Here's a story:

A group of enthusiastic explorers spend weeks on exploring their
way to a topend eq monster. They find it, and after numerous
attempts, manage to kill it. They get one topend item which
one of the members dices for himself.

Then comes an event...

The lucky member who diced the topend item misses the event and
logs on the next day. He finds out that every participant got
themselves a new uberitem(tm) with a couple of hours of work.
The uberitem(tm) happens to be better than his now ex-topend item.

Not only that, but the eq monster they worked hard to figure out
and kill, is now practically obsolete.