EDIT: This section probably works better as added context to a video of what happened in this match, but I have not yet made the video.
The date was Thursday, April 25th, 2024.
The final wave of challenges that needed to be completed in order to unlock the Appa glider had just been made available.
I was sticking to my usual method of going in solo to focus primarily on completing the challenges without any concerns of winning or sticking with a team.
In this particular match, I was aiming to complete one particularly tricky challenge.
At some point in a single match, I would need to have four of my five inventory slots filled with each of the four elemental bending scrolls.
Choosing a particular drop location could net me one of them right at the beginning,
but the other three would take some great fortune to come by and hang onto long enough to have all four at the same time.
During the pre-game dance party time of waiting for players to load into the server,
I was just using one of my emotes while thinking about how I was going to pull off the insurmountable task ahead.
A player using the Korra player model walked up to me from behind. Before I really knew what was happening, they dropped the crown they had won on the ground for me to pick up.
A "Victory Crown" is an item awarded to players who win a match that occupies its own special inventory slot.
It persists across games and is dropped when the player dies, allowing other players to pick it up.
Winning a match while holding a crown increases a "crowned" win count, which can be displayed with a special emote awarded to players after their first such win.
I'm not the type to take games too seriously (especially this one) but I didn't want to just take the crown.
Winning games in a battle royale format isn't easy to pull off and I wanted to let this player keep the crown they earned.
By some miracle, I managed to pick up a crown off a player I killed in my first ever solo match win, making it my first victory with a crown as well.
This happened just short of a week earlier on the 19th.
I used the special emote to try conveying to the Korra "I already have a win with a crown, so I'm okay."
The player picked up the crown and dropped it again, as if to say "No, I want you to have this."
After that, I finally took it.
In the last seconds before the start of the game, we did some friendly teabagging as signs of mutual respect and, in my case, gratitude.
Originally, I was queuing to complete the challenges to unlock the Appa glider, but with a crown that had been handed to me by someone I didn't know, I was feeling the pressure.
I'm sure it was given to me with no real expectations, but it felt too special to me.
At that point, I wanted to take that crown as far as I could manage and try to actually pull off the win, not for myself, but for the guy I didn't even have a name for that gifted it to me.
This wasn't going to make me give up on collecting the four bending scrolls to put together the royal flush that completed the challenge.
With all this, a game I originally planned to not care about just had the completely arbitrary stakes raised higher than I ever would have imagined.
Dropping down into the game, I made my destination one of the two Air Nomad shrines on the map to pick up the airbending scroll right away.
This would enable me to traverse the terrain much more quickly than on foot and should help me find the other three scrolls.
Another player dropped at the same location I did. Luck decided to let us split the two scrolls that dropped evenly.
With no real weapons on the ground, I was going to run to avoid any confrontation.
Before I could do that, the other player ran off.
That worked fine for me.
I talked to the Aang NPC that was at that particular location, collected a free shield potion, then used it before taking off.
I spent most of the match lurking about for resources.
I went to the Water Tribe shrine west of where I dropped hoping to pick up another scroll, but no dice.
Other players already looted it. I spent a long time at a building on an island by itself, where I managed to obtain a firebending scroll.
I continued west, avoiding player interaction as best as I could to minimize the risk of losing the crown and progress on collecting the scrolls.
The fire shrine had clear signs that players had been there, but both of the firebending scrolls that would be there at the beginning were still there.
If I hadn't found one at that random building, one of those would have been extremely helpful.
With two of the four scrolls obtained and not much further west I could go, I started moving south.
After a long while, I stumbled across an active and unclaimed weather station.
Those are the ones that can be claimed to have the map show where the next two storm circles will be instead of just one.
After picking off the NPCs that guard it, I got the card needed to claim the station and an upgrade to my marksman rifle.
I started getting shot at by a player just after I swiped the card, giving me an opportunity to put my new rifle to use.
I killed off the NPC bot hired to be his wingman by shooting it multiple times through the windshield of the stationary car it was waiting in.
The player drove off and I replenished my shield while deciding where to go next.
There was an Earth Kingdom shrine not too far east of where I had ended up.
The killer storm would be closing in on it soon, so I quickly made my way over there to hopefully pick up an earthbending scroll.
Nope, that one had been looted.
In order to not die, I quickly got out of there.
The map had two shrines for each of the elements, and it didn't take me long to set my next destination to the other Earth shrine.
On the way over, I spotted two players shooting at each other.
I had a good position and a better rifle, so I managed to take them both out.
Based on the usernames, they were both bots.
Oh well.
At least my kill count had finally progressed beyond zero.
Speaking of, with those two out of the way, the number of players still remaining was down to 13.
With a count that low and the storm shrinking in, I was running out of time to get my two scrolls up to the full four.
No time to waste. I made it to the other Earth shrine without any complications.
The pedestal on which the scrolls rest at the beginning of the round was untouched, which brought my total up to three.
Additionally, this other shrine is where the Toph NPC resided.
Standing there, beside the character that I was using, I decided to toss out my health kits in favor of the scroll.
Waterbending scrolls allow players who have them to heal while in water,
so once I found one, I could use it as an alternative to the kits I was leaving behind.
The shrine was at the top of a small mountain.
At its base was a named location highlighted in gold, meaning that rarer loot drops would be there.
With no other options on the table for finding the last scroll, I made my way there hoping to complete the quadfecta.
I started looking through the buildings for unopened chests in the hope that one of them would happen to drop the right item.
Within a minute of searching through the buildings, I opened a door to a room with an unopened chest on a counter... and a waterbending scroll on the ground.
About three seconds later, I picked it up and completed the challenge.
I temporarily dropped my shield potions to have all four in my inventory, but decided to leave behind the firebending scroll.
With this core component out of the way and the remaining player count down to just nine, it was time for me to face the music.
I was well-equiped, but not being a particularly great player, things could still go very wrong very fast.
Nobody seemed to be near me, so I took the time to wait a bit and plan out where I wanted to go using the more complete information made available to me by the weather station.
Just before the storm started to close in on my position, I started toward the location I had marked,
uncertain as to what could transpire once I got there.
Odds were good that I'd just die to the first player I came across.
Only one way to find out.
As I progressed to my location, I ended up in a good spot to look at the map just after the circle had finished its current phase of closing in.
With the new information available, I changed my target location, then moved on.
I found a player getting shot at near the river, clearly being shot from someone farther in the direction I was facing.
With their back to me, I threw in a few shots of my own, but didn't manage to get the kill.
A shot hit me from the direction of the player who did get the kill.
I took cover and managed to spot movement in the distance.
I scoped in to find the target, only to find two.
I had been shot by a player-hired NPC, who I decided to target first being that's the first one I saw.
I did also see the player that NPC was following.
It was someone using Korra.
Holy shit.
That could be the same guy that gave me the crown at the very beginning!
Still not wanting to die, I kept firing at the NPC and managed to take her out.
I don't think the player noticed the gunshots because the rifle I was using had a suppressor.
Then, I made a decision that I probably shouldn't have.
Without having any idea if it was the same guy, I didn't shoot at the Korra.
Further, I was going to do what I could to not have to kill that player until I either died or the player count dropped to just us.
There's no way this would matter to anyone else still standing and make my life more difficult,
but the thought of getting to the end of the match and having the last two standing be the player who gave me the crown and I was more important to me than winning ever could have been.
I went off in a different direction, hoping to find someone else to fight to further my newfound objective.
I got lucky, in a way.
By the time I found someone else, the count was down to three.
This player was the last player that would need to be eliminated before I got what I wanted.
Not long after, I got spotted by the third player and we started firing shots.
I got close with the earthbending scroll and managed to knock them away, which completed another tricky challenge for getting the Appa item that I can't remember the specifics of.
At this point, the Korra player dropped in on me.
The battle then turned into me doing my thing, the Korra trying to take out either of us, and the third player mostly just trying to survive.
EDIT: I found the specifics of the challenge I was thinking of. "Launch an opponent with Rock Wall technique and heal in water using waterbending in the same match"
After some time, I managed to get a few good shots on the third player while they were in a position fortified with earthbending.
Pushing that spot, I managed to force the player out into the open.
I took some hits from the Korra, but was able to regain shields while the other two fought with each other at a lower elevation I couldn't see from where I was.
They popped back up as I was trying to get a view of them.
Returning to the position I had stolen, I pulled off a headshot that killed the third player.
At this point, I was completely satisfied with the match.
I managed to knock out two challenges that seemed almost impossible to complete.
I took the crown that I had been gifted all the way to the final battle and the person I was fighting against was likely the same player who gave me the crown.
All that was left to do was finish the fight.
Obviously, winning was the objective, but as long as this last encounter was well fought, second could never have felt like losing to me.
I led with some friendly teabagging to see if I could indicate to the Korra that I was the same Toph player from before.
I don't know that the message got across.
We shot at each other with the extremely powerful ice-shard projectiles of the waterbending scroll and we both took significant damage.
Eventually, we ended up on a set of stairs.
Not much more running either of us could do.
By the skin of my teeth, I managed to land the final hit.
What a fucking game.
I could never have imagined an experience like this having transpired at any point during my time playing this game.
No denying it though, the excitement was real.
Not long after, I realized that the game deviates from its own norm and doesn't show the winning player the username of the player they just eliminated.
One of the biggest reasons I wanted to make it as far as I did was to have the name of that exact player.
This was bad.
I quickly got to searching for information on any way I could get that name.
Logs, demos/replays, or anything I could get. Apparently, the game does have a replay feature,
but it's buried in a small "Replays" button in the bottom-right corner of the "Career" tab on the main menu.
I wouldn't have thought to look for it there.
Anyway, not only was I able to make recordings of what had transpired to accompany the Windows Xbox Game Bar clips, but I got the name I was looking for.
This match defied all expectations for what this game I find stupid most of the time could offer.
The experience was mostly facilitated by the actions of one player,
who likely didn't know what was happening after the interaction at the beginning and certainly couldn't have known its effect on me.
If, by some remote chance, the same doughboy29 who was there on that Thursday night in April happens to be reading this,
I hope that match was at least somewhat as memorable to him as it was to me.
Additionally, I'd like to apologize to the third place player, AlphaTrooper_42, for my intentionally not targeting doughboy while attempting to have us be the last two.
It's not something that should have happened, but with everything leading up to that moment, I had to give it a try.
As of this writing, the match happened about a month and a half ago and I used those recordings of the demo playback to reconstruct a lot of what happened.
I should get around to editing those into something cohesive, but I have no idea when I'm going to get to that.