Everyone Likes Item Loot

Did you enjoy the movie Oceans Eleven? Resevoir Dogs? (insert any crime/gangster movie here)

Then you enjoy item loot pvp, I can see you are disagreeing with me already, so let me explain.

First, yes I am being a bit misleading with the title, many people do not like item loot, but you do like it at least at the vicarious level. Everyone enjoys a good movie with item loot, and if you have read about the Eve scams you probably found them interesting.

Second, you are already playing an item loot game, it's called 'Life', Life is the most hardcore game imaginable, item loot, scamming, permadeath, Life has it all.

It is my position that people enjoy movies, and games like poker (and DF) because it allows them to try out tactics that are generally too risky in the real world.

I'll start again with poker, a common strategy in poker is to go 'all in' meaning to bet everything you have at the table. This is an extremely rare tactic in real life. How often would you say that you have gone 'all in' in your actual life, betting everything you have that you are right about something?

Movies (crime movies in particular) do the same thing only without personal risk, you get to see 'what if' scenarios, where people are executing betrayal tactics that you would probably never try yourself.

In life, the majority of people (in civilized/developed countries) use tat-good as their strategy (infomercials/corporations and such not included, I'm talking about interpersonal relationships). You don't steal from your friends when you go to their house, and you don't gank strangers so you can take their stuff (well, some people do, but again the minority, and they are pretty much always desperate/poor so it is a necessary tactic for them).

The reason that so many people use tat-good in life, is because the consequences for being 'evil' are pretty damn severe. The harsh environment is an incentive to be nice.

People enjoy movies and games, so they can see/try alternate strategies that they would be too afraid to try in their real lives.

If at this point you are still thinking 'bullshit', then I would ask, what do you play games for? Have you ever played a game, and then gotten bored of it once you figured out all the strategies possible in that game? I'll use a War Games reference here and bring up Tic-Tac-Toe, an interesting game for children, until they figure out that there is ONE undefeatable strategy that will either result in a win or a draw every time.

There are more game situations than just the PD (prisoners dilemma), darkfall is very heavy in PD possibilities, but WoW is not, WoW however still has other strategies for you to test, but like in Tic-Tac-Toe they are strategies that have no stakes involved (other than your time), and once you've 'seen it all' in WoW you are pretty damn likely to get bored of it.

The biggest problem with a game like DF, is not that people don't like item loot, it is that they don't like losing. Other games have much milder penalties for losing, so it doesn't sting nearly as bad when it happens, WoW will even reward you for losing (bg's).

So, if you join DF, but get ganked several times in your early game, and feel you don't have the skill to compete in the system, you are likely to think it's 'cheap' or 'unfair'. This is really a problem with you not having adequate strategies or skill level for this game environment.

So, in summary, all games are strategy testing environments, item loot games are simply simulations that are one step closer to the 'real world' than others.

You eventually got bored of Tic-Tac-Toe, There is more than a single strategy to test in WoW, but when you are ready to step up to the next level of simulation we'll be waiting for you :)