On Mon, 13 Dec 1999 silky@... wrote:

>
> Ok, I'll bite - exactly how is this an 'advantage'? And how does it affect
> YOU?
>
> Unless you play on a PvP server - or as a PvP player - it never ceases to
> amaze me how some folks think someone with 'better' stuff than they have
> are somehow at an 'advantage'. Unless it affects YOU - does it REALLY matter?

It's a multi-player game with fixed-rate resources, where
things you do either directly or indirectly DOES affect
everyone else. By definition, anything that helps someone
else is a disadvantage for me. If that weren't the case, we
wouldn't need to balance anything, and it wouldn't matter if
anyone cheated, duped, kill stole, harvested, etc.

Can you deny that when too many people are in Unrest, your
enjoyment of the game suffers? Do you think it suddenly
becomes that way once you exceed X number of people? Of
course not. As X increases from 0, the average enjoyment of
the players goes up (easier to break in), peaks, then starts
to go down. Being too high level, twinked, having equipment
unavailable to others, etc, can cause your contribution to X
to be greater than 1; meaning if things are at the downward
slope of the enjoyment curve, your presence is hurting them
more than their presence is hurting you.

> Yeah - they might have it a bit easier, so? Given the opportunity to use
> better stuff - don't you take it? I just can't understand this at all -
> especially in an environment that is so group oriented that any pluses a
> group member may have is going to HELP you.

If something someone else has/does can help you, then it's
also possible for something someone else has/does to hurt
you. You can attempt to place a "diode" upon this reciprocity
(which is what the PvP switch does), but it will never be
perfect. Eliminating all hurtful interactions would require
the elimination of all interactions, at which point it's no
longer a multi-player game.

--
John H. Kim
kim@...