"it may make sense for them to leave the Lithium where it is, collecting interest as an investment of sorts"

What needs to also be remembered is that what is valuable today may not be valuable tomorrow.

Lithium may be valuable today for batteries, but what happens when a new battery technology is invented that is based on something other than lithium?

It would be smart to sell your lithium resources before that happens.

So just waiting and saving your natural resources may not always be the smartest move. Like stocks, you want to sell them at their peak value. Will lithium be more valuable or less valuable in the future? That is the question to ask here.

I guess everybody is having Christmases. It's damn near dead all over the Internet.

"I know lots of people who don't care to read quest texts"

And I do believe there is some psychological reason behind that.

In single-player games, like the Infinity Engine games, I always read the dialogue.

In MMOs like City of Heroes or D&D Online, I rarely do.

Why is that?

Potential reasons:
1) MMOs do not have dialogue trees. They only have "accept" and "decline" options, spruced up a little with flavor text, but by and large, they do not have the feeling of choice. Conversely, single-player game dialogues have the feeling of choice, that if you pick the right dialogue choices you may get more information and additional xp and additional quests. MMOs need to motivate the reader to read the dialogue by having some *reason* to read them.

2) Singleplayer games you can play at your own pace. In MMOs, you have to rush because your party is waiting for you to get the quest and you don't feel like you have the right to make them wait while you read the dialogue with thought. MMOs need to do something to mitigate the constant feeling of rushing.

3) Frankly, even when I *do* read MMO dialogues and story, they pale in quality compared to a good singleplayer game. MMOs need to write better quality story so people will bother to read them.

4) MMOs rarely have voiceovers or cutscenes. Voiceovers and cutscenes have an INCREDIBLE boost to immersion in singleplayer games. MMOs need to increase the amount of voiceovers and cutscenes.

So rather than just saying, "oh, it's the player's fault, they didn't read the story", it is long-term more productive to ask, "WHY did the player not read the story?" and try to fix those issues so players will read the story in the future.

Or, I suppose, they can just cross their arms, and stubbornly insist that "no, the player has to do it OUR way", and continue for the next ten years hearing bitching about no story and seeing their storywriting efforts go down the drain.

Play to how your audience wants to hear a story. Don't insist that your audience change. Change for them. That is, if you want to maximize your audience.