Dungeons Are Hard

Well, for some people. Like me. Other people breeze through them, but they represent a serious investment for me and, worst of all, the difficulty can never be nerfed (at least for as long as they are current content).

I don't mean performing my role in the dungeon. That was difficult at the start of the expansion when, as a healer, mana was tight and damage was reasonably high. However, now I overgear pretty much everything. And, really, even if I consider lower level dungeons on lower level alts, dungeons I don't necessarily overgear, I really never have much trouble playing my character. Dungeons aren't hard for me in that respect.

It's the social aspect that makes it hard, that makes it an investment that I have to weigh every time I queue. I'm not at all bad with people, in my daily life, in my personal life--even in my World of Warcraft life, with guildies and in-game friends. I wouldn't call myself socially awkward or anti-social. I get along with people, by and large.

However, in all those respects, the people are accountable to you in some respect. Even if it's as thin as the knowledge that the interaction is taking place with your real-life person, that's an accountability that puts quite a few limits on socially unacceptable behavior. In that setting, I'm fine with people. 

That, of course, is an overly-complicated way to introduce a pretty commonly-expressed sentiment that people given anonymity will (as a population) act quite a bit worse with respect to social mores.

Let me, though, start at a more general level before getting back to that.

Faking It

Even in "real life," I've become a pretty introverted person. In elementary school and junior high, I was a pretty introverted kid. I was the kid who took a book to school and spent recess sitting alone reading the book, because that's what I wanted to do. In high school, I was much more extroverted and friendly and that extended into college years. However, since then, it's been a slow descent back to introversion. Currently, my natural inclination is to keep to myself and avoid contact.

However, I avoid doing that at times. You can become a hermit, but it's not advisable. Some amount of socialization is healthy and you don't want to end up cut off from everyone. You don't want to be a dark presence in the company of friends, because then you'll be shunned.

So I force myself out of the automatic introversion and chat with people in an outwardly social manner. In fact, I'm so good at forcing myself to do this that people sometimes mistake me for outgoing. But I'm faking it!

This begs the question (and people have put the question to me directly), "What's the difference? How social one is is defined by how one interacts, so how can one plausibly define two identical results differently; one as real and one as fake?"

It's a good question, but I believe I have a good answer. 

The "bad answer" (by which I mean, the one with no explanatory value) is that it feels different. I know what it's like to want to interact and do it naturally and I know what it's like to do what I do today and they don't feel the same.

The better answer, from an explanatory standpoint, is the energy cost. Doing it naturally is effortless, because you enjoy doing it and it's the instinctive action. Faking it, however, requires the mental and emotional exercise of forcing one's self out of one's comfort zone and therefore carries a much greater toll and costs more energy (while generating no combo points).

I can experience this dichotomy even now. I am actually quite naturally social with people I'm very comfortable with. With those people, it's natural and I can interact with them easily for a great deal of time. It costs little, so it takes a long time to become mentally/emotionally exhausted. However, with strangers or casual acquaintances, it's forced and that costs a lot more energy per minute. Doing this exhausts me (again, on a mental/emotional axis) much more quickly.

I'm good at faking it, but my endurance isn't great in this mode. I can seem very social and chatty, but my clock is counting down rapidly.

Was This About World Of Warcraft Or Something?

I was just getting back to that, actually! I "recently" (end of November or so) switched guilds. I was joining the guild of a long-time friend, and several other friends were joining at the same time, but that still meant most people in the guild were new to me. I was leaving a guild of people I had known long enough to be quite comfortable with (including a good friend there, too).

For the first few months, I was faking it. On guild line, in vent, in raid chat...I didn't want to maintain a sullen silence, because no one likes sullen silence, right? I wanted to know the people I'd be spending so much time with per week, but I wanted them to know me, too. I consider myself reasonably interesting and occasionally funny, so I wanted people to know that. So I chatted on all those lines and made my little jokes and banter. It was tiring, though. Not tiresome, but tiring. The raiding was the easy part, the pretending-to-be-what-I-could-eventually-be-once-I-came-to-know-them-better was the part that taxed me. (Also taxing? Reading that hyphenated abomination I just created in the previous sentence.)

It's easier now, as I know them all better and they probably know me somewhat better. I no longer feel like the newcomer with no defined personality. Mission accomplished, but it came with effort.

So, this gets me back to where I started: dungeons are hard. A behavior of mine that I didn't really understand until I began to think about it in these terms now comes clear. Generally when I queue for dungeons, I queue for several in a row. Sometimes, a bunch in a row. There are times when I just want to run some dungeons, for the experience to level up or for gear.

What often ends up happening is that I run the dungeon, it goes well with no conflict and someone re-queues the group once it's finished. I'll watch one person after another re-queue as I hesitate, trying to decide if I will. And then, after saying something cheerful like "Good group, thanks!" I'll drop party and manually re-queue.

That, at face value, simply doesn't make sense, in my opinion. As I noted above, this happens when the run was smooth (so everyone was generally competent at their job) and there wasn't any conflict. I still want to run more dungeons. Why, then, would I turn down an instant queue with a perfectly reasonable group (the kind of group I'll hope to get in my next queue)?

The answer, now I realize, is simply that the social pressure got tiring. Even though I'll still be dealing with strangers in the next run, it'll be a new set of strangers. I can start over...I don't have to keep "being a person" with the same set of people. It sounds pretty strange and I'm probably explaining it with language poorly, but the longer the time spent with a group of people I don't know, where at any moment I may be called upon to interact, the more the toll. Re-queuing feels like a chance to recharge. Even as a healer (I'm usually a healer), my queues are generally not completely instant...more in the 1-5 minute range. That proves to be a nice mental/emotional recharge period. Plus, I get a new group of people. That does help ratchet down how much energy it feels like I've spent, since I'm not trying to extend the time of being nice or interesting or whatever with a group of people, I'm starting it from scratch.

Hopefully, the above paragraph made sense. It makes sense to me, because I know what I mean. Reading it over, I can see how it might not make sense to someone not already familiar with what I mean.

When you add in the knowledge that anyone in the party could be a griefer or that the first adversity (or any random event, really, from your point of view) could turn one or more people into raging jerks, that adds to the cost. The energy isn't only spent when I say something or when someone else says something. Some of the cost is just the presence of other people and that cost goes up when you have no reasonable expectation of what those people will say or do.

That is what makes dungeons hard and an investment. Each queue, I have to decide how much energy I have left for faking it. Depending on what else I've done during the day, I have more or less desire to spend that energy. Running a dungeon with friends substantially reduces the energy cost (indeed, reduces it to about 0, if I'm running with 3-4 other friends). Raiding with friends and guildmembers is about 0 in energy cost.

Running a dungeon with a PUG is costly, though. And until I can solo it, that cost can't be reduced by much of anything Blizzard does.