Sword Art Online - Episode 4 Discussion / Poll

[supermegasonic]

so we get introduced to an imouto character who obviously likes the MC. her pet dies, and kirito uses this opportunity as an excuse to take down a guild.

at this point i was thinking this is when their gonna start making a group, with all the ppl in the OP, or atleast a bunch of them. guess im wrong for now. though it was kinda funny how all of them were attacking him and he was just standing around like a bad@$$.
lvl 78?? he really is a levelholic, lol.
wonder how that other girl is doing, it doesnt seem like she's gonna appearing soon, since someone ppl are saying it will take a few more episodes until the real story starts.

one thing i totally just realized. what would happen if their was some sort of power outage or blackout??

[Xellos-_^]

Originally Posted by supermegasonic

so we get introduced to an imouto character who obviously likes the MC. her pet dies, and kirito uses this opportunity as an excuse to take down a guild.

at this point i was thinking this is when their gonna start making a group, with all the ppl in the OP, or atleast a bunch of them. guess im wrong for now. though it was kinda funny how all of them were attacking him and he was just standing around like a bad@$$.
lvl 78?? he really is a levelholic, lol.
wonder how that other girl is doing, it doesnt seem like she's gonna appearing soon, since someone ppl are saying it will take a few more episodes until the real story starts.

one thing i totally just realized. what would happen if their was some sort of power outage or blackout??

Hospital's have backup generators and i assume the servers do as well. Now if it was country wide event which knocks out not just the electric grid but the internet as well...then RIP.

[Adigard]

Originally Posted by Anh_Minh

If it makes you feel better, just assume that attempts have been made, and that they killed the test subjects. What's so hard to believe about that?

Ep1 mentioned this pretty directly no? In the tutorial.

"Unfortunately, the friends and family members of several players have ignored this warning and attempted to remove the NerveGear.
As a result, 213 players have permanently retired in both Aincrad and the real world."

After losing some of your pool of survivors the temptation to tamper more might be pretty damn small.

Originally Posted by supermegasonic

one thing i totally just realized. what would happen if their was some sort of power outage or blackout??

Assume for the sake of our mostly fantasy setting that the servers have 100% uptime, never need to be rebooted, and require zero maintenance. The LN's delved into it a trifle bit better, but it's mostly ignored because the events cover Sword Art ONLINE. Not the RL background stuff, which would really just distract you from the main story.

Also... Without contact with the real world no one really knows what happens when your HP hits zero. It has to be gnawing in the mind of every single person stuck in-game.

[relentlessflame]

If we really want to talk about "things I would have expected them to do by now", I guess one of the things I would have expected is that they would find some sort of way of relaying a message to people on the inside, at the very least so that their families can get in touch with them. I suppose that perhaps our evil mastermind doesn't want them to try to plan something, but it's a bit silly to imagine a VR world that is so completely cut-off from the real world that you can't even receive any mail. The only thing they said so far is that they removed the logout feature, but that implies that there wasn't even any way to communicate with the outside world except by logging out. I suppose there's a certain degree of immersion in that (and it worked given the evil plan), but that would be totally impractical in reality, and would probably have been a major criticism during the beta test. You'd need some way for the real world to get a hold of you.

Anyway, that's neither here nor there for this episode, I suppose, and we'll have to see what happens going forward.

[styr]

Originally Posted by supermegasonic

one thing i totally just realized. what would happen if their was some sort of power outage or blackout??

Since I'd rather not receive a warning from an admin for posting a LN spoiler, I will PM you the answer. It should have been covered in Kayaba's "tutorial" in the 1st Ep but for some reason it got cut.

[Adigard]

Originally Posted by relentlessflame

If we really want to talk about "things I would have expected them to do by now", I guess one of the things I would have expected is that they would find some sort of way of relaying a message to people on the inside, at the very least so that their families can get in touch with them. I suppose that perhaps our evil mastermind doesn't want them to try to plan something, but it's a bit silly to imagine a VR world that is so completely cut-off from the real world that you can't even receive any mail. The only thing they said so far is that they removed the logout feature, but that implies that there wasn't even any way to communicate with the outside world except by logging out. I suppose there's a certain degree of immersion in that (and it worked given the evil plan), but that would be totally impractical in reality, and would probably have been a major criticism during the beta test. You'd need some way for the real world to get a hold of you.

I've personally been playing one or another MMO for... damn, nearly a decade. I've never been able to receive external e-mail inside a game. I've always needed to alt-tab to my mail program to check external e-mail. I can only receive email from other player's of the MMO, or the company.

Also, the game was apparently designed from the get-go to trap people inside. I'd imagine any beta tester bug reports complaining that you could only get out by logging out would be happily ignored.

But since Kirito doesn't really think about the consequences until Ep1, we can fairly safely assume most people just didn't think about it. Or if they did, they simply decided not to log in on Day 1.... thus, aren't trapped in SAO.

[Anh_Minh]

Originally Posted by Adigard

I've personally been playing one or another MMO for... damn, nearly a decade. I've never been able to receive external e-mail inside a game. I've always needed to alt-tab to my mail program to check external e-mail. I can only receive email from other player's of the MMO, or the company.

Yeah, but even while playing MMOs, you can hear someone ringing at your door, the ring of your phone, and, yes alt-tab. You couldn't do any of that in SAO even before Kayaba's tampering.

[supermegasonic]

so what im getting from the majority of you is that we should assume (and maybe even ignore) everything outside of the game, all of that stuff have been taken care of, and there's no problem except for the whole life in the balance thing right?

[chaos_alfa]

Originally Posted by supermegasonic

so what im getting from the majority of you is that we should assume (and maybe even ignore) everything outside of the game, all of that stuff have been taken care of, and there's no problem except for the whole life in the balance thing right?

That's correct.

[OceanBlue]

Originally Posted by supermegasonic

so what im getting from the majority of you is that we should assume (and maybe even ignore) everything outside of the game, all of that stuff have been taken care of, and there's no problem except for the whole life in the balance thing right?

Well, even if we didn't have people familiar with the source material to tell us, it would be impossible to know unless the anime decided to de-immerse us in the setting to show us what's going on in the real world. I think the anime would do worse for itself finding a way to tell us (since I assume people aren't able to join the game anymore) instead of saving it for later or even the end.

[relentlessflame]

Originally Posted by Adigard

I've personally been playing one or another MMO for... damn, nearly a decade. I've never been able to receive external e-mail inside a game. I've always needed to alt-tab to my mail program to check external e-mail. I can only receive email from other player's of the MMO, or the company.

Yeah, the next post is really what I was getting it...

Originally Posted by Anh_Minh

Yeah, but even while playing MMOs, you can hear someone ringing at your door, the ring of your phone, and, yes alt-tab. You couldn't do any of that in SAO even before Kayaba's tampering.

So, yeah, it's exactly like you said: it was designed from the get-go with trapping in mind, and of course no one saw that far ahead. I'm sure it occurred to someone during the beta test, but as you said, probably an ignored "feature request".

Still, if I were the people on the outside, realizing that there's little safe way of getting people out, trying to send a message in would have been the next avenue. As was said, though, we have to assume (for the sake of the story) that there's just no way.

[Dengar]

Re: "How could this happen?" "How is this even possible?" "Shouldn't there have been a method to 'alt-tab' out?"

I think those are points where you NEED to suspend your disbelief or the story just wouldn't work.

[Anh_Minh]

Originally Posted by Dengar

"Shouldn't there have been a method to 'alt-tab' out?"

All you really need is a way to relay calls and mails to your ingame avatars. Maybe a smart house to relay doorbells and fire alarms. Oh, and various physical stressors (like a "your body really needs to pee. How about logging out?" message) All of which could have been taken away at the same time as the logout button. It just wasn't mentioned.

[Dengar]

I stand by my statement regarding the willing suspension of disbelief.

[halibonga]

the new characters are not bad though we want more asuna,

[Triple_R]

Originally Posted by FlareKnight

I don't really agree with this. The financial costs would certainly not be a pleasant thing, but neither is the likely extreme resources being committed to hunting down the man responsible and getting him to free the players without risking killing them. I don't think the budget would push the government to risk thousands of lives.

But those thousands of lives are already being risked simply by them being left in this game. Those lives are in jeopardy regardless of what the government does.

There's only two realistic ways for that "Lives in Jeopardy" situation to end:

1. The outside world finds a way to step in and end the madness.

2. The players within the game clear it.


Based on this, I think you have it backwards. In the early going, people might be more willing to just hope that the gamers can save themselves by clearing the game.

But as more and more time goes by, more and more people will start to believe that the game must be impossibly difficult to clear or the gamers would have cleared it by now. Or some might even start to believe that the game is a pure, endless deathtrap and that Kayaba was just BSing all along about the players being able to save themselves by clearing the game.

A full year is a long time to clear a game, even one with 100 levels. I mean, these gamers are now literally spending 24 hours a day inside this game.

Let's say your average SAO player is awake for 16 of those 24 hours. So over 3 days that's 48 hours of conscious, continuous gameplay. 48 hours is *a lot* of gameplay time. Plenty of hardcore gamers can clear full games in that amount of time, let alone one level.

It's not unreasonable to think that 48 hours of gameplay is enough time (on average) to clear a level, presuming the gamers are working cooperatively at all (which many of them clearly are). So 3 days per level. Now times by 100. 300 days. Let's even add on 65 more days since one would expect later levels to be harder to clear. So 365 days, or a full year.

Well, it's now over a full year. If I was a guy on the outside with a close relative in this game, by Day 365 (and yes, I'd be counting the days) I'd definitely be inclined to think "This game is just too hard for the players to clear. If we don't do something to save them, they're all basically doomed."


But ultimately, all this means is that I think that Reki Kawahara might have stretched out the dates a bit too much. I guess he wanted to give the SAO narrative an epic feeling, and so he wanted years of actual time to pass within the game (either that, or he wants SAO's Game Difficulty to seem incredibly badass). I can totally understand that, so I'll just take Anh_Minh up on his suggested assumption of thinking that the government already did try something, it failed, so they're naturally hesitant to try something else (and so are the Japanese people if they are aware of this failed attempt).

[Magewolf]

Originally Posted by Anh_Minh

If it makes you feel better, just assume that attempts have been made, and that they killed the test subjects. What's so hard to believe about that?


Reverse engineering isn't a problem. They have plenty of working samples. They probably even have the blueprints on file.

The problem is that they were made well enough it's not possible to disable them without killing the wearer.

The problem is that that is impossible which is what is sticking in many peoples throats.As you say they have plenty of samples to practice on and the factories that made them as well.Any competent police or army bomb squad should have had them all out in a month easy.And that is if they decide they need to get everyone out at the same time in case the psycho had put a fail-safe in to kill everyone if someone was successfully unhooked.

This is the main bit of suspension of disbelief that you need to make to enjoy the show I think.But the anime has not made any attempt to sell it so a lot of people keep finding it a problem.

[NoemiChan]

Episode 4 Question

Since Kirito has mentioned the gap between him and the other players, could that mean he doesn't need to worry fighting low level monsters? Like, just sit there eating sandwiches while monster attacks him since they could not provide enough damage to him?

Or its just PVP is different?

[Clarste]

It's not that hard compared to normal games, but it has the huge difference of not forgiving mistakes. You can't die, ever. Your standard gamer will encounter a tough boss and die a few times to find out what it does. Hardcore raiders in World of Warcraft (who tend to clear new dungeons within a couple of weeks or months) wipe hundreds if not thousands of times before they win. Trial and error is simply a part of playing games, and every gamer does it.

And trial and error doesn't work at all in SAO. If you die you die. So they have to much more cautious about what they're doing than normal gamers in normal games.

Regrading the attitudes of people outside though, it's probably a minority who even care about the issue at all. The only people who care are the families and close friends of the victims. Everyone else saw a big tragedy on the news and went back to their normal lives a few months later. No matter how big a tragedy something is, people can easily forget these things. It's not going to "boil up" to anything no matter how the families feel. Essentially, the victims are just coma patients now. They might wake up someday, they might die in their sleep, and there's nothing you can do about it but wait and pray.

[Clarste]

Originally Posted by GenjiChan

Episode 4 Question

Since Kirito has mentioned the gap between him and the other players, could that mean he doesn't need to worry fighting low level monsters? Like, just sit there eating sandwiches while monster attacks him since they could not provide enough damage to him?

Or its just PVP is different?

Of course he doesn't have to worry about low level monsters.