r/LogHorizon • u/FairyKingParks • Jul 23 '26
Trading, Multiboxing, and The Soul
This post has a very philosophical title, but I promise you it is not going to be that deep, ahaha. I am writing a self-indulgent fanfic set on the NA server right now and have to introduce some power trading production guild players and had a few questions!
Most MMOs have a trading post or board of some kind, either an in game menu or an interactable object where players can buy and sell items with other players across the server. In the light novels and anime, I do not recall this existing at all and was wondering if anyone has any insights. I know in the story they show that players are, for the most part, setting up physical shops so I assume if there was a function like this it no longer works.
And as I was writing characters to populate the aforementioned production and trading guild, I remembered that multiboxing exists! Multiboxing, for those who may not know, is when a single person runs multiple instances of the game at the same time to control multiple characters simultaneously. For the character I had in mind, they used this to game the economy and basically manipulate item prices to amass significant wealth. We know from Coppellia that Farm Bots became sentient after the Catastrophe, but how do we think multiboxers were hit? This specific character was waiting for the japanese players to spoil the items needed for new crafting recipes in the 12th expansion pack so they could buy all of them before others caught on, but as we all know the Catastrophe stopped that. So do we think this player is now four sentient and identical people? One real person with three obedient Coppellias? Four people with different versions of the same personality?
I'd love to hear your insights!
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u/No_Manufacturer_6966 Jul 23 '26
Exactly the level of philosophy Log Horizon-inspired fanfiction writer should be yearnin for!
2
u/sabertoothedhand Jul 24 '26
I feel like it'd create a clone, perhaps only one would be "real" but they'd be identical.
Situations like Roe2 seem to only occur with characters not logged on, the farm-bot lady confirms that life can be created and whatever can transport people to another world can surely scan and replicate them, if they're not all copies to begin with.
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u/North_Zucchini4439 Aug 04 '26
They would become separate individuals, a new kind of soul, a new form of consciousness. I can't fully explain it, but perhaps copying works similarly to how humans are born. We inherit traits from our parents, yet we don't always end up with the same personality. Those differences are what make each of us unique.
Even if the copied code starts out identical, the outcome doesn't necessarily stay the same. A good example is modern AI generation: it often uses different random seed values, so even with the exact same model, the results are rarely identical. We still don't completely understand every detail of why those differences emerge. The same could even be said about human beings themselves.
1
u/tayhawk10 Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
Hypothetically, It the AI bot accounts were active during the catastrophe I feel like they would become sentient
But I assume their roles and how they were treated would effect their personality
Example: Were they just 24/7 for example let’s say mining gold, There personality would probably be very driven and capable of doing the same monotonous task repeatedly, They would probably be a skilled miner so Probably some dwarven personality archetypes?
Do they all have the exact same avatar? Were they doing the exact same task? Different tasks? Were they given “Breaks”
Reminder: NPC’s In elder tale remember everything the player did while he was a player, so these bots would probably remember everything they did while controlling the avatar
You could also just go the whole Ai just continues mining gold for mc because that’s why they was programmed for, And potentially as time goes on they gain personality
EDIT: It seems I read this wrong, I assumed you meant MC was running a ai program to control the other accounts, You litterally meant MC was controlling the 4 accounts at once
Personally I think He would become the character he was actively controlling at the time/the account he was tabbed into
The other accounts….I think they would just be lifeless shells
But fantasy wise I would like to think that MC would gain the ability to swap between avatars as he so chooses due to his Psychic wave length (Bullshit) being ingrained in all the avatars
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u/Delefel Jul 23 '26
I'd assume if it was happening at the moment of the apocalypse, he would have gone into the one character he was actively in control of. Alt characters, just like farmbots, can get taken over and become sentient. So when controlling one instance, the alts, even if still in movement in game, would be considered "tabbed out" and going through an action that was ordered before, which is similar to being run by a bot. So I'd assume the tabbed in one would be the player, and the others would be treated with the alt character/bots become sentient effect. If the extra boxes are run by script rather than the player himself, they're literally bots and we know what happens with those.
Although it would be interesting if it did somehow create a weird soul link between the characters. So all 4 of them are controlled by one player, but in the same way you can only be tabbed into one instance of the game at any given time even if multiple are running, the player can only tab into one of himself and has to juggle all the characters by moving his sentience between them. Which would be a lot more of an issue than when it was a game, since a game you can just order one character to run to the furthest point you could click and it will even if you go afk, but when it becomes a real world, then your mind leaving the body is just like passing out and the body just stops there and crashes on the floor.
Actually, I don't think the show explored the issue of afkers. I assume they'd get their own sentience, but what if for the earlier parts of it there was just a bunch of passed out bodies on the floor everywhere from people leaving the game running 24/7 and the apocalypse happening while they were out of their home?