Scalzi posts regarding the advantages of being a straight white guy, here: Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is

In short, the analogy is that life is an MMO and that straight white guys play in easy-mode, with better stats and less aggro.

Not entirely off base... if you were writing, say, a hundred years ago.

To extend the analogy, the situation he's describing is the game on launch day. Since that day, long ago, the efforts of lots of well-meaning admins, players, etc. have changed the game so that a lot of the extra aggro is gone. And that's good - it didn't really serve any purpose and hardly anyone misses it. Sure, maybe a couple bugs cropped up here and there where the previously-easy-mode guy now catches a little bit of aggro too, but it's not out of line with the amount that's still remaining for everyone else and you're never gonna squash every last bug, so people don't worry about it.

And yet the easy-mode players were still doing pretty well, partly because they were the beneficiaries of earlier easy-mode players who passed their resources down the line. So the admins tweaked some of the encounters to level the playing field. Those playing at a higher difficulty level found some of the requirements to get in certain areas reduced, for example (though as usual, the competitive players got most of the benefits and the ones in the worst positions often didn't see a lot of benefit from those changes).

The most egregious change, to a lot of easy-mode players, was the changes to the rate of fire of boss enemies. Upon detecting that they are targeting a player on a higher level of difficulty, many boss characters are extremely slow to fire, and first have to fill out a tremendous amount of paperwork in a process that can take months. By contrast, should that boss target a player on easy mode, it fires without hesitation or mercy, leading many easy-mode players to say "wait, tell me which one of us is on easy mode again?"

Worse yet, the nature of the nerfs means that the discrepancy is felt most keenly by those players who are ostensibly on easy mode, but not really enjoying any of the benefits - they didn't themselves gain any swag from their earlier easy-mode predecessors, they don't have a competitive advantage in the debugged environment, and due to things like the rate-of-fire nerf (and extra loot provided for guild actions with a larger proportion of high-difficulty players, etc.) being changes to the rule-set of the game as a whole, are they really easy-mode anymore? Sure, on average the easy-mode player is better off, but that's the product of a few being extremely better off and the majority having a small or no basic advantage, so...

As you can guess, I'm more philosophically inclined to hunt bugs than to break out the nerf-bat.

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