"Holy crap, holy crap, look at these numbers!"
One of the players, Medical Insurance War God Big Saien, was sitting in his rented apartment with a cup of fizzy drink in hand, staring wide-eyed at the video he had uploaded to a video site four hours earlier.
The thirty-minute CG film, which he had titled "The Rise of Transia: The Gnoll Apocalypse," was a short edited together from gameplay recordings contributed by him and his buddies.
He wasn't a professional filmmaker, nor did he have a team, so even Big Saien thought the short was rough—almost embarrassingly so.
Its only real strengths were its completely authentic first-person perspective and its daring use of a single continuous shot.
Although Brother Fa had given him permission to make a fan work on the forum, one major reason Big Saien had taken nearly half a month to upload his first piece was that he lacked confidence.
He absolutely believed that True Otherworld had the potential to go viral, but even the development team wasn't in a hurry to promote it. Wasn't he being a little "presumptuous" by sticking his nose in?
With that mindset, Big Saien uploaded the CG video he'd so carefully edited, then promptly left it alone. He put on his headset and logged into the game to run the Rat King Apocalypse dungeon with a few friends. But he was still "cursed with bad luck": no rare drops and no random events.
Players had already confirmed that both of those things could be triggered.
The special drop, "Rat King's Echo," could be exchanged for a psionic weapon blueprint. The blacksmith NPCs in the camp were now offering high prices for it, because its cool appearance had pushed the order queue at the smithy out to a month.
It was also