All pictures originally taken in September 2021 for CDB’s Cassel Dream Theater contest. Nominated for the Best Prince user poll, I thought that I just had to sit back and let people who like my work vote for me naturally, but ohhhh, I was damn wrong! Although I usually don’t like complaining, I have a lot of things to say about the chaos that was this contest’s user poll period! XD
It was the first time CDB held a competition this huge, so I’ll forgive the staff for it being messy. But yeah, basically, the official staff did barely anything to spread the word about the competition, so most players didn’t even know it existed! In addition, the voting system was complicated, so a lot of people didn’t even know how to put in their vote.
As a result, the competitors had to explain everything by themselves using their in-game moments system and spread the word daily in the world chat and Twitter. To make it worse, voters didn’t get any rewards for voting, so there wasn’t any incentive and most players were indifferent about the contest. All the nominees felt bad that they couldn’t return any favor to their supporters, so the voting period was basically 11 days of torture…!
Still, I was adamant on doing my best in this contest, so I sat through the pain, steeled my heart, threw away my pride, and spread the word like a madman! As a shy introvert, it was extremely difficult for me to even show up in the world chat. (Voters don’t get any rewards. I didn’t want to sound noisy and annoying.) I got enough balls to show up in the world chat only on Day 5 and continued promoting for the remaining 7 days.
Luckily, the president of my current club Souten no Hikari, Kohi Bito-san, used to do promotions for his moments ranking, so he offered me some advice about how to promote in the world chat. I listened to him and promoted twice to thrice a day. My shy insides were secretly screaming in fear all the way! AAAAAA!! Luckily, Souten’s members and Fio-san showed up with me most of the time, so I didn’t have to go up the stage alone. Thank you so much, everyone!! I couldn’t have done it without you ;A;
I took new screenshots to use whenever I was promoting, just so I don’t bore the people who saw me. I’ll put them here:
I also included a thank you message and updates of the current situation in my in-game moments everyday. I won’t post the messages because they’re a bit messy, but you can have the doodles that I drew at the corner of every message:
Overall, I think the world chat’s still a scary place and I’ll forever be nervous to show up there. But during my promotion period, I also found that there were a lot more nice people than I thought! Even strangers cheered for me and I was able to make some new friends. Thank you so much for being nice and supporting me, everyone! May good things happen to you ;u;
(It was a shame that I couldn’t return any favor, so I at least wrote thank you messages and set up a photoshoot to thank everyone!)
P.S. If anything, this crazy hell turned into a pretty good mental training! With my newfound courage, I was able to gather the guts to go ask the official CDB staff for permission to upload my CDB fanworks here on this site. They said that it was okay, so I was elated!
Instead of just making Atelier Tenko fully original, the road of putting both original and fan works here is now open, so I can display 100% of my passion. It really brought everything to a new level! You can now enjoy the full package of Tenko!
