It’s considered pretty douchebag behavior to lie there relaxing while the healer runs back, sits down to get some mana, rezzes you, heals you up, then sits down again to get some more mana.

If the rezzer is right there alive and well, then it’s a waste of time making everyone wait while you run back. The only time you need to do so is if there is no one alive to rez you.

I’ve had people run back mid-boss-fight and save the day, thanks, random warrior in Grim Batol who died twice but enabled us to finish the fight.

This specific quality of the playerbase — the arrogance and aggressive one-upmanship and cookiecutterizing of what’s considered to be good– is what has turned me off from LFG, and overall decreased my play time.

Sometimes, you don’t get ressed even if you normally would but it is usually due to two reasons:
1) The ressers decided to be rude to you (either they’re just rude or they are fed up with your behaviour).
2) The ressers are busy; res takes about 10 seconds and some time to restore mana – if there is no pause between combat or if it diverted their attention from other group members who are pushing forward, they might not be able to res you.

As for the community in WoW I agree with others that it’s super-competitive. We tolerate zero pressure re: progression in the guild – the game is a game and we play to have fun not to achieve any goals/timetable set by Blizzard or any other players. We recently recruited someone after running some heroics with them and in the end it didn’t work out – they left since we’re not running heroics often enough for the VP. No hard feelings on our side and understandable but for me personally and the other leaders in the guild this almost fanatical drive towards progress is just something alien to our idea of a game.

The game simultaneously encourages group play but at the same time sets players against one another. The attitude from Blizzard has been a bit backstabby to the people/players who pay them money. I think people are starting to wise up and leave. Not in great masses but enough that Blizzard had to turn LvL1-20 free and give free weeks to the ones who left.

This is because the playerbase, culture, and devs all have put forth a mighty effort to belittle anyone that is not perfect. The word ‘bads’ and ‘fail’ and ‘don’t stand in the fire’ go along with ‘hardcore’ and ‘hard modes’.

Combine this with mathematical matrices required to gear/enchant properly with an addon that analyzes all of that into a nice neat number – and if you aren’t high enough – then you don’t measure up.

Further on top of this add in a built in ranking system that shows your ‘overall gear level’ and fights that are tuned so tight at the high end that the overall description of the encounters is ‘synchronized dancing’.

Put all of this together in a pot and you get an MMO where

a) The rest of the gaming world considers the worst part of the game not the game – but the players

b) Players that are so paranoid of being labeled ‘a bad’ that they are paranoid and at the same time vicious to others in an attempt to prove how much you are ‘a bad’ before you can label them.

And here is how pervasive that this culture is – 3 out of 4 of the WoW *specific* blogs that I read have talked about ‘the bads’ (yes just like that – or ‘a baddie’) just in the past 2 weeks.

Words matter – they carry weight – and this kind of culture is self destructive – when asking what will kill WoW – it won’t be the gameplay – the game is fun – it won’t be Blizzard – it is the players themselves – although I put Bliz at a close second as they encourage this culture – just look at the names of the achievements – and yes I know that they are ‘sarcastic’ – but Bliz is the authority figure in this relationship and when they use the terms they legitimize them.

And yesh on the grinding thing. I figured out that between hyjal dailies and running instances on two characters, I could be playing for several hours each night just doing “Chores”. Bugger that for a game of soldiers, I’ll do that if I’ve nothing better to do, but if something more fun comes along, well, it’s a game!

On the other hand, if everyone in the group is that competent and thoughtful you probably won’t NEED to take turns rezzing