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The EverQuest backstory has never been particularly powerful, beyond general knowledge of who the gods are and what they're the gods of. Yes, there is some story there, but over the past four years, it's been locked up in GM-driven quests where the players turn it into pure chaos, and quest text that everyone skips through once it's been posted to Allakhazam.

Yeah, they're pretty much just milking the franchise, and I don't doubt that some people will buy, but when you compare the backstory of EQ to the far more compelling universe of D&D Forgotten Realms, this game (in terms of sales) is just going to fall short. After all, why play EQ:CoN when you could just play EQ?

Any change in any part of the game has a signifigant chance of effecting multiple other parts of the game that no-one could predict. Players beat challenges with a speed that is awe-inspireing and demand more. Infact, the players do nothing but demand. ANY imbalance in the 15 classes causes thousands of complains. People get mad about the time that servers are patched, things spawning to fast and too slow. Things being too easy and too tough. Items entering the too fast or too slow. Players will use any method to win they can find whether legitimate or blatently exploitive. And then get mad when exploitive methods are removed.

SoE (Sony online Entertainment) is trying to satisfy hundreds of thousands of people of different levels, different classes, different races, different play times, different lengths of play and different goals, and at the same time trying to keep the game sustainable for the future. You can satisfy all the people some of the time, or some of the people all the time, but never all the people all the time. And those unsatisfied will be as loud about it as they possibly can.

I'm not trying to justify how SoE runs the game. I disagree with a lot that they do. They are by no means saints. But they DO face a daunting task.

This is exactly correct. A great example is the Wurmslayer. This is a weapon that used to be one of the very best in the game. Ignoring the fact that that is no longer the case, let's look at how it came to be valuable in the first place:

It requires a quest which involves killing a fairly tough dragon. So, only people who are high level and can call on a few other high-level folks to help will have the item. Also, the dragon only shows up ("spawns", in the lingo) infrequently, so this further restricts supply.

Ok, so you have very few of these, and they're hotly contested. This jacks up the price and people who do the quest get well rewarded.

After a few months, however you start to get secondary sales. People get better weapons (their "epics") or they decide to stop playing a class that can use such a weapon, so they decide to sell it. This creates a second wave of availability from folks who expect to take a little bit of a loss from what they paid (sellers rarely expect to make more money than what they paid in EQ).

So, now the price bumps down a notch, but it's still fairly high, and rewards those who do the quest well. However, as time goes by and more people do the quest, you begin to reach an equilibrium where there are more folks selling Wurmslayers second-hand than there are doing the quest. Now, the price can drop BELOW the level where it's worth doing the quest at all!

In the end, an item that started selling around 5-10k is now down to about 2k after just 2 years since the expansion's release.

More dramatic drops happen when items first come out in an expansion though. The recent release of Shadow of Luclin created a flood of neat new items people were willing to pay a great deal for until they realized that they were relatively common.