THE CORE DEMOGRAPHIC ENCONTER PART III: INVESTMENT VS REWARD

SOE came up with the term “Risk VS Reward” as a way of justifying their preferred method of assigning higher value to Everquest content. This phrase is dishonest, and most people who play Everquest know it. There is no real risk in Everquest except for players that actually run the risk of dying in an unrecoverable position and their equipment decaying on their corpse. That is the only “real” risk in this game; everything else just boils down to comparatively marginal inconveniences of time in corpse recoveries and regaining lost experience.

In order to participate in the top content, you have to have not only the organizational skill to accumulate 18-40 players willing to invest 4-16 hours in one session; you have to have had the aggregate value of having done this many times in order to gain equipment that makes you effective at the high end game. This means that, by the time you are engaging a top mob at the high end game, you have repeatedly organized or have been grouped with many others from that same marginal fraction of the total playing community. You have necros available to summon corpses, clerics ready to regain almost all lost experience, organizers that are certain about how to win, and if failure does happen, are certain of corpse recovery.

In the end, a failed attempt, for those capable of attempting such a feat, means the loss of perhaps a week’s worth of experience, and a couple of hours of CR time at most. This isn’t true risk in any sense of the word, so it is the wrong word to apply to what SOE is claiming is the medium of exchange for experiencing high end content.

“Investment VS Reward” is the true measure of value in Everquest. The more you invest in the game, or the more you have access to an accumulative pool of game investment, the more likely you are to experience or gain top content. For instance .... it might not be a RISK of any measure for a level 55 Cleric to stalk the Ancient Cyclops in Southern Ro for the JBoot quest, but he or she might have to INVEST considerable time in order to accomplish the goal, and the reward is considerable. No risk, lots of investment, great reward.

The same is true of any planar or high-boss raid; the risk is minimal; the immediate and accrued investment of time and effort is huge. However, the nature of this investment prevents 75% or more of the entire population of the game from even the hope that they will be able to accomplish or experience top end content. They cannot, or will not, meet the current investment requirements. SOE usually dismisses this point by pointing out that they cannot make all content available to everyone’s level of investment or else nothing will have any value.

While this is certainly true and valid, it is disingenuous. Nobody is asking verant to offer equal content for less investment; casual players are asking for equal reward for equal investment – only that there be alternate means for investing the same accumulative effort and time that they can accomplish via the CDE (4-6 players with 2-2½ hours to play at a time for a total of about 20-25 hours a week), instead of ONLY via massive collections of players in consecutive lengthy sessions.

SOE, again, brushes off this reasonable, logical request by saying they cannot create content that would be “challenging” for the CDE, but that wouldn’t be open to rampant abuse by the professional gamers. While I could argue that this is utterly irrelevant (since the professional gaming contingent is not exactly your most profitable section of the customer base), I will instead simply state this:

Bullshit.

I can think of many, many ways to do this that could not possibly be abused in any significant manner, or in ANY manner whatsoever. This is either an outright lie, or the designers and developers at SOE are unbelievably uncreative and abysmally uninventive.

My opinion is that the developers at SOE simply do not want top end content to be available to anyone that doesn’t invest via their preferred method of game investment. This seems to be a psychological situation, because there is absolutely no logical argument for it, no reasonable defense for the current structure, nor are there any coding barriers that prevent alternate reward pathways. It can also be done in a way that absolutely does not trivialize the massive effort necessary to gain that reward by the current required methods. Anyone that says it can’t be done is lying or misinformed.

The question is, SHOULD it be done? And if so, why won’t SOE provide alternate pathways?

Agree with me here. If you disagree, what makes you think I care?

Next: ALTERNATE PATHWAYS