<Snipped quote by Gowi>
I was not talking about RP players here. More about the general playerbase. Cities become wastelands because nobody lives in them anymore and the more players die the harder the "endgame content" becomes, no?
NPCs are a thing you know? We could have them also be lively and as real as the players so they act human.
Also... I have no idea why even somebody would do such a thing as to kill players IRL when they are killed in game. Makes no sense to me. Maybe the standard answer to that question. "Because he is evil". I dunno, I'd find it tricky to find a proper reason, but this is of course a weak argument against this.
I have an idea, two actually:
1) When people die they don't acutally "die" they simply wake up but no one on the inside knows since we've all been told that if we die in game we die irl.
2) We go the Log Horizon/Dark Souls route that means with every death, we begin to loose our mind more, unable to comprehend the fact we're supposed to be death but yet we're alive and slowly realizing that no matter what we do, we're trapped in an eternal cycle.
I hate to spoil childhood dreams, but being trapped in a game is not a good fate, its not paradise, its quite the opposite.
And what do you mean, there can't be any depth without consequences? Of course there can! Even with consequences SAO was as deep as a dried up lake in the desert, whereas Log Horizon had that depth. A meaning.
You'd just have to search the meaning for everybody's existence in the world somewhere else than it just being "a fight for survival", which in itself is pretty shallow, too...
Your comparison of LH vs SAO is flawed since its not the concept of death each series uses, its how the writers portray and actually write them, pretty sure everyone here can say that SAO has abysmal writing.
In other news, this is going really fucking fast for me, like Free-level fast; I hope that it doesn't speed along like this once there's an OOC (15 pages of OOC in 3 days like holy fuck that's insane)