Not sure why you insist on theorising as though Eternum is just a digital game, a bunch of code. Hasn't Caribdis given us enough foreshadowing that it's not? If Nova can hack a visor to steal a person's inventory at launch but can't once they're inside the game or even modify any single variable, that means something is off. What they've programmed has so far been foreshadowed as being accessing other worlds while maintaining a link to the Earth to prevent death, as well as installing exit gates. There's more of course, such as NPCs having chips just like players, or physical activity in Eternum resulting in consequences in the real world.
We can also see the 10 gems of doom floating around Calypso's ancestor, giving him the ability to use magic apparently. With Calypso being clearly unhappy with being seen as merely a tool, the chips, the reprogramming and whatever else, it's clear that she's her own person. Meaning that she and the gems of doom far predate the creation of Eternum's chips. And seriously, inability to even take screenshots in a game where you can have tons of different outfits in many types of worlds? No DM-ing while in-game or any such usual commodities found in any MMO? No character screen in-game to check level, stats, equipment or inventory? There isn't even a tutorial for new players! No in-game images on the net (as revealed in a conversation with Penelope). Why don't the devs have images of their own game?
You can't properly theorise if you continue with the assumption that it's just digital code. The game has abundantly made it clear that something's fishy and you'd need crazy infrastructures to support such vast amounts of data, yet there's no such thing back on Earth, and no way to modify any variable "in-game", not even for a hacker who can get access to a very secure server or remotely hack a secure casino computer in record time to feed it false info.
