So, i’ve taken up WoW again. This is the fourth extended stint i’ve had in the game in its over five years of existence. Checking one day, i found that i’d been awarded a free week’s game time during an anniversary promotion. Tried a whole new character, found that the leveling pace had become very quick, and then found the Dungeon Finder.
The Dungeon Finder is a new and improved system for finding groups for the more difficult and more lucrative encounters in the game. Because of expansions and the nature of RPG leveling, the lower level group encounters (aka “instances”) have been a wasteland. Most players have at least one avatar that’s advanced to maximum level, are not motivated to create more characters and have no need to revisit lower level instances, even though many of them are still entertaining for characters of appropriate levels. (The current expansion in development plans to address this overall problem by redesigning early play zones, which will probably work, at least for a while.) What the Dungeon Finder does is facilitate the formation of balanced groups, but moreover, it draws from a wider population to form the groups. The architecture of the game separates the player base into servers, and there is normally no contact between players on different servers, but recent innovations have allowed multi-server grouping for instances. So the 1% of the population who want to run a low-level dungeon on your server is combined with the 1% on all the other servers and now it’s just a queue of up to a half-hour.
So the Dungeon Finder, having restored the fun of leveling a character for me, has essentially kept me playing through this stint. It’s starting to wear on me now, though. i have kind of a love-hate relationship with WoW; while playing MMOs has filled gaps in my life, especially in the rougher periods, it often frustrates me. This is the problem: in theory the MMORPG, along with the gameplay, presents a means of social interaction. In practice, said social interaction is chiefly with 14 year old ADD sufferers, or it just seems that way; gamer culture seems to have evolved to encourage this mindset among players of all ages. In the context of instance running, they do things like try to boss the whole group around, rush through instances at a break-neck pace without giving the other members adequate prep time, try stupid shortcuts that too often fail and put the group in danger, use boring tactics just because they require no thought and they happen to work, skip bosses because it’s too tedious to get to them and the individual feels the reward inadequate for themselves. Most of all, though, they yell and bitch at each other for the slightest perceived shortcoming or most minor of failures.
i’ve had a history of having to deal with group dynamics in the game, especially for the really big undertakings that required cooperation of up to 40 players at once. For the most part, in my own dealings i tried to maintain some standard of conduct, ethics, mutual respect. Not being raised up in the culture that found rude behaviour commonplace, i came down pretty hard on people who refused to meet my standards and that just got me in trouble more often than not. Because of the server population limitation, there were consequences to not getting along with people; some notion of reputation applied. In the present experience, though, all that’s out the window, as there is no consequence to being rude in a Dungeon Finder group. In this system, you’re likely never to see the same people again, so to the kind of sociopaths i’m thinking of, it doesn’t matter.
i had an old friend from engineering school who had a theory that anyone who depended on the internet as a means of human contact, as opposed to face-to-face activity, could be depended on to be essentially damaged. i would be interested to see if he still holds this opinion, 12 years later, but my continuing experience has mostly borne it out. Except for the dilemma – i keep coming back to MMOs, even though i have to take shit from little kids. How damaged am i, really?
Some relevant articles. (mostly from WoW.com)
Escaping the Vortex of Suck
I’m so sick of people whing about bad PUGs
Know Where You’re Going: How LFD Killed Navigational Awareness
Using the LFD to level
How the Dungeon Finder beat Gearscore
Dungeon Finder – Becoming Part of the Problem
World of Warcraft’s new dungeon finder just made life worth living again
