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Old 09-02-2007, 05:30 PM   #14
Threshold
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Home MUD: Threshold RPG
Posts: 1,260
Threshold will become famous soon enough
Re: What Does "Fair" Mean?

I think you started off with a false premise.

You are treating time as an absolute (if you have ANY time, you "have time") but you do not apply the same standard to money. To the extent that everyone has time, everyone also has money. To the extent that not everyone has money, not everyone has time either. What you really said is:

Everyone has at least some time, but not everyone has a lot of money.

Well it isn't fair to compare them in that way.

Everyone has SOME time and SOME money (or else they couldn't even get online). The difference is, some people have a lot of one and not as much of the other.

For some reason, most games seem to have no problem with unfairness that benefits people with a lot of time. The grind model of advancement and the growing trend of no (or a very small) death penalty just make this worse. When dying does not set you back, skill is even less of an asset and sheer time becomes even more the only thing you need to get ahead. At least in older games, incompetent players would die a lot and lose levels frequently. This would give better players with less time an opportunity to "catch up."

I see no real difference, from a fairness perspective, between rewarding time vs. rewarding money. They are both scarce resources, and they frequently exist in inverse proportion to each other. Best of all are games that reward both, so people can use whichever they have an excess of (time or money) to stay relatively equal.
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