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Wouldn't it have made more sense for the rich nerd guy to use a d&d reference as his first test as something that he actually had a hand in? Like a module he helped write or a famous dungeon he once made for his friends or something that was an important memory from his childhood? It seems strange that the first of his big important tests just takes place in a dungeon he played with his friends once I guess. And that way his entire test couldn't be outsmarted by just downloading a pdf of the tomb of horrors Prima strategy guide. But I guess that wouldn't tick off the [ X ] DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS NERD REFERENCE box quite as well. Wade says he finds a ton of gold coins in the tomb which automatically converts to a bunch of OASIS money. But he can only pick up so much of it and that's why he doesn't just make himself filthy rich off of it. But since it automatically converts he doesn't actually need to exchange the gold anywhere to make credits from it so why can't he just pick up an assload of it? Or come back later and just keep picking up more and more to make himself a ton of money? He also says picking up the money gives him a bunch of experience. Which is fair because that's how it worked back in old d&d. But does this mean that it works like that everywhere in OASIS? The rich automatically get to be level 50000 and broke people are level 3 scrubs? Or does experience only work this way because he's in a d&d area? In which case why wouldn't people find a game area with rules that give out incredible amounts of easy exp because that's how it worked in those games and just power-level this way. Which if this is true it means that he must be really really dumb if he's still only ever made it to Level 3 over the course of his life. This was thinking into this terrible book way too much but his lovely throwaway nerd lines don't make any sense with what he's written about OASIS.
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Mar 16, 2018 18:55
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iospace posted:The thing is, I can sort of see where he was coming from in this. Tomb of Horrors is relatively well known, even by those who don't play DnD. So it allows him to make a DnD reference and not have it be obscure enough to fly over heads. You're right, but that just makes Halliday even lamer. Instead of using his basically infinite wealth and resources to make challenges and tests that force the Gunters to understand his actual life, they only need to just memorize assloads of pop culture. The tests don't seem to actually have anything to do with Halliday himself except that X Nerdy Item existed at the same time he did.
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Mar 16, 2018 19:26
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Adnachiel posted:Later plot points aside, nothing stops him from doing that. And the only thing stopping the rest of the player base from doing that is the fact that Cline underestimates the problem-solving abilities of the Internet. Or even just the ability of a MMO's player base to figure out how to game the system. Thats a good point. This tomb of annhilation gold and teasure automatically converts to OASIS credits. And since credits are better than real money this dungeon is full of more money than one person can carry. Is it only worth real money because its an "official" area or does any treasure acquired anywhere in the OASIS covert to real money? Whats stopping people from just poopsocking the world of warcraft land to make tons of realworld cash and moving from a 22nd floor trailer to a 3rd floor trailer?
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Mar 16, 2018 21:56
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chitoryu12 posted:Holy poo poo. That's how he even made it to the first challenge to start with. He just read all the maps and dungeon master information out of the tomb of horrors book. The only time he doesn't cheat is when he's blocked from doing so. It says a lot about Wade's lack of actual personal character that in the same breath he basically says "Wargames was Halliday's favorite movie. Thus its my favorite movie."
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Mar 17, 2018 00:20
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I liked that Wade could only beat the demi-lich Joust boss because he told the lich to let him play as player 1. He only knows how to play games as the first player because he's never had any friends to play games with.
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Mar 17, 2018 03:54
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I guess detonating antimatter bombs walking distance from schools isnt a big deal? The pvp rules would really just mean people would constantly grief each other since you're apparently allowed to trap people inside force fields and their only recourse is to break them down very slowly.
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Mar 19, 2018 16:05
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I'm on the run from a massive corporation with unlimited resources who blew up my home, my only family, and several other hundred people. I'm taking extra steps to make sure they still think I'm dead. But also I'm going to hang out in front of massive crowds of people flaunting my name everywhere.
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Mar 19, 2018 19:17
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I imagine when your singular hobby/interest/way of life/job consists of mindlessly consuming media so you can later regurgitate it word for word you'd probably develop the skill to absorb it easier. So Wade probably enters a semi-comatose state when hes re-watching the Snorks in its entirety for the 18th time that allows him to stay up for 56 hours at a time.
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Mar 19, 2018 19:56
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I load up my DANCEGOOD.exe program so that I don't have to actually enjoy interacting with my not-girlfriend. This could have been so much better of an interaction between the two characters if art3mis has recognized that wade turned on a dance program and told him she'd rather see him be himself. Then wade would have had to actually do something for himself for once instead of just 100% A++ ace'ing everything perfectly the first time. I wonder if Virtual VR bartenders make good tips serving people fake drinks that are just virtual food coloring called whatever the customer just asked for.
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Mar 20, 2018 14:43
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Renegret posted:The more I think about it, the more I think it'll be okay if the bad guys get control of OASIS. Wade earlier in the book talks about how he only ever made it to player level 3 and never really got to explore any other areas of OASIS because he was too broke. He says transportation costs around OASIS are the biggest expense in the VR world. This means that either OASIS is really terribly designed because you can't grind enough bear butts to ever actually make it out of the starting area; or it means that Wade is just the actual dumbest person in the entirety of OASIS. OASIS is described as an escapist fantasy world for everyone with entire planets of shopping and entertainment. It wouldn't be an escapist world for nearly the entire world's population if the regular person can't make enough money to leave the starting zones to go do stuff. None of the shopping mall planets, or night club planets, could operate regularly if there aren't any patrons. Which means other people don't have the problem of being too broke to move around OASIS. So really Wade is just actually the worst gamer on the entire planet. Even poor grandma Gilmore who got blown up made it out of Goldshire when Wade couldn't (that's a reference to the human starting zone from the popular game World of Warcraft)
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Mar 20, 2018 15:11
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Renegret posted:when does carrot top make an appearance If there's an infinite amount of content in OASIS then that means somewhere there is an entire handbook for mortals planet where you can hang out with virutal carrot top, casting chaos Magicks, and listening to the hit White Tees jams
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Mar 20, 2018 15:22
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One of the reasons Wade says he was unable to ever do anything but hang out on School planet is because he refused to join any of the gunter clans. He's a Lone Wolf and he's going to find the egg on his own. Im sure the clans help each other out all the time with taxis and ferries. So instead of joining a clan and just taking advantage of the help offered there Wade chose to accomplish absolutely nothing in the 5 years he's been hunting the egg. People join video game clans, take advantage of the help, and offer nothing back in return in MMOs all the time. This adds fuel to my theory that Wade is actually the worst video gamer on the planet.
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Mar 20, 2018 17:23
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Liquid Communism posted:I'm still wondering how this works with the Block feature. I mean, you can mute them, but they can still spawn a locker around you? I cast Bigby's Locker Shoving Hand at a 5th level spell, allowing it to shove 3 additional nerds.
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Mar 21, 2018 03:07
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I bet his 2 special rig suits smell awful. He said he washes them but they're the only thing he ever wears. Wade programmed his entire secret base himself. But I dont think it's ever mentioned anywhere that he knows how to program? Knowing how to program entire areas seems like a great marketable skill that he could have used earlier to make some money and move off of school planet earlier in his life. Its either that or he just used a tool that lets him cookie-cutter paste things together and called it programming to make him sound cool to himself.
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Mar 22, 2018 16:48
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Wade had the chance earlier to become the head of the most powerful company in the world. He was trying to make fun of the bad guy by asking for his job but the board of directors immediately actually offered it to him. They offered him the Chief of Operations position of the company with unlimited money and resources. He would have been put in charge of the entire egg hunting operations. Why the hell wouldn't you take that and abuse the poo poo out of their resources for you? Worst case is they find out Wade's actually incompetent and he coasts for a decade in the position before they offer him a huge retirement bonus. Best case he intentionally sabotages all their efforts and becomes the underdog Gunter Hero while secretly finding out a ton of stuff to help him on the egg hunt. Instead he turned down the easiest job ever with a like 5 million dollar a year salary and they blew up his neighborhood and now he eats microwave brownies for every meal.
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Mar 22, 2018 18:36
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Wade had his teeth replaced with fully haptic T31-Enamelizers that help you completelyy simulate the feeling of eating a virtual hamburger
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Mar 22, 2018 20:46
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Tunicate posted:the stupid part is that pacman is a purely deterministic game so you could totally just TAS it It was really surprising to me that Wade actually spent 6 hours beating pacman on his own instead of downloading a cheat for it like he does for every other single activity.
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Mar 23, 2018 14:25
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chitoryu12 posted:One thing you'll quickly notice is that Cline seems to have not actually bothered playing the game before describing it: Zork actually has quite a robust text parser, and trying to use simple commands like "climb tree" or "attack troll" can easily result in the game refusing input until you're more specific. That seems to be a pretty consistent occurrence in this book. If describing a thing requires more knowledge than a quick google search can tell you then Cline gets the reference wrong.
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Mar 23, 2018 15:26
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Hyrax Attack! posted:One of the many ways the book would been improved would have been if Halliday weren’t dead, and was instead running the contest as a power mad GM. An egotisical demand to be remembered would explain why the schools offer classes about his life, and there could be a scene where he permabans someone for pointing out he got a reference wrong. And when they get permabanned the game fries their real life brain or something. Boom now suddenly there's actually something at stake in playing these terrible challenges instead of the only consequence being that your entire life is a wasteland of 1980s bar trivia answers
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Mar 23, 2018 16:01
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I've brought dishonor upon my family by using gamefaqs walkthroughs to defeat this challenge *commits seppuku* *respawns 2 feet away*
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Mar 23, 2018 19:10
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It didn't actually sound like dying was that big of a deal when Wade described it earlier? You go back down to level 1. But Wade power leveling to level 99 was so trivial he barely mentioned it in a throw-away line. And even if you lose all the stuff you have on you, every gunter seems to have entire bases full of extra poo poo.
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Mar 23, 2018 19:21
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nerdz posted:They make it look like leveling is gated more by resources than time. If you're rich enough, you can boost yourself to the max level extremely quickly due to being able to quickly traveling between quests and finishing them as fast as possible. But here's the huge plothole: if the game currency is the highest valued currency of them all, can't you just get rich by poopsocking the poo poo out of OASIS? They even mention respawning instances, like the joust cave! Why is everyone so poor then? If you can farm raids and get infinite money, why is the currency so valued? yeah, OASIS being the primo currency of the entire world wouldn't make any sense because there's literally mounds of money just lying around all over the place that respawns every day. It should be trivial for anyone to make themselves near infinite money by using strategy guides to beat the toughest content (since Wade has shown us that its how he beats everything multiple times now). Really OASIS currency should be so insanely devalued from the massive amounts of it floating around in the system that it should be worth next to nothing in the real world. OASIS is just a virtual reality bitcoin mining machine
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Mar 23, 2018 19:53
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It makes me mad that half the dumb references in this book aren't even 80's references. He couldn't even stick to his lovely gimmick.
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Mar 26, 2018 16:52
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The Art3mis reveal should have been Cline himself
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Mar 26, 2018 18:23
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chitoryu12 posted:I’m still hitting a roadblock on making RPO better: redoing the WarGames section without just tossing it altogether. Just changing it to any sort of actual challenge of any kind would already be an improvement. The wargames test was the first time in Wade's life where he's been denied access the ability to just google the answers to everything in his life. It should have been an obstacle where he needed to use his actual skills to prove himself worthy. Just replacing that section with a challenge where Wade has to think of 5 words that rhyme with "wargames" would have been more exciting to read
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Mar 26, 2018 20:27
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The thing where Wade could only beat the Lich at Joust by switching to player 1 still bugs the poo poo out of me. As written its just a random bullshit thing Cline threw in to pad word count and is supposed to make us think Wade is really clever for some reason. If this book wasn't bullshit that moment could have been a thing Wade realized was the trick to beating Lich Haliday because Haliday was a lonely nerd and likely only ever played joust by himself as player 1. So taking that player position would throw lich haliday off his game because he wasn't programmed with a familiarity as player 2.
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Mar 26, 2018 20:34
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What was the point of Cline writing all that security-wank stuff about Wade's incredible apartment fortifications (including a metal cage he somehow installed entirely by himself in the walls/ceiling/floor) if it didn't even do anything for him. I guess his plan was to intentionally get caught? But why not just have a plan to disguise as a janitor and sneak in instead? I'm pretty convinced every single bit of writing Cline did about the real world was just word padding poo poo he threw out there occasionally when he thought of a new way to try and make Wade look as badass in real life as he is in the game.
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Mar 27, 2018 14:53
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Poulpe posted:I am reaching verrrrrry hard here but with an extremely liberal interpretation it could be assumed that they want them alive and incensed to solve the egg hunt to continue giving them solutions to the keys/gates, and then when they were all near the end and ready to snatch the victory out of the gunters' hands (which is basically now, in the plot) they could kill them off because they were finished using them. (Which they are more or less planning to do.) IOI is allowed to have what I assuming is government sanctioned legal slaves out of people who couldn't pay their regular credit card debt. And if you get out of the building they get to put a legal execution order out for you. So I guess they can get away with saving footage of them killing people because its probably required for their regular audits or something.
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Mar 27, 2018 19:11
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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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I'm impressed that this book manages to get worse every update
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Apr 2, 2018 15:29
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chitoryu12 posted:Also notice how the two main mechs in this final battle (Mechagodzilla and Leopardon) are from the 70s and Ultraman is from the 60s, so the most prominent artifacts we've seen aren't even from the 80s in a book that's exclusively about 80s nostalgia! He's been doing it all book but for a book with an 80's nostalgia gimmick, Cline doesn't actually write 80's references. He writes Cline Liked a Thing references that just mostly happened to be in the 80s. This book is so weak that it couldn't even stick to its really simple gimmick.
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Apr 2, 2018 15:38
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I'm looking forward to the update with a huge robot fight where all the robots get destroyed in a couple of sentences and there's no description of any action.
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Apr 2, 2018 19:36
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The Ultraman sequence isn't even very interesting (even if it was well written) because just a few chapters ago we already got an Ultraman fight scene. That scene was also somehow more interesting despite it just being Daito fighting off some random sixer nobodies instead of the big bad guy in a giant robot.
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Apr 2, 2018 20:52
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Darth Walrus posted:I think that one big problem is that it’s so depersonalised. It’s not a final ‘gently caress you’ from the hero to the villain, it’s one big monster fighting another big monster. There’s no interplay. Yeah, there was absolutely no weight to any part of this big showdown. The hyped up robots did nothing Shoto e-died Tons of people got e-killed The biggest battle in Oasis history E-Killing the Big Bad Guy All of these get like 1-2 non-descriptive sentences and then immediately dropped with no other attention. There's also something just specially stupid about the big final battle coming to a close by 3 turbo nerds walking up to a door and reciting schoolhouse rock. chitoryu12 posted:Also, the final battle suffers from a huge problem in that there's really no stakes until Wade decides that taunting his opponent is more important than winning. None of the avatars here are actually in physical danger and many of them can't even get into the castle because they don't have the Crystal Key, so the only risk to the gunter side is that a bunch of people have to start at Level 1 again. There's even fewer stakes for IOI because none of the Sixer avatars are personalized and they all have hacked rigs and a huge system of infrastructure and supply lines, so theoretically they could just jump right back into a new body and get geared up to return to battle within minutes. It also loses any sort of sense of victory because Wade even quickly mentions that Sorrento is just going to grab someone else's avatar and come right back. So good job mildly inconveniencing him??
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Apr 2, 2018 21:14
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Or just real life murder the people who showed up to fight you since it's been made pretty clear there are absolutely no consequences to IOI killing people and everyone in the world being shown definitive proof.
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Apr 2, 2018 21:20
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chitoryu12 posted:I thought about that, but realized how difficult of an undertaking would be. The battle sounds like it's barely lasting an hour, so you'd have to have IOI assassins stationed in just about every city sitting waiting for gunters in the enemy forces (who may have their name tags turned off) to be identified and have their data transmitted to the right agents. Logistically, it makes more sense for an evil "conquer the planet while laughing evilly" terrorist organization than an outwardly legitimate communications company that tries to keep its killings secret. That would have been cool if Cline has been able to write them as a competent super corporation. Since he can't we're left with a blundering EVIL CORP that's infinite money and resources but lost every single battle or encounter in the book to unorganized groups of gunters. The only actually evil thing they've been able to accomplish has been real life murders. The evil corporation's entire reason for wanting to take over the digital world is so they can charge a subscription and put ads into a free-to-play game. That's their entire nefarious plot. Cline isn't very good at making them evil. there wolf posted:The battle should have happened before the shield went down. Their super shield only covers the castle which has minimal defenses put on it. Then there's a sixers army camped out on the field around it, too big and tough for anything but a concentrated push by all the gunters and thus serving as the main deterrent. Wades drone plan only comes out when Sorrento is standing on the battlements yelling "you've beaten my army, but good look breaking my impervious shield!" And when that's down Sorrento turns into Mechagodzilla and starts thrashing everyone else who has roboted up by now; Shoto goes down early but then pops up as Ultraman to take out Sorrento. He doesn't have enough time to make the gate before the remaining sixers, and tells the other three it's been a privilege and to win the prize for gunters everywhere. Wade's signature car, the delorean, that's never been mentioned again but wade said is sitting miniaturized in his pocket, could turn invisible and phase through matter. Why didn't they just load up into his car and drive right through the castle walls to the gate after he blew up the shield?
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Apr 3, 2018 01:11
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Seriously? Cline REALLY couldn't think of any other challenge then "the first one again but easier because there is no lich opponent?" There's absolutely no challenge to this grand finale because he abuses a bug to get near infinite lives and just has someone read him the answers to the last test. How is the reader supposed to be excited about this? Also what's the point of making the final door require 3 people working together if the last challenge has nothing to do with more than one person? If this was a better book I'd say its Halliday being bitter that his 2 friends married each other and ditched him so he coded the last challenge so that only one person wins but really its just Cline forgot about the 3 people opening the door thing.
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Apr 3, 2018 16:35
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chitoryu12 posted:They talk about this when they figure out the clue, and the suggestion they come up with is that Halliday must have wanted to see the final challenge turn into a race by forcing the top three competitors to all enter at the same time. Since this final challenge was being broadcast around to every person in the world, it means the entire population of earth was forced to watch 20+ people all re-enacting the Holy Grail line for line for an hour and a half. Talk about edge of your seat action.
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Apr 3, 2018 16:59
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chitoryu12 posted:While cheating to beat cheaters may be justifiable, the problem is how the book handles it. None of the characters recognize that they’re winning the Hunt by doing exactly what they insulted their sworn enemies for doing. Instead, it’s treated as the protagonists finally becoming true companions. Since Wade said he was broadcasting to over 200 million people on his stream who watched him cheat his way through the final challenges, it would have been neat if instead of being the big hero for beating the big bad cheaters Wade finds himself rich and powerful but hated by all for pulling the same exact cheating they did.
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Apr 3, 2018 19:19
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"Now that I'm the most powerful man in the world I can finally achieve my lifelong dream, meeting carrot top."
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Apr 4, 2018 13:44
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