay that way.
"Roster's all set. Scrims are on the schedule from next week."
Only yesterday he'd said it still wasn't decided. The team just hadn't announced it — the names must already have been locked in. That's how it normally goes. A captain who can reach into signings the way Spax can is the strange case.
"Yeah? So what do you make of the teammates?"
My first call-up to KZ's main roster came back, and I heard myself asking around without meaning to. Like checking in with a junior about how school was treating him. That I used to be Galaxy — a fourth-year pro the world had forgotten — was a secret nobody knew but me. Pretending to know more than this would get awkward.
"I'd like to say they seem like good people... but honestly, I don't know. Yesterday was the first time I saw them."
"That's normal. How are you supposed to know someone you just met?"
My own first read on my teammates hadn't been especially warm either. Spax I'd known for a long time, but the rest of them looked like people who didn't come easy. I wasn't gifted that way myself, and even measured against me the KZ roster was bad. It helped that the team went on workshops often, and that Spax stuck his neck out and pulled everyone into one piece.
"It'll sort itself out with time."
It might sound a little careless, but people adapt. That's what we are. This wasn't a one-time meeting. They were teammates who had to live a year in the same room, and they'd get close, slowly.
"Mm... you think so?"
"Probably."
Past that, I didn't have more advice worth giving. Anything I might have said as a senior pro was attached to a career that was already gone, and a mere streamer holding forth on the pro world wouldn't be a good look.
After a short pause, what came out of my mouth was only a plain cheer.
"Well, good luck. I'll put the broadcast on now and then and root for you."
"Yeah, thanks. Oh— right."
"Yeah?"
"Someone you know joined our team."
He left it vague on purpose, like he wanted me to guess.
"Someone I know?"
There really shouldn't have been anyone. Not Spax, obviously, and Nebula was standing right in front of me. So someone off the Youngest and Oldest roster... maybe?
"Pola...?"
He was the only one who came to mind. Zzangdol and Oldboy were far enough along that debuting now would be a hard road. Pola was twenty — young enough to still compete — and he'd already been a pro in another FPS. Thin on Project A knowledge, but his baseline mechanics held, and he'd been a real help even on Youngest and Oldest.
"Yeah. That's him."
Han Seongun nodded, agreeing with the guess.
"Whoa..."
So Pola really had been scouted to SC, too.