Instances shouldn't just be mini games

Some days you have good pugs, some days you have bad pugs; some days you have pugs that make you angry, some days you have pugs that make you sad. Today I had one of the latter.

I queued up to tank normal Sethekk Halls on my death knight. Even though my death knight tanking involves a lot of flailing around as I still can't always decide on which ability would be best to use next, things went quite smoothly overall, until we got to the area with the trash mobs that fear... I died, the rest of the group got feared into all directions, it was a wipe.

The healer left the party and we queued up for a new one... just to get the exact same guy back a minute later. When someone asked him why he had left, his response was:

"Because we wiped lol, I dont have anything against u guys"

Another party member responded with "??", which reflected my own feelings pretty well. Does this guy also log off every time he dies while playing on his own? Or does he have a different version of the game where dying in an instance presents him with a pop-up that says: "Game over, press ok to start a new game?"

I mean, as much as I hate it, I can at least vaguely understand the idea that some people are so used to steamrolling everything that the slightest hitch makes them want to quit, but this guy seemed perfectly happy to continue with us after he had rejoined. He seriously made it sound as if quitting when you wipe was just some sort of compulsion that he simply had to follow. It made no sense to me.

We should have been able to continue at this point, but two of the dps had decided to port out of the instance and started questing instead. At first we waited for them, then I made a small pull that the three of us that remained should have been able to handle, but the healer had gone AFK without a word and we died again. Then we spent the next fifteen minutes or so mucking about as people left, disconnected, new players joined but the old ones couldn't be arsed to actually port back in and rejoin us... it was somewhat infuriating, considering that we could have continued so easily if everyone hadn't run off to do something else the instant we had that first wipe.

Finally we got a full group again, and everyone but our retribution paladin was back in. The pally told us that she was doing an escort quest and would rejoin us later. /groan. (I would have considered booting her, but I had already used up a kick to remove a DCed player from the group a few minutes earlier.) Nonetheless we managed to move on eventually and cleared the rest of the instance without any further problems.

Ikiss dropped his Crow Wing Reaper and my eyes got wide at the thought of filling all those sockets with Northrend gems, but the paladin rolled need on it as well and won. I politely asked why she had needed since she was using the heirloom axe anyway, to which she just replied with "I'm so dirty" and dropped group. I thought the average player was supposed to be way past high school age... /sigh.

Still, the thing that stuck with me the most was the massive grinding halt we came to halfway through the instance, when our first healer left "because we wiped lol" and everyone else immediately ran off to do something else, even though they stayed in the party. It really made me wonder if the dungeon finder wouldn't simply be a lot better without the teleportation feature. Keep everything else, just make it so that moving to the instance actually requires at least a little bit of brain power - even if you put some sort of summoning stone right inside the instance portal so you don't have to wait for every single person to make the run - and force players to actually move to the instance for real.

I bet that a lot of people wouldn't drop group over every broken nail if they actually had to invest at least a few minutes into moving their arse to the dungeon and if they knew that dumping the group would leave them sitting outside the entrance, possibly in the middle of nowhere, and not take them conveniently back to whatever else they were doing.

At the moment queuing up for an instance is sort of like playing a game of Bejeweled during your lunch break - one button press to join, one button press to leave, and it makes no difference to what you were doing before. I don't think a dungeon run should be like that though - it should be an activity in the world you're already playing in and affect that accordingly. Want to go to an instance? Well, then you should actually have to go to that instance. Doesn't that sound absurdly self-evident when put like that?

It would add a couple of minutes to each of our runs for sure, but I'm almost certain that we'd make that time up again with people being a little less likely to leave on a whim, so you wouldn't have to wait for replacements after every minor hiccup. (And maybe people wouldn't want to kick quite so easily either, knowing that they might have to go back to the summoning stone to get a replacement in. The horror!)