warcraft community demographics

I spend a lot of time thinking about different aspects of Warcraft and quite often wonder about the real people who play WoW.

Typically, gamers are stereotyped (unfairly) as Star Trek liking, basement dwellers who need to get out more. This is a rubbish assumption (as stereotypes tend to be), but it makes me wonder: with so many players in the World of Warcraft are there any commonalities? You'd think there MUST be.

The normal stuff like age and gender are often discussed, but how educated are we on average? Do we hold a certain type of job? Do we like certain films? I'm excited about the new Star Trek movie... are you?

Can you imagine the marketing we'd be subjected to if ad agencies knew this stuff? Wow. I'm feeling a little sick just thinking about it... billboards in Stormwind FTL!

ptr, not interested

The warcraft blogosphere has been abuzz lately with post after post regaling us with details of x or y on the ptr. It's interesting, but I just don't care to read it.

I think some of the incoming changes are sweet: I'm stoked about dual-specs and excited for the raiders who will (hopefully) have some more challenging content to work through. But I don't want to know every little detail before it comes out - I like the surprise, dammit!

With Burning Crusade I was still (sorta) new and didn't really know there was a whole community of sites reporting on warcraft news so I wasn't disappointed when it hit. With Wrath, however, I was already knee deep in WoW news (WoWInsider is on my daily read list) and let myself get all the details upfront... I think it kind of hurt the experience for me (the jormungar was out of the bag). Since then I've been staying away from the pre-release news.

Good on you guys for hitting the PTR and testing, we all owe you some gratitude. It's not for me, though, I'll just keep leeching off your hard work.

Good hunting!