I’m not entirely following you. Don’t get me wrong, I read it over 4 times but I’m still unsure what you mean. I’m assuming (and correct me if I’m wrong); you are comparing MMORPG as a game that holds less residual effect from that of my fish bowl metaphor.
If that be the case, then allow me to argue my point. Simply because a MMORPG is a game does not necessarily mean it has any less in integrity of that of a fish expressed in my metaphor. Everyone that plays the game has a duel set of missions. The first is that of playing a game; to have fun. The other however, is the meet one’s identifying point, which allows them to associate themselves to something they value; often the personality that blends with the role of who they play. Even the mildest of players who do not respect the fundamental rule set of the denotation brought from the word Role-Playing still act as an entity within a vivid society. Despite the support or lack of playing a role to the character, everyone, weather in MMORPG or in real life identifies themselves to some form of object or clause.
With this said, a society being a mass of people with this same attribute have both intertwining and conflicting interests. If by some form, something in the game dramatically changes, the balance of these interests would become tainted to a personal level. This results in a dramatic change of opinions, which normally moves for the worse, since it invades a person at a personal level.
Think of it this way: In real life, what would happen if I had full control over the stock market and decided to change the value of everything you could buy in your own country from its current value to a fee of no cost. This would result in everyone going to get the products they desire instantly. But within a few weeks, people’s mentality would begin to decay and people begin to lose value for their jobs, their houses, the assets in general. As time goes own, the specified country would appear just as distorted as the minds of those who live in it. Corruption would fill the void quickly and you would have a change of political structure (a change in society). In real life, as hard or easy as this may be to adopt, the same does not apply in a game because the inner politics are replaced by hard coded rule patterns that derived from pre-released development and pre-society expectancies. Yin-Yang is the fundamental rule I’m expressing here. One can not live without the other, and both hold equal importance.
A long time ago, in Ever Quest, I was a player who had the luxury of experiencing a small sample of this. Apparently, the development team changed a feature in the necromancers that was heavily used and not classified as anything faulty. Immediately following the change of this feature, almost every player using a necromancer with a level above 20 gathered up in front of Neriak (city of the dark elves) and went on strike. The numbers were so high; the development team had to get the president of the company to act as a character to sooth the players in real time due to risks of the server crashing. This was a result of a dramatic change to only one class. What if it was changed to all of them?
In Dark Age of Camelot, Mythic Entertainment changed the policy or rather, the very structure of how a person would use the realm ability system found in the game. In addition to this, dramatic changes in the game were made for the better; graphics, realm wars, siege weapons and much more were examples of these changes. A normal person, as did the Mythic Entertainment team, would believe this would be a great idea. But the simple change in how a person used the realm ability system caused many people who became heavily dependant on it to quickly dislike Mythic and go as far as looking for alternative avenues. As a result in a large player drop, Mythic created a new server that harbored the old system. Unfortunately, this server opened only after World of Warcraft released, and now their 3000 login population per server can often be seen as numbers under 200.
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