Are we another social experiment?

They are because experiments can’t be done in controlled environments nor are they really repeatable. Perhaps they aren’t hard sciences is more to your liking?

Fascinating. I believe this was before my time in vanilla but just got filled in on the details by a friend…

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That’s odd. I remember participating in psych studies during college. They were experiments done in a controlled environment and repeatable.

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So the results came out the same every time? That’s what I meant by repeatable. Every time you do it, you get the same result. I’ve never heard of that in psychology or sociology and other “soft” sciences.

I’m not trying to knock those fields btw. Not sure why it was taken as such.

Edit: Probably should have used the term reproducible instead of repeatable.

You don’t get the same exact results every time in medical experiments either. Is medicine also a pseudoscience?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience

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It wouldn’t surprise me if there were serious economists out there studying the WoW economy.

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How about my third try “soft science” then? You’re right, my mistake on using pseudoscience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_and_soft_science

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I’ll stand by that despite it’s sometimes being used as a pejorative. It’s still helps describe the important differences between them. I don’t believe they should be viewed on equal terms.

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Jenny McCarthy practices PsuedoScience. She went public with false information based on her experiences with her son whoshe thought was autistic. After reaching millions of people with unsubstantiated information she then realized her son was not autistic.

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That was obvious after you labeled those scientific fields as “pseudo” and “soft.”

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Yup, I used the wrong word. My bad. I will stand by the soft science description. I think they are of value, but only in looking for tendencies. The results aren’t really reliable as such but could help in playing the odds as it were.

You joke but a lot of the x files stuff is actually true, crazy stuff like a man surviving a 13 foot bar being shot through his skull and then believing he was abducted by aliens, weird as heck if you ask me.

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A lot of movies too. Government agencies developing plans on changing the trajectory of an incoming comet or asteroid is a good example. (Armageddon)

I suspect that a lot of the negative commentary in this thread is coming from young players. I’m going to remove myself from responding to them with one last statement, aside from love of the game, your bad behavior is one of the biggest reason why older players are abandoning you for Classic. Eventually you’ll win your battle and you’ll be left with no one but yourself.

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I was going to mention this. I thought I remembered there having been a study or something done on the economy… could be wrong.

This topic is interesting though.

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I’ve actually had discussions with people in the finance industry regarding the similarities between The WoW economy and current world economies.

I used to be a full time eBay vendor and was on my way to becoming extremely successful only to have the rug yanked right out from under me before I was strong enough to maintain. There were many of us, not just me. We had a whole economy going. Then the former CEO (Meg Whitman) took a trip to China and within a year China overtook not just eBay with the undercutting, sabotage and flooding the market with duplicate cheap listings but they also found a way to manipulate Google search with the use of keywords and redirects.

The discussion I brought to the table with my finance friends was the WoW auction house which was something I witnessed long before China hit our real world economy. I would say, “I can tell you exactly how this is going to go… the world is going to suffer and China is going to grow so powerful that there will be no way for us to compete”

editing in --when asked how I felt we could fix it I always responded that the moment Blizzard responded by removing the gold sellers for the WoW economy (Auction House), instantly our economy was bounding again. I’m not going to get political here but I have been following world trade VERY close over the years as a result of my experience.

It’s going to get much worse.

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Getting off topic here, but I really agree with this concern. There is someone close to me who also plays WoW, and she frequently cites toxic behavior (especially in random battlegrounds), as the single biggest negative experience around playing. We both have played since vanilla, I can definitely testify that toxicity within the community is far worse than it used to be. It’s hard to think that that isn’t a generational thing.

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Generational? As in “kids” are behaving that way? It seems that’s what you are implying. If you are meaning by your post to blame the long time players for the increase in toxicity you see, then the following is nothing new so feel free to skip :slightly_smiling_face:

The game is 14 years old or so, the player base numbers are diminishing rapidly. An overwhelming percentage of the current player base that’s left has aged 10-14 years playing this game. If they were kids at the beginning, they have “grown up” since then.

There’s not a significant number of new players and of those that are, not all are kids. The only ones I know of who are play with their parents who’ve played the game since the beginning.

I’d bet the odds are 99% of the toxic complainer types are at least 25 by now. One of the most infamous toxic player in epic bgs horde side is in her 80s. That’s right, 80s. Ever see “you can’t even spell PvP” in chat? 80s. Not born in the 80s, born over 80 years ago 80s to be clear.

People get older, become jaded, become “toxic”. Not a game only phenomenon and not a new one either.

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In response to the above, I’ll spell it out. Yes, I mean kids - or more broadly, millennials. Sure, you can cite a few anecdotes of senior citizens behaving badly, but I’d wager the vast majority of the player base today is under 30. As for those people still playing after 14 years, they have indeed grown up. But 14 years ago they were kids too, yet they behaved a lot better than today’s crop of players.

I should add that I do think one other factor has really contributed to the problem, and that is cross-realm zoning. In vanilla, and even through TBC, you were stuck on your own realm for everything, and it was a lot harder to remain anonymous. If you were a jerk, people knew about it, and you didn’t get invited to guilds or groups. Today, there’s very little consequence to being a jerk because the people you’re interacting with at moment probably will never see you again anyway. In a broader sense, I think that’s a result of today’s social media culture. There’s less incentive to treat people well when you can hide behind a screen pretty much all of the time. People who have grown up with smart phones since childhood, in my humble opinion, have not done well at developing social skills.

Addendum: there’s actually some social research out there to back up my last claim.

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I hope so, cuz Blizzard sure ain’t.