How a World of Warcraft Gamer Transformed the Crypto Landscape
After the game developers nerfed his WOW character, he got so mad and did this….
Part I: A Gamer’s Journey
I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007–2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock’s Siphon Life spell.
These are the words of a 15-year-old boy who will later change the course of digital finance.
Unlike most kids his age, his special interests and love for learning made him stand out, often making socializing a challenge.
While most teenagers are busy with routine activities, he was busy solving complex problems in programming, mathematics, and economics. In fact, he was so quick with numbers that he could add three-digit numbers in his head faster than most of his classmates.
Now, instead of trying to fit in with other kids, he found comfort in the virtual world of World of Warcraft.
This was his retreat from the social challenges he faced, a place where he could be himself, free from the usual teenage pressures. When he wasn’t focused on his studies, World of Warcraft became his safe haven.
He played as a Warlock, a class known for dealing damage through spells with a variety of debuffs. Simply put, his character is like Doctor Strange from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), a master of mystic arts and magic.
Around this time, Blizzard, the video game developer company behind World of Warcraft, launched a game patch for their first major WOW content expansion “Wrath of the Lich King” in November 2008 and was eventually rolled out on April 14, 2009.
The patch brought about a significant change to the game, particularly affecting certain character classes including the Warlock’s main ability known as “Siphon Life”.
Before the patch, Siphon Life was a crucial skill during combat, enabling the Warlock to drain health from enemies and deal some form of damage per second (DPS) output.
However, the introduction of the patch transformed this ability. Instead of draining health from enemies, it now healed the Warlock based on the damage inflicted by another spell, which is called “Corruption”.
This game patch had instead buffed the Corruption spell and massively nerfed the Siphon Life skill. This had significantly altered the gameplay for many Warlock users including the character of our young prodigy.
His words….
I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring!
Part II: The Birth of a Vision
After the game changes, he found himself slowly losing interest in World of Warcraft and eventually decided to quit. As the excitement of the game faded, he felt a gap and started looking for something new to fill it.
It was during this search that he came across Bitcoin, marking the start of a new phase in his life.
He went deeper into the rabbit hole of Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, and Blockchain and discovered a recurring pattern.
He noticed the similarities between the gaming world and our current financial system, both are dominated by central authorities.
In World of Warcraft, Blizzard’s decisions greatly impacted the game, just as corporations and financial institutions can make decisions that significantly impact how users interact with financial services.
This centralized control could lead to user dissatisfaction, as he had experienced in the game. To him, this revelation highlighted the necessity for a solution that was not only decentralized but also versatile.
And so, the young genius who once commanded mystical forces in the virtual world of World of Warcraft is now on the journey of making a real-world revolution in digital finance.
He traveled far and wide, met new people, and started to build his vision into reality…..
I went around the world, explored many crypto projects, and finally realized that they were all too concerned about specific applications and not being sufficiently general, hence the birth of Ethereum, which has been taking up my life ever since.
This young man, once a gamer and now a visionary, innovator, philanthropist, and a pioneer in cryptocurrency is none other than Vitalik Buterin. The creator of Ethereum, a blockchain platform that is now the second largest by market cap next to Bitcoin!
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