I couldn’t believe my eyes. The task the village chief had assigned was absurdly difficult. The very idea of it being a main quest was nonsense. And yet…… they were doing it? Limousine let out a hollow laugh, as if he had lost his mind. Jaheun, too, was at a loss for words and just kept silent.
<Tóng Jì> was part of <Celestial Wind>’s end content, one of the 10-man raids, and the latest one at that. Even though it had been about three months since its update—similar to the Bull Demon King’s Laboratory content—it still had such strict gear requirements that it remained one of the toughest.
Of course, Limousine had cleared Tóng Jì long ago, starting attempts right after its release, and he had already gotten all the loot he needed and graduated from it. Jaheun was probably in a similar boat…… Still, Limousine stared intently at the number ‘12 minutes’ written in the quest description, his eyes trembling.
Tóng Jì’s maximum play time—that is, the time from start to its wipe mechanic—was around 20 minutes. To clear it in under 12 would require not only top-tier gear but also a modified speedrun strategy, meaning the group needed players with a certain level of control. Even someone like Limousine, equipped with endgame gear, wouldn’t find the condition easy. And now…… they were doing that?
And the promotion to Prism Badge wasn’t exactly a breeze either…… If luck was on your side, it could go quickly, but without it, there was no guarantee you could get it done in a short time, either.
Both were crazy in terms of difficulty. PvE or PvP…… Limousine pondered for a moment.
<Celestial Wind> had a PvE system for dungeons and field hunting with AI monsters, but it also had multiple PvP systems where players could kill each other. Each type of PvP had different rules, and there were many users who found that appealing and mainly played PvP. Among Limousine’s acquaintances, Moto was one of them.
<Celestial Wind>’s PvP systems were divided into five types: Field PvP, 1v1 PvP, 6v6 Team PvP, Clan PvP, and Faction PvP. Of those, Field PvP—where you could stab and kill any passerby at any time—Faction PvP <Faction War>, which allowed large-scale battles between factions on special maps, and Clan PvP <Clan War>, the clan version of team PvP, did not count toward individual ranking points. However, in the case of Clan War, points were reflected in the clan rankings.
As a min-maxer, Limousine mostly played ranked PvP content: 1v1 PvP <Duel>, 6v6 Team PvP <Battlefield>, and <Clan War>.
For ranked PvP content, a tier system was used for easy rank calculation, with each score bracket named accordingly. From the lowest tier, Bronze Badge, the ranks ascended through Silver, Gold, Platinum, and finally Prism Badge. Everyone started from the base score at the Bronze level, and the score increased when you won and decreased when you lost.
Among them, the quest Limousine and Jaheun had just received was for Battlefield, where over half the factors that determined victory or loss came down to team luck. If your team was full of useless trash while the enemy team was all functioning humans, there wasn’t much you could do alone. That was both the charm and the flaw of team-based modes. Still, once you hit the higher tiers—Platinum and above—most players were at least competent, so as long as your own skills were decent, it actually felt like a proper game.
Of course, Limousine was in the Prism Badge tier. Since Battlefield scores factored into the overall rankings, not being good at it basically meant giving up on being a top-tier ranker. For now, the tiers had reset, so he was back at Bronze…… But Jaheun was also one of the top-tier rankers, so naturally, he had a Prism Badge as well.
Limousine quickly made his decision.
“Let’s go with Battlefield.”
“Not the raid? We have to raise our ranks for both anyway.”
“To clear Tóng Jì in under 12 minutes, we’d have to gather a bunch of high-DPS players, but anyone good is already in the middle of main quests. Even if we called them, they probably wouldn’t come. Who knows how long it’d take just to match everyone’s schedules. Do you have eight people you can pull in right now?”
“……We could try a public party……”
“You’ve cleared Tóng Jì with public parties before?”
Limousine gave Jaheun a look like he was staring at a monster. Jaheun was a regular on the first page of the raid rankings. He had cleared all that with randoms? Looking a bit sheepish, Jaheun averted his gaze, perhaps embarrassed to be outed as someone with no friends.
There was a reason people gathered a fixed team at regular times to run raids as a group. Compared to doing it with random strangers, your chances of getting good records were astronomically better when working with a trusted, coordinated group. It was just common sense.
“That’s insane. If you want to do it in 12 minutes, you have to place within the top 50. If you try to set a record with a public party and end up with a bunch of idiots, you’ll just end up stressed and have to go through the hassle of assembling a party all over again.”
But with Battlefield, it didn’t matter if it was a public party. From the start, the battlefield matchmaking system didn’t allow for full 6-player premade teams, only duos at most, so every party was essentially a public one.
Rankings had started being recorded the moment the update dropped, so it had already been ten days since the season began. Anyone who was going to climb had already done so, and in the current state of Bronze with no points from a single match, both allies and enemies were full of dumbasses. As long as you had just two competent players, it was enough. Starting from Platinum, it would get tougher, but with decent team luck, it wasn’t impossible to hit the goal within a week.
Either way, if you wanted to raise your personal ranking points, you had to reach the Prism Badge at some point. Normally, you just had to get there before the ranking period ended, so there had never been a need to rush like this…… but hey, just think of it as getting homework done early.
“Didn’t think I’d be starting off with Battlefield right after an update.”
Jaheun muttered beside him. Limousine completely agreed. He checked the current time. 3 AM. It was fairly late.
“Got anything going on tomorrow?”
“Nope.”
This was why gamer friends were the best. Strictly speaking, Jaheun wasn’t really a friend—both in the physical and emotional sense—but it did mean they’d at least developed that level of closeness.
“Let’s start grinding as soon as we wake up. If we’re unlucky, we could be stuck in Platinum all week.”
“When are you waking up?”
“……I can make it.”
“……Me too.”
The motivation to adjust their sleep schedule around a game appointment…… Satisfying. After a day of mentally exhausting work, a faint sense of contentment bloomed in Limousine’s weary heart. He and Jaheun cheerfully agreed to wake up, have lunch, and log in at 1 PM.
💔
Battlefield: Reporting the Married Scammer Duo
Can someone explain why a Prism tier is still hanging around in the Gold tier?
Every time I run into them, I’m just donating points. Why aren’t they moving up? I demand an explanation.
Replies (32)
└ What’s a ‘married scammer duo’?
└└ Have you been living under a rock?
└└ Celestial Wind’s No.1 couple
└└└ Damn… how did they end up with that title…
└└└└ If Prism players are stuck in Gold, that’s basically fraud. It’s borderline abusing the system
└└└└└ Maybe they didn’t want this either? ㅠㅠ
└└└└└└ Don’t talk about it… It’s too sad…
└ You need actual humans on your team to climb
└└ Oh… so they are social animals after all…
└└└ WTF ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ ‘Social animals’ got me good
└ I once faced that married scammer duo as enemies and actually won, but our team was a full-on suicide squad; no way the two of them could carry that
└└ Same here, ran into them once and won. I think it was pure team luck. Never seen enemies look so pitiful
└└ Still, if it’s Limousine and Jaheun-class players, just one or two decent teammates should be enough to demolish the other team ㄷㄷ
└└└ 2 monsters + 4 trash = still 6 players. In the end, the monsters get exterminated
└└└└ Bro… I just shed a single tear ㅠ
[See more…]
💔
Life, as always, was anything but easy. Despite expecting to reach Platinum without much trouble, Limousine had now been stuck drifting in Gold for five days. Still fuming from the last match they lost by just 10 points, he spent the matchmaking downtime reflecting on life and the universe.
Limousine and Jaheun’s current Battlefield score was 7,352. The cutoff for Platinum was 8,000, and for Prism, it was 10,000. They still had a long road ahead.
The climb through Bronze and Silver had been like child’s play.
Those tiers were filled with newbies just starting Battlefield or players who still didn’t fully understand their own class, so it barely counted as a warm-up.
But starting from Gold, strategy became a thing. Victory or defeat was decided by whether players could grasp the overall situation and fulfill their role accordingly.
It wasn’t Limousine and Jaheun’s fault that they kept getting matched with brainless teammates who took pride in charging headfirst into the enemy and landing lucky kills nor was it their fault that they’d been bouncing between 7,000 and 7,500 points for days now.
Hence, the mounting frustration.
Battlefield wasn’t a simple deathmatch where killing more enemies guaranteed a win. To avoid devolving into mindless brawling, unique rules were implemented, and they gave the game a sport-like feel that made it quite popular. Limousine was a fan of this system too.
Each match had a 15-minute time limit. The team that reached 1,500 points first or had more points when time ran out would win. That was the basic rule of Battlefield. And there were two ways to earn points.
First: kill enemies. One kill was worth 30 points.
Second: score a touchdown. A single touchdown gave a whopping 200 points.
Touchdown in a wuxia setting might sound weird, but the in-game terminology for it wasn’t clearly defined, so players just made up names. No one remembered who coined it, but at some point, everyone started calling it a ‘touchdown.’ Not an important detail—moving on.
At the start of the match, each team would spawn together on either the east or west side of the map, which became their base and respawn point. At the center of the base was a marked area big enough for a couple of people to stand in, which players called the ‘goal zone.’
At the same time, a spherical object called <Milky Way Sphere> would spawn in the center of the map. The name came from its translucent body and sparkling effect, like the Milky Way, but since Koreans loved shortening things, most people just called it ‘the ball.’ This ball could be picked up and carried by players.
In simple terms, the goal was to dash to the center, grab the ball, run, and drop it into the enemy’s goal zone. That was a touchdown—and it earned 200 points. Since a single touchdown gave way more points than a kill, the team that landed more touchdowns usually won. Of course, if you died seven times without scoring a single kill while trying to touchdown once, you just gave the enemy 210 points to earn your 200—clearly a bad trade.
Also, the player carrying the ball couldn’t use weapons. Instead of their combat skills, they had two ball-specific skills: <Unrivaled Under Heaven> (3 seconds of invulnerability, 20-second cooldown) and <Ball Throwing> to launch the ball a set distance.
If they’d already used their invincibility, they were just a walking scarecrow for 20 seconds, so the rest of the team needed to provide cover or create distractions.
Add to this the map’s terrain, which had multiple paths leading from the center to the goal zones, and you had a game full of strategy, analysis, and adaptation depending on your allies and enemies.
Of course, all of this only mattered if your teammates were at least semi-competent.
Limousine reminisced about all the times he had basically fought 2v10 in 6v6 Battlefield matches. He’d seen all kinds of idiots: People who ignored the ball carrier’s cooldown and just chased kills like maniacs, players who ran the ball straight into enemy ambushes, practically tossing it into their hands, and teams of three failing to stop one lone enemy from stealing the ball at their goal zone. He could list hundreds of examples.
Was it always this hard before? Back then, he hadn’t had a specific goal like ‘I must reach Prism Badge.’ He just played, and eventually ended up there, without really thinking much about it……
Now, after days of this, Limousine’s already short temper had reached rock bottom, and Jaheun had started snapping at teammates in chat more and more. And yet, strangely enough, things between the two of them were fine. Because, frankly, the problem wasn’t them—it was everyone else.
In fact, they were starting to develop a bit of a bond. Fighting their way through the chaos, Limousine and Jaheun had grown closer. How close? Well……
[Global] PrimeTimeParkBongpal: Guys, why do you keep coming here for your honeymoon?
[Global] Limousine: ㅋㅋ
[Global] Limousine: You want us to take your head as a wedding gift, Bongpal?
They no longer got annoyed when random players teased them about being a couple.
They could now reply smoothly and casually.
It was, truly, a major step forward.