[quote=@Mega Birb]
Alright, time for a little more philosophy.  The concept of Deep Ground was created some time in the near future (Let's say 2020, give or take a year) as a last resort to determine the best canidates for jobs.  I'm sure everyone knows that it's steadily becoming harder to find a job in modern parts of the world as it sits, but what will it be like in thirty or forty years from the current time?  Simply put, Deep Ground was born out of necessity and reflects the true, cutthroat nature of humanity.  The strong survive, and the weak fall behind.  Exactly like reality, if you think about it.
[/quote]

Sorta. If you really want to really look at the symbolism, you could look at it like this: In a way, deep ground [i]is[/i] a metaphor for human survival in the sense that it strips living down to its bare essentials, fighting for survival. It sort of tugs at the human instinct to fight and come out on top, to the fairly primal survival stuff, since the system is based around killing stuff.

The problem with deep ground is that it seems to promote a cut-throat nature, cooperating for mutual gain and also resorting to backstabs if it works for you, basically being extremely selfish in order to become successful (though that isn't really how it turned out I guess)

Technically speaking though, Deep Ground is also a good indication of cooperative play because you need other people working together to beat really tough content and having people watch your back is pretty essential in a cut throat industry.

It's sort of like the old strength to smarts debate (sort of). Which one is stronger, the guy who lifts 50 kg everyday or the guy that made the theory of relativity? The thing is, both can beat the other one way or another, or that's how it should be. The problem people have in Deep Ground is that, in theory, the guy who lifts 50 kg everyday will come out ahead of the relativity guy, though it was explicitly stated that a level 1 guy can beat a level 9 guy if he had advantages.

I don't actually know where I'm going with this, but I got to say that I agree with you. Deep Ground does represent the dog-eat-dog mentality of real life but the fact that you can succeed by getting carried by your high-level friends or wreck a dude several levels higher than you by using your brain also represents real life in that doing weird shit sometimes also gets you places.