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"After the Lead Content Designer of World of Warcraft (WoW), Tigole, deemed a new set of rewards ''welfare'' epics, the WoW player community responded in a multitude of fascinating ways. Using rhetorical analysis, gaming studies literature, and a critical analysis of welfare discourse, four rhetorical strategies can be seen in the discourse produced by the playing community. From directly confronting Tigole's statements to lamenting a loss of avatar capital and analyzing the role the changes have on the multiplayer aspects of the game, the rhetoric of ''welfare'' epics offers unique insights into the importance of balance and scarcity in the normative structures of WoW, how players accept and perpetuate the belief that rewards in online games should be ''earned,'' and how WoW's system of rewards has been fundamentally altered since the game's launch."

"MMOGCHART.COM is dedicated to my research in tracking the growth of subscription-based Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). The menu on the left is updated each version with new figures, charts, graphs, and my analysis. My work is wholly independent and free; if you find it useful please consider making a donation via PayPal. If you have any questions, desire an interview, wish to provide numbers, or would like to hire me to consult on a MMOG project, please feel free to contact me."

"During the past year, nearly 16,000 people have downloaded a 40-page economic analysis of EverQuest, Sony's popular online fantasy world of Norrath. "Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier," by California State Fullerton economics professor Edward Castronova, is the No. 1 article in the history of the Economics Research Network, an Internet library of tens of thousands of professional journals and research papers in economics."

"Massively multiplayer online worlds (e.g., EverQuest or SecondLife) constitute a new form of social life that is ripe for social scientific study. Inhabitants of persistent virtual environments spend on average more than twenty hours per week logged on."

"I've spent much of the last year collecting and helping to analyze data scraped from World of Warcraft as part of the largest quantitative study of virtual worlds to date."