I started a discussion on The Consortium’s forums about the comparison between them and the current ongoing global protests that started with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Occupy Wall Street is a people-powered movement that began on September 17, 2011 in Liberty Square in Manhattan’s Financial District, and has spread to over 100 cities in the United States and actions in over 1,500 cities globally. #OWS is fighting back against the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process, and the role of Wall Street in creating an economic collapse that has caused the greatest recession in generations. The movement is inspired by popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, and aims to expose how the richest 1% of people are writing the rules of an unfair global economy that is foreclosing on our future.

– http://occupywallst.org/about/

As far as I can see – keeping in mind I haven’t given it too much thought or research – it’s about exposing how 1% of the population owns and controls the majority of the World’s wealth and power, while the less wealthy or less fortunate suffer to pay their daily bills.

I got some great feedback from the forum and here are some fun quotes to read through:

I’m corrupt in WoW. The amount of anti-competitive practices I engage in while playing would land me in a federal penitentiary for 20+ years in real life.I was once told, “Dude, if there was an SEC in WoW, you’d be perma-banned.” To which I responded, “Dude, if there was an SEC in WoW, I’d send them all a chopper, a stack of fortune cards each week, dwarven kegs, and blood elf strippers.” Don’t rage; be the 1%. – Stede.

The biggest difference that I can see is that the OWS movement seems to take their biggest issue with the way that money seems to be directly linked to political influence and “power”. Are we perhaps in some sort of economic 1%? maybe, but we are by no means calling the shots as far as the entirety of the World of Warcraft is concerned. We can’t bend the TOS or bribe GMs into giving us favourable ticket decisions. At best – we have a strong, unified voice as an informed, reasonable, and well-intentioned community.

– Kathroman.

We bargained with the most vicious of sellers, took advantage of the weak, sought out the most rare of recipes, and constantly insured the lowest possible prices for the people of WoW while making a measly 100-3000% profit for our troubles. We are the prime movers of the server economies. They complain endlessly that things are overpriced, they don’t have enough gold to buy my Swift Spectral Tiger and it isn’t fair, or that getting gold requires work and that they should be given more! And without us they wouldn’t have access to very much of the things that make the game fun, for a price. So how’s it feel to be part of the 1% in this game? Pretty damned good. You?

– Zerohour

It’s nice to be part of the 1%, but you don’t have to be corrupt or egoistic to keep up. Sure, if you want to max out your potential, you don’t take hostages and everyone’s your enemy. But on the other hand, if you are TOO aggressive, things like on my server will happen: the “working class” gets pissed and flames every of your chars.

– Thanateros

I also made a poll on the forum where people could vote about how much gold they had. It’s quite a fun idea to get a very rough estimate of how much gold we “collectively control” between us on the forums, and I must admit the results were quite surprising.

So far we have had 122 voters, which is only about 17% of the active forum base, but pretty impressive for only 1 day duration so far.

The poll options weren’t ideally created, it was done rather hastily and just for fun by me, but by adding up the maximum possible result per category (so 500,000 gold from the 100,00 gold – 500,000 gold option) and then only the minimum possible result for the last category (4 million gold maximum even though we have some members with 4-6 million gold *cough* freaks *cough* haha) this was the result:

170.5 MILLION GOLD!