Top Hat Express, by Alex Wolf. I shall grant this work 4.5 out of 5 stars, for while it enlightens, entertains, and reveals the players of MMOs in a most meta (human) light, it does not quite reach the sublimest heights of supervillainy! Mwah-ha-hah-ha-hah!
*Cough. Sputter.*
Ahem. There are a lot – a lot – of SF books out there where Virtual Reality games are Serious Business, up to and including life or death stakes. This is not one of those books.
Our hero (ah, the irony!) is Dylan, a mild-mannered architect who on hearing of this new game where people could play superheroes or supervillains, decides it has great potential!
…To play a character meant for fun. An over-the-top, melodramatic, world-conquering Mad Scientist who’d fit the best of silent movies or children’s cartoons. A villain who can be dramatically thwarted!
(If any of you are seeing Dr. Drakken from the Kim Possible series right now, yes, like that.)
If you think about it, this is an excellent plan for someone who wants to keep playing the game for a long time. If you’re a straight-up hero, well, unless you can pull off a guy like Batman (and honestly, how many of us could?) after a while one bank robbery, hostage situation, or alien invasion looks just like all the rest. Likewise, if you’re a villain out to conquer the world at all costs, and you finally succeed… well, then what? Unless the game comes up with more worlds to conquer, you’re pretty much done.
Ah, but a villain who can be thwarted! So long as he escapes the heroes to plot another day, he can always try again!
(Personally my choice would be a Leverage-type character. But if the game doesn’t have a way for you to find characters who’ve been Wronged and commit crimes on their behalf – cartoon supervillain it is. Dibs on Shego!)
So Dylan makes his character, Dr. Zlo, and goes straight for the zany. For example:
“I shall kidnap the mayor’s daughter, tie her to the train tracks, and demand a ransom!
“Wait. The mayor has a son, not a daughter.”
Ponders.
“…I shall invent a Gender Bender gun!!!”
Yeah. It’s like that.
Of course this style of play does not appeal to everyone. There are griefers. There are trolls. There are people working livestreams for views and profit, and others vying to be impressive enough to land a job with the game company itself. It makes a drastic contrast with people just trying to play the game and have a good time.
There’s also a sober and realistic portrayal of a toxic relationship – and that, I think, is part of why the last bit of the book falls a little flatter than the rest. You don’t come back from an emotional betrayal like that in a hurry.
(There’s also the fact that Dr. Zlo and a few other supervillains manage to find bugs and exploits that a real MMO would patch. So losing some of their ill-gotten gains is realistic. Drat.)
All told, though, it was quite the romp. I look forward to Dr. Zlo’s next dastardly plan! I hear there are tsunami bombs….
Crossover Queen's Creative Chaos 
don’t be so sure, there is still a few game breaking (like literal server crashing) bugs that, I, a beta tester from ESO can in fact confirm are still there. There are also fewer people trying to intentionally break the game to gather up to overwhelm the gap in coding to cause a crash. Characters that had participated got banished to oblivion. One of my beta characters is still stuck.
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“For your punishment, you will be banished to oblivion.”
“I can’t play anymore?”
“You can play, but not online. You are banished to Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.”
“Noooo!!!!!”
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*cracks up*
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Hello,
I have been a fan of your work for quite a long time. I have recently gotten into book binding and was wondering if I could bind one of your ao3 stories for my personal library to go next to my copy of a Net of Dawn and Bones? If I’m any good at it, it would be awesome to gift you a bound copy as well, in appreciation for all your works!
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I like having printed hardcopy to read offline as well, so I’m fine with anyone fanbinding my fanfics. Have fun! 😉
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Oh, that does sound like fun, if you could manage to get in the right mindset….
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:sees “Gender Bender gun” and snerks, hard: Now THAT is villainous! Huh. Wonder if you could make a superhero who worked with traumatized people…. I call dibs on that one!
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It was so, so villainous. And unexpected, because it required phlebotinum, and no “serious” player would have wasted such a valuable thing on this when you could use it for a power-up instead!
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I’ve found that I prefer the game stories where the MC is seeking fun, i.e. playing the game.
I get why they try to raise the stakes and add tension, but doing that just seems to highlight the artificial nature of the game.
If you hold a gun to someone’s head and tell them to get X score on Guitar Hero, it has a lot of tension, but it’s an arbitrary series of actions for an arbitrary goal.
And if they “cheat” it doesn’t seem like a clever or tricky action, it just seems like common sense to ignore the game in favor of the real threat.
But if they are just playing for fun, then the motivations are scaled down to fit inside the game.
They still want to win, so there’s some tension, and any innovations are just more game.
It also means they can lose, so you can squeeze plot armor a lot more.
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I don’t know, Gender Bender gun makes me think Dr. Doofenshmirtz from Phineas and Ferb more. Also a fun romp though, so all good.
Actually Phineas and Ferb would have a blast with this game, too, except they’d do it for real.
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This sounds fantastic! I think I will have to look this up…
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For me: Cleric with ALL the Healing and Light spells. You think I’m the squishy: Think AGAIN. Now with a generous helping of fire and lightning.Note: I’m the type of person to have both good healing and damage.
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My husband’s favorite tank, still, is the one that had no agro grabbing abilities.
He got agro by healing more than everyone else.
The flavor of paladin he was playing had some damage spells that also did an AOE heal, you see…and then he went “hm. I’m already wearing the armor to survive WHEN I get agro…I wonder if I can out-heal the damage I’m taking?”
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I’m more of a heal/Spellcaster type. I also feel that the characters should not be split up into strictly Tank, DPS and Rogue. I like the idea of a healer who can also do good damage with a bow, or a Mage who wears armor and a weapon. A way so that if an enemy is immune to a certain element, the character can’t make a dent. That’s why my characters tend to be battlemages rather than straight mage or fighter types.
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Yes, their roles should be their primary strength, not the only thing they can do.
We’re still really impressed with Final Fantasy 14, where we took some friends in to a dungeon to do a quick synched run… and after we got in, we realized that nobody had brought a healer, because we’d all been being polite at eachother about roles. We had I think two warriors, a paladin and a summoner, level synced to the pirate dungeon.
Well, if we bowed out, we’d be locked out, so did the eh we’ll run until we wipe.
We cleared it. Took a few potions, but we didn’t even have a single wipe.
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You and I feel the same way about this. Thank you.
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Edit: Can make a dent. Hate that you can’t edit posts here.
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