... and my rogue now stands mean and wicked with 7 pieces of Nightslayer armour (Tier 1) and 5 pieces of Bloodfang armour (Tier 2), together with deadlier daggers to retire my well-serving Felstrikers. The cumulation of lots of spilled blood and hundreds upon hundreds of gold in repair bills.
Molten Core. Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj. Blackwing Lair. Zul Gurub. And even a few steps into Temple of Ahn'Qiraj and Naxxramas.
Places I previously never dreamt about reaching, made accessible via the cooperation of a raiding guild. This gameplay experience has completely transformed my take on WOW; what was previously a shallow eye on the technical mechanics of the game is now a deeper feel for aspects that are not programmed into the game itself - sociality. Ross Mayfield has a terse passage on the same topic I am touching, but I want to dive deep into the nitty gritty of it all.
I chose to raid in order to explore new locations of WOW. Having achieved that now, I found that in itself was actually not the thing that made a deep impact on me. What amazed me rather, was the level of professionalism (take that word loosely) the guild must maintain in order pull off the intricate and complex coordination required to overcome the unqiue challenges each stage of a dungeon throws at us. Raid dungeons are extremely difficult, and demand for each participant to be highly knowledgable and proficient with the class s/he brings to raid - incompentent players need not apply. It is no small feat to get 40 people to practise their individual sequences in orchestration for a fight. It takes heck alot of keen observation, analyzing reviews on failed attempts, and creative suggestions to determine what is the next path of action with the highest probability of success. The ratio of failure : success is a very high one, and anybody not prepared to accept such consequences will find it incredibly demoralising and even sometimes outright depressing. Blizzard has some pretty effective ways for defeating the human spirit.
And it is here where one will begin to witness the many social issues creeping in, and claiming the larger portions of one's concerns over the game itself. And this is where I slowly begin to believe that Blizzard has not done a good job in building healthy end-game content.
Back in normal gameplay, dungeons are typically attempted in parties of 5, and some with a raid limit of 10. These dungeons are pretty difficult due to the fact that most of the time one groups up with strangers (PUG - PickUp Group), and there is no good way for measuring and testing their level of competency; blunders are always in excess supply (sometimes experienced players can also make mistakes). As players get better at their trade, along with the aquiring of better gear, these places eventually become too easy and boring.
Blizzard's answer to keeping things "fresh and challenging" for the PVE scene is to simply up the raid count to 20 and 40 and design mobs with thicker skins and fickle aggro (let's face it - the basic key to any fight is to have the mobs hating the tanks, and healers making sure the tanks survive, while the DPSers deliver AHAP AFAP withou stealing aggro). Stacking them together to prevent "shortcutting" (although I don't know about the deal with Onyxia...), and we have a dungeon that requires committment of some 5 to 6 exhausting hours when things do not turn out as desired.
As mentioned above, failures are aplenty. And failures mean delays in progression - retry, again and again. Delay means time is running out. As time stretches people will eventually drop out of the raid, leaving gaps that equate to lesser output and lower performance. Too few people and the raid is called to a close. Frustration abounds.
Human emotion is a weird thing. We possess a brain that can think things through logically, but emotions runs the opposite way and delivers us with fairly misplaced logic most of the time. In the situation described it is way too easy for players committed to staying feel some form of resentment towards those who dropped out with brief notice. The situation does not improve if said players somehow appear more committed to dungeons with Farm status, or the inverse with players uninterested in dungeons where there is no longer any gain (be it gear or reputation). Mistrust and misunderstanding seep in to distance relationships.
What Blizzard, and many gamers, had forgotten to do is to draw clearer lines inbetween the casual-hardcore continuum. WOW is a computer game, played by people mostly in the comfort of their homes. The level of difficulty in end-game content is hardcore; the professional discipline required is no joke. Trying to instill such discipline into people who are not physically congregated together is sometimes like trying to conduct Physcial Training to a platoon via the Internet. The game being a game, cannot be seen as something with priority trumping real life issues. And who does not have real life issues to attend to? Vehicle, school, work, family, illness, friends, travelling, housing. The list goes on. People are responsible enough to know what they need to attend to. Seldom is gaming the first. In other words, your gaming buddies take backseat. The result? A "dropout" is perceived as irresponsible or selfish towards the guild.
This is a very real trap that many people fall into. And just about every raiding guild in WOW will face this, time and again.
Blizzard has recognised these social ills and in effort to lessen the sour relationships have implemented mehcanics like quest-based gear, 25-player cap for Burning Crusade dungeons, etc. However, alot is still left to the players and guilds to decide just how they want to play their game, and therefore I believe it is imperative to know this factor in their hearts:
This is just a game. Don't hate others for being responsible to their own lives.