Malbutorius
C'est le bien qui fait mal
Which is also bullshit since most of those skills probably wouldn't even be in the game and having such high numbers would get him looked at mods anyways.
Dragon Quest Online (SAO/Worm)
BoSPaladin
The Paladin
Kirito is bullshit, that's part of the fun.
But the scene in question his skills translated fine, it's all built on "The Seed." Anyway. The issue with his items is they came across as &%$*£%$%$ or such, random squiggles. Except for one item, which was translated perfectly as an advice pixie.
Cardinal being cardinal.
CaesriusPolybius
Worldgate Mechanic
- Location
- United States. Ish.
On the former part of your point, the skills probably would still be in the game- ALO was based on SAO, and say what you will about it, SAO did have a pretty damn good physical combat system. Why fix what ain't broke when you can just mod it to not use the old level system anymore? Changing the names would be pretty much pointless as well.
Your latter point still remains, though.
- Location
- Ohio
This is interesting and all, but every time I get an alert saying you've posted over 200 words, I keep wondering if the first chapter has been written.
Stop doing this to me!
BoSPaladin
The Paladin
Alfheim Online had already been around for several months by then, enough for several players to reach similar high levels.
CaesriusPolybius
Worldgate Mechanic
- Location
- United States. Ish.
What, and there's no 'hours played' stat for the mods to look at? 'Cause you're either going to get an absurdly short amount of time, or an amount of time that's longer than the game's existed for.
LostDeviljho
Flame Dragon Princess
- Location
- The glorious Pacific Northwest
- Pronouns
- Any
Worth noting that Heathcliff's unique skill was designed to make him a godlike tank.
This is assuming that the mods are looking at every character that enters the game. Now, it is feasible for them to have an alert set to trigger when specific conditions are met but the likelihood of them actually implementing such an alert is quite low. Nobody knew about the ability to import character data from SAO into ALO. Usually, things like this are only caught after someone makes a report about abuse or hacking and then the exploit used to generate it is patched so it doesn't work anymore.
CaesriusPolybius
Worldgate Mechanic
- Location
- United States. Ish.
Doesn't Cardinal do bug/exploit checks as well?
Wait, Cardinal's avatar is female, isn't it. Never mind.
BoSPaladin
The Paladin
Alfheim was built around PvP, as opposed to Aincrad which was designed as PvE.
Kirito had basically a couple of fights with a single guild. Who wouldn't want to admit to getting beat by a spriggan who were basically the joke race.
the way it was set up was designed to encourage the races to fight each other. if Kirito had gone and roflstomped all the best players, sure, he'd probably get looked at. What he did instead, was get several races to work together to finish the grand quest.
Bear in mind the game is nothing more than a smokescreen to hide the people that were kept in coma's for study. A way to explain the server load, the mod's weren't concerned with balance or creating a playable game. The main quest was never designed to be winnable. It required mod access to open the door. Even if you somehow got past all the guardians.
The game was a sick joke. It put Asuna at the top, the prize that all the players were fighting to reach, but only the villain would ever get to see her. Giving himself godmode and magic abilities before general release and such, it made him the god of his own little word. It wasn't a game, it was a fantasy built to cater to one mans whims.
Those with mod access were researchers, more interested in being tentacle monsters and conducting experiments on the captives.
The game was a sick joke. It put Asuna at the top, the prize that all the players were fighting to reach, but only the villain would ever get to see her. Giving himself godmode and magic abilities before general release and such, it made him the god of his own little word. It wasn't a game, it was a fantasy built to cater to one mans whims.
Those with mod access were researchers, more interested in being tentacle monsters and conducting experiments on the captives.
TL: DR SAO has a lot of failings, but Kirito is the main character because he's overpowered.
And the game has enough players that one more isn't exactly a priority, why would he be, it's not like anyone is powerful enough to actually defeat the games final dungeon boss.
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CaesriusPolybius
Worldgate Mechanic
- Location
- United States. Ish.
And yet, hilariously, ALO is seemingly the best-balanced VRMMO in 2024. (Also, best magic system in any game ever(possibly barring Magicka and maybe Minecraft with Ars Magicka), combined with flight).
- Pronouns
- Exist
@CaesriusPolybius, I think that had more to do with being an Overly Narrow Superlative where your only competition in the quest is the Fucking "Coma/Death" Game that no one wants to say is good because that's kind like saying killing people for the shits is fun.
BoSPaladin
The Paladin
Missed this earlier. But anything like say, people shrugging off the paralysis effect? Well Aincrad was never supposed to have magic, that was cardinal making things fair.
And Kirito not dying?
That was Klein holding on to the resurrection item and using it then
Anything else that's weird. Can be hand waved by cardinal. It's a self aware AI that procedurally generates new quests and updates based on real world mythology and such.
It runs in the background and is basically the god of it's own little realm. Like a psychologist AI that's unshackled and has system access.
Citation needed for it being balanced. Spriggans were seen as a joke race compared to the others. The whole premise of it is one race finishes the grand quest and unlocks unlimited flight. (screw you everybody else) Before Kirito no-one had the idea to work together.
And who knows, it might actually have been the best game available, The Seed was released freely and spawned thousands of online worlds, anyone who had a server could download The Seed and let that handle all of the universe creation for them.
ALO was simply the one whose servers were picked up by a big company. So compared to the other worlds being ran by guys as a hobby off a single server it's probably better than many other of the one man band operations.
CaesriusPolybius
Worldgate Mechanic
- Location
- United States. Ish.
Or alternately, Gun Gale!
Joking aside, it has it's predecessor's relatively solid sword/spear/whathaveyou fighting mechanics, alongside one of the best magic systems in a game. The flight, admittedly, would need the immersion; frankly, as our systems are now, gliding is far more enjoyable. Anyways, my point is that even in the modern day, it could probably buoy itself up for like half a year- which is more than SAO or GGO could say!(Really, SAO at least would be a lot like Achron- It has one (set of) absolutely fucking brilliant mechanic(s), but is hindered by literally everything else).
I said best-balanced. Like AbZHz101 said, that's a bit like being the sharpest scissors in a preschooler's backpack.
Malbutorius
C'est le bien qui fait mal
I think Yui is the kind of character that you either love for being an adorable daughter tamagachi or hate her for being the most manipulative character on the show that ruined the entire core concept of said show.
- Location
- In the ocean of my heart
[2] [Meet] Yui
[3] [Meet] Silica
[4] [Meet] Lisbeth
[1] [Meet] Asuna
[5] [Meet] Argo
[3] [Meet] Silica
[4] [Meet] Lisbeth
[1] [Meet] Asuna
[5] [Meet] Argo
CaesriusPolybius
Worldgate Mechanic
- Location
- United States. Ish.
I've never really understood why people hate Yui for that; She's an AI, she just runs on different rules.
Well, y'know, theoretically; there's no good reason that Kirito could do what he did. There's also no good reason for him not logging everyone out. These could both have been explained away(maybe Kirito coded as a hobby, and there's a prebuilt utility for using NPC references to transfer their specific data into a player object, the use for which was dummied out? Maybe the logout requires additional credentials?), but they never did, so that's a moot point.
Don't hate Yui for running on different rules; hate the writer(s) for mangling those rules.
theimpetus
Fist of the Duplex
- Location
- The Unbekannt
[5] [Meet] Yui
[4] [Meet] Silica
[2] [Meet] Lisbeth
[3] [Meet] Asuna
[1] [Meet] Argo
[4] [Meet] Silica
[2] [Meet] Lisbeth
[3] [Meet] Asuna
[1] [Meet] Argo
Actually, there is no reason at all that her Tinker ability wouldn't work on perfectly mundane technology.
Cardinal wasn't active in ALO until the Calibur story arc and was deactivated shortly after due to putting the whole MMO world into jeopardy.
ALO was the direct successor to SAO. Until the release of The Seed at the end of the ALO arc there simply weren't other VRMMOs with the capabilities that the two games shared. There was also, I believe, a small blurb about ALO being far more a community game than SAO and other MMOs. People played it for the social aspects and the ability to do just about whatever the hell you wanted. It has a lot of the draw of EVE Online really.
It would make a lot of sense for this to be the case. This exact thing was shown earlier in the series. You know, Pina? Silica's dragon familiar? That was reduced to a feather called "Pina's Heart" and later restored with an item drop? The thing that happened before the whole Yui arc that pretty much foreshadows the exact thing happening?
Incidentally, I don't think people are really Grocking the full scope of SAO and to a significantly lesser extent, it's successor games. SAO was something of a test bed and masterpiece of Kayaba's. Everything was procedurally generated. From the terrain to the skills characters used. Now, the Unique skills and "limited" skills like Martial Arts are major dick moves on the developer's part, they can be explained away as Kayaba being an asshole. He had dreams of living out the epic story in fantasy sword land. And what is that story without a group of special snowflakes to fight the demon lord.
That skills load into other games may mean that their data is saved tot he client machine with other character information. Now, from a game design perspective this is somewhat of a majorly exploitable hack but if Kayaba had made it so that characters were portable between games, which seems to have been the intention from the start with The Seed and all, then it would make sense for that procedurally generated skill set to be completely stored on the nerve gear.
CaesriusPolybius
Worldgate Mechanic
- Location
- United States. Ish.
The major problem with this is that [Pina's Heart] wouldn't have had to be more than a reference pointer; the data was still on the same server. Meanwhile, Yui's data would've had to be transferred entirely; creating a new reference pointer wouldn't do any good, since Cardinal could still just strike at the data's location, and there would be no way to 'save the item to the nerve gear'(which, honestly speaking, is the biggest grievance I have with that scene; there's no fucking way the Nerve Gear has enough room to save an AI on it just like *snap* that.
Well, yes. Though, Like I was talking about with the skills being stored locally on the nervegear client, it's entirely possible that items themselves along with familiar data is stored locally rather than on the server. It also makes a certain amount of sense to have both a local and server copy to sync with. It's entirely possible that Yui was transferring for days rather than the almost instant one that the anime/book implied.
BoSPaladin
The Paladin
Nerve gear is hyper advanced, it can fry peoples brains with no way for doctors to take it off without setting off the failsafe and killing them anyway.
Even assuming it contains a screen for eyesight and headphones for hearing it still has to transmit, smell, touch and taste. It's powerful enough to give people lag-free realtime connection to the largest, most detailed vr world ever developed and allow them to communicate with thousands of other players.
If we're operating on real world physics/ technology the nerve gear shouldn't be able to do a lot of what it does. But it does, therefore those same rules don't apply.
Kayaba created multiple, functional strong AI's. And used one as a psychologist to monitor players for their safety.
That alone could make him millions. Instead he locks it up and forgets about it.
Things like lag, upload speeds, nerve gear storage. It's all future tech, considering it can render an entire world in real time down to blades of grass having storage space is the least of my worries.
The helmet can be put on within seconds, can instantly sense when it's being tampered with, and release an instantly lethal attack with no way around it.
And no-one ever found out about it until after general release. So not only is SAO tech advanced, but Kayaba especially is a genius beyond anyone else.
- Pronouns
- Exist
Unless the dude managed to rewrite how computers communicate and managed to do so in a manner that was still somehow backwards compatible with all the current internet hardware, Kirito realistically could not have saved Yui's file, at least not in its entirety because the method of transfer would have said "Something's fucked up, let me start over again." And kept doing that while she was still loosing data and dying.