Instances While Lvl'ing

So, this blog is all about things that interfere with maximizing my fun while playing WoW. That's pretty much it, with a little bit of stories about fun that I've had, so I don't just radiate the negativity. In general, its mostly fun, but you get to hear about the 5% that aggravates me. Lucky You!

And your job is to share your solutions to these same problems (hence the whole real selfish reason for starting the blog, its actually a cry for help from you).

I'll just jump in with my single biggest issue that I feel is preventing me from maximizing my fun.

Running Instances While Levelling.

I'm currently lvl'ing my first toon. I'm in a very new guild, where pretty much all of us are on our first toon, and at 50, I'm a close second place for higest lvl in the guild. So there isn't a huge amount of organization or focus or mission. It pretty much works well for all the members, as we're all reasonably helpful and polite to eachother.

The only place I really look for groups to run instances is from my guild. That's had some success, in that there's a handful of us that have improved our teamwork a bit. The voice chat in the new patch is helping communication a bit (despite the total bubble bursting about the imaginary voices and personalities that I had constructed in my head). Our run in ZF on friday was a testament to that, I had a lot of fun and we did a pretty good job (in my opinion).

Then we had an informal arrangement to get the same 5 back together for another ZF run on saturday night. As it got later and later on saturday, and one of the guys hadn't come online yet, we just let it fizzle and didn't run the instance. Disappointing, as I had picked up the "carrot on a stick" quest on saturday morning, and really wanted to get that speed increase. Even more important now that I did my talent build and got rid of the 2 points I had thrown into the mounted speed increase.

Also, for instances while levelling, I hate that you can go into an instance, get totally wiped, go away for a week or two and lvl up a few notches, come back, and with no improvement in teamwork, totally pwn the instance.

For me, fun is maximized when a team of people work together closely and accomplish something challenging together. Something that the same group of people working as individuals would fail at.

Is this just something to accept about the game? Is there any way to enjoy the instances more while levelling? Should I just grind away and rush to get to the end game where the challenge increases to a point that you have no choice but build teamwork?

How about guilds? Are there guilds out there who do a good job of running instances while levelling? Because I'd love to learn what they do and adopt it in my guild, and if I can't get the guild to adopt it, seek out one of the levelling guilds.

Or what about the "LFG/LFM" interface? I've never used that yet, has anybody been successful with that?

I've got 20 more levels to go, and I'd hate to have to power my way through to 70 before I can enjoy improving my team play.

I was out walking the dog the other day. Any of you herbalists? As I walk, every unique patch of grass or flowers I see, I think about what kind of herb it would be. You think I need to log out for a little while? Either way, back to the dog walk...I was brainstorming how this problem can be solved. Perhaps by influencing my current guild to do more structured instancing, perhaps by seeking out a new guild who already has some structure around instancing, and perhaps by the LFG/LFM interface.

The idea that popped into my head was...I wish Blizz would make instancing a requirement for levelling. I don't know if this is a new idea to the world, but it was original idea in my head when I thought of it....

For each block of 10 levels there will be an instance requirement before you can lvl up to the next block, in a similar fashion to the BG brackets. For example, there could be 5 dungeons in the game that are labelled as "lvl 20 prerequisites" or "lvl 20 merit badge dungeons". And before you can lvl up from 19->20, you need to complete 2 of the 5 dungeons, and each member of your party needs to be in the bracket too, or else you don't get the merit badge.

And maybe since this isn't appealing to everyone, maybe they could have realms/servers that operate this way, similar to how you can choose PvE, PvP, RP, etc.

Plus, they could add a page to your armory profile that shows your merit badges for each level bracket.

Plus add options to LFG/LFM that allow you to specify that you're looking for a "merit badge" group, not just any old collection of multi-lvl players.

And these dungeons would be challenging to complete for players at the "merit badge" level for that dungeon. Perhaps not as hard as the end-game instances, but hard enough to require people to work together, even a little bit, and to learn to play their class a drop better.

Personally, that would help me increase my enjoyment of the game as a person levelling my first character.