My experiences in random instances and raids in WoW has been pretty positive recently. I’ve been in groups with some people who weren’t good players but haven’t seen any of the type of bad behaviour that makes for amusing blog posts. That’s a good thing, although sad for the blog posts.
Still, here are a couple of PUG stories.
Suddenly, RP
The instance is “Gate of the Setting Sun”, set on a wall-top garrison that is under siege by the mantid hordes. My group had been competent but silent, making our way through the various trash and boss spawns in a business like way.
Then we get to the section (shown above) where the soldiers are trying to fight through enemy ranks so that they can light a signal fire to raise the alert. One NPC offers to try to run the gauntlet.
Suddenly one of my group pipes up on group chat: He was going to retire in two weeks time
Another player adds: And his girlfriend is pregnant
Then someone else adds: they just got engaged to be married
And that was it for group communication for the whole of the instance. I like to think everyone found it as engaging as I did.
Apparently anti-magic shield prevents magic
In another group, LFR this time, I was healing in a fight where there are a lot of enemies, and several of the mobs can buff all the NPC to make them do more damage (Wind Lord Mel’jarak). So it’s down to healers (and anyone else) to debuff them, and priests have an AE debuff which makes them quite handy in this fight.
Anyhow, after the first wipe, the tanks were complaining about lazy priests because the debuff hadn’t been dispelled. I thought this was odd because I knew I’d been casting it and seen it not taking. Then I realised both the tanks were death knights, which means they both had an AE anti magic shield which had probably been covering the NPCs as well as the players.
“It will work better if you don’t put up anti magic shield,” I said.
There was silence. We killed him next try. (Note: I don’t know for sure that I was right, but I think it’s quite likely.)
Welcome to Spinksville! 
I had a good laugh about the anti magic shield story. I’ve so been there before.
Anti-magic Zone only affects raid and party members. Ant-magic shell only affects the DK. Neither spell will affect your success of Mass Dispel on enemy targets. What likely happened is if your group didn’t CC two of the three healer mobs, one probably reapplied the group buff immediately after you dispelled it, and given the cooldown on Mass Dispel, good luck keeping up with two mobs.
See http://www.wowhead.com/spell=51052 and http://www.wowhead.com/spell=48707 for details on the DK abilities.
I’m thinking the lack of drama may signify a maturing community. While that’s good news for the players it may not be good news for the franchise which depends on a large influx of clueless newbies and brash brittle achievement-mongers.
I’ve written before that OMG NUUB Y U NO HAEL? behaviour is the second phase of newbyness, where you’ve gleaned enough knowledge to believe you’re doing your job right so failures must be because of other people.
At least there are still Death Knights proudly waving the second phase noob banner!
I would like to disagree with Stabs. At least in regards to the matureness – or rather the nature of it. Lately i’ve spend many hours in low’ish level dungeons, and the players have not been mature in regards to age/knowledge of the game, but have been very mature in their use of party chat.
Maybe I’ve just been lucky compared to Cata. Next week will tell, im planning to start pvp’ing then