Chapter 107: Metapic

Meanwhile, while Kayak was achieving 1 million views and doing ASMR on her stream, the Abyss League Spring Season continued.

In first place, naturally, was Fusion Gaming.

There were no teams that could stop them after they pulled out Camilla as a joker pick in the opening match.

Was this what it meant to be a powerhouse team?

They maintained their unshakable first-place position even now, having completed about half of the total league schedule.

However, the other teams weren’t just idly watching Fusion Gaming’s solo run.

This was the Korean league, known to be the most competitive among all the Abyss world leagues.

As such, the other teams were hell-bent on seizing the season championship cup, and for that, hadn’t they spent a considerable amount of money rebuilding their teams before the season?

From the start of the season, they had declared that this season would be different, and for the sake of their hopeful fans, it had to be different.

Therefore, they would stop at nothing to win.

Researching the Camilla pick that Fusion Gaming had first introduced was also part of that ‘stopping at nothing.’

– Ah, what is this?

– Camilla, Camilla has reappeared! Following Fusion Gaming, Hansung has also picked Camilla!

– It’s certainly a pick that catches them off guard… but will Hansung be able to show a good performance with Camilla?

Kayak had unleashed poison into the league!

Contrary to the commentators’ concerns, Hansung also showcased a respectable performance with Camilla, no less than Fusion Gaming’s, and led their team to victory.

Perhaps because of that, Camilla continued to be researched by various teams even during the season, and she became a pick that consistently appeared in subsequent matches.

Some teams even started to permanently ban her, feeling she was considerably tricky to deal with.

This, too, was Camilla’s status, her majesty.

It was also a phenomenon that proved Camilla was a meta pick.

After all, a pick that fits the meta was either banned or picked.

A series of games continued where teams that couldn’t handle Camilla banned her, and teams that had successfully completed their research picked her.

This change wasn’t just limited to the tournament.

As Camilla became a meta pick fit for tournaments and appeared frequently, more people started thinking, ‘Maybe she’s better than I thought,’ and began to try playing her at least once.

It wasn’t so strange, then, that the stats website, which ranked heroes’ tiers by compiling various solo rank indicators, designated Camilla as a Tier 1 hero.

Camilla: Tier 1, Pick Rate: 13.22%, Win Rate: 46.98% – Role (Assassin)

– Camilla is Tier 1…? Has a day like this really come?

– Please practice in normals before you come to ranked, stop troll-picking.

– They should legally make it so no one below Diamond can pick Camilla. Can’t play a normal game because of her, for real.

– Teacher… you’ve finally achieved your dream.

– FR, it’s a hero even the pros find difficult and only a few use lol, why are they picking her in ranked?

– When she appears, it’s one of two things: either our team gets crushed or the enemy team gets crushed.

– I really want to kill the kids who pick Camilla after watching the tournament. You think you’re Lee Junhyeok, Kayak, or Envy?

– I insta-ban her at the start so my team can’t pick her.

– I still don’t know what she does. All I’ve seen is her spinning around and dying.

Was it because the tournament season hadn’t ended yet?

Contrary to Kayak’s expectations, Camilla’s nerf didn’t happen immediately.

There must have been a reason like that for Camilla to be placed in Tier 1.

I thought her arms and legs would be chopped off in the very next patch, but she wasn’t even touched by the balancing knife.

Thanks to that, Camilla began to be treated as a great hero as long as you had decent mechanics and proficiency.

Unbeknownst to many, the number of people trying to practice Camilla started to increase.

After all, everyone had been reluctant because of her performance; the hero herself was impossible to dislike based on her appearance.

Instead, she had now become a kind of ‘fiend’ hero, where only skilled players could bring out her full potential.

Following the Renoc-fiends and Alex-fiends, it was the birth of the Camilla-fiends.

At the same time, people began to flock to the stream of Kayak, who expertly handled Camilla.

It was a kind of trickle-down effect.

Hadn’t she said that she even passed on her builds to the pros?

They had not forgotten Lee Junhyeok’s shocking interview, where he said he had learned everything he needed for the tournament from Kayak, the master of Camilla.

Upon belatedly grasping the situation due to the flocking crowd, Kayak simply raised the corners of her mouth quietly.

First of all, my analysis was wrong.

I thought Eonix, with their characteristic wariness of a specific hero becoming too prominent, would nerf Camilla immediately.

Why was I in a good mood even though my prediction was wrong?

That was probably because it was a miscalculation that wasn’t so bad.

With Camilla not getting nerfed, she continued to appear in tournaments, and accordingly, her pick rate increased, and she finally reached Tier 1.

It was truly a perfect butterfly effect.

The fact that I was the one who provided the starting point of that butterfly effect was another delightful fact.

Of course, this wasn’t what I had intended, but since the result was good, wasn’t it a good thing in the end?

It feels like only good things have been happening lately, is it just my imagination?

I feel like something suddenly bad is going to happen…

‘I’ll just think about that when it happens.’

I shook my head, forcefully brushing away the anxiety that was slowly creeping up.

Anyway, as the demand for Camilla increased, the number of people flowing into my stream was also continuously increasing.

It was just yesterday that I heard people, thirsty for knowledge about Camilla, asking me to do a coaching stream.

I was so surprised when I heard that.

A streamer must be quick to adapt to change.

Should I say one has to grasp the flow of the times well? It’s a profession where those who can read such trends are more likely to succeed.

The current wave of the era is… Camilla.

To summarize it in one sentence, that was it, and if that was the flow of the times, it was the same as saying that the era was calling for me.

In such a situation, what I had to do was simple.

Click, clack.

I am writing an announcement.

What kind of announcement, you ask? It was an announcement to recruit a student for coaching.

For a while now, there had been a lot of talk about doing a coaching stream.

It was even mentioned in donations, so it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that orders were flooding in.

If there is sufficient demand, there is no reason not to provide the supply.

Moreover, coaching streams were something of my specialty.

Just how many people had I taught on my stream already?

I could have simply shown myself playing in a live stream and even produced a VTube video, but I decided this way was better.

It’s called tailored education; I had realized from past experience the importance of educating people at their own eye level.

Even if I showed my gameplay videos, the level was too high, and in most cases, people couldn’t understand it.

Also, I would have to explain for every single play why I did this here and why I did that there, but in my tier, the situation unfolds so rapidly that I didn’t have the luxury to do so.

In the end, I would have to make a smurf account like other streamers do, but I figured it would be better to just take on a disciple, a student, and use that person as a case study for teaching.

I also had a subtle aversion to making a smurf account and playing Camilla.

If I made a sub-account, what sin had the people who matched with me and lost to me committed?

As someone who detested the kind of people who felt superior by slaughtering players in tiers lower than their own, I could not become one of them.

“Hmm….”

Therefore, I was currently writing an announcement.

An announcement to recruit a student.

For now… should I make it a beginner class?

A tier around Bronze or Silver would be appropriate.

The so-called low tiers.

Viewers may lump Bronze, Silver, and Gold together, calling them ‘Bro-Sil-Gold’ and scoffing, but statistically, the Silver population is the largest in Abyss.

My stream would be no different.

That meant a person from that tier was most suitable to be a case study.

If the tiers are similar, they mostly have similar problems, and it could easily evoke empathy from the viewers.

Like them thinking, ‘Ah, I had a similar thought.’

Let’s decide to open intermediate and advanced classes later if there are requests.

It seems there are still many who haven’t even mastered the basics, so it’s too early to cover an advanced course.

…

And so, the announcement was finally complete.

Perhaps because I put a lot of effort into it, it felt like the best-written announcement I had ever made.

It was a post that would make me want to apply immediately if I were a student wanting to learn Camilla.

But after I finished writing it, a thought began to surface.

A slight, but huge question that felt like an ‘oops’ moment I had only just realized.

‘Is it okay for Bronze-Silver-Gold players to play Camilla?’

Isn’t this akin to teaching apes mathematics?

It might be a way of unleashing a catastrophe upon the Bronze-Silver-Gold ranked games.

Looking at the announcement I had written, I fell into thought for a moment.