I want to be a lone hero

Fantasy MMORPGs cast the player in the role of a hero. They work by making the player believe that he, either alone or in a group, braves great dangers, for which he is rewarded not only with treasure, but also with a sense of accomplishment. For this it is necessary for us to “forget” that when we kill the evil sorcerer, we aren’t the first to do so, and once we are gone the evil sorcerer pops back into existence to be killed by the next hero.

Right now the Burning Crusade is causing me problems. Not just the queues, the lag, or the repeated server resets I encountered last night. But because, with every spawn in Hellfire Peninsula being camped by at least a dozen people, I just can’t manage to forget that I am not unique. And I have the same problems with my blood elf mage in the newbie zones. At one point my mage started his combats by sticking a dagger in the mobs that spawned next to him. Because if he had stepped back and launched a fireball instead, the mob would have been claimed by somebody else in the 3 seconds that this would take.

In the best of cases I group with the other players standing around to kill a specific monster. But unlike other groups, which are formed to be stronger together, I am very much aware that I could have killed that monster alone, I just group so that one kill scores for the quest of several people, relieving some pressure. That is rational, but not very heroic.

The more normal case is that every player just plays for himself, tagging one mob at a time. In practical terms that means that every quest takes a bit longer, because I have to wait for respawns and run around more to find something to kill. But that is not the only impact. Lots of players grinding a limited number of monster spawns also feels a lot more like work than like a heroic achievement.

In the worst case the players start fighting among each other who gets to kill a spawn. The more players are hunting a mob, and the fewer of this mob there are, or the slower they respawn, the easier that happens. People accidentally or on purpose killsteal mobs from each other. People tag several mobs to prevent others from getting them. The event about the opening of the Dark Portal, in the week before the expansion came out, was probably the worst example I have ever witnessed, with players turning on PvP to be able to kill other players, just because those other players wanted to kill 6 demons for a quest too. Situations like that resemble more a food fight among little children than anything remotely heroic.

I play MMOGs because of the interaction with other players, the groups, the guild, the chat, strangers you meet, friends you make, the player-based economy. I wouldn’t want the world to be instanced so that I never meet anyone. But beyond a certain population density, other players start to become annoying. Right now questing in Hellfire Peninsula just doesn’t feel right. I want to heroically fight evil monsters, not treacherously fight other players for the tag.

If the servers were stable enough, I’d escape with a group into the Hellfire Citadel instances. But yesterday that wasn’t really the case, and I’m not too optimistic about the upcoming first Burning Crusade weekend. So I’m currently wondering whether I should spend time this weekend doing quests I didn’t do yet in places like Winterspring or Silithus, which should be a lot less populated.

I want to be a lone hero. But by definition a hero is an above average person. If you stand in a huge crowd of people all doing the same thing as you do, it is hard to feel anything heroic about that. I’m not saying that the narrative of the hero’s journey is not possible in a MMORPG, but I think it requires a better dispersion of players. Right now, due to the expansion, World of Warcraft has problems offering that.