Behavior in raids – conformation

Raids and guilds are like ‘The Borg’:

“We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.”

From psychology this phenomena represents almost ‘magical’ properties, and I am uncertain as to how to evaluate it beyond the questions it poses. Would a low performance gamer become hardcore by joining a hardcore raid community? Would an awesome PvP-gamer totally loose his ‘mojo’ if she/he continually helps out newbies?

At the same time there is also a social aspect to it that I am much more comfortable talking about as I constantly see this when playing. The moment a group goes social in a positive way the players will immediately try to find common ground. How are we alike? With the positive attitude comes the wish to get along. And once common ground is found there is no stopping the possibilities, and I have on several occasions taken my relations out of the game and into a bar or cafe and actually met the person. Some relationships I still have and nurture and some fade into history, not unlike in real life. But once a good connection is made you will rarely loose it.

On the negative side a good social foundation might also get the same raid group wiping for hours on the same boss even if they should have accepted the fact that there is ‘no way in hell’ they are going to be able to succeed with the present team. All you need is a few blindly positive players along with some insanely hopeful loot-junkies and the conformity can convince the rest of the players to keep at it for hours. Over time I have come to accept that I can get entrapped this way as well, and I usually try to operate with a 3-wipe rule before I give up, possibly pushing it to five if I feel lucky. Problem is that with the LFR-tool in WoW you will always have someone leaving when there is a wipe, and that means you get new members that might be just the ones you need to succeed and thus making it harder to leave if the group has conformed to a certain point.

In general the consensus seems to be that we all want to have fun and we are desperately willing to conform if this makes the fun more likely to happen. Of course ‘fun’ can be different from player to player, but for most gamers these days its about mastering the ‘toon’ you have chosen, to overcome tough game challenges, to win some awesome epic items and to have some fun while doing it.