THE CORE DEMOGRAPHIC ENCOUNTER, PART V: THE ECONOMY, BALANCE, RISK VS REWARD, AND OTHER TIRESOME JUSTIFICATIONS

Whenever SOE was challenged on any conceptual or gameplay point on the old boards, they repeatedly resorted to what I call “the wall”: dead end rhetoric that is removed from examination.

They would say that they had to consider the delicate mechanisms that governed the economy and arcane chaos theory effects on game balance, or make sure that the reward was worth the risk - something only they claimed that only they could judge in relationship to the whole and future game. Repeatedly the gaming community hammered SOE into irretrievable positions of irrational claims, deceit, and pure denial on several meaningful and important topics. After SOE repeatedly claimed that their decisions about certain aspects of the game were “absolute” and would never be changed, they changed them.

Of course, this makes everything that SOE claims about the game suspect. Obviously, they can alter, code, and add anything they want, if they so choose. They can alter the way experienced is doled out. They can change the death penalty and corpse run arrangement. They can change anything, and will change anything if they see fit, so this opens the debate up to include anything and everything about Everquest, regardless of what SOE claims is final and unchanging.

It is apparent that SOE could create alternate pathways towards superior reward in Everquest. The idea that it doesn’t fit their definition of “Risk Vs Reward” is easily dismissed. There is no real risk in Everquest, there is only investment of time. Large raids on high level creatures provide less risk to the time investment of those gathered than the risk taken on by a single group of casual players in most of the upper end game areas. As far as overall risk to investment of time, casual players that have been in Norrath since the game went live have invested far more, and risk far more every time they log on, than many professional players that have been playing a couple of months and are already reaping the rewards of Epic Quests through guild association.

Even the high end trade skills require professional level play in order to gain the ingredients necessary to complete worthwhile recipes. Spending endless hours increasing the skill and collecting ingredients isn’t enough for SOE; they also require that you play the way they want you to play before you can experience anything .. and I mean any part whatsoever .. of the “end game”. It is hard enough to scrape together the necessary high quality bear skins, cat pelts, and spider silk necessary to raise tailoring skills ... it is ludicrous to make similarly rare-drop ingredients items only a full group of level 50+ could dare, or perhaps more than a single group.

Balance? After two years of getting all the classes finely tuned to some semblance of “balance”, and admittedly still not being there, SOE is throwing in a completely new pet class. They can do this because, simply, there is no such thing AS class balance. It is a myth, a red herring used to distract the gullible from the fact that SOE just tunes the classes however they see fit.

Recently, SOE decided to allow character transfers from server to server. Before, they always stood firm that this would never happen, because it would destroy "game balance", or the economy (when a guild with 20 level 55+ characters transfers over to a relatively new server, the economy of that server has just been destroyed .... if anything CAN destroy an MMOG economy, that is). I guess the economy they were talking about was the expense to SOE devoting man hours to transferring characters, because now that they are offering this "premium" service for a nice little fee, the damage to the game economy becomes a non-issue.

All of those rationalizations mask the true intent behind SOE’s decision making policies; they simply don’t want casual players to be able to achieve what professional players can achieve. This is why they make soloing an exercise in futility, why they won’t grant wizards that extra 10%, and why they instituted a experience penalty for any kills outdoors, why they don't allow melee binding or gating potions or clarity stones. They simply don’t want your average band of casual players to be able to remotely approach what their rabid fanboy subculture of professional players can achieve. They don't want to make the game possible to 90% of their customer base because they can't think of how to do that and not make it extremely easy for the 10% whom they truly want to impress ... the rabid, fanboy professional gamers.

This is what they really mean by “balance”; they have to fine tune the game so that casual players cannot achieve what the dedicated players can. By far the simplest method of achieving a game friendly to the casual player is to allow level-based random drops. In other words, there isn’t anything that absolutely can ONLY be gotten via some uberguild mega-raid. If you instituted a level-based random drop system, then even casual players would know they would have a CHANCE at obtaining that rare random drop at some point.

But no, this “violates” the “vision” of the game, where only that inbred clique of a hundred or so players per server, who form their dysfunctional “community”, can achieve the highest content of the game.

Once again .. if anything .. ANYTHING .. in the game, which is exclusively superior, can only be obtained by playing in some other fashion than the Core Demographic Encounter (group of 4-6 players with 2-3 hours to play), then the development team is guilty of explicit pandering to a subculture fringe group. There is no way around that conclusion. And all the justifications and excuses in the world amounts to nothing more than misdirection away from that basic fact.

Who is SOE ... and apparently the entire MMOG industry trying to please? The answer is, rabid, foam-mouthed fanboys that make playing these games their lives and hope one day to be working in the industry. And that system assures us that it will be a long, long time before the industry actually starts to attempt to satisfy the other 90% of its customers and quits worrying about this fringe subculture who's presence only ruins the game for the rest of us.

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