Facing the choices before him, Duanmu Huai hesitated for quite some time without coming to a decision.
This was not due to indecisiveness, but Duanmu Huai was suspicious that there might be a trap involved.
In the game Star Ocean Online, the cost of trial and error for players was extremely high. If one made the wrong choice, the lightest consequence was having to painfully erase one's account and start all over again, while the worst-case scenario might result in the player losing everything they had built in the game, with the Day of End being the perfect example.
Worse still, the damn game company, resting on its laurels as the world's only one of its kind, adopted an attitude of not caring whether players play or not and didn't bother making any changes. As a result, players either had to swallow their anger or give up playing the game altogether, although most ended up truly missing the latter.