On 1/29/07, Lisa Hayhurst <lisa_hayhurst@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>From: Marc Hartstein >And now personal wealth gives you an >advantage in this game, because it makes it easier to select the optimal >strategy.) You were denied it for one of two reasons: > >1. You didn't have enough money when you bought the first stuff >2. You didn't plan ahead well enough. (Played the game poorly) > >These are both bad reasons for you not to be able to get a >rabbit-exclusive item. A good reason would be that you hadn't yet done >enough promotion to earn the privilege of buying the item. So, what you want is to, essentially, remove personal responsibility. I use the phrase "Personal Responsibility" here to mean "Planning Ahead" and "Budgeting." Not having enough money IS a Very Good (TM) reason for not buying something. Not planning ahead well enough is what gets people in trouble financially (in this case one is unable to purchase from the DC.) Life itself is a game and these 2 points that you say are "bad reasons" to be unable to get something work in real life, too.
I was less clear than I might have been in the second you quote. I've written a lot of text on this issue now; I think it may be time to go through it and collect what I feel better says what I was trying to and repost. In the meantime: Notice that I didn't say not having "enough money". I said not having "enough money when you bought the first stuff". That part which you left out is critical to the point I'm trying to make. My objection is to the situation where there are two ways of spending an equal number of points and dollars, one of which gets you two rewards, and one of which does not. Not having enough money is a good reason not to be able to buy something. Not having had enough money two months ago seems to me a poor reason not to be able to buy something today. While planning is a very valuable skill, and planning expenses particularly so, I don't think it should be necessary to plan around the edge case in the system. I think the system asks people to budget for something very specific which doesn't make a lot of sense, in addition to asking them to budget for very reasonable normal conditions. It's the former I object to.