[Participating in the NEXON PEAK Post Challenge]

https://peak.nexon.com/post/2446

I never used to look closely at other people's profiles in games.

When a friend request came in, I would check little more than the name and level, then accept it if nothing seemed wrong. I thought profile messages and featured characters were details for people who enjoyed customization.

After I started playing Blue Archive, though, I found myself looking at profiles first whenever I opened my friends list.

Seeing which student someone had chosen to feature and what they had written in their profile message gave me a glimpse of how they enjoyed the game.

Some people featured students who performed well in battle, while others chose the student they had liked most in the story. Some left a brief joke in their message, while others listed event dates and their goals.

The NEXON game that really showed me how enjoyable customizing a profile could be was Blue Archive.

At First, I Featured My Strongest Student

When I first started the game, I thought of my profile as another part of preparing for battle.

I chose a well-known, high-rarity student from my roster to feature. A small part of me also hoped that other people would not see me as a beginner.

A few days later, though, I noticed something unexpected while browsing my friends list.

More people than I had expected were featuring students I rarely saw in battle. These students did not often come up in discussions about performance rankings, but people chose them because they liked their expressions, stories, or voices.

That was when I began to look at my own profile differently.

The featured student slot was not a place to prove my strength to others. It was a place for the student I wanted people to see first when they looked at my account.

In the end, I replaced my strongest student with one who had left a particularly lasting impression on me in the main story.

My combat power did not change at all.

Yet when I saw my profile in the friends list, the account felt much more like my own than it had before.

Writing a One-Line Introduction Took Longer Than I Expected

Once I changed my featured student, I began to give more thought to my profile message.

At first, I wrote something simple and safe.

“Nice to meet you.”

There was nothing wrong with it, but it was a phrase I had seen on plenty of other profiles. After leaving it there for a few days, I changed it to something a little more honest.

“Always short on materials, with so many students I want to build.”

It was not particularly funny, but it described my situation exactly.

One friend saw the message and reached out to say they were in the same position. Until then, we had only borrowed each other's assistants, but that short introduction led to our first conversation.

After that, I changed my profile message from time to time.

When I earned a reward I wanted from an event, I wrote about the result, and when I was preparing for a difficult battle, I sometimes put down my current goal. Rather than writing a long introduction full of personal details, I left a line about what I had been doing in the game lately.

Even though I did not change my profile often, that one sentence was enough to remind me of what I had been enjoying in the game at the time.

A Friend's Featured Student Led Me to Reread a Story

At one point, a friend kept the same student featured for quite a while.

They did not switch to anyone else even when new students were released, and their profile message also mentioned how much they liked that student.

At first, I assumed they simply liked the student's appearance.

Eventually, curiosity led me to reread a story featuring that student. I had skimmed through the scene the first time, but on a second reading, I found the student's speech and behavior more entertaining than I had expected.

In the end, I began building that student myself.

If I had chosen students purely for their performance, I probably would never have taken an interest. In a sense, someone else's profile had served as a brief recommendation.

Blue Archive has so many students that it is difficult to give every story a close reading from the start. Simply seeing who my friends chose to feature helped me decide which student to look into next.

Trying to Make My Profile Look Impressive Hid My Own Tastes

Once I began enjoying profile customization, I tried copying a profile someone else had put together that I thought looked particularly good.

I featured a popular student and wrote a message to match that student's personality. It looked neat, but after a few days, it began to feel awkward.

The student was not one I particularly liked, and the message did not sound like something I would normally write.

After that, I focused on choices that would bring back memories when I looked at my profile, rather than ones that would impress other people.

I chose whichever student I was building with the most affection at the time. For the message, I briefly described something I had actually experienced rather than using a popular phrase.

On a day when I used up all my materials during an event, I even wrote, “I had a plan, but the materials are gone.”

Whenever I saw that message, I remembered trying to build too many students at once and failing to finish any of them.

Four Guidelines I Developed Over Time

The first is not to choose a featured student based on performance alone.

Featuring a student I used often was fine, but choosing one whose story or appearance had stayed with me gave my profile more personality.

The second is not to make the profile message too long.

Short sentences caught my eye more quickly in the friends list. Fitting a current goal or a recent experience into a single sentence felt the most natural.

The third is to make a change whenever a major event ends.

Leaving the featured student and message untouched was convenient, but occasional changes helped me remember later what I had been playing at the time. My profile could serve as a small gaming diary.

The fourth is not to treat other people's profiles as scorecards.

I could not judge how experienced someone was from their level or featured student alone. Some played casually, while others were experienced players who deliberately featured only their favorite students.

A profile was less a screen for proving skill and more a space for showing personal taste.

The Numbers Changed, but I Remembered What My Profile Said About Me

The longer I played, the more my account level and the number of students I owned changed.

Battles that had seemed difficult at first could later be cleared quickly with a sweep, and a student who had once been my strongest would sometimes give way to another.

But I still remembered the students I had featured before.

Along with them came memories of why I had liked them, which story had made me fond of them, and what event I had been playing at the time.

Blue Archive's profile feature was not designed for elaborate decoration.

A single featured student and a short message were enough to change the feel of an account. Having fewer choices actually made me think more carefully about what I wanted to show.

To me, a good game profile is not a feature that lays out every achievement and combat stat on one screen.

It is a space that makes someone think, even after a brief glance, “This person really likes this character.”

That is why Blue Archive comes to mind when I am asked to name a game in which I enjoyed customizing my profile.

Setting a featured student took only a few seconds, but deciding who to choose brought to mind all the scenes I had loved in this game.

On your game profile, do you feature your strongest character or your favorite?

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