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I hope Ready Player Two is just Wade sitting in board meetings all day now that he controls the oasis and he hates it.
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Apr 1, 2018 15:49
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Actually yeah, why didn’t Wade just tell Og “IOI is using hacked rigs, which is explicitly against the ToS and grounds for a permaban”?
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Apr 1, 2018 17:00
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Didn't Og leave the company because he married Halliday's nerd crush? His avatar still has admin superpowers but he presumably doesn't have any sway in oasis corp anymore.
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Apr 1, 2018 17:28
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Leofish posted:Didn't Og leave the company because he married Halliday's nerd crush? His avatar still has admin superpowers but he presumably doesn't have any sway in oasis corp anymore. Not even if he went and told them? Ogden Morrow himself walking up to GSS should have some clout. If the retired co-founder himself can’t do anything about it, I don’t get why anyone would ever be afraid of getting caught hacking.
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Apr 1, 2018 17:42
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Has the book ever mentioned anybody like, running the drat thing? Where are the people responsible for fixing poo poo when the game crashes or your avatar gets corrupted and is now a mass of geometry errors extending out into forever for anybody in rendering range of you? What happens when a sector crashes? I'm getting the feeling they aren't reporting the "IOI has managed to find one of the few ways it is possible to cheat at this contest and is using it" issue to anybody because there's nobody to report it to.
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Apr 1, 2018 17:53
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Get Cory and Wil on the case, stat!
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Apr 1, 2018 18:04
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Let’s not also forget nukes are literally blowing up in cities but there’s never any lag or downtime
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Apr 1, 2018 18:06
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Shark Sandwich posted:Let’s not also forget nukes are literally blowing up in cities but there’s never any lag or downtime Ins’t lag a world-ending cursed word in the Clineverse though?
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Apr 1, 2018 18:09
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Zereth posted:Has the book ever mentioned anybody like, running the drat thing? Where are the people responsible for fixing poo poo when the game crashes or your avatar gets corrupted and is now a mass of geometry errors extending out into forever for anybody in rendering range of you? What happens when a sector crashes? When Wade gets kidnapped he does tech support for IOI where his job is apparently to solve in-game issues for people, like the guy who can't equip a level 10 sword when he's level 7. But isn't IOI an ISP and not a game company? He should be telling people to unplug their modem for 30 seconds and then plug it back in or something. chitoryu12 posted:Not even if he went and told them? Ogden Morrow himself walking up to GSS should have some clout. I suppose so, but he really wanted to see the most epic videogame battle in history, so maybe that's why he won't ban anyone.
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Apr 1, 2018 18:18
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M. Morgan posted:The more I think about this Evil Corp slavery plot, the less sense it makes. Wouldn't people prefer this to starving on welfare, praying their stacks don't fall down and murder hundreds, avoiding rapists and literal raiders? At least they get food, a bed to sleep in, clean clothes and security. They might get bored if Evil Corp Commissary is stupidly expensive for the internet or other poo poo, but I imagine you do the same things to keep you busy as in real life prison. The one aspect that's ignored is why is there indentured servitude when most processes would be automated anyway. Automated tech support lines are a thing that happens now, or the tech is so stable there's little need for it. In fact, it would be more appropriate for Evil Corp to make their corporate slaves into NPCs: before bots become commonplace in Second Life, this is what you had to do if you wanted NPCs like greeters, sex slaves, etc. And, even with third-party bots, people can usually tell a bot from a real person just due to interactivity and canned responses, so having some poor schmuck play at being a blacksmith or seamstress in the background, the virtual equivalent of Disney cast member or some sort of mook that hunts down players. Of course, this starts butting into the premise of Cory Doctorow's "Anda's Game"/"In Real Life" and "For The Win", which deal with digital sweatshops and gold farming in the developing world in a far better way. Also, why even bother with setting up an indentured servitude system where you have to pay for room and board when you can rig up some "gig economy" equivalent and the slaves pay you for the privilege of working for you?
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Apr 1, 2018 20:30
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Look Ernest Cline could’ve put some effort into how the RPO-world works, and he could’ve spent his 10,000 hours reading and writing to hone his craft, or he could argue which 80s films are “teh suxxoorz” and there are only so many hours in a day
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Apr 1, 2018 20:58
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I wonder if you could out-ironic Cline or if he would have a knee jerk desire to defend anything 80s no matter how obscure and awful Like could you trick him into singing the praises of that cop show with Roddy Piper and Jesse Ventura
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Apr 1, 2018 21:33
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I wonder if you could out-ironic Cline or if he would have a knee jerk desire to defend anything 80s no matter how obscure and awful Given that “classic 80s” means to Cline “nerd poo poo I grew up with” I imagine there are plenty of things from that decade he hates. Like anything artistic merit from that decade.
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Apr 1, 2018 21:43
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I wonder if you could out-ironic Cline or if he would have a knee jerk desire to defend anything 80s no matter how obscure and awful I don't think irony has anything to do with it. At the most he would just demure from actually criticizing it. That's something you pick up with Cline as you go through his stuff with a critical or at least aware eye: he doesn't have anything bad to say about anything from the 80s, nor does he reference anything that can be be viewed as okay to criticize. He either doesn't appear to have a content barometer, so everything from the 80s is certified good in his view, or he's afraid to step on anyone's toes from a decade creeping up on 40 years removed from our present time frame that he just won't criticize anything from it, even gently. He's terrified of insulting his gods...
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Apr 1, 2018 23:20
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Shark Sandwich posted:Given that “classic 80s” means to Cline “nerd poo poo I grew up with” I imagine there are plenty of things from that decade he hates. Like anything artistic merit from that decade. I've mentioned this before in other discussions about RP:O that Cline has the very shallowest of cultural familiarity with the subject of '80s pop culture. He's not like Quentin Tarantino, who revels in obscure miscellany like little-known grindhouse films, forgotten spaghetti westerns, then-unknown HK crime dramas, or the works of Enzo Castellari, digging them up from his memories and lovingly giving them a public viewing for mainstream audiences, Cline focuses on the well-tread path. Almost nothing he brings up is niche or cult hit, everything got a wide release and was shown on cable a billion times. You're not going to see Cline bringing up Castellari's 1990: The Bronx Warriors, Sergio Martino's 2019: After The Fall Of New York, Jean-Claude Lord's The Vindicator, Albert Pyun's Radioactive Dreams, or hundreds of the lesser-known B-movies that filled the airtime on UHF channels, populated late night cable, or crowded video store shelves, it's all going to be a Greatest Hits Of The '80s.
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Apr 1, 2018 23:59
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I might be misremembering, but wasn't Wade doing tech support for Oasis while in indentured servitude at IOI? Cause I thought they were like an ISP but if they're involved in the running of Oasis, that would mean they already have some measure of control over the company. Like, I don't go to Comcast when I encounter a bug in World of Warcraft.
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Apr 2, 2018 00:06
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Poops Mcgoots posted:I might be misremembering, but wasn't Wade doing tech support for Oasis while in indentured servitude at IOI? Cause I thought they were like an ISP but if they're involved in the running of Oasis, that would mean they already have some measure of control over the company. Like, I don't go to Comcast when I encounter a bug in World of Warcraft. He's not really clear about it, but I saw IOI as a financial services company that decided to create a tech support outsourcing department. (Used to work for Siemens as an outsourced helldesk guy, and they started out in the telegram field and later moved to electric lights.)
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Apr 2, 2018 01:11
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IOI is a multinational communications company, so they run ISPs but also stuff like taxis. I don’t find it really implausible that they would provide a third-party tech support option. The bigger problem is that basically none of their tech support can involve bug fixes or anything beyond general advice, because until they win the Hunt they have no direct access to the game and its source code.
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Apr 2, 2018 01:15
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Yet he's able to look up the customer's inventory.
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Apr 2, 2018 01:30
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chitoryu12 posted:IOI is a multinational communications company, so they run ISPs but also stuff like taxis. I don’t find it really implausible that they would provide a third-party tech support option. It would have been hilarious if that got brought up in the ending: technically, Wade was working for GSS as a contractor and thus invalidated himself from the prize.
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Apr 2, 2018 01:34
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Young Freud posted:It would have been hilarious if that got brought up in the ending: technically, Wade was working for GSS as a contractor and thus invalidated himself from the prize.
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Apr 2, 2018 01:58
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Finally caught up with the thread, thank you all so much for making this adventure a blast. I originally found RP1 through the audiobook and I just got past the first gate when I gave up; Wade's sociopathic response to the stack explosion was a huge turnoff and I just couldn't sit through hours of the story without the ability to skip over swathes of pop-culture references. Nevertheless I didn't hate on RP1; in fact I actualy suggested it to some of my hyper-nerdy friends because I saw the potential for the story and felt while it wasn't my cup of tea it could apeal to other folks. I kept doing this until I picked up Armada. Now I genuinely wanted to enjoy Armada; I routinely buy space dogfight stories because I want the itch scratched and a book overtly written to play into my escapist fantasies of flying a hyperspace fighter against the zog empire seemed like exactly the right choice, and because I knew Cline was a total goober when it came to nerd culture I figured he could hit my nerdy G-Spot. I think I got 50 pages in until the point where the protagonist meets the nominal love interest and wins her over by recognizing one of her tattoos as being an Aliens reference. At this point I realized it was a nerd power fantasy built around the idea that if you reference enough pop culture you will get laid and it made me realize this is Cline's driving force; if you're a good nerd and consume enough content you will win the internet and girls will like you and the bullies will leave you alone and your life will be perfect. I threw the book across the room and felt ashamed for giving the man a chance. This thread has only reaffirmed this as the more I actually learn about RP1 the more I realize I gave up on it at the right time (Aside from the whole thing that you shouldn't pick up this book in the first place).
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Apr 2, 2018 03:04
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chitoryu12 posted:Also not only are Daito and Shoto the only Japanese characters in the entire book, Shoto never changes his “honorable samurai-san” personality after Daito dies, which means he’s 100% serious about this. Wade successfully appeals to them by referring to Japanese properties with their Japanese pronunciation and making a big ceremony of offering them Japanese items in game. Other than Aech, are there even any black characters in the novel? Which would mean, functionally, there's no black characters in the novel? Ironically, Armada has the literal exact same ethnic makeup for its cast; everyone is white except for two asian male characters and one black female teenager. chitoryu12 posted:Actually yeah, why didn’t Wade just tell Og “IOI is using hacked rigs, which is explicitly against the ToS and grounds for a permaban”? Was it ever said that the helluva rigs IOI used were illegal? Wade considers it cheating, but Wade's a moronic hypocritical dipshit who also cheats all the time anyway -- fully half the challenges are solved by him just reading a walkthrough he pulls up on/offline, because Halliday/Cline loves text adventures, the most cheatable of games -- so I'm not sure if it counts. There's no functional difference bewteenw aht IOI does and the big Gunter guilds, or the High Five for that matter, pooling knowledge and resources.
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Apr 2, 2018 03:08
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I guess I figured the biggest sin IOI committed (in the realm of cheating the TOS) was account sharing/letting more than one user control a particular avatar. That’s bannable. 
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Apr 2, 2018 03:35
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burial posted:I guess I figured the biggest sin IOI committed (in the realm of cheating the TOS) was account sharing/letting more than one user control a particular avatar. I mean, if it were against the rules, they already would have been banned for it; IOI doesn't even try to hide what they're doing. They even have serial numbers for names. Which is dumb, again, because any actual evil corporation would never do that; they'd generate an ethnically and sexually diverse team of fake Gunters with marketing-approved looks, names, and gimmicks, all portrayed by paid actors when not actively gunting so that when and if they won they'd be able to bank on the publicity and sell merchandise and movie rights. That would have not only been more realistic, it would have made for a better series of antagonists, since there would have been actual characters with actual dialogue and personalities in competition with the main character. Earnest Cline's a real bad writer, y'all.
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Apr 2, 2018 03:41
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:Cline has the same approach to ethnicity as the Superfriends cartoon show; all non-Americans speak in stilted English except for occasionally changing one of the words to being a word from their home language, usually one of the five words the audience might have heard before. Wade specifically says early in the book that it’s a permaban if you use a hacked visor to do things like have multiple avatars. Presumably IOI allowing multiple people to control the same avatar falls under the same offense. Wade is just so locked into OASIS that it never occurs to him to battle IOI in any way except beating them at video games.
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Apr 2, 2018 03:47
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Wade is the MMO equivalent of an Extremely Online political activist who can’t interact with anyone outside Twitter and Discord and whose biggest fear is doxxing, like Paul Joseph Watson.
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Apr 2, 2018 03:49
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When someone rewrites this, how is the SA gunter clan going to be portrayed?
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Apr 2, 2018 03:53
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Young Freud posted:It would have been hilarious if that got brought up in the ending: technically, Wade was working for GSS as a contractor and thus invalidated himself from the prize. Speaking of that - why isn't IOI bribing everyone who ever worked with Halliday to tell them about his programming and any back doors (which OASIS is apparently full of)? When every single person who ever worked for him and their entire families are forever banned from accessing the mega-billion dollar prize, surely at least a few would he happy to sell everything they know for a couple million. Or, just as good yet, bribe the hell out of people still working there. When there are apparently superpowerful objects just laying around, pay someone to code an endless stream of superweapons or a compass which points to hidden areas.
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Apr 2, 2018 03:54
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burial posted:When someone rewrites this, how is the SA gunter clan going to be portrayed? Smash Mouth, find the egg
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Apr 2, 2018 04:13
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HappyKitty posted:Smash Mouth, find the egg Love this, but I'm going to approach the question seriously. First off, when you join the Goonters, players are given a decent amount of credits to supplement their avatars and proceed to scam other hunters with the promise of either a) joining the Goonters or b) getting super secret Egg clues at the cost of thousands if not millions of credits. When someone pays up, lolthanksbye. Then the russians get involved. Actually on that note that's another thing that sets my teeth on edge about this whole book; for a hyperconnected internet economy and culture, it's unbearably western centric. Like I get that Halliday's challenge leads to American 80's culture taking precedent but the fact the only characters we meet are from the US (or racist caricatures of asian culture) really weakens the global exspanse of the OASIS.
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Apr 2, 2018 04:40
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burial posted:When someone rewrites this, how is the SA gunter clan going to be portrayed? lol SA is gonna be 20 years dead by then. The serious answer is: "Goonfleet". Or one of those SA-based Second Life griefing brigades.
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Apr 2, 2018 05:02
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It doesn’t have to be so grounded in reality, does it? A clan with tight moderation and a sick sense of humour could make for interesting background noise.
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Apr 2, 2018 06:11
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Well, yeah, but when you have so many EVE shenanigans to go with...
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Apr 2, 2018 08:23
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nine-gear crow posted:lol SA is gonna be 20 years dead by then. What would be the Oasis equivalent of being told to post a thread on the Oprah forums or something in order to get into Goonter Squad?
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Apr 2, 2018 08:32
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Write a 20 page paper on which Goku planet is your favorite or record yourself eating a cyber-jar of mayonnaise before you're allowed to join the goon vr clan.
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Apr 2, 2018 13:46
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Young Freud posted:Also, why even bother with setting up an indentured servitude system where you have to pay for room and board when you can rig up some "gig economy" equivalent and the slaves pay you for the privilege of working for you? This bit actally makes sense. They indenture people for not paying their ISP bill. It's a collections process.
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Apr 2, 2018 14:20
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Leofish posted:What would be the Oasis equivalent of being told to post a thread on the Oprah forums or something in order to get into Goonter Squad? Take them to Planet Goatse, and keep the ones who notice the ring, clearly. Can you imagine how jaded we'd be if we could experience the Internet interactively?
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Apr 2, 2018 14:25
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burial posted:When someone rewrites this, how is the SA gunter clan going to be portrayed? I say again: Fish Noise posted:Post your OASIS avatars.
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Apr 2, 2018 14:29
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Liquid Communism posted:Take them to Planet Goatse, and keep the ones who notice the ring, clearly. Can you imagine how jaded we'd be if we could experience the Internet interactively? As a trap, have several false Planet Goatses without the ring, and if they can't tell the difference, they don't get in.
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Apr 2, 2018 14:35
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