The Birth of Professional WoW

"Just ask for a Citadel group in general chat. But once you get in the group, go directly to the quest area. People don't fool around."

Thus spake my wife, introducing me to the Argent Crusade daily group quest, and to The World Of Warcraft circa 2009.

Once upon a time you would get a group together for an instance. And that would literally take an hour. And then everyone would slowly gravitate towards the instance, which was ten or fifteen minutes away but would require a good half hour for everyone to arrive.

And then you'd do the instance, and despite the fact that there were only sixty or seventy pulls you'd be in the instance for two or three hours. I once had an unsuccessful Scholomance group that lasted four hours. People would just take their time, then screw up, then take more time to recover from screwing up. There was waiting before everything. At least a minute between every pull.

That just doesn't happen anymore. Instances are done quickly and players get out. Often tanks will simply not stop, immediately going to the next pull after the current pull is dead.

It's wonderful.

There's no reason that the game couldn't have been this way back in 2005. Even though instances were longer players still could have torn through them if they so desired. But they didn't. What's changed?

Well, players are more experienced now, but that's not the biggest reason. WoW is more professional because Blizzard has introduced any number of mechanics to make WoW quicker and more streamlined.

It takes less traveling time to get to an instance now. The instances are much shorter. Daily quests encourage people both to do the instances, and to hurry through them (so more dailies can be done). Meeting stones allow the first two players to the instance to summon the rest of the group. Achievements let ordinary players see how much they have undone in the game, and so encourage people to "keep achieving" instead of spending all day in a single instance.

It's something to keep in mind when you see people playing a game stupid : how people play is heavily influenced by the design of the game itself. Game design brought about the enjoyment of professional WoW. Game design in older MMORPG's also made people stay awake for days on end to nab a rare spawn or craft a special item.