These Pretzels are Making Me Thirsty

Shut up, Tesh. I am perfectly capable of thinking of ideas for posts without you coming in here with ideas to argue against or explore further.

It's a peculiar problem for "live" games that are expected to mutate over time... and player expectation is that it will mutate to their taste.

People like salt. It's a great substance. Makes food taste more. Tasteless soup? Add salt. Tasteless anything? Add salt.

But flavor is something we get used to. Like most things. People who eat spicy food get used to spice. People who eat salty food get used to salt. It ceases to taste salty. Companies did the only sensible thing when competing with salt-addicted customers: they added more. And more. Before long the level of salt in prepared foods was enough to kill a bear at 300 yards, so the FDA tried to step in. But that's beside the point.

Salt is analogous to something in WoW. Maybe it's mount speed, teleportation, or disambiguation of quest objectives. Something that has been desired, and justifiably, since we need salt to live. Gold? Maybe it's experience gain. Blizzard adds salt since that's what we want. Then we get used to it and need more salt. And more. Eventually some high and mighty know it all Pollyanna* who knows better than you comes along to say that this is bad. I guess in this analogy I'm the FDA, except remarkably with even less funding. Hey Congress, a hand here!

In real life I don't eat a lot of salt. My family is in the habit of cooking and we're not major users of the salt shaker for most foods. As a result, we're not desensitized to salt. And so we don't use as much. And so on. Now sugar, I like sugar. Chocolate and... chocolate. Okay maybe I just like chocolate. I'm sure this fits into the analogy somehow. But give me too much salt and I'll feel sick, with too much being a lower amount than for other people.

Have you ever eaten pure salt? It doesn't taste very good. My brother once missed lunch when he was in grade school and somehow got a bunch of salt packets, which he then ate because he was hungry. He got very sick. Pure salt just isn't very good. Added to food it is great. But by itself, not at all.

I think WoW just doesn't have enough food for all the salt it has been putting in it.

* Did you know there are poor children who have never even gotten to play a MMO? They'd love to have the WoW that we keep whining about. But just next door are an elderly couple who may not even own a computer and what do I do to help them with their horrible deprivation? Nothing.

P.S. If the title makes no sense it's because it's from a show about nothing.