Okay, here's one I haven't seen done before.
During the first month of Sword Art Online, roughly 2,000 people died in the game. As per Kayaba's hack of the NervGear, game death caused the NerveGear headset to emit a lethal microwave pulse, killing the player IRL.
But, while Kayaba may have been a brilliant hacker and programmer, and perhaps even hardware designer, there's one thing he wasn't: a quality-control expert.
So what are the odds that, among those ~2000 fatalities, one of them had a NervGear that popped a breaker or blue-screened instead of frying the wearer? Now, suddenly, the Virtual Crimes Division has an SAO escapee with valid login credentials, who's not dead... and might be able to re-spawn. If they can convince him/her to log back in. And if they can come up with a way to give their agent... an edge.
(I recall a *lot* of griping from MMO players about how SAO's local file storage for items, skills, levels, etc, could be abused. Kayaba didn't care, since he didn't really have to worry about that. But now?)
During the first month of Sword Art Online, roughly 2,000 people died in the game. As per Kayaba's hack of the NervGear, game death caused the NerveGear headset to emit a lethal microwave pulse, killing the player IRL.
But, while Kayaba may have been a brilliant hacker and programmer, and perhaps even hardware designer, there's one thing he wasn't: a quality-control expert.
So what are the odds that, among those ~2000 fatalities, one of them had a NervGear that popped a breaker or blue-screened instead of frying the wearer? Now, suddenly, the Virtual Crimes Division has an SAO escapee with valid login credentials, who's not dead... and might be able to re-spawn. If they can convince him/her to log back in. And if they can come up with a way to give their agent... an edge.
(I recall a *lot* of griping from MMO players about how SAO's local file storage for items, skills, levels, etc, could be abused. Kayaba didn't care, since he didn't really have to worry about that. But now?)