#he doesn't upload often but when he does it's almost always extremely impressive. The holy grail of arbitrary code execution exploits

[honestlyvan]

wym ovan is a cheater?

I mean it's not explicitly in the text but listen. Come the fuck on now. Do you really think Mr Interpol-affiliated grey hat, climbs-firewalls-for-fun-and-sport, intended-play-area-is-merely-a-suggestion has ever played a single game in anything approaching a "normal" way? CC Corp were having psychological breakdowns about Ovan's presence on the service even before he became a walking system integrity error and spent, what, several years giving CC Corp the runaround on their own platform.

Ovan is just so damn wilful and composed and perpetually invested in outwitting his circumstances that he'd get bored with a game that just tells him what to do, and doesn't really offer him options to figure out what he wants to do for himself. He is patient with things exactly to the point where his influence over them begins -- and if he can give things a shove to get them cascading, he absolutely will. The game he'd be playing in The World is the meta-game speedrunners play, where it's not a matter of what you can do in-game, it's a matter of what the game technically can't stop you from doing.

I think if Ovan did start playing The World for fun rather than simply using it as an entry point into investigating CC Corp's systems, he spent his early levels trying to sequence break every single quest and then very quickly jumped to glitchhunting and rumorchasing and escalating amounts of fucking around in the black box parts of the system. He already had access to the Creator Room by the time Aina started playing, and once she got deep into the lore of the game, it would have been pretty trivial to put his PC at the level cap with maxed out equipment so that she never had to stop to grind and could keep getting deeper into the game at her own pace.