[Adigard]

Originally Posted by creb

Furthermore, I'm now confused why all these big bad players like Asuna and Kirito are back on the 50th floor.

Spoiler for Comparison to the novels:

The book did a better job with it, but in essence the bigger towns are on the more 'important' floors (0, 25, 50). Also, the more popular places become those with the better goods / service access. If everyone spends most of their time in the biggest town that was most recently cleared that becomes the new central hub. And if you consider other MMO's, you 'live' where you buy your house. You probably wouldn't buy a new home every level. So you either go back however many levels to your house, or rent an inn room every night for money.

Originally Posted by creb

I thought they were on floor 50 to help the masses, so to speak, but that makes little sense if only one person needs to clear the game.

The raid teams we've seen to-date ensure a solo player can't clear the game though. You seem to need really big parties to take down each floor's raid boss to progress to the next level. So you can't just wait for that one guy to do it. Also, eventually in a death game you're going to lose player's... you'd have to support the masses at least a little to ensure fresh player's can move into the meat grinder... so to speak.

Originally Posted by paraalso

I think it would be a bit different with a VRMMO. Being athlethic, fit and having fast reflexes in real life might be a bigger advantage than having experience with a lot of normal mmos since you need to actually move with your body to play. It's the first VRMMO, so only the beta testers would have prior experience with playing a system like that.

Also, being the world's first VR MMO means absolutely no one has any experience with it, other than the beta testers. Sure, there would be a ton of tropes and things that you'd know entering the game on day one, but even Klein who's had years of MMO experience (at least, from what we saw in Ep1) had a ton of issues with a simple mob on lvl1. So in theory everyone would be on a level playing field... once the basics were understood.