Are there advantages and disadvantages between different players? Sure. But those advantages are not necessarily equated with who is an immortal or who is not.

I can guarantee you that the vast majority of active players know substantially more than I do in terms of wand locations, even after being an imm for years and years. So whatever advantage there might be between some item-saavy imm and a non-imm, and a non-item-saavy imm and an item-saavy mortal.. it's all irrevelent. Fundamentally speaking, most imms are good players not because they are imms, but because they are veteran players. (And for the record, for every Nepenthe there are plenty of imm characters that are not earth-shattering or even noticed. Hell, for every talk-of-the-town mortal some imm is to discovered to have played, there may be half a dozen other characters played by the exact same imm that no one had a single conspiracy theory about!)

You really don't want equity. At least *I* don't want equity. At the risk of getting into political discourse, socialism is bunny-fluff happy in theory but insideously destructive in practice.

Your analogy to games like chess or football are irrelevant because games like chess and football DO have inequities. Some players are stronger, faster, smarter, whatever. You have to learn to work around that, and just do your best against stronger players and strategies, and have fun. Whether you are physically stronger or not is equalized in a MUD. Instead, the factors of competition in CF are in part items and knowledge. It's what gives the game longevity, to constantly be expanding your knowledge and thus improving your game.

If everyone could just look up locations of items on a database somewhere, it would remove a factor of long-term competition. Not to mention, it would ruin the exploration element (which is fun for a LOT of player-types, myself included). Even people who refused to look on the database are screwed out of exploration challenges when those things become common knowledge. Similarly it would ruin roleplaying opportunities.. bargaining or flattering another character for knowledge, etc. That's the beauty of it.. you insert these elements, and they become a major player in PK, and by extention, a player in exploration and RP as well.

To take an extreme, everything would be *most* equitible if you just dropped everyone into the game with identical stats and sub-issue items, popped them all to level 51 and queued them into equally balanced fights in some perfectly balanced battlefield. But, that would be a different game (and I dare suspect, one you wouldn't play as much.) Again, that is an extreme, but the theory still applies.

What makes any game or story interesting is conflict, mystery, uncertainty. Does my opponent have him some good wands, or not? Where can I find my own? How can I find my own? Maybe I can persuade him to share them with me, or explore on my own... And on and on.

This isn't just some strategy/twitch game... it's a strategy/twitch game interwoven with story elements, and with relationship elements. "The cat sat on the mat." is not a story. "The cat sat on the dog's mat.", now *there's* a story.