Well, obviously you are competing - I do NOT compete. Period. Things like
cheating, duping, kill stealing affect confidence in the game itself - in
the game mechanics, etc. It's important to stop those things for confidence
reasons, not necessarily because it has such world shattering effects (at
least in EQ in it's current state)
This is where the difference between play and competition comes in. I play
to PLAY not compete. Competition by it's nature has a winner and loser -
play does not. Does the first one to lvl 50 get a cookie that no one told
me about?
>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.
Again, you are looking at this as a competition. So what if it's crowded? I
hunt what I can, when I can - if someone else gets it, oh well. Mobs are
good little trains - another is along every X min. like clockwork. If an
area is so massively crowded that I can't move - I just log - or find
somewhere else to hunt.
I regularly visit areas that are WAY under my level. I also regularly save
low level players from trains or certain death - I ENJOY doing that. Is my
presence depriving them of the joy of death? Do you think my presence there
is resented? If it is, I've never heard anyone remark on it.
If you let what another has affect YOUR enjoyment - that is a problem of
yours you need to address. Does your neighbor having a nicer car than you
bother you? A bigger house? A better income? Does it really affect you
adversely?
>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.