Insanity on the World of Warcraft forums...

[Khaldun]

In one small, puny way, MMOG designers have themselves to blame for this. Oh, not all the stuff about how they handle Beta, nor even necessarily the massive clustering of stupidity that somehow infests Blizzard's most devoted fanbase, but simply this: because they continue, again and again, to design persistent-world games where the first and fastest levellers/looters/what have you have permanent advantages, where being ahead of the curve matters to those powergamers that care about such things, they have created a near-unstoppable demand among powergamers for early admission to Betas. Reason: because it confers an overwhelming advantage in terms of being the fastest leveller/looter. At the least, because you gain a huge advantage in terms of knowledge of the gameworld and game mechanics. More often, because you and your guildies learn about a bug or exploit and you keep it to yourselves.

The answer to that is to rethink the entire design of MMOGs and the way they deal with persistence. Ain't gonna happen soon, from what we're seeing. So expect every inbred catass to immolate himself on the lawn of an MMOG designer when he doesn't get into Beta, because the sad thing is that for the players for whom catassing matters, Beta matters.