Worst MMO ever

I've got anime logic on my side. Idiots can defeat geniuses with pure determination so using genre savvyness, i'll intentionally let you underestimate me and kill you instead.

Not playing the game that way also means you let them win.

When you can play the game as you try to figure out a way to fight back. You either get out, die anyways, or you get out alive while able to get revenge/justice/what have you on the one who put you in that place.

Sometimes getting out alive is the only reward. Sometimes justice doesn't get dealt.

I wouldn't estimate a target I had to kill for real. I'm not an anime villain. If my life depended on surviving City of Heroes combat I would use my entire inspiration tray to kill a minion, and I would use nukes on a player with only five points of health left. And then I would run out to sniper range and wait to see if it rezzed. While stealthed. And running a full complement of amplifiers. With all the base buffs.

The only thing killing me in a deathmatch MMO is the RNG.

Just because it might not be possible to win, doesn't mean you shouldn't recognize who the real enemy is. The real enemy is the game dev, and the real game is against him. The MMO itself is a meta game. Win or lose, my sole goal would be to beat the dev. Everything else is a distraction, even if a very dangerous one.

Take out all the sci-fi stuff about VR and neural connections and an MMO, and what we basically have is a hostage situation. The criminal has a gun, a bomb, something that gives him life and death leverage over everyone at no risk to himself, and he's telling them that if they want to be released, they have to jump through his hoops.

On the one hand, we should always be looking for a chance to wrest power from him when he least expects it and escape that way. But on the other, if a criminal has a gun drawn on you and says "dance like a chicken and I'll let you go," would you really choose to instead let him pull the trigger, just to make a philosophical point about free will? This criminal went one better than most hostage-takers by giving his hostages a way out, so I'd focus on keeping everyone safe and taking advantage of it, so 10,000 people can then march right over to his real-life house and give him a collective beatdown.

On the third hand (hey, it works for Zaphod!), this troubles me...

If the developer's willing to meddle with people's interactions above and beyond the rules of the game, then he's not playing by his own rules. I haven't read anything apart from this thread and the Wiki article on SAO, but that suggests he can and will interfere with any mass escape plan that gets too close to succeeding, even if everyone's following his rules. In that case, we'd keep playing the game (after all, he's still holding a gun on 10,000 people), but the game becomes even more of a pretense for hacking the system from within, secretly coordinating with people on the outside, finding exploits that screw up the engine or some other method of breaking his hold on the situation.

Just because you dance like a chicken when the gun is on you doesn't mean you can't be looking for another way out while you're doing it.

Nor does it preclude observation of the gunman's behavior while you're dancing, so that you can try to get inside his head.

Let's ask the crew of the USS Pueblo:

Sounds like exactly what I was saying: play along long enough to get out alive, and worry about getting revenge later. Virtual reality trappings aside, this is precisely the same situation that Bane had Gotham City in during Dark Knight Rises: the villain could kill thousands of people instantly, so people have to play his game until they can secretly figure out how to fight back without dying instantly. If "playing his game" in this case gets them out faster than playing along until they've outsmarted and beaten the villain, that works too. They're not mutually exclusive plans.