Chapter 149
[Open Recruitment: Influencers Wanted for 2051 Fall Tournament/Win-It-Back Tournament Season 2.]
[Tournament Prize: 50 million won per event, 300 million won across six divisions]
[Recruitment Period: Monday, April 10, 2051, until the deadline; a separate notice will be posted]
[Tournament Period: Late May to early June]
[Events: Resonance / World of Arseria / Legacy of Legend]
[Eligibility: Broadcast on Twishy or V-Tube; see the attached tournament operations plan for tier requirements]
[Applications will be accepted by email only ([email protected]), and a separate notice will be posted once participant selection is complete. Thank you.]
Sponsored by Letterbox, the “Win-It-Back Tournament (the tournament to win it back)” was the largest event held on Korean Twishy.
Current esports casters and analysts served as commentators, while the directors and coaches were all former pros who had left their mark on esports history, making it a prestigious tournament.
Although Season 1 in the first half of 2051 had ended successfully despite various rumors and controversies, the employees were already eager to recruit participants for Season 2.
“Suuuuuck... Wow, this is really tricky...?”
The planning team manager at Letterbox let out a deep sigh as he evaluated the applicants’ documents.
“Why? Did someone lie about their tier again?”
A junior employee who had nearly reached his first anniversary at the company but was still considered a new hire in the department approached and asked.
Each event consisted of two types of tournaments.
The “Fall Tournament,” in which top-tier streamers participated, and the “Win-It-Back Tournament,” for streamers between Silver and low Diamond.
Most of the problems arose in the latter, after the team-auction system had been introduced.
It was extremely common for people with ambiguous skill levels around high Diamond or Master to deliberately lower their tiers.
But the manager shook his head.
“No, it’s not that. A streamer applied for two events this time.”
“Two? Which ones?”
“LoL and WoA.”
“Then just reject one. I don’t know about Fall, but in Win-It-Back they might end up on a team with strangers. Wouldn’t they be a burden during practice?”
“Ah, the problem is that giving up either one would be such a huge shame. And of all things, they entered WoA in Win-It-Back instead of Fall.”
“What tier are they?”
“Unranked, but they say they’ll reach at least Silver before the tournament.”
“Silver should be manageable, shouldn’t it? There’s still plenty of time before the team auction.”
“That’s not the problem. Just come over and see for yourself.”
The junior employee dragged a chair over to the manager’s desk and skimmed through the information displayed on the monitor.
“Eek! That’s the person in the news recently, right? The one who set a world record for combat power in Korea...!”
“Yep. On top of that, apparently she’s the youngest partner streamer in Twishy Korea’s history. I heard she’s fourteen.”
“Wow, NoName is entering too. Wait, she’s the youngest? Seriously?”
The man clicking his ballpoint pen leaned back in his chair and thought it over.
The reason the manager couldn’t give up on NoName was the type of viewers she attracted.
A streamer with a suspiciously high proportion of foreign viewers.
While other broadcasters had one or two percent foreign viewers, a whopping fifty percent of her viewers were foreigners.
This was despite the barrier to entry created by the fact that she hadn’t even enabled Twishy’s translation interface, forcing viewers to find their own ways to watch her. That was how large her audience was.
The prize pool for Win-It-Back was growing, but since the event was still maintained by Letterbox and a handful of corporate sponsors, it needed new capital.
And attracting foreign viewers was also part of the assignment the manager had received this time.
“But there’s no way this person is actually Silver.”
“Exactly! Even if everyone’s combat power is normalized to the same level during the tournament, do you really think someone who’s made it through story mode would only be Silver?”
“Wouldn’t physical skill alone get you to Diamond?”
“Master, too, if you’re good.”
But there was no justification for rejecting her.
Why? Because the account she was leveling was her main account.
If they simply selected her, however, controversy would follow. There was bound to be a balance issue.
And playing story mode and playing a team game were entirely different things, making it difficult to accurately assess her skill.
The man had heard that WoA was completely new to her, so it was safe to assume she had no basic knowledge of game management either.
But she was also far too big a catch to give up.
After agonizing over it again and again, the manager took the application to his superior,
“Her peak viewership was thirty thousand? Pick her. Why are you even hesitating?”
Persuaded by such a simple argument, the manager sent an acceptance reply.
Whatever happens now isn’t my responsibility.
* * *
[NoName Official]
[Evolution Theory #World of Arseria (5/5)]
[Best Comment]
-(19:34) Only ningen can save ningen...! [Likes: 5.3K]
└ Ningu-ningu-ning~ [Likes: 5.8K]
└ Ningu-ningu-ning, are you out of your mind? LOLㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
└ Lmaoㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
└ I seriously didn’t see this coming at allㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
└ LOLㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ This is ridiculous
-She is Korean [Likes: 2.8K]
└ Kyaah, have the Yankee bastards finally come to their senses?
└ NoName is truly Korea’s treasure
└ wtf is she really 14 years old?
└ Yeah, man! This is the terrifying might of a Korean eighth-grader!
-You couldn’t hold a candle to her even if you brought in the top student from any academyㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
└ Where do these hidden masters keep popping out from? Is this Murim?
└ Wasn’t Korean academia actually the real bubble?
└ Altena Academy’s high school division got the first perfect score in the international Olympiad this time, so fuck off
└ Are you an academy student? Why are you so triggered?
“Ningu-ningu-ning!”
“Hey, Pyo Minjun! Stop it! Why do you keep going ‘pffft’ only at Name?”
“Could you at least either stop her or laugh, Sia unni?”
“Aheukhek, sorry! I don’t usually laugh much, but once I start, khff!”
“In my opinion, Yoo Sia is the worst of us.”
I was already regretting deciding to enter the LoL Fall Tournament with these people.
After agonizing over how to build my recognition in one fell swoop, I decided to participate in every tournament I could play at least reasonably well.
Since all the clan members I knew from LoL were streamers too, I decided to form a team with them and enter Fall.
I had also applied to the WoA division’s Win-It-Back Tournament without much expectation, but I was accepted far more easily than I’d anticipated.
“Middle-school syndrome? I’ll give you that. You’re at exactly the age for it.”
Minjun continued nodding.
“Hurry up and break the fortress.”
“I think we’d be a little short on damage without our ADC eee? But hey, NoName. Don’t you think you’re being a little ridiculous? How many years older am I than you, and why were you talking casually to me from the moment we met?”
“That line sounded so incredibly boomer, right, Name?”
“Sia, go away.”
“Aaaaaah, is Name upset? Huh? Big sis is sorryyy! I’ll even fire the ultimate for you. Grow!”
“If you’re going to do that, just make me taller already.”
Rattle-rattle—
Rattle-rattle—
Each shot from the machine gun I fired punched holes through the enemy fortress until it looked like a honeycomb.
Even after their base was destroyed, the enemies showed little reaction, as though they were preparing for the next game. It seemed their morale had already been broken long ago.
[Victory]
“That was way too one-sided.”
“Bro, seriously, we could put any random Master-tier mid in here and this would be a championship-winning lineup!”
Mir and Minjun were already getting ahead of themselves.
But it was understandable, since when we faced a five-man queue that always maintained Challenger in solo queue, the game had tilted in our favor without us suffering even a single disadvantage.
The only randomly matched mid laner scratched his head, looking bewildered.
“Are you guys entering Fall like this?”
“Yep! How were we?”
“The girls are better than the guys. How could you possibly lose?”
Unlike most tournaments, Fall had no tier restrictions, but it did require each team to include at least two female streamers.
Sia alone had maintained Challenger for years, and I wasn’t behind them in skill either, considering how many games I had played.
Even Minjun and Mir had reached Challenger, creating a practically overpowered combination.
“A lot of former pros enter Fall, too.”
“So what? How much does it matter if one lane is Diamond?”
“True.”
“Then I hope you win! Oh, and NoName, I’m a huge fan! I did drop about 400 points playing Mid Asteria back in the day, but it was fun watching you use that build.”
“Why do you even play Asteria mid? Hey, NoName, do you even realize how much shit you dumped all over the LoL scene? And now you’re abandoning LoL and running off to WoA?”
“When did I ever do that?”
“Kyaaaaa! That was exhausting.”
Sia stretched and began signaling that it was time to disband.
“NoName, is it okay if I upload today’s video to my V-Tube?”
“What, Pyo Minjun? Were you recording? Are you already planning to leech off Name’s viewers?”
“Isn’t that just standard in this industry?”
“Aha! So trying to sell someone else’s personal information and almost getting canceled was industry standard too?”
“I told you I got scammed too! It was so unfair, seriously.”
“Anyway, Name is precious. I’m not showing her to anyone.”
“Fine, become a big corporate streamer all by yourself. Guess we’ll stay tiny forever, sigh.”
Sia wrapped her arms around me and blocked my view.
Her pink hair kept poking my nose, and I had to endure the feeling that I was about to sneeze.
Mir had an appointment with an acquaintance, so he slipped away as soon as practice ended. Left alone, Minjun apparently had nothing else to talk about with us, so after exchanging a few words, he logged out.
“But what did you mean by almost getting canceled? Was it related to that hiatus?”
“Oh, you know! Ugh, I still get so angry whenever I think about it.”
Sia suddenly thumped her chest with both fists and flew into a rage.
“Have you heard of BebeGood? Oh, you haven’t? Anyway, those assholes from that crew subtly suggested that we collab with other female streamers. They said that if we handed over our footage, they’d even edit it all for free.”
“Really?”
“Yeah! Of course I declined, saying I didn’t need it. But Minjun oppa got really tempted, bowed and thanked them, while Mir oppa has always been kind of thoughtless.”
Sia explained that it was later revealed that when they collabed with female streamers, logs from the extensions those streamers used were left in their capsules as well, and that their real intention had been to use hacking tools to steal their personal information.
“Aren’t they total psychos? Both the ones trying to buy it and the ones trying to sell it. I got chills when I heard they could even find your home address.”
The subject came up while we were doing a drinking collab with our clan members. BebeGood hadn’t realized their microphone was on, and was properly immortalized in TreeWiki’s controversy category.
“No, they were the ones who did wrong, so why did the fallout hit us too?”
At least Sia, perhaps because she was a woman too, kept a low profile and returned after a month, but apparently people still didn’t look kindly on Minjun and Mir.
Since BebeGood had made the offer directly, people said there was no way the participants hadn’t known about it and wondered why they were pretending otherwise. The female streamers who were actually victimized even filed civil lawsuits as well.
In any case, the instigator, BebeGood, had been criminally punished, so there was no doubt it had been a fairly major controversy.
“That’s scary.”
“Exactly. So don’t collab with just anyone. You never know when they might steal your personal information using some other method we don’t know about.”
Although Twishy had supposedly established thorough measures to prevent anything like that from happening again, Sia was still full of distrust.
[Whisper]
[186 Unread Messages]
[Kariri: I told you, let’s collab! A collab!]
“Yeah, I’ll definitely keep that in mind.”
[You blocked Kariri.]
“But if you said you attend an academy, shouldn’t you be in the middle of exam season by now? It’s late April. Is it really okay to play around like this?”
“That’s why I’ve been taking a break from streaming lately.”
“...? We’re playing a game right now—what does that have to do with streaming!”
“I guess. It’s fine; there’s not much else for me to study anyway.”
“Wow, so this is what geniuses are like...”