Dorfnutter

Engaged Member
May 21, 2017
2,963
14,696
It's really simple to defend it actually. Leaving aside the whole "the NPCs might be actual people" thing, the other player has no reason to believe that the NPC is anything more than lines of code, an object. Child abuse is wrong because it harms children, but regardless of whether the other player is a pedo or not, if the NPC really is just lines of code then he isn't harming anyone.

And again, this is more about how the Dev had to virtue signal like this by bringing internet arguments into his game.
And yet part of your argument is that Orion acted rashly because he may have not known despite all signs - with the way the story is told and what we've learned throughout - that says otherwise.

So again, I'm not sure why you're insisting on the "lines of code" and "not real" argument for the child NPC when we as players ought to know better at this point.

Also again, it's hard to argue against the "not real" excuse when the child looks like a real-life equivalent of a kid in their universe. No uncanny valley, "it's just the art style that makes it look like a kid" excuse here. Even worse is the fact that the "game" basically allows you to feel with all senses the sensations of doing it in real life. So if the pedo eventually goes the distance and porks the kid, his experience is pretty much a 1-to-1 representation of what it really feels like to rape a kid.

Which again, is pretty hard to defend, really.
 

Dragon59

Conversation Conqueror
Apr 24, 2020
6,699
10,941
Loli porn is actually legal in most countriesthat allows porn, including America.


I'm not making you or the Dev do anything, all I'm saying is that virtue signaling is a dumb move, especially if you make porn.
The fact that you accuse those whose opinion differs from yours to be "virtue signaling," says more than enough. I'm excommunicating you from my feed.
 

sampow

Member
May 14, 2023
285
2,675
Morals aren't about feelings, and just because you can't stomach those things happening in fiction it doesn't mean there aren't other who can. At the end of the day it's fiction, so morality really doesn't even apply to it.

And yeah, same, of course I'm going to choose the option which gives more affection points. Just sucks that it's the option that affirms the Dev's virtue signalling.
I don't know if I agree with anything you've written there, except that people have different preferences.

Morals totally are about feelings. Of course society heavily dictates various morals, but we all have our own moral compass, based on upbringing and our own feelings. A person can "feel" something is right or wrong. Doesn't mean they are necessarily correct though. Some will say looking at drawn CP is wrong, others will say it's fine since there are no victims.

I also don't know about this "virtue signalling" argument. I don't believe the dev wrote that scene to get points with some anti-fake-CP crowd. He put it in because it was an interesting dilemma for the mc. Alex's response isn't necessarily the dev's response; it might be, but it's not a given.

But anyway, the dev providing the antagonists argument, "I would never do this in real life!" and "...Don't you understand? It's not a real kid!" is a fair argument. If it were true. But like the mc responds, "He once was."

The mc actually believes the kid may be an imprint of a real child. And what does that mean? Is the child now just a program? Is Thanatos now just a program? Do their "souls" still reside in the machine? Are they even in a machine? Like Axel says, where are the servers?

Also, the scene highlights a dilemma that will be real soon enough in our own world. When AI behaves self aware, does it have rights? Many stories and movies have been made on this topic.

Don't cheapen such an interesting subject by simply labelling it, "Virtue signalling".

Are you implying, good sir/madam, that Alex's pussy tastes like fresh fish? :unsure:
"What's the difference between eating sushi and eating pussy?"

It's the rice.

:p

Seriously, you guys haven't heard of those connotations? :D
 

SlapE

Well-Known Member
Dec 4, 2022
1,626
4,473
Finished the update the other night and WOW, that was so damn amazing. :love:

The Annie and Alex scenes were both... god damn. :sneaky:

I definitely think Alex moved up a few spots for me, but also... that ending with William Bardot has me a bit worried, we can never have an ending where we just chillin and everything good. :(
 

Son of Durin

Engaged Member
Jul 5, 2021
3,686
6,673
I don't know if I agree with anything you've written there, except that people have different preferences.

Morals totally are about feelings. Of course society heavily dictates various morals, but we all have our own moral compass, based on upbringing and our own feelings. A person can "feel" something is right or wrong. Doesn't mean they are necessarily correct though. Some will say looking at drawn CP is wrong, others will say it's fine since there are no victims.

I also don't know about this "virtue signalling" argument. I don't believe the dev wrote that scene to get points with some anti-fake-CP crowd. He put it in because it was an interesting dilemma for the mc. Alex's response isn't necessarily the dev's response; it might be, but it's not a given.

But anyway, the dev providing the antagonists argument, "I would never do this in real life!" and "...Don't you understand? It's not a real kid!" is a fair argument. If it were true. But like the mc responds, "He once was."

The mc actually believes the kid may be an imprint of a real child. And what does that mean? Is the child now just a program? Is Thanatos now just a program? Do their "souls" still reside in the machine? Are they even in a machine? Like Axel says, where are the servers?

Also, the scene highlights a dilemma that will be real soon enough in our own world. When AI behaves self aware, does it have rights? Many stories and movies have been made on this topic.

Don't cheapen such an interesting subject by simply labelling it, "Virtue signalling".



"What's the difference between eating sushi and eating pussy?"

It's the rice.

:p

Seriously, you guys haven't heard of those connotations? :D
Smell, not taste. Sweaty can kind of remind you of tuna salad; but it can still taste just fine. ;)
 

Ellyx

Active Member
Apr 9, 2022
671
4,270
Finished the update the other night and WOW, that was so damn amazing. :love:
The Annie and Alex scenes were both... god damn. :sneaky:
[/ISPOILER] :(
This update is definetly one of my pref, we have everything in it humor, story/revelations, sexiness. After replaying it, and I will say this as an Annie fan, the scene I least preferred in this update was Annie's one mainly due to the teasing at the end and when you know how good the others scenes are this scene leaves us "hungry" for more(I preferred the others 2 scenes of Annie). As Dorfnutter said, I think next update will feature a Nova scene similar to the Alex one and I do hope Luna is getting a nice scene without feeling "unatural"
 
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ArDZer

Well-Known Member
Feb 20, 2019
1,451
3,433
I don't know what everyone is losing their fucking minds about but I just played the whole game through from the beginning just to extend the experience and it's STILL NOT LONG ENOUGH!
And still Eternum's v0.6 has to be publicly released. The Eternum withdrawal syndrome should last for about 5 months or so (which would be an estimated time for Caribdis to develop and release v0.7 for the higher tiers, that's if the project doesn't encounter any issues along the way). As a poster I saw online once with this caption says:
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Dorfnutter

Engaged Member
May 21, 2017
2,963
14,696
This update is definetly one of my pref, we have everything in it humor, story/revelations, sexiness. After replaying it, and I will say this as an Annie fan, the scene I least preferred in this update was Annie's one mainly due to the teasing at the end and when you know how good the others scenes are this sceneleaves us "hungry" for more(I preffered the others 2 scenes of Annie). As Dorfnutter said, I think next update will feature a Nova scene similar to the Alex one and I do hope Luna is getting a nice scene without feeling "unatural"
Unless of course...Cari makes good with his idea to have a non-lewd update by killing Orion and trapping him in Eternum, leading to him spending the entire update trying to get back to the real world (and also leads to Caly finally crossing over in the process)...
 

Ellyx

Active Member
Apr 9, 2022
671
4,270
Unless of course...Cari makes good with his idea to have a non-lewd update by killing Orion and trapping him in Eternum, leading to him spending the entire update trying to get back to the real world (and also leads to Caly finally crossing over in the process)...
I mean storywise it can be good but I will react like this:
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and after this one we would have Chang's pov (and Micaela)for all 0.8
 
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rebel836

Newbie
May 15, 2018
35
67
And still Eternum's v0.6 has to be publicly released. The Eternum withdrawal syndrome should last for about 5 months or so (which would be an estimated time for Caribdis to develop and release v0.7 for the higher tiers, that's if the project doesn't encounter any issues along the way). As a poster I saw online once with this caption says:
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I can see why addicts have a hard time quitting. This is gonna be a long ass rest of the year
 
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theblasbla

Newbie
Feb 2, 2018
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Lets assume that the child NPC really is an actual person turned into an NPC... where exactly is the interesting moral dilemma there? If it really is a child then of course causing it harm would be wrong. The best defense you could give the other player is that he's ignorant of the possibility of the NPC being an actual person. This is reflected in how the two options are "Kill the bad guy(good option)" and "Accept the bribe from the bad guy(bad option)". It's very cut and dry what the intent is.

The Dev put actual, reasonable, real world arguments in favor for of taboo erotic fiction in a scenario where it can't be anything but wrong. It's the equivalent of having enemies spout capitalist rhetoric as they loot a village or having the asshole character in a romance VN be a Men's Rights Activist.

That's not an attempt at having an interesting moral dilemma, that's just virtue signaling. If you really want an interesting moral dilemma, have a player character corner a young bandit NPC. The player needs to kill the bandit for a quest and is about to execute it, does MC intervene or does he let it happen? If the MC intervenes, the NPC kills the other player before running away. If the NPC dies it will respawn after a while, and the other player will be able to log in after 24 hours at Level 1 if he dies. No lasting consequences except their suffering, but whose suffering does the MC prioritize? Fuck, Marry, Kill... and no saying "Fuck" twice.

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What the child NPC looks like or how real it feels doesn't matter if it's not actually real, and to the other player, that's what he thought it was: Not Real. That's all the defense that's needed really because no reasonable person would think that NPCs would be actual people.
 

Ungawa

Well-Known Member
Apr 16, 2017
1,513
3,198
I don't know what everyone is losing their fucking minds about but I just played the whole game through from the beginning just to extend the experience and it's STILL NOT LONG ENOUGH!
Well, it needs to be
 
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Dorfnutter

Engaged Member
May 21, 2017
2,963
14,696
What the child NPC looks like or how real it feels doesn't matter if it's not actually real, and to the other player, that's what he thought it was: Not Real. That's all the defense that's needed really because no reasonable person would think that NPCs would be actual people.
Except we as players know (and Orion to an extent because his supernatural senses could sense it even though he may have some doubts about it) based from what has been presented so far that it's likely a kid. If you have the burden of knowing that knowledge (or at the very least, you know there's a significant chance that that's the case), would you not feel revulsion for what the pedophile was doing - despite him not knowing?

Also, ignorance on the matter can't really be used as a defense when we (being the players and to some extent Orion) know that there is harm being done to someone. "Oh I didn't know this person was a victim of human trafficking, I thought she was a bonafide prostitute who's doing her job with her consent." That's basically what the "ignorance" argument sounds like to me, given what we know so far in the story.
 

sampow

Member
May 14, 2023
285
2,675
Lets assume that the child NPC really is an actual person turned into an NPC... where exactly is the interesting moral dilemma there? If it really is a child then of course causing it harm would be wrong. The best defense you could give the other player is that he's ignorant of the possibility of the NPC being an actual person. This is reflected in how the two options are "Kill the bad guy(good option)" and "Accept the bribe from the bad guy(bad option)". It's very cut and dry what the intent is.

The Dev put actual, reasonable, real world arguments in favor for of taboo erotic fiction in a scenario where it can't be anything but wrong. It's the equivalent of having enemies spout capitalist rhetoric as they loot a village or having the asshole character in a romance VN be a Men's Rights Activist.

That's not an attempt at having an interesting moral dilemma, that's just virtue signaling. If you really want an interesting moral dilemma, have a player character corner a young bandit NPC. The player needs to kill the bandit for a quest and is about to execute it, does MC intervene or does he let it happen? If the MC intervenes, the NPC kills the other player before running away. If the NPC dies it will respawn after a while, and the other player will be able to log in after 24 hours at Level 1 if he dies. No lasting consequences except their suffering, but whose suffering does the MC prioritize? Fuck, Marry, Kill... and no saying "Fuck" twice.
Your moral dilemma example seems kinda lame to me. NPC dies or Player dies? Where's the dilemma? Players killing NPC's (in a quest scenario) would be entirely expected. Intervening because you want to save the NPC seems rather nonsensical.

It's not that the NPC kid is an actual person, it's that they might have been a real kid in the past. The understanding is that some NPC characters were real people. So what are these characters now? Imprints of their data from when they were alive? Do they have "souls"? And also, do you care for the feelings of an AI that appears to be self aware?

You can't just say, "lets assume this..." and then say "where exactly is the interesting moral dilemma there". I'm not assuming anything, I'm placing a whole lot of possibilities on the table and then saying, it's a dilemma. The dilemma is in the fact that we don't know.

And I still don't get your virtue signalling accusation. What exactly is the dev signalling? That he doesn't like child abuse? That he thinks child abuse, even in a fantasy-no-real-victim scenario, is still reprehensible? It's unfair to the perpetrator that he doesn't know that the kid is anything more than lines of code, but it's clear that the mc and Alex both treat him like a real kid. And the kid's reaction, confused, and frightened, does nothing to convince them otherwise.

So yeah, what exactly is this virtue signalling you're going on about? Is every choice that the mc makes throughout the game virtue signalling? Is every choice that leads to one of the LI's approval virtue signalling? I mean why draw the line at this one incident? Why is shooting a paedophile in the head before he abuses an NPC kid virtue signalling? Does that mean:
  • Is it virtue signalling that the player can buy x-ray glasses only to have them breakdown on their first use?
  • Is it virtue signalling that Benjamin's head was blown off, and he died in real life, as he was perpetrating a rape?
  • Is it virtue signalling that the mc acts all nervous when he runs into Annie just after fucking Eva's brains out, and that he is nervous again when Eva meets up with the gang at Blackridge?
  • Is it virtue signalling every time the mc highly regards another character's actions (like when Nancy consoles Thanatos' mom)?
  • Is it virtue signalling when Nancy decks the misogynist emperor and becomes the empress?
  • Is it virtue signalling that raping Dalia leads to the relationship ending?
The scene actually played out mostly like it might in a VR game in our world:
  • Paedophile finds out how to control NPC child and intends to abuse it
  • Other players discover him and think he's a sicko,
  • He argues that it's not real, it's just a fantasy
  • Players shoot him in the head (that's not real either)
  • The end
  • PS: Alex points ++
 
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theblasbla

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Feb 2, 2018
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What are you even on about? Human trafficking is rampant in the sex industry, actual human souls being trapped as NPCs in a video game is NOT. Like, say you killed a bandit in the last game you played... but, SURPRISE, there was actually the soul of an actual human being in that bandit, and you just erased that soul from existence. Should you then branded as a murderer? No. Because no reasonable person would assume that there's actual people trapped in a video game. Same goes for the player raping the NPC, he has no reason to believe that his actions would cause harm to an actual person, so he is much less culpable, arguably even innocent.
 
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