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Nemo2342 posted:The better stories at least make it so that the MC is just the first person to try something, instead of the only person to try something. That's slightly more believable since there always has to be someone who is the first at something, and it doesn't stretch my belief too much that the MC is that person (or at least the first one to bring attention to it). well, it starts okay on that front. eventually he starts getting first clears on party dungeons while solo. also every important female npc falls madly in love with him.
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Mar 6, 2023 02:18
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GateOfD posted:any thoughts on the usually silly VR/isekai stories, There's a danmei webnovel I read once (pretty sure it's "It's Said That I Attacked the Great Demon King"), where the explanation for players was that they were a race who could all regenerate their bodies, could live forever (except for when they stopped logging in), and had a method of communication between themselves (player messages and forums), so they were all curious and attracted to new/unique events and items, and some of them were the equivalent of walking nukes. The native people got used to posting quests whenever they needed anything done and getting wandering immortal weirdos to come see it and call all their friends over to grab it. There was a time when the MC (player stuck in the world) needed to grab some critical info on the bad guy's plan, but he didn't know which safehouse it was in and didn't want to risk the villain finding out and destroying the info, so he dressed up in a robe and stood around a crowded area until some players asked him what he was doing, and then he told him it was a time-limited but sharable quest to go to certain locations at a specific time and grab anything that looked important. There were dozens of players just rampaging in and robbing each place blind - not even the curtains and carpets were left. The villain had no idea WTF - it was pretty hilarious.
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Mar 6, 2023 02:43
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KittyEmpress posted:The big issue with every VRMMO type story is that the MC is 'the only person in ____ billions of players' to do any of the poo poo they do. Oh, crafters get a bad rap because they still have to grind kills to get levels, and without levels they can't actually meet the stat requirements to craft? Well this MC is the only person in billions to max str as a blacksmith and self craft entire suits of op armor with inflated str requirements to get around that. Why? Because duh, the beta said it was impossible to craft so no one else picked it. In this population supposedly in the billions. Honestly? This happens, especially with high-end play paradigms. If there's an accepted strategy that does "good enough", people will just focus on executing that strategy well rather than experimenting, because experimenting means showing up to fail but at least with the strategy you can succeed. Real-world example: the initial endgame raid of FFXIV in its 2.0 state, the Binding Coil of Bahamut. One of the bosses had an enrage timer - essentially putting a time limit on the fight and requiring a certain level of aggregate damage per second from the raid. And people were having the devil's own time with it. The problem was that the strategy everybody was using was for the 2 healers in the 8-man party not to cast any damage spells at all, saving their cast time for patching up the other raid members if they got caught in telegraphed damage. On a certain level this even feels like the right thing to do - the sort of person who wants to play a healer in an MMO is probably going to feel like a real loser if somebody in the party dies and they couldn't heal them because they were busy doing damage. This isn't to say that healers did good damage; they did maybe half of what a damage-focused class could bring to the table. But in the standard full party of one tank, two healers, and 5 damage dealers, having both your healers focused on doing damage while the damage dealers pay enough attention to dodge most of the telegraphed attacks is about a 20% increase in damage, easily enough to let most of the marginal parties clear the fight. People were just so focused on having emergency healing available if it was needed that nobody tried it, and up to that point content hadn't been challenging enough that people needed the higher party damage output. Of course, real life also isn't obliged to be a good story, and if some newb just rolled up to the FFXIV vets at the time all "um actually if you glory-hog DPS players could be more considerate of your adorable healer waifus and didn't get hit by all the stuff you could easily dodge, then they could do damage too and you'd all be better off" it probably wouldn't make for a great story when it turned out he (it's always a he) was right. The protagonist of Shangri-La Frontier, Sunraku, has two arguably unique edges, both of which stem from his background as a player of poo poo VR games, where a boss might only have three vulnerability pixels or the game might have implemented a "realistic damage system" that instantly kills you if your avatar gets hit in the eye. He's experimenting constantly. Sometimes this works out for him, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it works too well and it gets patched out. Shangri-La Frontier is only a year from launch and still a young game in MMO terms. The devs are keeping a lot of game mechanics close to their chest and the game has a culture of not only player-killer guilds but guilds focused on acquiring Internet fame for exploring or achieving something big, so it's possible that some things are known about the game but haven't gotten out into the general populace yet. More specific plot spoilers follow, though only up through about chapter five. So one of Sunraku's advantages is probably not unique: he assumed the game cared about location-based damage from the word go, and found that it did, so he was able to leverage his past experience into a low-armor high-evasion gameplay style that uses parries and precision damage to make up for his deficiencies in offense and defense. The monster that the devs may or may not have intended to teach this, the bipedal knife-wielding "vorpal bunny", is a rare encounter in the starting area and general newb chatter is just that you'd better run before it crits you to death. Sunraku protects his neck and farms up a pair of fine blades. Most people that come onscreen play in a more conventional way where they acquire statistical superiority through equipment, skill training, buffs, and debuffs on enemies, and then collide their larger numbers into the smaller numbers until they're gone. This isn't presented as a wrongheaded way to play the game, at least not from Sunraku's perspective - if it's something the game gave you it's not somehow "lesser" or "illegitimate", and the game is respecting their time and dedication as much as it's respecting his reflexes. The other of Sunraku's advantages is related to a rare scenario that people in the game have already found out how to trigger - if you equip a vorpal weapon and then head out and land a bunch of critical hits on monsters stronger than you, you might get White Rabbited next time you're in a major city, and if you can follow its hopping through back alleys you'll stumble on a door that wasn't there before: "a tour of Lagonia", a peaceable kingdom of vorpal bunnies who bear no love for their hot-headed outcasts. After you spend some time walking around and talking to the locals, there's a boss fight against a big snake and if you win you'll learn how to create your very own vorpal weapons, but then you have to leave and nobody's ever found a way back. Sunraku doesn't know this scenario exists until he Googles it later; he manages to trigger it without knowing, and the strong monster he crits with his vorpal weapons is one of the game's inscrutable superbosses, out for a nighttime wander while he's making a ruckus fighting the nastier night monsters. He survives long enough to hit a phase transition and then gets pasted by area attacks, which is enough to earn a mark of the superboss's respect that says "some NPCs will react differently to this" when he inspects it... and also acts as a curse that scares weak monsters, repels player buffs, and locks up about half his equipment slots with the scar. The door that appears for him is "an invitation from Lagonia", and what he walks into is a palatial island, a guide who says he's the first to come there, and a towering yakuza boss of a rabbit who commends him on "keeping his vorpal soul", offers the guide as an NPC companion, and lays out a path to citizenship. And now, as long as Sunraku has his guide with him, he can open a door to Lagonia in any major city. Sunraku still doesn't know exactly what did this, whether it's as simple as "rare event + superboss mutator" or if "keeping his vorpal soul" also takes into account the other weird things he's done, like his fighting style, or that he farmed up his vorpal blades as a newb, or that he grabbed an origin bonus that spawned him outside the starter town, got sucked in to an actually good combat system, found himself a short way away from the second town when he next checked his map and said YOLO.
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Mar 6, 2023 04:13
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I appreciate that Infinite Dendrogram threw up its hands at the problem of "how do I make the main character special in an online game that countless people are playing" and said "gently caress it, everyone gets entirely unique magical nonsense." This guy can create a chain cage and he gets a motorcycle that can ride on the chains, and also he has his class build bullshit on top of that. The main character's brother can punch so hard he can break reality, and also he has a space battleship. What do the two of these have to do with each other? Who knows, but it's cool! And then they went even further all-in on that concept and made at least half the named cast Superiors, who are in totally unique classes that no one else can have until they retire, and all of them have tricked out special drops that no one else has either. It's not even pretending to be an actual game that would exist in reality, the author just wants to have ridiculous superpower battles. I can respect that.
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Mar 6, 2023 05:04
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:it's bad when exactly one person realizes they can use basic game mechanics that are available to every player in a basic way to achieve success. it is worse when one person gets a unique in-game benefit that no one else can ever get again, often for no particular reason. the very worst is, of course, vrmmo: the unrivaled.
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Mar 6, 2023 05:25
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SLF puts a lot less emphasis on Sunraku's build/equipment being unique and more emphasis on him just being really goddamn good. The only stuff he has that is truly unique came from beating the superbosses in the first place, unlike King's Avatar where he just starts with it. The story doesn't care if there's a million high luck fragile characters running around Also early on I got the impression the superbosses were something that could only be killed once but they seem to have nixed that, which i appreciate.
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Mar 6, 2023 07:56
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Nihilarian posted:SLF puts a lot less emphasis on Sunraku's build/equipment being unique and more emphasis on him just being really goddamn good. The only stuff he has that is truly unique came from beating the superbosses in the first place, unlike King's Avatar where he just starts with it. The story doesn't care if there's a million high luck fragile characters running around SLF also shows Sunraku playing other games and showing that he's just that good in any game, until he's acknowledged by other top players of each game when he logs in those games.
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Mar 6, 2023 08:40
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Nihilarian posted:SLF puts a lot less emphasis on Sunraku's build/equipment being unique and more emphasis on him just being really goddamn good. The only stuff he has that is truly unique came from beating the superbosses in the first place, unlike King's Avatar where he just starts with it. The story doesn't care if there's a million high luck fragile characters running around It's... mixed. Though I haven't gone into the light novel, this is all just manga stuff. As far as everybody knows right now, the superbosses are all one and done. You may have seen some stuff involving a second fight against the superboss that marked Sunraku at the start of the story? It turns out it's actually the gatekeeper shadow that lets you start hunting the actual superboss. The hunt for the actual superboss is still pending. But the one superboss that they have killed was very explicitly done out of order, sealed behind a knowledge checkpoint and found by accident. The actual intended first one in the chain, clued up by events in the final town of the original launch world, involves a boss who does some weird stuff with the concept of life and death. He hasn't gone down yet either, but it's possible that the aftermath would create some kind of in-world excuse for people to confront a living memory of fallen superbosses so that other people could experience the plot going forward.
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Mar 6, 2023 10:06
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One of the funny things about SLF is that the game's writer/designer very much wants a lovely railroady game with overly hidden mechanics and stuff, and then someone else has to pull it back into playability.
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Mar 6, 2023 14:49
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the whole 'x player is the only person who does y' is running into the issue a lot of classic fairy tales and other morality fables have, where some supernatural force offers some guy a regular thing or a very shiny thing, then rewards them for being humble enough to take the regular thing by also giving them the shiny thing, except this is supposed to be an impressive and unique display of their character, except substitute 'is the only person with even a basic degree of honesty' with 'is the only person that is actually playing this game' and then factor in that the average mmo, vr or otherwise, has more people than some small countries did back when those fairy tales were being written it's a decent conceit but the suspension of disbelief required is. great.
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Mar 6, 2023 15:14
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It's like that thing in Ready Player One where no one has ever thought to reverse at the starting line in a world that presumably had Mario Kart in it. Where in real life someone would have found a way to drive through the right combination of walls to side-load DOOM.
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Mar 6, 2023 16:05
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any VRMMO manga would should need to contend with situations like "I spent five hours launching myself into scenery textures, glitched behind a invisible wall and I'm now PKing new characters with impunity" and "I found a random quest item that messes with damage scaling and used it to one shot the next progression boss"
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Mar 6, 2023 17:11
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The existence of speedrunners proves that there is a small but dedicated group of people willing to try totally off-the-wall stuff to see if it works. Combine that with MMOs that have been played for a while (and these always take place in well-established games, not new ones), and I have no doubt that pretty much everything will have already been tried. Like, someone gave the example earlier of healers in FFXIV not realizing they needed to deal damage too, but that was literally the first raid to ever exist in the game, when it was brand new, and they adapted quickly enough. It did not take years for people to figure out how to kill Bahamut. Heck, look at FFXI for the exact opposite: players regularly found new and unintended ways to kill the ultimate superboss that they weren't supposed to kill, so much so that the devs had to keep patching it so those techniques didn't work. Clarste fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Mar 6, 2023 |
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Mar 6, 2023 17:38
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Brought To You By posted:It's the opposite for me because at the very least there are a larger number of acceptable reasons for why the main character gets a unique item that grants them some special status, ability, or capability. There's far fewer reasons why someone could discover and often solely exploit or utilize the game mechanics in an MMO to just outclass everyone else. Often time in games that have been running for years before the MC ever touched it meaning nobody bothered to try it before and there's no game documentation other people might have noticed any unique skill synergies, etc on. To be fair, there's like one guy in World of Warcraft whose whole shtick is finding overlooked synergies and using them to delete people in PVP. It happens pretty regularly just because it is such an old game that the new updates have unintended consequences on old content. Of course since this is real life he publicizes these things and they get quickly fixed, but I don't begrudge a manga using a similar situation in their setup. The problem though is that most of the mangas are less "I found this one item people haven't used in 15 years and it's incredibly broken" and more "I tried the two most obvious things and they were OP when combined".
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Mar 6, 2023 19:20
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So what's the VRMMO anime (isekai or otherwise) that gets the closest to "Now, you're probably wondering what I'm gonna need all this speed for. After all, I do build up speed for 12 hours. But to answer that, we need to talk about parallel universes"? I was hoping the one with birdhead guy would get there eventually, but it didn't.
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Mar 6, 2023 20:15
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Every game manga these days is trying to recreate the FF9 Excalibur ll phenomenon
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Mar 6, 2023 20:25
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Nemo2342 posted:To be fair, there's like one guy in World of Warcraft whose whole shtick is finding overlooked synergies and using them to delete people in PVP. It happens pretty regularly just because it is such an old game that the new updates have unintended consequences on old content.
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Mar 6, 2023 20:29
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there's one manga where a guy is reincarnated into a game, but as a garbage tutorial/cutscene npc. it's a game where character building is vitally important and that character has a moderately high level but unbelievably bad stats, growths, and skills. also, no player character or equivalent appears, so his only option is to use all his knowledge of mechanics, bugs and exploits to raise some rando kids into heroes. it's pretty interesting, but there's not much of it out yet and the translation quickly goes to pot.
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Mar 6, 2023 20:42
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I think there was something in Suikoden Tactics where if you hack in some NPC or guest character they were secretly the best in the game....?
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Mar 6, 2023 20:48
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SexyBlindfold posted:So what's the VRMMO anime (isekai or otherwise) that gets the closest to "Now, you're probably wondering what I'm gonna need all this speed for. After all, I do build up speed for 12 hours. But to answer that, we need to talk about parallel universes"? I was hoping the one with birdhead guy would get there eventually, but it didn't. Only I Know This World Is A Game, wherein the lead spends the better part of 12 hours running facefirst into a wall to build up stats and exploits an immortal everburning torch.
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Mar 6, 2023 21:18
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my personal mmo manga beef is how everyone obsesses with keeping their discoveries and information secret and valuable when irl literally anything that happens gets reposted faster than it can even be verified (often it's crafting recipes) even SLF falls into that Kyte fucked around with this message at 23:03 on Mar 6, 2023 |
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Mar 6, 2023 22:30
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I want a story where the hero has a massive advantage because he spent a poo poo load of money on pay to win stuff.
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Mar 6, 2023 22:51
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Fangz posted:I want a story where the hero has a massive advantage because he spent a poo poo load of money on pay to win stuff. I think I've seen a description for one that was about how the MC has access to all the stuff he had piled up from the gacha shop before he got sucked into the game world.
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Mar 6, 2023 23:03
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Kyte posted:my personal mmo manga beef is how everyone obsesses with keeping their discoveries and information secret and valuable when irl literally anything that happens gets reposted faster than it can even be verified (often it's crafting recipes) I dunno about SLF. Most of the more obscure stuff is really weird in how you trigger it or find it. Plus there's the whole info sale so psople likely hoard nits of info for later sale or favors(thus seems intentional on the devs part).
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Mar 6, 2023 23:11
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Paracelsus posted:I think I've seen a description for one that was about how the MC has access to all the stuff he had piled up from the gacha shop before he got sucked into the game world. Basically Overlord.
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Mar 6, 2023 23:23
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Fangz posted:I want a story where the hero has a massive advantage because he spent a poo poo load of money on pay to win stuff. Saw one that was a pretty blah 'betrayed by party- REVENGE story where the MC had Gacha as a power but it never did anything helpful because it takes mana from the surrounding area and only back at the horrible abyss the demon king crawled out our does mana exist in high enough quantities to get a 9999 SSSSS+ rolled character. And then off screen he rolled like 800 more times and they're all women' and I lost interest. Does make me intrigued by the idea of rng summons as a power though. LorneReams posted:Basically Overlord. And also the other one about being a skeleton, but they have skills from the video game version of the world. And they were more like a paladin. RareAcumen fucked around with this message at 23:26 on Mar 6, 2023 |
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Mar 6, 2023 23:23
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there's more to it than that. he's also incredibly cruel and intent on exterminating every sapient non-human. so really, the problem with the betrayal is that they didn't finish the job.
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Mar 6, 2023 23:33
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:there's more to it than that. he's also incredibly cruel and intent on exterminating every sapient non-human. so really, the problem with the betrayal is that they didn't finish the job. RareAcumen posted:Saw one that was a pretty blah 'betrayed by party- REVENGE story where the MC had Gacha as a power but it never did anything helpful because it takes mana from the surrounding area and only back at the horrible abyss the demon king crawled out our does mana exist in high enough quantities to get a 9999 SSSSS+ rolled character. And then off screen he rolled like 800 more times and they're all women' and I lost interest. I remember that summon one. It was pretty poo poo and trashy. The skeleton one had a VERY questionable opening chapter/episode before settling into massacring slavers which is always good fun.
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Mar 6, 2023 23:47
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doomrider7 posted:I dunno about SLF. Most of the more obscure stuff is really weird in how you trigger it or find it. Plus there's the whole info sale so psople likely hoard nits of info for later sale or favors(thus seems intentional on the devs part).
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Mar 6, 2023 23:51
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Fangz posted:I want a story where the hero has a massive advantage because he spent a poo poo load of money on pay to win stuff. I can think of at least one, but it doesn't qualify for the thread because of the flowchart reason, at least when applied to a major supporting character.
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Mar 7, 2023 00:06
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Kyte posted:Yes that's my point. Hoarding information is the kinda nonsense that'd get people leaking stuff out of spite, especially if there's profit involved. I mean that's kind of already happening with Pencilgon leaking incomplete info to the guild to pay off her bounty and Sunraku drip feeding stuff to Rust
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Mar 7, 2023 00:11
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:there's one manga where a guy is reincarnated into a game, but as a garbage tutorial/cutscene npc. it's a game where character building is vitally important and that character has a moderately high level but unbelievably bad stats, growths, and skills. also, no player character or equivalent appears, so his only option is to use all his knowledge of mechanics, bugs and exploits to raise some rando kids into heroes. it's pretty interesting, but there's not much of it out yet and the translation quickly goes to pot. That one is Shujinkou Janai! (I'm Not the Hero) and is a pretty good read. RareAcumen posted:Saw one that was a pretty blah 'betrayed by party- REVENGE story where the MC had Gacha as a power but it never did anything helpful because it takes mana from the surrounding area and only back at the horrible abyss the demon king crawled out our does mana exist in high enough quantities to get a 9999 SSSSS+ rolled character. And then off screen he rolled like 800 more times and they're all women' and I lost interest. The first one was absolute garbage and I dropped it because it was a villain story masquerading as a hero story, and all it cared about was making non-humans suffer. It was called Gift "Mugen Gacha" de Level 9999 The second one is Skeleton Knight in Another World. As mentioned it starts out with an attempted rape to show what a good guy the MC is, then largely focuses on murdering slavers until it transitions into a journey to find food ingredients (and sometimes thwarting evil religions). Kyte posted:my personal mmo manga beef is how everyone obsesses with keeping their discoveries and information secret and valuable when irl literally anything that happens gets reposted faster than it can even be verified (often it's crafting recipes) In all fairness, that was the norm back in the early days of MMOs. Raid strategies in particular were closely guarded info and no one would post it until after the competition for first kills was over. These days it's not really a thing, especially in WoW where all the new bosses are open for public testing and it's better to get revenue via publishing strategy videos and streaming your attempts.
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Mar 7, 2023 00:47
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Kyte posted:Yes that's my point. Hoarding information is the kinda nonsense that'd get people leaking stuff out of spite, especially if there's profit involved.
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Mar 7, 2023 00:50
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I mean it's not entirely unrealistic given what happened in 2016 with an old MMO game called Tibia. https://www.pcgamer.com/after-12-years-one-player-has-exposed-the-truth-behind-this-mmos-biggest-mystery-and-it-sucks/
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Mar 7, 2023 01:08
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Kyte posted:my personal mmo manga beef is how everyone obsesses with keeping their discoveries and information secret and valuable when irl literally anything that happens gets reposted faster than it can even be verified (often it's crafting recipes) Vrmmos stories seem to explain it with the world and npcs being a black box with almost lifelike AI and personality that’s up to the player and their interactions
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Mar 7, 2023 01:10
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Fangz posted:I want a story where the hero has a massive advantage because he spent a poo poo load of money on pay to win stuff. There's an otome isekai one where the main character has a massive advantage because she has access to the gacha and can pull handsome men from it who have OP stats and love her. Mostly it's about kingdom building though.
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Mar 7, 2023 04:32
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i think a lot of 'transfer former game character into game world' stories has the pay to win cheat as part of the package of rare items
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Mar 7, 2023 04:49
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skaianDestiny posted:I mean it's not entirely unrealistic given what happened in 2016 with an old MMO game called Tibia. I'm imagining a story where the first chapter is the MC accessing some exclusive post-game area. Only to be confronted by a bunch of shacks some vendor selling a bog standard object and the rest of the series is them obsessing over finding anything of value in this small shanty town.
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Mar 7, 2023 04:54
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Strongest florist uses "MC was the only person to do a thing in an mmo" and it rules.
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Mar 7, 2023 04:55
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the most annoying isekai ones where its like "oh no, everyone is bullying the MC because his elemental affinity is what everyone thought is the weakest" what weak elemental affinity you ask? usually freaking water or healing (gasp, what a weakling), like are you kidding me, water element is probably the most versatile, easily OP one, and healing is invaluable.
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Mar 7, 2023 04:58
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