Something Evangolis said as a comment to a post by Lum on a paper by VekTor struck me. First, the comment:

A fascinating idea, although I worry about the commoditization of access replacing the commoditization of possession.

Comment by Evangolis — 4/27/2005 @ 1:03 pm

What got to me, though, was a different interpretation of “commoditization of access.” Consider, if you will, how access to items is controlled:

• In EverQuest, you wait a week for the dragon to respawn. If you want to get access to the uber stuff in the dungeon, you have to wait a day or more for the bosses to respawn, and hope that you arrive on time for the pop before the other cockblockers get there. Access to the best mobs (and their drops) becomes a very limited commodity. On highly cooperative servers, guilds agree to schedule access to dungeons and bosses to ensure that when they want access, other guild agree to grant it.
• In Dark Age of Camelot, you wait between one minute and an hour for the dragon to respawn, or six hours for the epic dungeon to repop. In theory, you should be able to access uber bosses and uber loot far more often than in EQ. However, you need to grab a couple dozen of your closest friends, buffbots, and pet spammers to do so. Access to the best mobs and access to the people needed to take down the mobs are roughly balanced. The rate at which the best items enter the game is limited, though, as any particular piece of loot has a lower frequency of dropping than in EverQuest. Also, because of the limit on people (requiring a certain amount of certain classes to guarantee success), as well as the limit on mob availability (no more than three or four times daily), raids become highly scheduled and a only certain percentage (25% or so) are public. Easy access to the best items is limited to those guilds or associations capable of fielding private groups.
• In World of Warcraft, you can enter a new instance any time you get a new group leader. In theory, you could constantly be working the same instance dungeons for days as long as you kept joining new groups. Access to the mobs (with only a few exceptions) is unlimited, although because of that, access to people becomes more limited than in other games: it’s likely that the people needed to succeed at one raid are already raiding another dungeon, or another instance, and won’t be available. As a consequence, raids become as highly scheduled as in Dark Age of Camelot, although fewer are made public–WoW simply isn’t as social a game as either EQ or DAOC. The best gear (purple) drops even less often than in DAOC, although many good items (blue) are common in those instances.

Players adapt equally well to any of the three mechanisms for controlling access. They continue to game the game, finding the most advantageous ratio of risk-to-reward. In WoW, that’s why many players simply skip instances until they can walk through, or be walked through by higher level characters: risk approaches zero, and reward approaches the maximum. In EQ, where the risks were much, much higher than either DAOC or WoW, players were far more cautious about the dungeons that they would take on, and tended to work outside encounters or easily managed spawns, again minimizing their risk and maximizing their reward.

In all cases, players avoid encounters which are “overcons,” where the encounter difficulty is higher than it should or is advertised to be, and the risk far outweighs the reward. Quests, random encounters, or dungeon encounters: players will quickly determine what is balanced against their success and where the reward is too small for the risk, and avoid that content.

Players care first and foremost about the reward. Good game design makes earning the reward compelling, challenging, and one that balances the risk and reward.