Please allow me this moment of introspection and self-pity, because they come all too infrequently. Perhaps it’ll offer a little insight, for those curious, into my deeply neurotic mind.

50 gold coins wasted and some bruised egos all around. It should have been an easy run — perhaps that kind of confidence had made us complacent; arrogant, even. It should have been easy, but everything went to hell for reasons that nobody could agree on. It’s easy to point fingers, of course, and everyone points away from themselves, but sometimes things just aren’t meant to be.

This is the point where I realized — or perhaps I should say, it was the last straw, the last thread on an ever-so-long rope — something which spans further than mere raid groups in World of Warcraft, but also extends to my out-of-game personality. By habit I tend to play a support role in online RPGs, most notably the archetypal healer whose job it is to keep the group alive — stemming, I think, from earlier excursions where the ‘group’ tended to just be a core body of 3-4 friends who’d play online games together, a team I was comfortable and happy enough with to easily support my compatriots.

Sadly, herein lies the problem, an issue which has been troubling me with increasing intensity for weeks, and finally culminated with the realization that no matter how hard I try, no matter what angle I look at the problem from, nothing can change the simple and undeniable fact that I’m simply not built for this — or, more specifically, not willing to put the responsibility and safety of others in my hands, even if only in the context of online games, tenfold when applied to reality. The expectations of others — and, indeed, myself — combined with what eventually becomes crushing stress and self-doubt, thoroughly abandons the realm of what should be considered ‘fun’ and enters into much less favourable places.

To clarify, while I wish I was and certainly try hard to be, I’m just not a ‘team player’; I don’t easily handle the responsibility of being the lynchpin of failure or success upon which others rely, and except when given fairly menial, low-risk tasks, the combined stress and self-doubt accumulate into what eventually becomes an aversion so great that I’m unable to react with anything but an overwhelming sense of avoidance. Indeed, I’m not much of a team anything, being a person who tends to flourish in very small groups, but when at large social gatherings or parties (and I would consider a ‘large’ gathering being that which has more than 5-6 people present), the urge is almost overwhelming to quietly occupy a corner and interact with others as little — and avoid drawing attention to myself as much — as is possible. Indeed, I’m even known to abandon a group entirely, when the combined weight of numbers becomes too much to bear.

The lesson learned, I think, is merely that the greater the concentration of people — whether be it a real-life social gathering or an online game — the less I want to play a prominent part. It’s less a case of apathy, laziness or unwillingness to contribute, and more that I’m just not comfortable leading the charge, having people rely upon me, or being the centre of attention during a group discussion. I mostly just want to do my own thing — the archetypal ‘lone wolf’, as it were — and when I do have to rely on others, do my part in the most subtle, unassuming, and unnoticable way possible. I don’t want praise for being a good team player — I just want to do my part in such a way that, failure or success, neither the blame nor thanks land on my shoulders.

Sometimes, I wonder just how the majority of humanity survives without choking on their own tongues. Today’s supreme redefinition of “fail” is in a class of its own, enough to make me despair for the species. Yes, it’s a fail-group in World of Warcraft.

Now, let me step back for a moment and say that I’ve generally had superb experiences when it comes to level 80, “endgame” dungeon-running, even despite the occasional player who displays, shall we say, less-than-stellar performance. People generally know the game, they know their role, and with very few exceptions, things tend to go pretty smoothly. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for misbegotten attempts at low-level dungeoneering, a tendency I’d blame simply on players being new to the game, but that pretty heirloom gear (adorned with Crusader, no less), tells a different story.

I wish I could make this shit up.

So, cue the contestants: Mentat, my freshly-minted (and already level 21) paladin, the obligatory hunter, and three druids. While normally not a major issue, I knew there’d be a problem with our furry brethren when the ‘tank’ (feral spec, natch) started casting Wrath, the healer used nothing but Healing Touch, the hunter’s pet growled, and Muggins here had to sort the whole mess out by flailing into action as a stand-in tank, despite the sheer ineptitude present. Just as I thought I was in some grotesque parody, things turned from bad to worse — the two druids decided to have a tank-off by both assuming bear form and attempting a most painful display of fighting over aggro — I say this, because the healer and hunter were taking more hits than anyone.

The loot rolling was a similar farce — a situation so laughably awful that it could only have been a cosmic joke, with each player a mere puppet playing a caricature. The hunter rolled need on a dagger with arcane damage, the flea-ridden druid rolled need on a shield, the other bear-druid rolled need one a one-handed DPS mace, and all the time I’m praising the god of random numbers for the fortune to bless me with the winning rolls on both Stinging Viper and Worn Turtle Shell Shield (I wanted Kresh’s Back, but that only ever drops when I’m playing a cloth-wearer). After an almost predictable moment of uncertainty, the group ‘leader’ unsure which direction to go for the seventh time, all proverbial hell broke loose and the fail-druids fell down the gap during an easy jump, and between the two of them managed to aggro half a dozen elites. I bravely jumped down to lend a hand, but of course the healer was nowhere to be seen, and I’m sure you can imagine the outcome of this most ill-fated excursion.

Much as I wanted to stay and collect my booty, I simply couldn’t handle it any longer, and bailed — perhaps some other poor fool would take my place, and learn the unfortunate truth of it all; that at the bottom of a barrel is another barrel, and at the bottom of that one is a trio of druids.

There are nicer places to spend your vacation. Iraq, for example, or an active volcano.

Icecrown, the home of the soon-to-be-dispatched Arthas, bane of Warcraft players everywhere: A frozen wasteland populated by all manner of twisted horrors, towering structures of blackened steel, and — perhaps somewhat eclectically — vikings. It’s not a nice place, and it’s not supposed to be a nice place. It’s not somewhere that you’d take your family for a summer vacation, setting up the beach chairs on the frozen tundra and basking under the plague-blighted sky. It’s the closest place to hell you’ll find in World of Warcraft — Molten Core excluded, I suppose — and it’s already well and truly frozen over.

This is nothing new, a zone which has been around since the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, though recently expanded in the form of three new 5-man dungeons and the long-waited Icecrown Citadel raids. Revisiting this frigid wasteland on my rather unpleasant quest towards Loremaster, I’m struck by a revelation: I honestly believe that Icecrown is the single worst thing to have ever happened to WoW, due to terrible design decisions, and I’m going to tell you exactly why.

First of all, it’s big. Really big. Imagine the biggest thing you can possibly visualise in your mind. Got something in mind? Okay, it’s not quite that big, but it’s close. Getting around this sprawling mass of an area can be tedious at best, even with a fast flying mount, and much of the space honestly seems wasted; it’s as if Blizzard simply tried too hard to provide a grand, epic experience of towering monuments, jagged hills, and sprawling tundra, and simply cranked the experience up to 11. I applaud the effort, but there’s such a thing as “too much of a good thing” — and this is most certainly not a good thing that’s being stretched out from one horizon to the other.

Secondly, and this is my main gripe, phasing. This technology, new with the release of Wrath, allows the world to change dynamically around each player depending on what events had passed in their personal timeline. One player may visit an area and see a village full of happy, innocent fools, ignorant of their impending fate — another player, who has finished the quest chain, may see a burning, ruined wasteland, with skeletons and husks of buildings abound. A great idea in theory, and it can really help bring the player further into the game, enhancing the ‘realism’ of it all; the problem is that it tends to segregate too much. Your friends have all done these quests, and you’ve done these other quests, and you’re all looking at different versions of the world, unable to properly interact with each other. Add to this the frankly abysmal decision to add in 5-man group quests — which are near-impossible to perform alone, and even a challenge for a duo working together — which are also dynamically phased, so you can’t even help out a friend if you’ve finished the quest or aren’t up to that point yet. It’s like playing a single-player RPG, except you can’t complete certain segments without the help of others. Catch 22, indeed.

Finally, the new dungeons — while I haven’t experienced the Icecrown Citadel raids yet, I must express a great deal of displeasure with the direction Blizzard have taken, which is to say, hand out high-level gear for minimal amounts of effort, and then build dungeons around the assumption that everyone is already heavily-geared so artificial difficulty must be imposed. One of the worst offenders is fear — a game mechanic that sends your character fleeing in abject horror, leaving them unable to perform actions, and yet can be countered in many different ways. Not so, say Blizzard, apparently diametrically opposed to such concepts that they themselves invented. Not so, indeed, as any and all fear effects in the Icecrown dungeons — of which there are many, I must add — have been replaced with a similar mechanic which has exactly the same effect, except is now impossible to block or dispel. Add in living bombs and a number of other “forced damage” mechanics and other unpleasant effects — Mirrored Soul and Overlord’s Brand being the sadistic older brothers of King Ymiron’s Bane, while Permafrost is an obnoxious evolution of Keristrasza’s Intense Cold.

Add all these together, and what do you get? You get a zone that hates you; a collection of 140-odd quests and a large selection of dailies, the final “endgame” raid instances before the release of Cataclysm, and a trio of 5-man dungeons, all of which seem to go frankly above and beyond in terms of sadism and artificial difficulty. This isn’t just a place in the game’s world that is difficult, it’s a place where the designers have gone out of their way to force excess difficulty and “challenges” in, using methods that often cannot be avoided or mitigated. This is a place where even the basic mechanics of the game — the rules of the world, as it were — have been twisted and modified, purely for the sake of adding extra forced lumps of adversity. Hell, it seems, truly has frozen over.

It's all fun and games until somebody loses an eye.

Now there’s something I never thought I’d see — thanks, perhaps, to my one ill-fated former experience in the Ahn’Qiraj region, with a pick-up group so mythically inept that it instilled a deep terror of that whole place in my mind, a group so thoroughly uncoordinated and inexperienced that I’m surprised they could even unsheathe their own swords without falling upon them. In retrospect, part of me wishes they had, but I digress.

While being somewhat of a self-indulgent segue and not entirely relevant to the point at hand, given Ahn’Qiraj was designed back in the days when level 60 was the highest rung on the ladder, it does seem like the game is changing — evolving, some may say — into something which is, to put it bluntly, easier. With a mass appeal that already extends across the globe to people who would never normally play an MMORPG, it makes perfect sense for Blizzard to cater to their biggest paying audience, that being the oft-derided casual gamers. As someone who has played WoW on-and-off since launch, and seen the ‘hard mode’ of things before the way became paved for the newer players, I can understand and even relate to the bitterness some feel, with newer players having their hands held through content that the older players had to slog through. We also had to walk to work uphill both ways in the snow, and all that.

In the years since launch, the world (of Warcraft) has changed around us in numerous subtle — and not-so-subtle — ways. With the upcoming expansion Cataclysm promising to rend the world into something new and unfamiliar, sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of the smaller changes that happened ‘under the hood’, so to speak. Once upon a time owning an epic mount was something of a badge of honour, an achievement in its own right, yet now we see freshly-rolled characters charging mounts through the jungles of Stranglethorn Vale with wild abandon, tearing up the roads as early as level 40 on cheaper-than-ever epic mounts, and even soaring through the skies of Outland shortly after their arrival.

Speaking of flying mounts, Hellfire Peninsula has certainly become a lot less of a headache-inducing nightmare compared to previous visits as older characters, and I’m sure Squick — my venerable shaman — has only the happiest Tauren feelings about the whole thing. Stranglethorn Vale and Desolace, once the banes of re-rollers everywhere, are now almost enjoyable. Heirloom gear with bonuses to experience provide a smoother run. City reputation is no longer the stuff of tears and misery. Even the classes are easier to play than ever — I for one am immensely grateful that, not only do shamans have abilities to provide a built-in totem bar, but we also have fewer, more general-use totems instead of a million and one to cover all the minutiae.

In a way, patches 2.0 and 3.0 were more than mere patches — it’s as if we’re playing World of Warcraft 2 and World of Warcraft 3 already, with changes and improvements to the game system happening fluidly and almost inconceivably around us, a perspective driven further home by Cataclysm’s promises to reshape the now rather dusty old-world, which is shoddy and outdated compared to Blizzard’s more recent offerings. Rather than other games — such as EverQuest, which attempted to re-make itself from scratch with a newer engine and modernized gameplay in EverQuest II — it seems as though Blizzard consider World of Warcraft a work-in-progress, a piece of art which is constantly being changed and improved, with the old, ugly parts cut out and replaced as seamlessly as possible to follow the game’s constant, organic evolution.

I can’t help but miss the old days, though. Sure, they were the days when only the best of the best could even hope to acquire any kind of good gear, back when trying to find a group was a case of standing in the middle of Orgrimmar yelling, “LF4M UBRS, NEED TANK!” But no matter how clumsy, how shoddy (at least, compared to Wrath and future promised offerings), how brutally unfair and obnoxiously limiting the old-world was, it’ll still always hold some small place in my heart — a very, very small place. In a crazy sort of way, some part of me will be a little sad to see it gone, when the world is broken and reshaped forever — or, at least, until the next expansion.