[Chaos Zero] The Story of Being Chosen as a Strategy Master

I thought, 'I wonder what this email is?' and when I opened it, wow!

It seems I was chosen as a Strategy Master. 40 gacha pulls. How nice!

So, today I'm going to brag a little.

I have a sense that I hacked the event.

The article I actually posted is the one above: 'Finishing the Sortie I Hardcore "Grind" with Heidemarie.' Since my user ID is in the post title, there's no point in hiding it with ***. I basically just took my usual note-writing style and did it on the STOVE community.

But!

Actually, I have a sense that I hacked the strategy challenge.

It was rough, but I analyzed it to some extent, and it's a fact that I chose the subject matter and decided to participate based on the strategy that 'an article with this kind of content might win.' Since I'm on the winning side, I can come up with any number of justifications after the fact, but it's true that I was aiming to win. If I just wanted to write an article, I could have used note. I posted it because I thought I could win.

So, the bragging content of this article is sharing the "ultimate method" of how I won the strategy challenge. Man, I've wanted to say that at least once. Method.

Thinking about the intent behind holding the event

What is the greatest success of a strategy challenge?

First, I thought, 'What does the management expect by holding a strategy challenge?'

It goes without saying that any event costs the production and management team, and companies don't usually hold events that don't promise a benefit.

Benefit means sales, directly or in the short term, like merchandise or gacha. Indirectly or in the medium to long term, it aims for sales through promotion, reliability, or authority. In the case of Chaos Zero, introducing high difficulty or new characters is direct, while X's RP campaigns or official broadcasts are indirect. In any case, an event won't happen unless there is a prospect or expectation that it will ultimately benefit them (the management). Usually.

The point is to be aware of the premise that 'the event organizers are thinking, "It would be great if this goes well"'.

When it comes to this strategy challenge, I needed to think from the management's perspective: "What does a successful event look like?" I had to hack the intent behind the event. To put it bluntly, what kind of article would the management want to award? In short, I had to put myself in their shoes.

So, I reached the conclusion that it is extremely important that the content encourages spending.

If user submissions for the strategy challenge gathered, generated some buzz, and a decent number of users viewed the winning articles... wouldn't it be perfect if those readers were inspired to spend money based on the winning article? You can treat UGC as advertising, right? From the management's perspective, it's killing two birds with one stone. This is a strategy that works precisely because it's decided by internal selection rather than user voting.

The new character at this time was Heidemarie. She is currently active and highly acclaimed as an insanely strong ace attacker, but looking at the story and how the official side was pushing her, it was clear they were putting more effort into her than Seleniel, so I figured they really wanted to sell her.

Therefore, in my submitted article, I recommended getting Heidemarie to 2-dupe.At first, I only touched on the strength of the 2-dupe red light sword and left it at that, but I remember adding a note at the very top of the article saying, "This is based on the premise of recommending 2-dupes."

The reason was to get the management's attention. It wasn't in the first view, but it was in the lead paragraph. I even made it bold to draw attention to it. I must have added it with the feeling of, "Ooh, look at me! I'm a spending-recommendation article!"

What do you do with Heidemarie?

So, it was decided that I would cover Heidemarie, but I was a bit lost on how to introduce her. At first, I thought about doing a safe build introduction, but I just had to think about what the management was pushing at the time.

The half-anniversary for Heidemarie's implementation had various highlights, but I think they could be broadly divided into four: the luxurious giveaways, the Sortie mode, Heidemarie, and the Screaming Spiral Tower. In that case, the subject is obviously the Sortie mode. Choosing the Spiral Tower here would mean my "strategy" wasn't up to par.

The half-anniversary had a pretty blatant atmosphere of trying to acquire new users, and the Sortie mode was definitely a hook (or rather, it seemed like the management wanted it to be a hook), so I went with that. In fact, I saw some people in the user community advertising it by comparing it to Slay the Spire 2, saying, "It has a roguelike mode!"

And so, the article "Clearing Sortie I Hardcore 'Grinding' with Heidemarie" was born.

I won, but my prediction was wrong.

Since I ended up winning, I think my aim wasn't wrong, but in the end, my prediction was off.

The announcement of the winners was late, and Heidemarie's gacha period had already ended. My article lost its value as a tool to incite spending. There's no point in advertising a character that can no longer be obtained.

I think it was my own fault that I completely lacked the perspective of when the announcement would be made. Or rather, if they were originally planning to announce it in early June, then my analysis was completely off. In fact, it might not have mattered that it was an article recommending Heidemarie at 2-dupes. Hmm.

Write it properly

The competition ratio is...

This is a story from my student days, but I knew someone who won a certain literary award. When I was talking about how amazing that was, they said it was no big deal and that it was already their fourth time.

When I asked what they meant, they said they had been targeting and applying only to small-scale short story literary awards with prize money of around 10,000 yen for several years. They called it a hobby to earn some pocket money, but I understood. They said the winning rate was 33%. Amazing.

I don't think it's good to make remarks that belittle this event even though I was awarded, but this was the trigger for me to try participating in the strategy challenge. The scale isn't that big, and the competition ratio probably won't be that high either.

As a matter of hindsight, the final number of submissions for the strategy challenge was 44. Since there are 3 winning slots, you have a 6.82% chance of winning. Even if someone says I only won by luck, the winning rate is high enough that I can't deny it. It's hindsight no matter how you look at it, but even with 100 entries, you'd have a 3% chance of winning.

Also... this might sound like I'm belittling other contributors, but honestly, I saw the articles posted before mine and thought, "I can do this."

I like Chaos Zero, but I've been slacking off, and I don't have any special knowledge. I'm sure there are plenty of people with more passion, knowledge, and money spent than me, but I feel like there aren't that many people who can write articles that are readable.It's so cringey writing this myself. I'm basking in self-satisfaction.

If you have time, even if you just skim through the content of the posted articles, I think you'll understand what I'm trying to say.

Decide on an article structure, even if it's rough. Add decorations, even if they're simple. Make sure to use line breaks properly. Insert images so people don't get tired of just text. Imagine what kind of person will read it. In short, write it properly.

It's cringey, but I'm good at writing, or at least I like it, so I definitely had an advantage. In fact, if the stage for this strategy challenge had been X, Shorts, or TikTok, I definitely wouldn't have participated (with the goal of winning). I have no know-how and no experience.

Based on experience rather than facts

It's like how to write an entry sheet, but individual, specific experiences are important.

ES aside, as far as this strategy challenge is concerned, it's important to think about the criteria from the selector's perspective. I spoke earlier about the axis of "which one do I want to win," but there is another perspective. That is, "is it not violating the regulations?"

The thing you have to be most wary of in these types of submission-based events is checking for plagiarism. You know how it happens sometimes—someone wins an award by submitting someone else's art or screenshots, and then the plagiarism is discovered later.

It makes no one happy, and while the person doing the plagiarizing is the worst, the organizers are usually the ones who get absolutely hammered. As an organizer, you definitely want to avoid that.

That being said, it must be scary to choose information based on objective facts.

A slightly simplified example. In the new Chaos, the unconfirmed event 'Craving Tasting' in the Theater of Phantoms has options that are too abstract, so you can't confirm what effects they trigger in-game. So, I tried all the patterns and made a list. That's it.

This is extremely useful as strategy information. It's strategy information based on objective facts that will lead to the exact same conclusion no matter who verifies it or how. In other words, it can be plagiarized without getting caught, even without verifying it yourself. Conversely, even if someone claims they researched everything from scratch, a third party wouldn't know.

You might think it's fine if you can confirm it's the original information, but there's also the issue of whether it's realistically possible to investigate text information on platforms like Note or X, video information on YouTube, closed communities like Discord, or everything from EN bulletin boards to KO social media. Drawing the line on how far you need to investigate is also a problem.

Therefore, the more you try to avoid awarding plagiarized submissions, the scarier it is to choose strategy information based on objective facts. I think. Because it's factual, it spreads rapidly through the community, making it hard to tell what the original source is and time-consuming to investigate.

Compared to that, subjective and individual specific strategy information is still better. From the perspective of the selector.

First, originality inevitably comes through. Since it's subjective for better or worse, it's highly likely that someone actually wrote it. Even if it's role-played or cited, it's basically never plagiarized word-for-word. Although there are examples of plagiarism where people just turn cooking recipes or game impressions into videos.

Also, I think it's important that what you're thinking is written honestly. In the article I submitted, there are even sentences critical of the management, such as 'If you have complaints about too many terms, tell the smartphone game developers,' 'A bug where the required points for Unconscious Blooming are off by a digit,' and 'The initial Colossus is too trashy', but it still won an award. There's also the scary possibility that the selector didn't even read the text.

Though I say it myself, my writing style has quirks and I included some small jokes, so maybe they judged that I must have played it myself and written it myself. It's just a case of it passing because I wrote it with the same vibe I usually use on Note.

Thinking about it now, it might have also helped that I submitted it relatively early.

In conclusion

To be honest, the 'Finishing Sortie I Hardcore "farming" with Haidemari' that I wrote is quite half-baked as a "strategy." There's no information based on objective facts at all (it's not useful from a user's perspective), and I'm just saying, 'This is how I'm farming!' I wonder what people who haven't pulled Haidemari twice are supposed to do, and it's also not good that I didn't mention partners at all.

Well, even so, I think winning the award was a result of being lucky and properly analyzing the strategy challenge itself. I'd like to think so. Due to the timing of the announcement, I ended up missing the prediction, though.

If there's a next time, I don't think I'll participate. If I were the selector, I wouldn't choose the same person. Besides, STOVE's UGC is set to noindex. It's configured so that it doesn't show up even if you search on Google or similar. It's like an unlisted video on YouTube. If that's the case, I'd rather write on note.

Related/Reference

"Completing Sortie I Hardcore 'farming' with Haidemarie"

Chaos Zero Strategy Challenge. The navigation link within the site is gone.

Results announcement. I did it!