An analysis of the social dynamics of a raiding group

"Leet Noobs: Expertise and Collaboration in a World of Warcraft Player Group as Distributed Sociomaterial Practice" is the title of a doctoral dissertation by Mark Chen for the University of Washington; it can be downloaded from the link at the bottom of this post. Now, I fully appreciate that the title sounds like somebody's parody of academic research; nevertheless, I would recommend it unreservedly for anybody interested in gaming and gaming theory, and, above all, in the way social gaming groups (including kinships and raiding alliances) operate - or sometimes cease operating.

The academic jargon is limited mostly to the opening chapters; what follows is the author's account of ten months spent actively raiding in WoW with the same group, including actual in-game chat logs, and his analysis of the group's social dynamics. Personally, I found it both fascinating and illuminating.

Link: https://digital.lib.washington.edu/resea...sequence=1

I found the whole thing to be highly fascinating.

I doubt many people will read through the whole thing and I skipped some parts myself but the Chapters about the actual in game experiences touch on a lot of similarities I have come across in Lotro, from his recounting of a conversation with a very vocabulary limited person, to his experience in a raid alliance.

Probably some things we can learn from this as well.

Probably some things we can learn from this as well.

My thinking precisely.

Hehe, I bet the guy wasted his year playing World of Warcraft and then in a stroke of genius decided to make it the subject of his thesis.

Sando - Minstrel // Rissa - Burglar // Adelrisk - Guardian // Tember - Hunter

There is no try, there is only hobbits, hobbits everywhere!

Here are a few of the author's observations and conclusions; they apply just as much to LOTRO as to WoW:

• My raid group’s success could be understood through the concept of trust. We trusted each other to play our agreed-upon roles and be responsible for necessary tasks in our raiding network. Again, this trust was based on our collectively accrued social and cultural capital.

• Disruptions and failures required repair work and renegotiation of roles and responsibilities. This repair work was done through multiple communication channels over various timescales.

• Shared, negotiated goals are necessary for the continued existence of an online team. Eventually the raid group broke up. We lost our collective goal of hanging out and having fun. How this happened could be explained in a few different ways, but, primarily, it is possible that the narrowing ways to play the game changed the goals of some of the players to gaining loot and maximizing progress with raid fights, and these differing player motivations could not be reconciled.

• After playing WoW for a while, I came to realize this was a site where people attach deep meanings to their activities and experiences with the game and other players. It became clear that social relationships and connections have a profound effect on an individual player‘s experience with the game and the social and cultural world of the game make playing it feel very different than playing a single-player game.

• Αccess to in-game content was often limited by a player‘s ability to align him or herself with a larger group of expert players, since at higher levels, monsters and quests were not easy enough to overcome alone. This, in turn, depended on successful networking and possessing a high enough reputation,

• Expertise development in World of Warcraft was not limited to an individual player‘s ability to grasp the underlying mechanics of the game. The social aspects—social and cultural capital, social networking—played a tremendous role in whether a particular player was successful and could engage in the various seemingly equally accessible game activities. It was these social aspects that determined whether players were included as participants determining the ever changing sociomaterial practices that defined expertise.

• Playing World of Warcraft occurred in roughly two stages: (a) progression through more forgiving early game content and (b) engaging in technically difficult endgame content. Both stages included disciplined assemblage of social and technical resources to success.

• Shared, negotiated goals are necessary for the continued existence of an online team. Eventually the raid group broke up. We lost our collective goal of hanging out and having fun. How this happened could be explained in a few different ways, but, primarily, it is possible that the narrowing ways to play the game changed the goals of some of the players to gaining loot and maximizing progress with raid fights, and these differing player motivations could not be reconciled.

That's so interesting. I guess there is only so long most people are happy to hang out and have fun before they start to assess what they are getting out of it. I also guess that there are two phases to raiding each raid:

1) when you start on a raid, its easy to make a mistake and wipe, and there is alot of thought required to unlock the puzzle and complete the raid effectively. So you are engaged with the content, its not the end of the world if you mess up, and the reward drops are new and exciting BUT
2) once you are successful a few times at a raid, the raid group will expect to succeed. The content and rewards are predictable and if you mess up you have ruined everyone's evening

So then its more difficult to have fun because the focus is only on 2 things - 1) mainly on what reward you get at the end if any, and to a lesser extent 2) if you mess up and then get blamed for it. In other words you are not having fun going through the process, you are only happy at the end if things go your way.

So what happens after the raid group goes at a raid for a while:
If what you want is fun, then you might drop out as instead of having fun, you're just stressed making sure you don't mess up (and having a very non-fun experience if you do actually mess up).
If what you want is rewards, then you will get fed up having to wait your turn for a drop - lets face it the best that can happen is that you get exactly what you expected before you started out.

This wouldn't matter if just completing the raid successfully was the game goal. Because we have to keep going back to earn drops to get the endgame gear then we have to keep grinding the raid which ratchets up the negative elements of "phase 2" raiding.

If the priority is keeping the group together then it may be that mixing and matching the raids you do will keep things more interesting than grinding the same raid, even though I appreciate that if your goal is to gather rewards for endgame goodies then it will take longer. But on that logic it would appear that greed (or more accurately impatience) for endgame rewards, causing a need to grind raids repetitively in a short space of time is in fact what breaks up the raiding group.

Gimli: Oh come on, we can take 'em.  Aragorn: It's a long way. Gimli: Toss me. Aragorn: What? Gimli: I cannot jump the distance, you'll have to toss me.
[pauses, looks up at Aragorn] Gimli: Don't tell the elf. Aragorn: Not a word.

If the priority is keeping the group together then it may be that mixing and matching the raids you do will keep things more interesting than grinding the same raid, even though I appreciate that if your goal is to gather rewards for endgame goodies then it will take longer. But on that logic it would appear that greed (or more accurately impatience) for endgame rewards, causing a need to grind raids repetitively in a short space of time is in fact what breaks up the raiding group.

This is a problem ascribable to the design of most such games, namely the fact at that at any one time there is just one obvious end-game challenge, making it difficult or impossible to to offer a satisfactory mix of raids. There is of course the option of going back and repeating earlier, less challenging raids, but that's only really feasible as an occasional once-off.  Where I disagree with Chen, in the paragraph quoted, is that though greed for endgame rewards is certainly a factor, I would argue that the going up against the hardest possible challenge and the prestige of having done so successfully are at least as important a factor. In fact, in the case of LOTRO (unlike WoW), the "material" rewards of completing Barad Guldur and Ost Dunhoth are generally regarded as mediocre at best.

indeed, the social capital gained from completing the hardest challenges is not only an important drive for individuals, it is also important to the collective as it can increase social status for the whole group in the larger cosmos of the game.
I would say in Lotro the social capital reward from completing the endgame content outweighs the cultural capital of the loot by a considerable amount.

This poses the problem that inability to do it is not only a problem for the individual, but for he whole group on a collective scale.

The only option then is to gain social capital in other ways.