Chicken and the egg. Scarcity of an item aka large demand lets the price of the item soar. Scarcity of content creates a high price of obtaining said content, which in turn makes it hard for people to pay that 'cost' of possession. The problem is very much lack of content.

You just contradicted yourself. The problem is our huge endgame population (a product of the long delay before velious, increased knowledge about the game and relatively serious nature of the players) relative to the small amount of high-end content.

100% agree with Tomtee here. Having to track/batphone to have any chance at the raid scene is not classic.

But the biggest reason I would prefer tokens is that I think it would go a huge way towards making this server's endgame a more pleasant, friendly place. Instead everyone fights like dogs over the tiny amount of Kunark endgame content.

What will more content do? With Velious out, Kunark loot will be undesirable and the desirable mobs will still be killed every time by the top. I've seen it before, at it will happen again.

How is that a contradiction. The cost of competition that I am referring to is waking up at a moments notice to kill a mob, leave alts parked at every mob, train for hours on end, and track like its a paying job.

The contradiction is that it is a lack of content that causes the cost of competition. If no one wanted to kill Nagafen, then anyone could make a PUG at any time and casually raid him. When you have 300 people that want to kill raid targets and only 5-6 targets to go after, the cost becomes incredibly high.

View it as a commodity, or oil. The less of it we produce, the higher it's cost assuming constant demand. Velious changes this somewhat -although I too have lived this progression before and have seen it's outcome. THere is a LOT more end game content in velious - a lot more stuff to do - period. It's an expansion devoted solely to level 60 activities. However, I don't think it will be enough to keep everyone happy. It never is.

I think the real lesson is that I'm just bored at work today.

Supply and demand. There are a good number of people who want to log on and kill EQ bosses on this server. There are a very small number of such bosses. Therefore the price is high, and its paid in time tracking.

No, the variance is the effect of the congestion, not the cause. Rogean and co got tired of having 200 people on every bosses spawnpoint.

I don't like variance because although it does solve the congestion problem it does so by making the endgame so annoying that most people can't/choose not to participate. I was chatting with Flemming yesterday on my mage and asked how much tracking he did. He said 10 hours and I thought that was a lot, but apparently a lot of people do 40+ hours (!).

Wow 40 hours a week? Do they get paid? Some people make six figures for that kind of dedication.

lol @ TMO that want things to stay the same because "it's classic" when variance is not.

My server on live (Karana) had a player enforced rotation. Don't ever tell me that p99 is classic the way it is.

Things will not change much at all with Velious. The top guilds will add more alts to their army and each player will have 15+ lvl 60 decked out characters to camp at every single raid spawn. Don't worry, after a couple of years the "casual" player should be able to get a HoT raid going to get their SS armor