Moonlight Sculptor was a series I had high hopes for going in. The premise was enough to get me interested, and at first things were moving along at a brisk pace, but pretty early on certain aspects of the story began to fall apart for me. I suppose I'll just get the elephant in the room dealt with first: I think the author has no idea how MMOs really work. Normally this may be a little nitpicky, but this is what the entire story revolves around and it's specifically made to make the MC seem that much smarter.
Let me give you a prime example. Weed goes into the game world, and there finds out that during your first 7 days you're not allowed to leave your starting city or kill any monsters. While this is already dumb because seriously what dev would FORCE you to spend a week not actually playing the game, that's not even the stupidest part. You see, Weed finds out that there are training dummies, and if you sit there an attack the training dummies for long enough then your strength goes up. And you can do this multiple times. Other PCs scoff at the idea, saying it's "too much effort for so little gain" but frankly, due to him completing this training (which NOBODY else has ever done by the way) he absolutely dominates every monster his own level, often in one shot. Now, you probably already see the problem with this. Namely, why didn't EVERYONE do this? You're stuck in town for a week anyhow unable to fight monsters, why wouldn't every single player grind out those strength points when they're obviously SUPER advantageous? This is even dumber because of the fact that this is one of the most popular games around with millions of people playing it and yet not one person ever tried to do the thing that increases your stats. Heck, the guy even got a rare sword and special quest from doing this, and one PC even mentions that everyone has been scouring the world looking for these rare quests. Even though (once again) nobody bothered to check the most obvious location somehow.
Really, this is just another one of those "everyone is stupid so the MC can seem much smarter" stories. Because that is the ONLY reason the guy is successful at all. Another example is with the cooking skill. Namely, the MC is one of the few people who actually levels up his cooking skill. Except that in actual MMOs, people do this all the time and in this game you can actually TASTE the food! Why wouldn't everyone be leveling this skill up? Oh right, it's so the MC can seem that much smarter for doing something every character should be.
I honestly wish that I could say a little more positive about this story. It's not godawful, but it IS built on plot convenience and extreme coincidence. It's built on you not questioning the game world or story too much and just going with the flow, and I'm not ok with that.