Lia Turns Apology for Server-Wide Discord Pings Into a Slideshow Comedy Bit

PHASE CONNECT — Lia, the Phase Connect talent also known as Rinkou Ashelia, opened her stream with an apology for pinging everyone in the company’s Discord server, then spent much of the evening arguing, in character, that the pings were a kindness. She said she had notified about 50,000 people at once to urge them to try Final Fantasy XIV, whose free trial now includes the Shadowbringers expansion up to level 80 with no restriction on play time.

She presented the apology as a slideshow titled as a deep dive into “Discord ping conditioning,” and read replies to her ping aloud, answering each one live. Her case was that the only downside of pinging the whole server was “a single annoying alert noise” that passes within seconds, and that the pings gave members a feeling of being wanted and a common target in her. She also listed preventive measures, including setting a Discord status to do not disturb and muting mentions of @everyone, and she said plainly that the apology was not meant sincerely.

“There is really truly no downside to pinging besides a single annoying alert noise.” — Lia, defending her @everyone pings

From there the stream became a running routine about her powers as a moderator. She handed out joke timeouts, offered chat the choice of taking a 4 1/2-hour ban or doubling it for the next person, and let the figure climb to 10 and then 20 years. She described the Michigan coffee-shop reunion she imagined for a viewer banned that long. She also related two real mishaps, an accidental 15-minute timeout on Twitch and a month-long timeout on YouTube, both of which she said she felt bad about. Later she tried a stand-up spot, which she said she moonlights as, and chat greeted it with tomato emotes and requests that she stop.

At about the hour mark she switched to reading Super Chats from her cosplay stream the day before, thanking viewers and answering questions about cosplay. She said she had cosplayed since childhood, when her grandmother made costumes by hand, and that she has a half-finished Fire Emblem: Three Houses costume in her closet. The stream drew 48 Super Chats.

Lia said she would not stream only Final Fantasy that week, but that her family was arriving in town, which had upset her plans, so she was not sure how many streams she could add. She said she would tweet when she next went live, and she raided another channel to close the stream.