I got my Beta Opt-In e-mail at work. With shifty eyes I looked towards my co-workers all huddled in a small smoke-filled room, each of us typing away on our keyboards with research articles open on the conference table. Looking left and right, I clicked the print button. Sprinting to the printer, I grabbed for my golden ticket. Without packing up my personal things, I ducked out the door, work forgotten. Reminiscing about Gene Wilder’s crazy antics, I whistled the whole way home.

While Beta-Testing, something dawned on me. I was waiting for a quest mob to spawn so that I could whirlwind its face off when I thought to myself that I was experiencing a parody of life. World of Warcraft to me at this time was a metaphor for how everything should be.

During the days of Vanilla WoW, most things were taken for granted on my realm. People were still discovering what the game had to offer. With the first expansion pack “The Burning Crusade” most addicts complained about things that they felt should be changed. Thus, with so much complaining going on, the game itself was changed around to suit the needs of the demanding public, and WoW matured. It grew from the industry standard. It continued raising the bar. The users defined the game as it changed. Blizzard provided the content while the users dictated how their characters would interact with that content. Surely, Earth would be a better place if it could be changed accordingly.

If world governments would open up their doors to the demanding “users” or citizens, and start taking suggestions, I think that we would literally witness a dramatic change. Don’t get discouraged, I’m sure your democracy is better than any other place in the world; take it from WoW however, and know that it can always get better, and more balanced. A shining example of this is how Blizzard released a “Class Feedback” section on the forums, which quickly (nearly instantly) grew from a single post on each official class forum to 75-100 pages in length, full of posts of people who were eager for change to their class. Sure enough, suggestions from each and every post were taken into consideration, and many of the more frequent suggestions were actually implemented. Fury Warriors for example, in the latest build of the Beta, received two very important buffs to their class: PvP Viability and PvE Effectiveness. They can now buff the entire raid to do a ton more damage, and compete in arenas with the best of the arms cookie-cutters. Some people might suggest that changes like these are supposed to happen during the event of an expansion pack—but I disagree. Changes like this happened because the WoW citizens wanted it. They spoke out, and eager ears listened.

So keep demanding change, brothers and sisters—please give a 10, 25 or 50 word donation to your respective forum, and don’t let the flamers get you down.