We're just discussing side effects here, and not to sound like a conspiracy theorist... but there are in fact people who benefit from everyone else focusing on effects rather than causes.
The whole "if you don't work you're lazy and a bad person and going to hell, and don't deserve to have anything, and if you can't find work, just go out and find something, I hear people scoop shit these days, stop being lazy and go scoop shit you slacker" ideology and "Protestant Work Ethic" was an after the fact justification applied to laws which helped transition from serfdom to wage labor.
You worked for "honest" wages, and it was "more moral" to be satisfied with ordinary things, and so forth.
Now we've gotten so used to the idea that market forces are some fundamental aspect of reality that looking at them as a cultural construct--one with negative consequences given current trends--is easily dismissed.
"The market isn't innately good or bad, it merely optimizes blah blah blah" the spiel goes at this point.
Life is not an RPG, but market forces being treated as a law of nature with optimization seen as an ideal goal has some shitty outcomes.
If you want to keep score you might create something called value, and a way to track it, let's call it money. You can use these money points to obtain things which have their value costs set for various reasons.
The idea that going for a high score is admirable means people try to keep big piles of these money points, even when they aren't being used, and at some point simply can't be used anymore. You already bought out the GMG loot lists, got all the pluses on your magical items, so now you sit on your hoard and smile because you're on the leaderboard.
This system needs lots of participants though, and it needs npcs. Nobody wants to be an npc because the starting money points are crappy and the beginner gear sucks.
Now, when you're trying to climb the leaderboard one of the most popular builds currently has you set up guilds to produce stuff to sell to newbie adventurers and even npcs, but lots of these guilds need members to run them, so you have to reduce your score some to get them to stay in your guild, right?
What if you could get some wizards and pay them to create some magical servants, bound spirits, golems, and so forth?
Those wouldn't need to reduce your score beyond the initial point cost, so the obvious solution when pursuing an optimal build is cut out all the npcs and replace them with these magical servants and golems, right?
Once you are able to stop the point drain from regularly distributing loot to npc members of your guild you can focus on getting adventurers to use their points on your stuff and anybody else who isn't doing this is going to start sliding down the leaderboard.
Course, without npcs around to provide information and quest hooks and parental background stories for adventurers, that source of points is going to dry up too, and then where do you go?
Maybe there is more to do than chase after gaining a rank or two on this imaginary leaderboard, indeed maybe the whole idea that chasing these rank-ups is noble shouldn't persist, assuming we don't want to look around one day and wonder where all the npcs and adventurers went?
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Topic: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: T+0 (Read 1421120 times)