I ran a guild for a few years. It was a whole lot more work than running a business, with worse hours and more drama. Also, the loot sucked.
That said: Some people watch TV, some people put petroleum products on dead plant matter using animal hair, some people go watch fat men sing in classical Italian and they would have to read along in the handy little English guide if they hadn't known the plot for the last forty years. I killed imaginary dragons. It was quite fun at the time.
P.S. Not related to Starcraft, but nice job with the Japanese-learning startup. Cheers to your & your students' success with it.
The best thing about WoW is being thrown into a group of 10 or 25 strangers trying to solve a problem that requires careful, coordinated action. The group dynamics that emerge can be fascinating and the interactions and history of these groups reflect a lot of common real-world social dynamics.
It's interesting as a near-pure meritocracy too. A 15-year old kid might be calling the shots for 24 other people twice his age if he's got the experience and skills to lead.
I can't agree with you that WoW is a meritocracy. Give two people similarly situated characters and it might very well come down to experience, skills, and leadership ability.
However, the ability to arrive at "similarly situated characters" is not distributed in an equitable manner, and that grossly tilts the playing field. For example, WoW trades advancement for time. If you've got 720 hours to kill and spent them in the same calendar years as I did, you were going to end up with a level 60 character and a fair amount of gear (with differences depending on your WoW skill, guild, etc, but negligible compared to the differences between a lvl 1 and lvl 60 character).
Maybe skills would let you lead a raiding guild taking down what was then "top content", maybe they would not. But if you didn't have 720 hours free, perhaps because you had to work three jobs to keep your children fed, then you weren't going to be leading that raid, regardless of your charming personality or skill with stance dance.
(Speaking of stance dance, I have a few years of practice of flipping between Academic Liberal Or At Least Educated By Them and Republican Somewhere To The Right of Atilla The Hun. Sometimes in the same conversation.)
Yeah it's a meritocracy assuming you put in the minimum baseline of time it takes to grind up gear. This takes a lot less time than it used to though. I'm not sure if you played recently but the whole thing has been tremendously dumbed down. Players of average ability can now clear all raid content without a huge weekly time investment.
Nowadays participation mostly depends on gear, not abilities. Parties will seek players with for example "at least 5K GS", which means 5000 GearScore points according to a popular GearScore AddOn which analyzes your equipment.
The Dungeon Finder (with which you can find random parties for random instances) also employs a gear filter, albeit less outrageous than human players.
That said: Some people watch TV, some people put petroleum products on dead plant matter using animal hair, some people go watch fat men sing in classical Italian and they would have to read along in the handy little English guide if they hadn't known the plot for the last forty years. I killed imaginary dragons. It was quite fun at the time.
P.S. Not related to Starcraft, but nice job with the Japanese-learning startup. Cheers to your & your students' success with it.