Expansion Deficit Disorder or "E.D.D." - a disorder common among some of the gaming communities more driven members. Whenever an expansion to a new mmo comes out, these individuals are compelled to reach the new level cap as fast as possible, throwing all caution, common sense and health issues aside. As one urban rumor has it, one graduate student in applied mechanics, his neurons fried from an attempt at leveling Warhammer Online in record time, submitted his masters thesis on the subject of practical time travel in an attempt to reach the level 80 cap in Warcraft before the Wrath of the Lich King Expansion was even released; but these are, of course, only idle rumors. O.K I will admit it - one of my favorite podcasts isn't even part of the Virgin Worlds collective. The show Blue Plz, hosted by Total Biscuit (T.B.), is the sort of show that you may love, or you may hate but it always makes you think. Last week I listened to T.B. start his show with 15 minutes of screaming about how horrible and easy the end game instances are in Wrath "" at one point in the show he complained about "not having anything to do, considering we've beaten' pretty much everything in Wrath in 2 weeks..." Since the day I first set foot in Azeroth and cast my eyes upon the great gateway of Ironforge (back when the biggest, baddest instance was Molten Core) to the present there the Warcraft community has been fraught with players I call the "Un-silent minority". Now I am not talking about the trolls who fill the "official forums" whining whenever someone of class other than theirs manages to top them on the DPS meters thereby shortening their "e-peen". I am not even talking about players who find that raiding is their favorite part of the game. I am talking about players who are self described "hardcore" raiders - the sort of players to whom the game comes first, even before family, and raiding becomes not a lifestyle but life. I might narrow it down even further to those members of the "hardcore" community who are dead set certain that the rest of the 11,499,999 of us all look up to them as the crème de la crème. There are many reasons to look up to someone, but about the last reason to idolize someone is how fast they can push a button on a keyboard. After The Burning Crusade expansion came out, Jeff Kaplan and Rob Pardo both gave interviews where they admitted that high end content like The Black Temple was being experience by about 1% of the player base at the time. And all the while they were raiding, members of that 1 percent where busy applying terms like "welfare epics" and busily trying to fit the remainder of the 10 million players (at the time) into a nice neat little box they labeled "casual players" - as if the rest of us were some how not up to their professional standards. Back in grad school we were all taught that good marketing means making your product meet the needs of the consumer. How long, I wonder, would the Activision/Blizzard gorilla be able to through its weight around if it catered to only one percent of its customers? There are some players who think that the shoe is now on the other foot, and it is the turn of the hard core raiding guilds to complain - after all, turn about, as it is said, is fair play. But with the release of the Wrath of the Lich King Activision/Blizzard is continuing its efforts to let the players have their cake and eat it too, with content that is variable beyond simply a choice between normal and heroic difficulties. In the mean time, those players looking for difficulty beyond what Warcraft has to offer can either turn to running Nax in their undies or have someone dump them in Zero Security space in a frigate in Eve Online. See you online, - Julie Whitefeather |