MMORPG Economies Explored in Depth

Obscure Economist writes "The Social Science Research Network (SSRN, http://www.ssrn.com) has just posted a free download of "On Virtual Economies," a new broad-focused study of the market for MMORPGs. Think of it as a less descriptive, but more predictive, follow-up to my paper on the EverQuest economy of last spring. The link, for those interested: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =338500. Comments and criticism appreciated. Edward Castronova, Associate Professor of Economics, Cal State Fullerton"

Comments

In case you missed it the first time around...

[flogger]

there is this /. article. that showcases someone's ideas about how to unbalance a game with exploits in the economy.

These games are very rentable

[Espectr0]

Since they are subscription based and need servers, piracy is cut down , almost all of it. What i don't approve is that the games cost full price like every offline game plus the subscription, which is not cheap at all.

At least anarchy online allows you to test the game for free

Re:These games are very rentable

[rogueuk]

a lot of times, a while after the game has come out, there's a huge discount to get a lot of new players into the game. I remember seeing asheron's call about 6-8 months ago for 10 bucks plus 2 months free subscription...at a cost of 10 bucks a month..

so you end up with a net surplus of 10 dollars in your wallet for those 2 months.
it's a pretty decent deal if you like those games.

Re:These games are very rentable

[Dirtside]

What i don't approve is that the games cost full price like every offline game plus the subscription, which is not cheap at all.

The cost of purchasing the game box is there to offset the development costs of the game -- i.e. all the money spent paying the programmers, artists, designers, and managers who develop the game to begin with. For a modern, first-tier computer game, this process can take two to four years; all that money is invested in the project before the company gets a single dime from customers.

Now for a regular game, once the game launches, there's some followup (patches, fixes, etc.) but the amount of effort is small compared to the amount of effort that went into creating the original game. But with an MMO, once the game launches, the company is also providing servers for you to play on. Providing that service is an ongoing cost; you have to pay people to admin and maintain the servers, pay for new or replacement hardware, pay for bandwidth, electricity, etc. It's a significant chunk of change, which is why there's the ongoing fee. In addition, MMOs tend to have additional (free) content introduced down the line; the monthly fee pays for this as well (although full expansions are usually Sold Separately, and the development costs for the content in those expansions are paid for by the box cost... in theory).

AO allows a download of the client to test out the game, but if you want to play the game, you still need to buy a game box (in order to receive a registration key). Most MMOs don't have this option, since downloading a 1 gig+ client just to test would be an additional huge load on their bandwidth.

There is a reason for the up-front cost plus the ongoing monthly cost; it's just odd that so few people seem to understand that running servers that can handle thousands of simultaneous players for months at a time is an expensive thing to do.

Re:These games are very rentable

[Hott of the World]

And yet somewhere, somehow, people manage to do it at no cost to the users. Thats just insane! I mean, with all the costs associated with running BATTLE.NET, I'm surprised that Blizzard is not bankrupt...

Jurisdiction of Virtual Economies

[thefinite]

Quote from abstract:

It will also raise certain constitutional issues, since it is not clear, today, exactly who has jurisdiction over these new economies.

Don't the games already dictate the control of these economies? MMORPG game makers decide the rules of the economy according to what they think makes them enjoyable. Granted, if you are selling EverQuest items on Ebay, then you are subject to U.S. economic laws, but why would any government care about the economic activities in a virtual world, except in areas that affect their own economies? There may be an answer to this I don't see. If so, what is it?

not gonna happen

[dirvish]

Virtual Economies will have to expand immensely to have any real effect on real economies. Sure, people trade some EverCrack stuff on Ebay but it is a miniscule amount compared to the rest of the economy. It really has no effect on the real world. How can a virual economy ever have something that is truly valuable? I can't think of an instance and I don't see one coming about.

How Scientists justify wasting time

[Drawkcab]

No, I didn't waste 1000 hours this year playing EverCrack, it was important research!

Re:How Scientists justify wasting time

[unicron]

Whenever I type /played it comes back with "don't worry about it".

Everquest Economy Threatened with Inflation

[Pave Low]

on a related note, check this out. funny stuff, art imitating life.

No real value

[Anonymous Coward]

"It will also raise certain constitutional issues, since it is not clear, today, exactly who has jurisdiction over these new economies. "

Uh, it's pretty obvious, Sony (in the case of EQ) "owns" your gear and gold pieces, etc. There is no value to it - it's just 0's and 1's on their server, and when you sign up for an account, the licence spells this out.

Why does everyone have to take something fun (a game) and try to assign real life value to it? It makes MMPOGs less interesting when you know there are people who "cheat" by buying and selling items in real life. That's not the point of a game!

Re:No real value

[orthogonal]

Why does everyone have to take something fun (a game) and try to assign real life value to it?

"Value" is simply what somebody is willing to pay for something.

Obviously, people are willing to pay to play the game. They value the enjoyment they get from playing more than they enjoy spending that money on something else (or holding on to it). So they purchase a game subscription, trading real money for access to the game.

Some people value the status (or the ease, or whatever) that comes with a more capable "avatar", more than they value having real money, so they're willing to trade real money for game money (or experience points, or "lore" or "fungi tunics")

Recently a forty year old can of an artist's excrement was bought for several thousand dollars by a museum. It was "valuable" not for its potential use as fertilizer, but as "art".

A original copy ("original copy"? An oxymoron or not?) of the American Declaration of Independence was sold for over eight million dollars, despite the fact that anyone can download the exact text -- or a photo reproduction -- for free. Are the words valuable then? Not, apparently, as much as the context they are in.

Even real money is simply a social convention: its utililty for any use other than trade (its "intrinsic value") is virtually (pun intended?) nil. Real money is useful only insofar as people will trade goods and services for it. When real money is perceived as not being as useful for trade, its value collapses, and we have the super inflation exemplified by Weimar Germany or present-day Argentina.

Which is more valuable to you, a dollar or a month of game play? What if it's your only dollar, and you're hungry? Which is more valuable, a million dollars or a month of game play? What if you could only buy cans of artists' excrement with that million? What if you know you'll be dead in a month? What is more valuable, a million dollars or the Declaration of Independence? What if it's an electronic copy? What if it's the only remaining copy (electronic or not) remaining in existance? What is more valuable, the single remaining copy of the Declaration, the single remaining copy of the Bible, the single remaining copy of Moby Dick, the single remaining sequencing of the human genome?

What's the value, to me, of the last letter you even got from your high-school sweetheart? How much money would you charge me (i.e., what's the value of it to you) to sell me that letter, if I told you I planned to burn it?

"Value" changes with circumstances, with the surplus or scarcity of what you have and what can trade for, and with your, uh, "values". "Value" is what you can get for something, less what it's worth to you not to part with something.

Re:No real value

[GigsVT]

More interestingly, the free market may rule in every way.

Imagine this, the first MMORPG that actually has it's own auction site where players are even encouraged to trade game items for real money. Of course that creates all kinds of legal hassles, but some sort of in-game escrow would be pretty trivial to implement, reducing arguments.

The way I see it, in real life, money can buy you better equipment, etc, but it can't make you a better player of the game. When these games evolve to the point where it isn't centered around equipment (and the quest to get better equipment), but rather on real game skill, then is when we will see the really big things happen.

Re:So much simpler than the real thing

[Ryan Amos]

I think you miss the point.. Yeah, MMORPGS are geeky (and a waste of time IMO) but consider it a small-scale model for the real world economy and how the real economy might be under different circumstances. No, it's not the same as the real economy by any means, but it's an interesting sociological "experiment" (though more of an observation.) Besides, not everything needs to have a practical application. Some people just enjoy this kind of stuff. :)

Economic crisis

[0ddity]

National economies are suffering now that online economies are manipulated through dubious means using real world monies. The value of the EverQuest currency currently exceeds the value of the US dollar. Other markets are experiencing similiar downfalls. One solution proposed by Microsoft Corporation is to alter the virual economies with DRM technology to facilitate fair usage of currency. RIAA sources say that they are also working on a solution but offered no details.

On art and games

[GigsVT]

people reveal that they are willing to pay money to be constrained.

This is an interesting observation. As many of us know, cheating takes all the fun out of the game for most normal people (15 year olds that crave attention and respect in an unhealthy way excepted). In art, self-imposed contraints are what makes good art. Without contraints, the games become meaningless.

I think when bugs are discovered in games that allow rampant cloning of items or free money to spread, is parallel to what would happen in society when and if we discover a way to make a "replicator" type device.

These games do make an interesting microcosm for sociologists to study. Identifing the differences is more interesting, since once we identify how it is different from the macro-society, we can use it as a model.

Re:So much simpler than the real thing

[TGK]

Interestingly enough, US Banks have the power to create and destroy money.

The way it works is this. MyBank (insured FDIC) has a certain amount of money on deposit with its local Federal Reserve Bank (NY, Phillie, Whatnot). The Federal Reserve then sets a multiplier, allowing MyBank to loan out Z*Deposit where Z is a number chosen between 1 and however many Cherios Allen Greenspan ate for breakfast this morning.

MyBank then lends you that money. It just up and lends it to you. It didn't have the money to lend, but the Fed said it could so it does.

The key to the entire system is the ASSUMPTION that money is scarce. Or rather, that money has inherent value.

In the case of a MMORPG money is created (typicaly) by killing stuff. This killing of stuff is work, and requires the player (or a cleverly written bot) to spend time persuing this activity.

This time is equivilent to work. As long as people feel that they have to work to get money and that money in turn can be used to get someone else to work for them (or something else) the economy will keep going.

So in essence, as long as the player can not randomly create money (but can work for it), it really is just as valid as any other national currency (except perhaps the old Lira, which was so worthless as to require several million to buy a mellon)

Could Inflation threaten the EverQuest economy?

[microbob]

Could Inflation threaten the EverQuest economy?

A funny read on the BBC.

I'm sure some people take this stuff waaaayyyy to seriously.

Think stamps/baseball cards/collectables

[Brian_Ellenberger]

EverCrack may not have an "immense effect", but there are plenty of instances of pretty much worthless things gaining value because they are rare and people want them. Look at stamps. Little pieces of scrap paper with a face value of pocket change. How about baseball cards? Just cheap cardboard. The pictures and information on both are easily duplicated. So why in the heck do people pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for them?

Heck compared to a stamp an Axe of Power or a level 99 character seems much more interesting and useful for entertainment. As long as it is sufficiently rare and useful, people will attach some sort monetary value to it.

Brian Ellenberger

Eh? Are these people serious?

[Jon Erikson]

Despite the expanding popularity of games like EverQuest and it's huge array of derivatives and competitors to suggest that the "economy" (and those quotes are deliberate; to suggest that any of these games has anything like a real economy is patently ludicrous) is in anyway comparable to that of real-world markets is... well, just wrong. Any Economic 101 student should be able to tell you that.

As such any talk of jurisdiction over these "new economies" is just a pipe dream by over-addicted players; there is quite simply no such new economy at all, merely players (and sad, cheap addicted ones at that) within the current economy, trading their resources for ever more ephemeral rewards.

Indeed it seems like such talk of new economies is nothing more than subliminal advertising; trying to talk up the game to make it more important than it is. After all, it certianly suits the makers of the game if it's seen to be more "real"... even this sort of "negative" publicity is good for it since the sort of person that has such a pathetic life they get addicted to online games seems to be craving a reality of sorts, preferably one where they can overcome the crippling social, mental and physical deficiencies that plague them in real life. There is no genuine MMORPG economy. There's just a fringe of people who really need to get out more, trading within the regular economy on sites like EBay.

Very true.. except..

[Inoshiro]

A virtual economy, like any economy, must barter in scarcity. After all, it is scarcity which forces the choices of economics on people.

The most obvious object which a virtual economy could manage is time. You can't turn time into an encoded form on a computer which can be played back at any moment. By farming out your own time that you are willing to spend on some problem, you could get some credit that would be useful to negotiate time off of someone else's hands for a task you need completed by a certain time. It'll be the ultimate in specialization, where you need only know one thing well, because you can use that skill to aquire the credits that you use to buy the time of other people who specialize is some task you need completed.

If this sounds a lot like your day-to-day job life, it is. But it breaks down if you look at it from a non-time perspective. Things that are not direct people services aren't scarce in a digital world. You need to move to something else for the creation and release of digital knowledge, something like the street performer protocol. Then the goods (which, when released, are not scarce) can have the creators of those goods still benefit.

Traditional models of scarcity and resource utilization do not apply in a virtual economy. Once one copy of something is released, infinite copies may be made at any point. The only thing you, as a content producer, can do is set how much you want to release that product. This is the next step (IMO) in the evolution of economic theory because it'll allow people to make things on their own, without a big corporate body (RIAA, MPAA) taking a cut off of everything. Prices will go down, and creations will go up.

Maybe in ten years we'll be seeing this on CNN...

[Doctor Sbaitso]

NASDAQ up 21.42 points
Dow down by 8.21
EverQuest SE up 1.50

Star Wars: Galaxies

[RobinH]

I've been following the development of a new MMORPG, called Star Wars: Galaxies. The designers are trying some new concepts with the economies, and they really seem interesting:

1) Raw resources only exist in a set quantity. When a resource runs out, it is replaced by a brand new one, and the old one will never be available again. All the designs and items using the old material will become rares, meaning: a) designers stay busy, and b) prospectors stay busy.

2) You only get crafting experience when an item is *used*, not when it's made. Therefore, you are naturally motivated to make things people want, not whatever increases your skills the most.

I'm really interested to see how it turns out.

EQ Platinum is a tradable commodity like any other

[raehl]

The only question is how much real money is it worth. When you get down to it, buying EQ characters or equipment on Ebay is no different than buying a movie or videogame or shelling out $40 to go to Six Flags. It's paying for entertainment. Buy powerful character, be more entertained. Selling characters and equipment is the same thing: Providing entertainment to someone who is willing to pay for it. It doesn't matter that the entertainment in question is 1's and 0's on a server somewhere, or that there's no "sink" for it (i.e., a way for money to leave the game). If more and more EQ Platinum becomes available, like any other currency, it'll just suffer rampant inflation. Sony creating lots of platinum, or players exploiting bugs to create lots of platinum, is no different than Mexico printing up lots of pesos to pay off national debt. It just makes the value of the platinum/pesos worth less in dollars.

EQ money is the same as real dollars - it represents production of a tradeable product.

When people buy EQ "Stuff", what they're REALLY buying is the TIME of the people who generated that stuff (or more accurately, they're buying the time they now don't have to spend getting the stuff themselves.)

EQ Platinum *IS* money, moreso than real platinum. Can't do anything with dollar bills, can't do anything with EQ platinum, but people will give you stuff for both because they believe other people will do the same. That's where it gets its value - not because of any useful properties, but just because people BELIEVE it's money.

One of these days, people won't play EQ anymore, and EQ money will be worthless. You'll be able to buy billions of EQ platinum pieces for $1 because no one will believe they have any value anymore.

Its exactly the same reason you can buy millions of Afghans or Lira for $1. People stopped believing the money was worth anything, so you needed a lot more of it for someone to trade you a dollar for it.

Earth & Beyond economy

[Dirtside]

The economic model in Earth & Beyond is an interesting change from games like EverQuest. It's closer to DAOC's model, as I understand it (I'm not very familiar with DAOC though).

Basically, the best items are player-made versions of loot-only items. Players can make better-quality items than the NPC merchants sell, but the best overall items aren't sold by merchants at all, but rather are dropped off NPCs that you have to go out and kill. So player crafting is important, because it yields the best items; but hunting is also important, because in order for the crafters to make those items, they (or others) have to go out and kill monsters to get those items in the first place. A big problem with EQ's economy is that *all* the best items are dropped off creatures. The best player-made items are pretty good, but do not compare to loot items.

Re:"Wooden game pieces do not...immersive experien

[unicron]

Your last sentence is laughable. It's a countless hour thrill in a 4+ year world where everything is just beyond your grasp. That is Everquest.

Gov't Jurisprudence in Virtual Economies

[limekiller4]

thefinite writes:
"Granted, if you are selling EverQuest items on Ebay, then you are subject to U.S. economic laws, but why would any government care about the economic activities in a virtual world, except in areas that affect their own economies? There may be an answer to this I don't see. If so, what is it?"

If you think about the selling of "plat" (platinum) obtained from Everquest on eBay, you're basically talking about a commodities market and the people running the game are essentially printing money.

Re:Gov't Jurisprudence in Virtual Economies

[Danse]

The only commodity being sold is the time that it takes someone to gather the plat to sell on ebay. Since the vast majority of us sell our time (and expertise or muscle as well in most cases) to make a living, this doesn't seem very different.

Re:Gov't Jurisprudence in Virtual Economies

[limekiller4]

Danse writes:
"The only commodity being sold is the time that it takes someone to gather the plat to sell on ebay. Since the vast majority of us sell our time (and expertise or muscle as well in most cases) to make a living, this doesn't seem very different."

You are 100% correct ...but this qualifies for oil too. Or electricity. Or or orange juice or porkbellies. These are commodities. And they're regulated because if you do not, it is possible to manipulate the environment which will result in profit with no risk for the manipulators and assured loss for those not "in on the deal." Hence 'insider trading.'

Whether the item in question is lawfully obtained by the sweat of your brow has nothing to do with the problem. Everquest isn't regulated. An admin could, conceivably, give themselves or others plat. Yes, there might be internal safeguards in place, but are they adequate? Can someone code a script to do that work automagically? Or even worse, can the system be hacked outright?

The result of "printing script" (ie, money) is that it devalues the legitimate money and this leads to inflation and relative devaluation. In other words, if there exists 1,000 units of money in an environment and we both have half, if you can print yourself 5,000 units, we now have 6,000u of money in circulation and my lot is significantly devalued.

Granted, this is an extreme example, but it is only provided to illustrate the point.

Define "Real"

[Mahrin Skel]

As probably the only one in the thread who has designed a virtual economy from scratch and had a few hundred thousand people beat on it, I found the paper very interesting. I also work for the first company to get sued because we stopped someone from converting virtual money to the real thing. This stuff isn't hypothetical to *me*.

What is real, when we're talking about economics and communities? Is the community of baseball card collectors real? Are the economics of fine art auctions based on rational decisions?

People "live" in these worlds. They have friends, lovers, rivalries, and the *emotions* are certainly indistinguishable from "real". You may smugly sneer at the inconsequentialness of it all, but what would your ancestors of a few hundred years ago think of you? How many of you make a living directly producing something you can hold in your hands? How many of you have jobs you can't quite get your grandparents to understand?

How many people who read /. routinely hunt and kill their own food, or till the soil to grow the wheat for their daily bread? How few people actually make things *essential* to daily life in this modern age?

The worlds I build are virtual. The communities that appear in them are real.

--Dave Rickey

My impression

[mao che minh]

I played Ultima Online of-and-on for about 3 years. My playing days ended a good year or so ago, but I spent so many hours obsessing over the particulars of the economy that much of it remains vivid in my mind. If there is one thing I can add to this discussion it's my belief that a "virtual economy" (like those in MMORPGs) can easily "run away" from the administrators of the game. The factors that give online economies their frailaties can not be applied to real world models.

When I first started playing Ultima Online, 10,000 gold pieces was a considerable amount of captial, and real estate of the lowest kind ran one roughly 55,000 gold pieces. Even with a considerably large user base, supply and demand of the various core resources (wood, cloth, ore) of the game was in a remarkable state of acceptable flux. Inflation was well controlled. The demand of "rares" (items that varied in degrees of difficulty to obtain) drove their prices high, but never to unreasonable levels.

This all ran smoothly, much like a real world economy of small nation might run. But then came factors that real world economists do not have to fret much over, factors that only exist in the virtual world. The most significant was that people started cheating. Specifically, a considerable amount of people found clever ways to mass produce gold by the tens of millions.

You might ask "why didn't the admins just remove all of the excess gold?". Well, they didn't know exactly who cheated, and therefore could not effectively enforce an across-the-board gold removal without losing valuable customers (where the real $$$ comes from). I stopped playing for a short period of time, and when I came back it was a new UO. Houses that were once 55,000 gold were now 1.5 million. Much sought over rares sky rocketed to values of 10 million gold (or more, I am told). New players (and long time players that decided not to cheat or purchase wealth off of Ebay) were now rendered "impoverished" for the duration of their UO life. Basic materialistic goals that players could pursue, goals that were promised to new players on the back of the box, were simply unattainable.

OSI, the company that runs UO, tried a plethora of schemes to make the economy bearable again. They failed utterly, and UO subscriptions continue to dwindle. What differentiates a make believe economy from a real one is the fact that people can do make believe things in a game. No one can dupe 1.5 million dollars out of thin air in the real world.

Re:My impression

[bbaskin]

>No one can dupe 1.5 million dollars out of thin air in the real world.

Actually, this is not quite true. Central banks have almost always done this. The Federal Reserve "creates" money out of thin air, buys government debt with it and thus tries to alter the various interest rates to what the Board of Governors desires. The central bank's control of the volume of dollars is nothing more than a monopoly on counterfeiting. This also shows that increasing the volume of money is the cause of inflation, both in the real world and the virtual.

The laws of economics apply to people no matter where they interact with each other and counterfeiting is still counterfeiting no matter who does it. It is a distortion of the economy and will eventually lead to its collapse. It's happened in the real world and evidently has happened online, too.

Inflation is evil, it is theft, it is a stealth "tax" (when used to buy government debt), and it is caused by government monopolies on the production of "money". Only a hard money system (much like an online system where people can't cheat) can save us from these problems.

Think about it, they don't call it "gold" in the games for no reason. It's been money for 6000 years all across the world until the beginning of the 1900s when governments banned its use and started cranking out pure fiat money. And look what has happened to its value. $1 today buys what 5 cents bought in about 1913, the year the Federal Reserve was created. Even at the "low" rate of about 3% inflation today (according to the Cleveland Fed) every dollar you earn today will only be worth 17 cents in 60 years. That's a tough hill to climb when planning for retirement.

Inflation is theft.

Bryan Baskin

Re:My impression

[swillden]

No one can dupe 1.5 million dollars out of thin air in the real world.

Sure they can. It does tend to piss off the Secret Service, though, and they can get downright testy about it.

they appear real...

[mao che minh]

...and yet they are not. The commodity that you invented was real: the game, the software itself. The "world" within it is not.

Comparing emotions to the value gold is ridiculous.

Re:they appear real...

[MikeBabcock]

Comparing emotions to value is not ridiculous, as any psychotherapist would tell you; people pay a very large amount of money every year to be happy. Not to live, or to eat, but to be happy. Why is there so much more money in pro sports than roofing? Why are the expensive homes filled with entertainment equipment? You obviously weren't thinking 'big picture' with your comment; peoples' feelings, emotions and perspectives _are_ the reality we live, the reality _you_ live.

Asheron's Call 2

[zaffir]

I'm in on the AC2 beta test (it's a free, open download at fileplanet), and they've taken the player economy to the next level - there are NO NPCs involved. You either get items from monsters you kill, or from ones you craft. And crafting is open to everyone - it doesn't require you to use skill points that could otherwise be spent in combat skills. This could be very interesting; it's a much more hands-off economic structure as far as the developers go.

Not quite there yet

[Andy Dodd]

Currently, player-made items in DAoC cannot be the best in the game. Armor can have the best AF, and weapons can have the highest damage, but they don't have the magical bonuses that people REALLY want. As a result, especially thanks to the "epic armor" received after a quest at level 50, there's only a demand for 2 of the 4 tradeskills.

This all changes in 6 days, when Spellcrafting and Alchemy (The ability to give items magical bonuses and make potions) finally goes live. At that point, Mythic's original promise that players would be able to MAKE the best items in the game will finally become reality.

That said, DAoC's economy is a bit more robust than EQ's - The problem with EQ was that certain crafted items sold for more than they cost to make. This is what the free-money exploits take advantage of. In DAoC, EVERYTHING is a loss except for one of the lowest items, which will net you 7 copper per build. (Note: Macro this all you want, it would probably take a day just to make one gold, whereas a player could make that much in a few minutes solo farming.)

Also, DAoC has a couple of inherent "cash sinks" built into the game. While EQ's economy primarily consists of buying "rare items" that enter the game but rarely exit, probably 50% or more of the cash in DAoC's economy is used to buy wood.

Wood, you say? A key part of DAoC's endgame is realm vs. realm battle. Part of RvR is taking over enemy keeps and holding them.

Upgrading a door to level 5-6 usually costs a few hundred gold worth of wood. Holding a keep for two weeks against attacks can make an entire guild go flat broke. (This happened to my guild - People are just beginning to recover their cash reserves well over a month later.)

Who Cares?

[delus10n0]

If you're spending (say it with me) "real life" monies to advance yourself in a GAME, you are a loser.

And if your arguement is that this is for entertainment, well my friend, I only paid once for my copy of Soldier of Fortune II, and it's offered me endless hours of entertainment. Same with Half-Life.. Unreal Tournament.. Tribes.. WarCraft III.. Quake2.. etc..

I don't have to pay to advance my character or stats in these games. My level of fun isn't going to depend on whether I have some piece of "r4r3 ph4t l3wt" or if my character doesn't have a sword with +1 against ogres. I can just play, and not worry about such things. Nor do I have to pay a lame "monthly fee" to keep playing the game.

Consequently, EverQuest sucks the wang, and you all need to get lives.