>Not to mention that there are some fairly compelling and
>completely non-altruistic reasons for an evil character to
>deck out a lowbie in gear - future favours being the most
>obvious.

This seems extremely hard to justify to me in almost all cases for almost all realistically roleplayed evil characters.

Many lowbie characters will turn out to be incompetent buffoons later in life, if they survive.

Most lowbie characters will not survive to see higher levels. In a metagaming sense this is because of deletions. . . no matter how you look at it IC, any reasonably intelligent character is going to know that only a small fraction of those who set out as adventurers survive to become powerful or famous enough to be useful.

In the best of circumstances, investing in lowbie futures is an extremely risky, even stupid endeavor, not unlike drafting Michael Vick for next year's fantasy football team. It's actually worse than that, because you're almost certainly investing in a person that, even if by chance should survive and be in a position to be useful to you, would (i.e., being evil) have on incentive to repay your time and effort, and probably will even see you as a bigger sucker for having helped them for no reason.

All in all, you've got better odds of sending the next Nigerian general's son who needs some of your cash to get his father's money out of the country $20 and saying: "Send me back whatever you think I deserve."