World of Storcraft

Many of my storage buddies are World of Warcraft addicts or recovering addicts at least; I've recently fallen back off the wagon after seeing the videos for the next expansion and was inspired to start playing again.

Actually levelling a character in Warcraft has many similarities with the world of storage management and administration; it is mostly a matter of repetitive grind, repeating processes over and over again. Yet for some reason, us addicts seem to enjoy it. When I consider many of buddies who play, most of them are fairly senior and have moved away from the daily grind of storage allocations and obviously have had to replace it with another regular grind.

Pretty much the whole of the Player versus Environment (player versus machine) content is actually a simple decision tree;  if this event, trigger this action etc and at one point, there was functionality built into the Warcraft scripting engine to allow whole encounters to be automated but when Blizzard released the first expansion, they removed much of the functionality which allowed play to be automated and the decisions now pretty much always have to be driven by a human.

Why? Because using an automated engine allowed an unfair advantage to be developed and could have led to an escalating war of Bots as opposed to human beings; machines are much better at reacting and responding to simple decision tree based events than humans but where was the fun in that?

But this is precisely what we want to get to in Storage Management; we want fully automated storage management, tools like FAST etc are key and we certainly want decent scripting interfaces to allow us to build our own automation! Actually perhaps Blizzard should get involved because once all the Lun monkeys are freed from the repetitve grind of storage allocations, they'd be freed up to play Warcraft and further fill their coffers!