daniel_gudman said:
Ravraxas, you're raising some good points, but there is a detail I want to correct: Kayaba is also surprised when Sugou manages to intercept some Players on log-out, and pinning the SAO Incident on him is a crime of opportunity, it's not even plan B for Kayaba.
And yeah, he's gotta use magecraft to make the SAO Incident work, but doing so is actually advertising to the MA that he's using magecraft; that problem is acute.
His plan is actually to play on their assumptions: like, most guys who earn a Sealing Designation do so because they got sloppy and careless about maintaining the Masquerade, but on the other hand, they're still at least trying to maintain it.
So basically Kayaba's plan A was to pretend he was that kind of guy to play for time; that way the Enforcers would play quiet and aim for an outcome that doesn't result in an outrageous number of very public terrorism-related deaths that have to be covered up against the next thirty years of inquiries and panels.
When the chance shows up he turns Sugou into his patsy using that as a template.
So his first line of defense is keeping himself as obfuscated as possible, and his second line of defense is making it seem to the MA that whoever is behind the SAO Incident was just over-confident in their ability to keep the secret. Not that he's actively plotting the destruction of the Secret.
And keep in mind that he had to keep the publicly-available version of Aincrad scrubbed of magecraft. Not just as a precaution against getting intercepted before he even starts his Incident; but also so when the MA cyber-literate Enforcers get involved, they don't see anything there that disturbs the narrative he's trying to sell them.
You see Daniel, the problem I see with that is that at the point the Association learns about it merely seeming like he is trying (and failing epically) is literally too little too late.
What I mean is, If he is obviously using magic to hinder the Rescue Team he isn't only announcing to the Association that he is using Magecraft,
he is openly using magecraft in public. Even if they believe that he is "merely" using superscience this is going to come to the attention of the authorities, the Japanese Govenrment at the very least, and probably even the EEUU Government.
Due to the involvement of the government in the Rescue Team, this will inevitably happen long before the Association is aware anything is wrong.
And governments would
want to be involved. Because they would want the "technology" capable of doing what Kayaba is doing.
The scale governemts operate in is simply beyond anything that the Association can pull of, governement involvement makes this an existential threat to the Association.
By the time they learn of what's happenning the Association should already be looking to clean up Kayaba's mess.
And really, they have it very easy, it would only take a blackout on the Servers or a simple loss of conection and Kayaba's little failsafe will clean up for them.
They won't even need to fabricate anything, it's all the SAO Terrorists fault. Hell, if they really want they could just manufacture a Terrorist group with Mental Interference, it wouldn't even be hard to fool the muggles. Because they simply don't care how many people die.
Now, thinking about it there are various ways you could go about handling this:
- It's a Feaute and not a Bug: Have Kayaba brive the Japanese Government to keep it under wraps. He does have plenty of superscience to do it. I'm sure they would love to be able to make Yui grade IAs. Or just have him give them Magecraft, a government with magic has to be like the Association's worst nightmare. Or use the lives of the players to threaten it into compliance.
This has many probles, not the least that I don't think this is the direction you want to take the story. But it would make for an interesting discovery for when Diabel tries to get into the Diet.
- Bold with magic, subtle with everything else: If a Magic Server can run a simulation of the world there isn't a reason it cannot run the original server
too. This way the Rescue Team spends years having Hacker offs with a legion of IAs and Old Cardinal in an old copy of the Server.
This still has the problem of not handling the hardware solution, but if Canon SAO didn't have to accout for that you haven't either. It also keeps the Association blissfully unaware.
In this option anything the Rescue Team gets it's because Kayaba gives to them. I still like the idea of Kayaba using the greed of RECTO Progress to further his goals, but I will take more about that later...
daniel_gudman said:
So his plan post-Game Clear is two-fold:
1) Release 10k amateur-to-journeyman class spellcasters into the wild, none of whom even know the Statute of Secrecy is a thing
2) Release a modified SAO source code, the one that has magecraft baked into the physics engine
Additionally;
3) Somehow hack all the games derived from "vanilla" SAO and, like, forcibly patch them
In the past I said I don't like Alfheim and I don't want to use it, but I want to reiterate that's for thematic reasons; "fairies chanting magic" is a different flavor of fantasy, whereas I want it to be clearly different in genre and flavor (which as a practical matter means a scifi video game instead).
I think I should elavorate in were was I going with my game proposal:
I really,
really disagree with the plan of having the Thaumaturgy System show up unanounced on any game made with the SEED. Specially if it involves keeping the Circuit Pain.
I just cannot believe people would do anything but the obvious and just not use the damned thing.
So I went for a way I considered plausible to make the Thaumaturgy System
popular. Get rid of the pain, and the thing is actually incredibly interesting and engaging. Hell, we have spent a non trivial amount of time arguing about it in this very thread.
What I meant to say is that, rather than trying to forze the Thaumatury System down everyone's throats, it makes much more sense for Kayaba to try and make it the Default Magic System of Full Dive games through social manipulation, and maybe some subtle Suggestions.
Just market it normally inside a game, preferible the first to come out with a Magic System, and for good measure put a suggestion, magical or otherwise, to ensure its popular as hell and people will develop games usign it. Specially if he provides the System for free.
He doesn't need a monopoly on being the Magic System, he just need the most reach he can get. And he especially doesn't need the attention forcing the Thaumaturgy System in all Full Dive games will bring.
Hell, this way having someone like Waver find out really fast that the Secret is being broken in VR games is a minnor setback for Kayaba and gives it more meaning than a convenient way to get more Fate characters into the plot.
Personally I still think the game I described should exist as the fist game after SAO, because it's just too much of a low hanging fruit for RECTO Progress to sink development time in something else when they have it half done.
But really, who cares? your idea of having a game about androids is cool and it would fit with the Circuit theme of the Thaumaturgy System. You could fluff it as Thaumaturgy being the Super-Science discovered by the Creators of the Android before being destroyed by a misterious force that is behind the mobs. Now their old servants must inherit their legacy and defeat those that killed them.
But the truth is I'm much more interested in the way Kayaba goes on to promote the use of the Thaumaturgy System making sense.
daniel_gudman said:
But I'm still not 100% settled on how I want to handle the friction between expectations of games, held by Players and Developers, their friction with the reality of the magecraft system.
Personally I'm thinking something like,
SAO Front Liner Survivors can stomp on anybody using magecraft?
I'm really up in the air on this still, so I want to hear other ideas.
Well, the Thaumaturgy System is obviouly a Sandbox more akin to something like Oblivion's spellcrafting system than something that has a fixed spell list. So, it isn't like game developers and gamers have no idea how to deal with something like that.
The difference is that rather than being something as artifical as Oblivion's spellcrafting system it's more like an hypercomplicated "fake-physics" engine that simulates something that "doesn't exists" as if it were natural law.
In that it's certainly different and much more involved than any other Magic System.
It requires much more involvement from the player to get good at. Someone at level 1 could slauther his way though a full high level party due to superior magecraft knowledge. Even something as basic as "Running your Circuits generates Magic Resistance" is a gamechanger.
And the thing is so complex and massive than you can't really go arround nerfing things. Is like, what would be the effect of nerfing gravity? How would that affect the rest of the simulation? How the hell do you even nerf physics?
They would probably just make overpowered things public rather than try and nerf them, it would be a faster and more effective way of making the playing field level.
How they will deal with things like not all players being born equal and things like that is much more tricky, really.
If they pay enough attention they will realize a Players spiritual Traits aren't generated randomply but rather come apparently from nowere, as if the system recieved the data from the Full Dive device.
I suppose they could experiment to see where exactly the data comes from but that wouldn't solve their balance problem.
I suppose they could try and input the Spiritual Trait data in the System themselves bypassing Kayaba's original setup. But they will previsibly fail because of Plot. Then we return to the question of "Why the hell are they even trying to sell this thing they can't control?".
Anyway, for as long as nobody complains I don't think they will even bother to look a anything like that. So, if Kayaba is subtly Suggesting everyone that the Thaumaturgy System is awesome and they shouldn't change it I don't think there'll be any problem on that front.