The Explanation (Just Chatting)
After the Newbie Guide video went up, I spent a good while doing everything I could to drag the mood of my stream back to what it used to be.
Part of that was shutting down viewers who demanded the cam this hard. Wow. There really were a lot of them.
The day the Newbie Guide dropped, we were already in the forty thousands, and now it was fifty thousand. The ripple from this whole mess had been bigger than I'd imagined.
I didn't want the mods suffering any more than they already were, so I hurried and locked chat to anyone who had followed for at least a month. Surely the spam would stop coming through now.
"Ack."
What? Why wasn't it thinning out at all? It had definitely worked last time. Oh.
Right. The day the cam parrots had swarmed like this was the very next day after the Newbie Guide video went up, and a good stretch of time had passed since then. If most of the parrots who flooded in back then had been following for over a month by now, then of course they could keep spamming.
In that case...
It wasn't a tool I particularly wanted to reach for, but right now it looked like the only one I had.
Subscribers. A sub is one of Kwitch's features: every month, you pay the streamer a set amount as support. In return you get a handful of emotes you can use only on that streamer's broadcast, and you're spared the forced ads—only on the channel you subscribed to.
Set the room to subscriber-only chat, and only subscribers can type. I almost never use it. I'm afraid it'll make me look like a money parrot screaming subscribe if you want to chat! Right now, though, I didn't have a choice.
"Whew... it's finally quiet."
With subscriber-only chat on, the window came out noticeably cleaner.
Of course, even among them, someone was still spamming.
The mods brought the hammer down at once. Why subscribe and then spam? I genuinely didn't get it.
"I've said it how many times? I'll do a cam stream when I feel like it. Don't demand it like that."
Even if they were people who liked me, this was the moment to restore order. If I didn't catch it now and bring the switch down, the one who ended up worn out would be me.
"I know you want to see my cam stream. But I want to run the broadcast I want to run. I'm not a cam girl. I'm a streamer who specializes in Project A."
My airtime was split between Just Chatting and Project A, sure. But the root of the channel, as I thought of it, had always been Project A. Just Chatting was only a corner I'd set aside for talking, because if I buried myself in Project A alone I couldn't help neglecting the viewers.
"If you'd just sit still, I'd turn it on myself... I don't know why you all have to rush me."
I'd even gotten the equipment ready for a cam-stream event. Of course, that was exactly what caused the accident.
What happened, he asked.
"Um... if you want to know what happened yesterday..."
A viewer wondering why the cam parrots had suddenly descended. Fair enough. The accident had been at dawn yesterday—or maybe I should have called it today, not yesterday. It happened at an hour when most people were already asleep, and if you didn't follow the community, you wouldn't even know there had been an accident. A reaction like this was normal, if anything counted as normal.
"I'll walk you through it, one piece at a time..."
The whole reason I'd gone live today was to explain yesterday. My precious viewers had a right to know. I owed them a careful account.
"Ahem..."
It felt like it was going to be a long story, so I loosened my throat and started laying out exactly how it had gone.
eh?
???
?
?
The chat began to fill with question marks.
"So..."
"That's why..."
"That's how it happened."
The explanation ended clean and short. There hadn't been much to explain in the first place. The whole thing had happened in a flash. I'd meant to run a quick test broadcast to try the gear before the cam stream. I thought I'd started a test. It was the real broadcast. Then I turned the cam on. That was the end of it.
And once my viewers heard my tragic tale, their reaction was...
Blunt enough to actually sting a little.
"A d-dumbass?!"
I mean, I'd done something a little stupid, but dumbass was way too far!
"No... th-that's a mistake anyone could make, isn't it?"
Had I explained it wrong?
"I mean... everyone wanted a cam stream, so I ordered the equipment, and I was going to start a test broadcast to try it, and I accidentally started the real one..."
"...Ngh."
Put like that, I had nothing to say.
"I-I'm not that bad in the head!"
Dumbass... honestly, that was slander. Too much. I got into ridiculous situations sometimes, but not to the point where people should be calling me stupid, all right? If I were really that empty-headed, how could I have been the ace of a team that finished third in the world?
Reaction speed matters in an FPS, sure, but Project A also demands a real understanding of the game. Even more so in the pro scene, where how you use your skills has to be exact. So the brain that had played as KZ's ace was already proven...
...hadn't it?
Uh.
Probably?
"Anyway, calling me a dumbass is outright slander. I'm pretty smart, in my own way. You can tell when you watch me play Project A!"
There's one thing my viewers sometimes get wrong: the idea that I only solve the game with raw mechanics. I won't deny I lean on them. I was a pro people called the best in the country, so my reaction speed was never ordinary. But that doesn't mean mechanics are all I play with. Maybe that used to be true, but after Coach Yoo Seonho drilled me, I started thinking through the game without even noticing.
Project A is about half my stream, so people would just have to admit I wasn't a dumbass—
"I just slept through the mock exams?"
A mock exam... that was like a practice college entrance exam, wasn't it? I wasn't even preparing for the CSAT. Of course I wasn't going to take one seriously. I have no plans to go to college anyway.
Even the viewers who loved teasing me didn't have much to say this time, so I probably wasn't the weird one here.
Mm... right?