PUBG Online Romance of the Century

Chapter 22 - StarTV’s third anchor selection competition

Edited by Divetus and Noks

By the time Yu Yan woke up the next day, it was already bright.

Although his livestream time was 11:00 a.m, he usually got up around 8:00 a.m or 9:00 a.m. Tilting his head to glance at the time, he saw that it was already 10:30 a.m.

He hurriedly got up to wash his face and rinse out his mouth. He didn’t have time to go out to buy breakfast, so he just ordered takeout and hastily sat down in front of the computer.

Skipping the step of going out for breakfast gave him more time. He had the time to check his private messages once he went online.

As he wasn’t very familiar with many of the features of the livestream platform, his private message settings didn’t block strangers from messaging him. Thus, every day he could receive dozens of private messages.

There weren’t too many this time, so he could still read all of them, unlike the previous couple of days when he had been under the suspicion of cheating and had received thousands of messages just cursing him out.

When he clicked the messages open to take a look, he found that Administrator 03 had also sent him a private message.

He had previously privately messaged the other party and inquired about the announcement made on his stream, but had only got back a vague and perfunctory explanation from Administrator 03. His reply only said that it was the platform internally testing the function for the future, and the two of them didn’t communicate any further.

[Administrator 03: StarTV’s third anchor selection competition is officially open for registration! The registration time is from July 29 to August 03, and the selection period will start from 00:00 a.m. on August 04 and last until 23:59 p.m. on August 18. Please clic.k here→]

It was followed by a long list of websites.

Anchor selection competition?

This sort of thing was part of his knowledge gap of the platform, and his curiosity made him click on the link.

There were no less than 20 different competition category descriptions. Yu Yan directly skipped over them and scrolled over to the awards.

With so many different competition categories, there were naturally many rewards. These awards were further divided into two categories: One was awards that all of the platform’s anchors could win, while the other were awards that only anchors playing specific games could win.

The big awards included “Best Anchor of the Year”, “Most Popular Anchor of the Year”, and “Newcomer Anchor of the Year”.

Among those three awards, even the lowest level “Newcomer Anchor of the Year” award required the anchor to have streamed on the platform for at least three months, but also less than a year, so Yu Yan directly ignored these awards and continued to scroll down.

He finally found the PUBG section that had three shining medals hanging on top of the webpage.

“Strongest Kills King”, “Chicken-Eating King”, and “Diligent Anchor”.

Among these three awards, the one with the most ambiguous selection method was the “Chicken-Eating King” award. It wasn’t the anchor who won the most matches; the description on the webpage was: “the selection criteria of this award will be based on popularity, public enthusiasm and viewer count. The final result will be evaluated by a platform staff member”.

The title of the “Strongest Kills King” sounded imposing. Naturally, this selection’s requirements were the highest of the three awards—a platform staff member would select some anchors according to their stream data, and the winner would be selected from those anchors based on their popularity during the 15 days of the competition.

The last award, the “Diligent Anchor”, was completely evaluated based on the anchor’s total livestreaming time span. You also couldn’t just cram in livestream time last minute for the award; the platform staff member would take the anchor’s previous livestream time spans as a reference.

Yu Yan felt like he could touch the edge of this award. Although he hadn’t been livestreaming for long, his daily streaming hours were about 12 hours, which practically counted as a conscientious anchor.

He had just finished reading the introductions for the awards when Lu Xiuhe messaged him.

Your Great Lord Lu: [Website Link: StarTV’s third anchor selection competition has officially opened!]

Yu Yan: I’m looking at it now.

Your Great Lord Lu: Thought of which one you want to participate in?

Yu Yan: … How long have I been livestreaming for? I don’t think I could even get close to any of them.

Your Great Lord Lu: Don’t say that ah. In any case, just sign up anyways. Even if you can’t be judged, getting a participation award is good too!

There were also participation awards?

He scrolled to the end of the webpage and sure enough, saw participation awards: all eligible and registered anchors could get a “Myriads of Lights” gift after the selection.

“Myriads of Lights” was one of StarTV’s paid gifts, worth 100 yuan. Subtracting the platform’s share, you would basically get 50 yuan just for signing up.

There was no such thing as too little free money. 50 yuan was enough for a whole day’s worth of takeout for him.

Your Great Lord Lu: What do you think? Did you figure out which one you’re going to participate in?

Yu Yan: En… “Diligent Anchor” ba

Your Great Lord Lu: Forget about that award. Don’t think about it, you can’t get it.

Yu Yan: Why?

Your Great Lord Lu: Don’t you know? There’s a PUBG anchor that streams from 9:00 a.m to 11:00 p.m, no matter what. He’s been keeping this schedule for more than half a year already, even when he’s ill, he would livestream while attached to an IV! Could you beat such a guy?

Yu Yan: … I’m no match for him. Forget it, play a match now?

He didn’t have to get that 50 yuan.

Your Great Lord Lu: You can go participate in the Chicken-Eating King or the Strongest Kills King category ah! Those big PUBG anchors will definitely be competing for those platform-wide awards.

Among the competition’s 20 rules, one was that anchors who signed up to participate in the platform-wide awards couldn’t participate in specific category award competitions as well. This was considered as giving the other small anchors a chance.

Yu Yan: Anchors can only participate in those two awards if they’re selected by the platform staff members.

Lu Xiuhe took a look. Hey, it was actually true.

Who would look carefully through this long list of rules ah, he vented in his heart.

Your Great Lord Lu: What a troublesome platform… Man, you’re so strong, if the platform staff member didn’t pick you, there must be something going on behind the scenes!

Yu Yan laughed and was about to begin his livestream when his private messages icon lit up again.

Administrator 03: yanxyan, congratulations on your qualification to compete for the [PUBG category— Chicken-Eating King] award. Please submit your application to the platform within the registration time as soon as possible. Applications submitted after the registration period will be rejected.

“….”

He clicked on the awards page for the PUBG Chicken-Eating King category.

After reading it, he was shocked—it had to be said that the company behind StarTV was really rich. It was just a small game category award, but the prize was as high as 200,000 yuan! Additionally, you would be displayed in a recommended position on the front page on three separate occasions.

What was the value of a 200,000 yuan prize? As of now, in a small-scale professional online competition, the 1st place prize was usually just 200,000 yuan. Subtract the company fees, add the fact that the prize money needed to be split amongst teammates, and you would only end up with a few tens of thousands of yuan.

He couldn’t help scrolling up.

For the “Best Anchor of the Year” award, the prize was 1 million yuan along with a whole week of being in a recommended position on the front page.

… He had seriously gotten too carried away. He had even dared to look at the prize for the “Best Anchor of the Year”.

If it was just the 50 yuan participation award, he was willing to give up.

But for a 200,000 yuan prize… Even if his chances of winning were just 1%, he would still want to compete.

If he really managed to win the 200,000 yuan prize, he could get that mo-ped and those new computer accessories that he had his heart set on without blinking an eye.

He decisively clicked “I want to register” on the webpage and entered his account ID and login password.

[Sorry, your registration has failed.]

He frowned. Thinking that he might’ve made a mistake somewhere, he tried registering again, but still received the same prompt.

Having no other choice, he sent the screenshot of the prompt to Administrator 03.

Administrator 03: Hello, only anchors who use their video cameras can participate in this competition.

???

yanxyan: But there’s no such rule on the webpage.

The administrator also wanted to vent—You’re the only anchor who could qualify to participate in this competition without turning on their video camera ah!

Administrator 03: During this competition, there will be an extra [Competition Zone] on the livestream platform’s front page, and the competitors’ livestreams will randomly be displayed in that zone. Our platform’s rule is that we can’t manually enter anchors into the recommendation page without their video camera on.

What kind of bullshit rule was this?

Yu Yan didn’t quite understand.

yanxyan: Can you get stronger by turning on the webcam?

Administrator 03: … This is just one of the measures the platform is taking to prevent a scenario of pre-recording and then livestreaming that. In fact, you don’t have to worry too much about it. The viewers don’t have high requirements for the physical appearance of male anchors. Besides, after turning on a webcam, it can also slightly eliminate some of the stream followers’ misunderstandings.

This Administrator 03’s speaking ability was really powerful. The meaning of his words was precisely: you don’t have to worry about losing stream followers if you’re ugly, and being able to see your gameplay actions when shooting will stop the rumors of you using a cheat software.

yanxyan：… Let me think about it.

Their conversation ended there. Yu Yan started the livestream right at 11:00 a.m and saw the red scarf on his game avatar’s neck as soon as he entered the game.

When other people wore this red scarf, they looked particularly oppressive. When he wore it, with his avatar dressed in a plain white T-shirt and khaki trousers, he looked like he was wearing the red neck scarf of the young pioneers.

[Anchor, you can count this as me begging you—Buy yourself a new outfit ba!]

[The attire is so ugly that it’ll be likely that you’ll draw fire when you enter the game.]

[The anchor is only wearing the default outfit to be funny ba?]

“No, I’m just really poor.” Yu Yan was very calm. “I haven’t bought anything since I started playing this game.”

[… Too tragic.]

[Listening to that has brought tears to this sad viewer, sending you a “Myriad of Lights” gift. Go buy yourself a key to open a box ba.]

After the end of each match, every player would get a certain amount of in-game currency. This game currency could be used to exchange for a loot crate.

However, without a key, you couldn’t open the loot crate anyway. Crates could be bought with in-game currency, but keys could only be bought with real money.

In a split second, he received a lot of paid gifts in the livestream. Although most of them were small 10 yuan or 50 yuan gifts, collectively, it still amounted to quite a bit.

Yu Yan chuckled, “Thank you for your gifts, but I’m not very particular about clothes. This already looks pretty good.”

[Are you going to take part in the anchor competition?]

“I don’t know yet.” Yu Yan said, “But even if I join, it’ll just be about getting the participation award.”

As he finished saying that, a message popped up in the game—T0Tttt12 invites you to a team.

Yu Yan didn’t remember who this was, but the barrage already gave him the answer.

[Tuantuan!! Tuantuan actually invited you to play games with her!!!]

[Tch, how come I can still see her even when I open a gaming anchor’s livestream? Can’t you peacefully stay in your own entertainment category? Don’t come out here to disgust people.]

[Have a faint impression, is this the little Jiejie with the very sweet voice and extremely good luck?]

[Yes, yes, yes, it’s her.]

Today, Lu Xiuhe couldn’t come online because he had class. Since Yu Yan was alone anyways, he simply accepted the invitation. In a flash, there were three more people in his game interface.

… All three game avatars were women dressed in black pleated miniskirts and black suspenders.

[Judging from my years of experience in online dating, these three are all girls. If they’re not, then I’ll quit online dating on the spot and never come out again!]

[You’ve appeared, the expert of online dating has appeared again! Big Gege, take me with you!]

One of them opened their mouth. “Tuantuan, is this the little Gege you mentioned last time?”

“Yes, he’s very powerful, he can even carry me.” Speaking of this, Tuantan sweetly laughed, “And he’s very gentle.”

“Really? Is the little Gege there? Say something?”

The online dating expert was right. These were three female players. Yu Yan even suspected that all the three girls were fellow anchors.

Their voices were clean and penetrating. It was easy to hear that they were using good quality sound cards priced in the tens of thousands of yuan, crushing his discounted 228 yuan sound card into the ground.

—

Juurensha: I believe in you Yanyan! I’m sure you can get both Chicken-Eating King and Strongest Killing King!

Divi: I’m sure that you can get the other two titles! Especially if you turn on your webcam hurhur, the Chicken-Eating title would be so easy to grasp. I hope yanyan has a good time with the girls, and that they also appreciate him.

Noks: So that’s how Boss Yi gets to see Yanyan’s face for the first time!!! Can’t wait for that scene… hehehe

Please check out and support the raws if you can!