What happens in the dungeon, stays in the dungeon
What happens to you when you go in a dungeon? Or maybe I don’t want to know… moving on…
Recently, in the context of my musings related to being a long-time video gamer but a newer MMO player, I’ve posted about fail MMO groups and about getting corpse camped in PvP. Today, I’d like to talk about an experience I recently had in World of Warcraft dungeons, also known as instances. Please forgive my indulgence… as a social scientist trained to observe human behavior, I am fascinated with watching the group dynamics in MMOs. The topic is so ripe for research.
My first time (in a dungeon)
My very first experience in a WoW dungeon was a fail. I was on a lowbie tauren druid (around level 15, I think), and Jacob convinced me to try an instance on my own. (Since everybody I knew in game was playing much higher level characters, I didn’t know anybody to group up with.) But I used the Dungeon Finder tool and got assigned to a random group of people. I was in the dungeon for maybe one minute, and I had no idea what to do. I died quickly, and I didn’t know how to get back. I whispered Jacob, and he said something about how I had to re-enter the instance to rez. He identified the dungeon I was in, and tried to give me instructions for going back, but I got lost, nerd raged, ignored the party leader yelling “DRUID! Come back!” at me in chat, rezed at the graveyard, and decided I wouldn’t do any more dungeons anytime soon.
My enlightened return to the dungeon
Months later, a few people convinced me to try dungeons again. I was much more experienced in WoW by that time, and went in one with an experienced friend. Suddenly, when I saw how easy they were and how much XP and gear you could get in payoff, I couldn’t get enough of them. A few days later, I ran a dungeon with somebody in guild. I didn’t know him personally, but I felt good knowing that I would be with a guildie. Things were going along well until we arrived at the last boss. We worked and worked at killing him, and he had no health left, but no matter what we did, he wouldn’t die! A group member submitted a trouble ticket, hoping that Blizzard would respond very quickly, but they did not. He then suggested that everyone die, rez, and try again. We tried that, but he still wouldn’t die. Eventually, we collectively decided to leave the group while lamenting the weirdness and thanking each other for the good try. We never finished the dungeon. He dropped the ticket. We never determined what happened. That should be frustrating, right?
Dungeon fail, not group fail
In this case, the game itself was “bugged.” I have done that same dungeon twice since the fail, and have not seen the same issue. People have certainly played it many times before me. Only Blizzard knows (or, perhaps, doesn’t know) why it happened, and perhaps it’s happened more than once. Whatever the reason, the fail was based on the game itself, not on the players, and I can’t believe what a difference that made in how I viewed the experience. In the incidents involving the annoying corpse camper and the fail Goldshire-area group that I’ve discussed in previous posts, I completely stressed out. But with the dungeon problem, I think that the group dynamic made all the difference. We were respectful and supportive toward one another, despite our shared frustration. If we had blamed each other, abandoned each other, or taken out excessive nerd rage on each other in some other way, I think I would have logged for the night, ran to bed, and pulled the covers over my head.
Groups in the dungeon (and on the playground)
I need to qualify this discussion by saying that I’ve heard stories from more experienced WoW players explaining that dungeons are much easier now than they used to be. I also have seen a few dungeon fails in my relatively limited experience, like when the tank leaves the group, or when a group member gets left behind. That all said, it seems to me as though the group dynamic in a dungeon is more cooperative than in a BG (or in Goldshire, when you’re not ERPing! haha!) Perhaps this is because all the people in the group are focusing on the same goal: killing the same NPCs. But then, how is this is different than many BG groups in which the BG chat is used to insult the other players on your side; isn’t the goal there to defeat the opposing side as well?
Jacob/Gameronomist/Ace and I discuss all the time how games parallel RL. People have opportunities to work together in all MMO settings. For information science researchers, it would be interesting to find out what factors influence whether people choose to work together and encourage group members, or decide instead to call them “f*****g idiots” in public chat, abandon them, camp them, or whatever other bad behaviors they choose to exhibit. There is an existing body of research about small groups in psychology (I know this because I once took an undergraduate course called “The Psychology of Small Groups”), but there is something different about in-game group behavior. It’s live and it’s got XP/honor/gold at stake, just like RL. But it’s (sometimes, although not always) anonymous. There are probably other factors that are different too, but I can’t think of them right now because (1) they need to be studied so we can identify them and (2) I really want to finish this post so I can go run a dungeon or two.
In the end, public behavior in MMOs all comes back to what we should have learned in kindergarten: play nicely with others. Unfortunately, it seems like too many gamers stayed home sick that day.
In closing (and I mean it this time), below is a screenshot of my mage in the Auchenai Crypts instance. For the record, I didn’t know anybody else in the instance with me, we killed everything, I didn’t die a single time, and the only time anyone in the group used chat was at the end, when one player said “cyas.”
MMO group experiences can be positive, even when the game goes badly.
Ding! You’ve leveled up! Please see your local librarian for training.

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