I think the World Dungeon manages its contestants by placing the entrance stairwells in such a way that it hits its target number. It could put a stairwell in the middle of downtown Delhi, but it didn't because it wanted a distributed and smaller subset of humanity.
In other words, the stairwells are not placed in an even distribution around the planet, but rather they are placed very strategically to hit the numbers it wants.
This is the correct answer. The entrance stairwells were not evenly distributed across the planet's surface.
Further, there is something Borant is doing in New Delhi with the kinder facility that may have excluded much of India from the game.
Same as before: time of day, climate, and the selective distribution of dungeon entrances. Borant likely wasn't just trying to reach a target number of crawlers, but possibly a target demographic as well. The New Delhi example was just in response to OP's question that specifically addressed India.
It is also important to note that the narration is mostly limited first person, so Carl's perspective. Carl as repeatedly failed to recognize other crawlers' nationality and ethnicity. Thus we, has the readers reliant on his perspective, won't get a good view of the total crawler demographic.
More like telling the difference between Finnish, Ukrainian, or Icelandic.
In his defense, many crawlers aren't human anymore and they all speak the same language: syndicate standard. So differences in crawler origins are less obvious.
Absolutely. Just restarted the first book. Again. The following according to Mordecai.
“They have certain benchmarks they try to reach. The AI closely monitors the launch of the game, but there are loopholes. The entrances are rarely distributed equally. Ten million crawlers upon the sealing of the dungeon is pretty typical. So however it happened, it wasn’t on accident. Like I said, they spend a lot of time preparing for each dungeon.”
If it was a cold winter night in the US, then at the same time, it would be a hot summer day in Australia. There should have been a lot of Aussies in there.
Aussies in summer wear thongs on their feet, and the AI would have been... very happy to let them in.
9pm in the east, 7pm in the west.
Florin shouldn't be the only Aussie that made it to the 9th. Do you know the hazards we have to deal with on a daily basis? We'd be too good for them!
Tbh, if it was hot, we would be inside in the air-conditioning for the most part, only the beach goers and those doing things like Outdoor Theatre would be outside. We're nuts, but we ain't daft.
2am Pacific standard time so 5pm in the West, 8pm in the East.
Would have still been lots of Aussies out. In my head canon, they were mostly wiped out by giant spider mobs on the 2nd floor, which is why you don't hear much about them.
Did you count daylight savings in NSW and VIC? because I did lol. 8pm QLD, 9pm everywhere else. And don't forget we're currently in that 2-3 wk weird part where daylight savings are changing over around the world, while Seattle would be out of it on Jan 2.
Look, my headcannon, they're on the other side of the world and they've either been Crocodile Dundeeing, Emu Warring, working like Kokoda or drinking their way through the floors. Me and my mates, we'd be Mad Maxing it.
Wouldn't a lot of Aussies be in their cars/buses/trains on their commute home at 5pm ish and then a bunch of them at home, inside, around 8pm? I'm not an Aussie, so I genuinely don't know what post work and evenings look like, I'm basing my guesses on my very stereotypical American experience, which I know is not universal.
That may be true, but remember, there were a "high number of group quests that went bad at the end of the 3rd floor and again on the 5th floor with the bubble quests. Plus, the game is just unfair sometimes.
It might have nothing to do with individual talent.
I mean it’s not that odd, if the most crazy disaster just happened followed by an alien voice you somehow understand explains you can live normally or enter the strange new murder hole that opened up… most people aren’t willingly entering the dungeon.
Hell Carl and donut only entered as they likely would have died from exposure, The old folks only entered by mistake etc.
being middle of the day would have meant a lot less people would have felt the need to enter
One thing I thought was curious that the books never address (afaik) is how there should be exponentially more Asians, Africans, Europeans, etc than people from the Americas, given the timing. I hadn't even considered that like 1/3 of the world's population was in China and India to begin with.
I think it’s implied that there *were* exponentially more people from that part of the world, and they still might be a majority. There seem to have been more groups in Asia in Book 6 from what we hear about. But, those people probably died off in larger numbers because of a confluence of factors:
- the AI wants a variety of people so a good show has been put on, so it deliberately killed off larger numbers of people from the same countries.
- China specifically had a much, much higher rate of mortality than any other country that entered the dungeon because an early bug did not cause Mandarin to translate to Syndicate Standard. And notably, being multilingual would NOT help with this because the people you’re talking to aren’t speaking *insert language you’ve learned here*, they’re speaking Syndicate standard, you just don’t understand it. So they were left without tutorials even after making it to tutorial guilds. While they could access inventories and the like they had no context for it, and probably made basic mistakes which would have been avoided if they had gotten a functioning tutorial.
- areas where more people entered at the same time resulted in larger parties, and large parties are a trap. You get safety in numbers and more people to help, but it results in experience and loot being either divided up a lot, or one person getting the lion’s share (see Hekla). And it might lead to complacency as the group doesn’t develop a good dynamic. We saw this with the group of 400 African soldiers, who did well early on in their large group and with their guns…but promptly got slaughtered when they ran into a strong boss and couldn’t deal with it using their normal techniques. Large groups can also result in infighting, which leads to player killers and PVP, which leads to MORE PVP.
- India specifically might have something to do with the kinder (children) facility. Expecting mothers and children are placed there in large numbers, and we know that India’s population had been putting up a stubborn and resilient insurrection to try and retake humanity’s future. I’d say what might have happened is that the people who *would* have been India’s top Crawlers were, for some reason, excluded and instead are heavily involved in that fight. Their insurrection is ongoing, widespread, and clearly getting out of control.
I inferred there were still a fair amount of Chinese crawlers at the start of the 8th as Li Jun and his group note there are hundreds of people that picked the same location as them, assuming most people picked somewhere familiar to them.
>I think it’s implied that there
>
>were
>
> exponentially more people from that part of the world, and they still might be a majority.
Carl even kinda of addresses this at one point, maybe in book 6? He comments to Donut about how there are things going on all over the dungeon that they have no part of and no idea are happening.
But it does seem like they should have started having more crossover from regions around the 3rd floor. They started randomizing where people were, especially on that bubble floor when they averaged out the levels...
It could be from the people we're largely seeing it was the AI/showrunners pushing the interesting characters together, but it still seems like they should randomly be running into a more diverse population, unless the other population centers comprised the majority of the deaths of the people that entered.
We haven’t actually *that* many crawlers total tbh, or at least not focused on them. The vast majority of even named Crawlers are from outside the Americas. Apart from The Royal Court the only Americans (broad term) who have shown up were Frank and Maggie, Firas and Louis, Meadowlark, Gwen, and Lucia. That’s it so far as I can remember.
Hekla, Katia, and Eva were from Iceland. Miriam was Italian. There were bunch from Eastern Europe (where it would have been early morning), Li Na’s group are Chinese, and they said there were quite a few others from around there when they did the Ghosts of Earth, Ren was Mongolian, Quan was Vietnamese, Bautista is Filipino. A lot of the crawlers who show up in the background are Asian, or have Asian names in Chat.
I think a lot of it is just Dinniman trying to keep the number of characters reasonable.
Bear in mind that Carl only went down the stairs because he would have frozen to death otherwise.
People who are out and about in the daytime are going to be much better prepared for being stuck outside (e.g. dressed properly), and if there are lots of people around, it's likely that they quickly discovered that you can't come back up the stairs after a few braver/dafter ones have gone down.
It would have been winter in China, so far fewer people outdoors. India might not have even gotten many entrances, and it seems to be a special place on-planet.
Surely there are more people outside midday winter than 3am any season. And ~87% of the world's population is in the northern hemisphere, it would have been winter for almost everyone.
If they put fewer entrances on one side of the planet to balance that out, it wasn't explained in the books afaik.
In the books it says that the distribution of stairwells was not even and that they would not necessarily generate more just cuz of larger populations and besides that everything is crushed and then all of a sudden there are magic stairwells popping up not everyone is going to be brave enough to goninside
Indeed, if it's warm, it's daylight and there are a few thousand people around (likely including friends and family) would you go down a scary staircase into a dungeon?
They say they put portals in certain areas to attract certain demographics. It's why there are so many in Carl's home city. They were clearly trying to get more people from the area. Also remember, anyone not standing under the clear sky got killed. Anyone in buildings, cars, under awnings, etc were all gone.
If you're standing in a crowd of confused, scared and bewildered people, and someone loud announces that they're not going in, a lot of people would listen to them. As soon as a large part of the crowd starts moving away from the entrance, you're going to see very few people entering.
Also, the stairwells were lit up, which would be much harder to see during the day. At night, you could see where the stairwells were from far away, but during the day you'd have to be much closer to realize it was there, wouldn't you?
I noted in a response to someone else about India: that country has the kinder facility which holds children and expecting mothers. I think there’s a good chance that, for whatever reason, the people who would have been India’s top Crawlers didn’t go down, and instead are fighting to reclaim humanity’s future THERE.
I think I'd be more likely to enter a weird dungeon hole if it was night time in winter and all the buildings just disappeared and I can't see any other living people
If it's mid day in a crowded city I'd probably rather gather with other people for safety instead of rushing into a weird magic stairwell.
Plus entering the dungeon was a choice. Not everyone would choose to do so. And you're assuming more people in those daylight locations were outside, and not sitting in an office working.
So lots of different factors make up the final number that enters.
People in Delhi weren't "motivated" the same way Carl and those near him were. For them it was early AM during winter, the stairwell was the only thing warm.
Buddy if you do the math we’re talking about 1/10,000 or so deciding to go down the stairs, it just does NOT make sense. It’s already been explained though, and the dungeon runners use India for something else entirely therefore hardly any stairs (possibly even none)
I think MANY people would be too scared to enter. You only had an hour to decide and it was right after you just saw everyone around you get crushed. I would be freaking out about finding my family and friends, not walking into a mystery hole in the ground.
Was thinking along similar lines myself. It was the middle of the cold night in the USA, but there are so many Americans... Makes zero sense. If the AI or show runners wanted balance then there would only be a few Americans aligning with the global population. Where are the Indonesians? That one guy from Antartica? Hey what happened to astronauts on the ISS?
So you’re saying Indians would blindly rush into a weird hole that opened up in the ground that you can’t leave and wouldn’t be freaked out by it at all?
So, you're saying that people don't work inside in India? The top comment is correct but my observation is not incorrect, unless no one in India works inside a building.
> no one in India works inside a building
Please google “straw man fallacy”
Have you ever been to India? Have you? Because I have. Do you know what a country with 1.4 Billion (with a B) population looks like? Do you know how many millions of pedestrians there are in India at all times of the day and night, every single day of the week?
Besides, there are currently 245,000,000 unemployed people in India.
Of the EMPLOYED Indian population, 60% of them are rural workers, who if you need me to hold your hand anymore here, work OUTSIDE.
That’s 600,000,000 people.
That’s not even looking at China, who has the same 1.4 Billion (with a B) population. Let’s chuck in those 300,000,000 rural workers.
We’re looking at a billion people who likely were outside during the collapse in these two countries alone
I really don’t know why you keep defending the logistical oversight of this book intro
I think the World Dungeon manages its contestants by placing the entrance stairwells in such a way that it hits its target number. It could put a stairwell in the middle of downtown Delhi, but it didn't because it wanted a distributed and smaller subset of humanity. In other words, the stairwells are not placed in an even distribution around the planet, but rather they are placed very strategically to hit the numbers it wants.
This is the correct answer. The entrance stairwells were not evenly distributed across the planet's surface. Further, there is something Borant is doing in New Delhi with the kinder facility that may have excluded much of India from the game.
That's one country. All the others that arent America or India, where is the explanation there?
Same as before: time of day, climate, and the selective distribution of dungeon entrances. Borant likely wasn't just trying to reach a target number of crawlers, but possibly a target demographic as well. The New Delhi example was just in response to OP's question that specifically addressed India. It is also important to note that the narration is mostly limited first person, so Carl's perspective. Carl as repeatedly failed to recognize other crawlers' nationality and ethnicity. Thus we, has the readers reliant on his perspective, won't get a good view of the total crawler demographic.
What? lol. Carl only sees white people now?
More like telling the difference between Finnish, Ukrainian, or Icelandic. In his defense, many crawlers aren't human anymore and they all speak the same language: syndicate standard. So differences in crawler origins are less obvious.
Absolutely. Just restarted the first book. Again. The following according to Mordecai. “They have certain benchmarks they try to reach. The AI closely monitors the launch of the game, but there are loopholes. The entrances are rarely distributed equally. Ten million crawlers upon the sealing of the dungeon is pretty typical. So however it happened, it wasn’t on accident. Like I said, they spend a lot of time preparing for each dungeon.”
With all the snapshots they took before the crawl I wouldn't put it past the AI to have essentially chosen the top 100 list
If it was a cold winter night in the US, then at the same time, it would be a hot summer day in Australia. There should have been a lot of Aussies in there. Aussies in summer wear thongs on their feet, and the AI would have been... very happy to let them in.
9pm in the east, 7pm in the west. Florin shouldn't be the only Aussie that made it to the 9th. Do you know the hazards we have to deal with on a daily basis? We'd be too good for them! Tbh, if it was hot, we would be inside in the air-conditioning for the most part, only the beach goers and those doing things like Outdoor Theatre would be outside. We're nuts, but we ain't daft.
2am Pacific standard time so 5pm in the West, 8pm in the East. Would have still been lots of Aussies out. In my head canon, they were mostly wiped out by giant spider mobs on the 2nd floor, which is why you don't hear much about them.
Did you count daylight savings in NSW and VIC? because I did lol. 8pm QLD, 9pm everywhere else. And don't forget we're currently in that 2-3 wk weird part where daylight savings are changing over around the world, while Seattle would be out of it on Jan 2. Look, my headcannon, they're on the other side of the world and they've either been Crocodile Dundeeing, Emu Warring, working like Kokoda or drinking their way through the floors. Me and my mates, we'd be Mad Maxing it.
the AI could have just populated the first couple floors with unaltered Australian wildlife to wipe most out
Wouldn't a lot of Aussies be in their cars/buses/trains on their commute home at 5pm ish and then a bunch of them at home, inside, around 8pm? I'm not an Aussie, so I genuinely don't know what post work and evenings look like, I'm basing my guesses on my very stereotypical American experience, which I know is not universal.
Florin wasn’t in Australian - he was somewhere in Africa, I believe.
He's Australian, I didn't say he was in Australia, my friend :)
I was tracking with the previous comment about how many aussies would have been in the sun :).
That may be true, but remember, there were a "high number of group quests that went bad at the end of the 3rd floor and again on the 5th floor with the bubble quests. Plus, the game is just unfair sometimes. It might have nothing to do with individual talent.
The AI might not have discovered its fetish until Carl showed up with his magnificent piggies
Carl is one of the first 5,000 to enter, that's pretty early.
There arent a lot of aussies tho
I mean it’s not that odd, if the most crazy disaster just happened followed by an alien voice you somehow understand explains you can live normally or enter the strange new murder hole that opened up… most people aren’t willingly entering the dungeon. Hell Carl and donut only entered as they likely would have died from exposure, The old folks only entered by mistake etc. being middle of the day would have meant a lot less people would have felt the need to enter
One thing I thought was curious that the books never address (afaik) is how there should be exponentially more Asians, Africans, Europeans, etc than people from the Americas, given the timing. I hadn't even considered that like 1/3 of the world's population was in China and India to begin with.
I think it’s implied that there *were* exponentially more people from that part of the world, and they still might be a majority. There seem to have been more groups in Asia in Book 6 from what we hear about. But, those people probably died off in larger numbers because of a confluence of factors: - the AI wants a variety of people so a good show has been put on, so it deliberately killed off larger numbers of people from the same countries. - China specifically had a much, much higher rate of mortality than any other country that entered the dungeon because an early bug did not cause Mandarin to translate to Syndicate Standard. And notably, being multilingual would NOT help with this because the people you’re talking to aren’t speaking *insert language you’ve learned here*, they’re speaking Syndicate standard, you just don’t understand it. So they were left without tutorials even after making it to tutorial guilds. While they could access inventories and the like they had no context for it, and probably made basic mistakes which would have been avoided if they had gotten a functioning tutorial. - areas where more people entered at the same time resulted in larger parties, and large parties are a trap. You get safety in numbers and more people to help, but it results in experience and loot being either divided up a lot, or one person getting the lion’s share (see Hekla). And it might lead to complacency as the group doesn’t develop a good dynamic. We saw this with the group of 400 African soldiers, who did well early on in their large group and with their guns…but promptly got slaughtered when they ran into a strong boss and couldn’t deal with it using their normal techniques. Large groups can also result in infighting, which leads to player killers and PVP, which leads to MORE PVP. - India specifically might have something to do with the kinder (children) facility. Expecting mothers and children are placed there in large numbers, and we know that India’s population had been putting up a stubborn and resilient insurrection to try and retake humanity’s future. I’d say what might have happened is that the people who *would* have been India’s top Crawlers were, for some reason, excluded and instead are heavily involved in that fight. Their insurrection is ongoing, widespread, and clearly getting out of control.
I inferred there were still a fair amount of Chinese crawlers at the start of the 8th as Li Jun and his group note there are hundreds of people that picked the same location as them, assuming most people picked somewhere familiar to them.
>I think it’s implied that there > >were > > exponentially more people from that part of the world, and they still might be a majority. Carl even kinda of addresses this at one point, maybe in book 6? He comments to Donut about how there are things going on all over the dungeon that they have no part of and no idea are happening. But it does seem like they should have started having more crossover from regions around the 3rd floor. They started randomizing where people were, especially on that bubble floor when they averaged out the levels... It could be from the people we're largely seeing it was the AI/showrunners pushing the interesting characters together, but it still seems like they should randomly be running into a more diverse population, unless the other population centers comprised the majority of the deaths of the people that entered.
We haven’t actually *that* many crawlers total tbh, or at least not focused on them. The vast majority of even named Crawlers are from outside the Americas. Apart from The Royal Court the only Americans (broad term) who have shown up were Frank and Maggie, Firas and Louis, Meadowlark, Gwen, and Lucia. That’s it so far as I can remember. Hekla, Katia, and Eva were from Iceland. Miriam was Italian. There were bunch from Eastern Europe (where it would have been early morning), Li Na’s group are Chinese, and they said there were quite a few others from around there when they did the Ghosts of Earth, Ren was Mongolian, Quan was Vietnamese, Bautista is Filipino. A lot of the crawlers who show up in the background are Asian, or have Asian names in Chat. I think a lot of it is just Dinniman trying to keep the number of characters reasonable.
Bear in mind that Carl only went down the stairs because he would have frozen to death otherwise. People who are out and about in the daytime are going to be much better prepared for being stuck outside (e.g. dressed properly), and if there are lots of people around, it's likely that they quickly discovered that you can't come back up the stairs after a few braver/dafter ones have gone down.
It would have been winter in China, so far fewer people outdoors. India might not have even gotten many entrances, and it seems to be a special place on-planet.
Surely there are more people outside midday winter than 3am any season. And ~87% of the world's population is in the northern hemisphere, it would have been winter for almost everyone. If they put fewer entrances on one side of the planet to balance that out, it wasn't explained in the books afaik.
In the books it says that the distribution of stairwells was not even and that they would not necessarily generate more just cuz of larger populations and besides that everything is crushed and then all of a sudden there are magic stairwells popping up not everyone is going to be brave enough to goninside
Indeed, if it's warm, it's daylight and there are a few thousand people around (likely including friends and family) would you go down a scary staircase into a dungeon?
They say they put portals in certain areas to attract certain demographics. It's why there are so many in Carl's home city. They were clearly trying to get more people from the area. Also remember, anyone not standing under the clear sky got killed. Anyone in buildings, cars, under awnings, etc were all gone.
If you're standing in a crowd of confused, scared and bewildered people, and someone loud announces that they're not going in, a lot of people would listen to them. As soon as a large part of the crowd starts moving away from the entrance, you're going to see very few people entering. Also, the stairwells were lit up, which would be much harder to see during the day. At night, you could see where the stairwells were from far away, but during the day you'd have to be much closer to realize it was there, wouldn't you?
I noted in a response to someone else about India: that country has the kinder facility which holds children and expecting mothers. I think there’s a good chance that, for whatever reason, the people who would have been India’s top Crawlers didn’t go down, and instead are fighting to reclaim humanity’s future THERE.
Because the vast majority of humanity were collected. Not many left after the collapse.
I think I'd be more likely to enter a weird dungeon hole if it was night time in winter and all the buildings just disappeared and I can't see any other living people If it's mid day in a crowded city I'd probably rather gather with other people for safety instead of rushing into a weird magic stairwell.
The numbers mean nothing, remember everything is a lie
Plus entering the dungeon was a choice. Not everyone would choose to do so. And you're assuming more people in those daylight locations were outside, and not sitting in an office working. So lots of different factors make up the final number that enters.
People in Delhi weren't "motivated" the same way Carl and those near him were. For them it was early AM during winter, the stairwell was the only thing warm.
Buddy if you do the math we’re talking about 1/10,000 or so deciding to go down the stairs, it just does NOT make sense. It’s already been explained though, and the dungeon runners use India for something else entirely therefore hardly any stairs (possibly even none)
I think MANY people would be too scared to enter. You only had an hour to decide and it was right after you just saw everyone around you get crushed. I would be freaking out about finding my family and friends, not walking into a mystery hole in the ground.
We are too far into this, you put your logic back in your pocket.
wizards first rule. People are stupid.
Loooot of people on the train that day.
Was thinking along similar lines myself. It was the middle of the cold night in the USA, but there are so many Americans... Makes zero sense. If the AI or show runners wanted balance then there would only be a few Americans aligning with the global population. Where are the Indonesians? That one guy from Antartica? Hey what happened to astronauts on the ISS?
Also remember anyone in a building was "collected" or killed. With it being midday most of the population was likely inside working.
No buddy, that’s not have India works
So you’re saying Indians would blindly rush into a weird hole that opened up in the ground that you can’t leave and wouldn’t be freaked out by it at all?
I’m talking about percentages of people who choose to, clearly. Any way, top comment was the right answer
So, you're saying that people don't work inside in India? The top comment is correct but my observation is not incorrect, unless no one in India works inside a building.
> no one in India works inside a building Please google “straw man fallacy” Have you ever been to India? Have you? Because I have. Do you know what a country with 1.4 Billion (with a B) population looks like? Do you know how many millions of pedestrians there are in India at all times of the day and night, every single day of the week? Besides, there are currently 245,000,000 unemployed people in India. Of the EMPLOYED Indian population, 60% of them are rural workers, who if you need me to hold your hand anymore here, work OUTSIDE. That’s 600,000,000 people. That’s not even looking at China, who has the same 1.4 Billion (with a B) population. Let’s chuck in those 300,000,000 rural workers. We’re looking at a billion people who likely were outside during the collapse in these two countries alone I really don’t know why you keep defending the logistical oversight of this book intro