But It's My First Day

It's hard to say what makes a game good; one school of thought says the ideal games will be easy to learn and hard to master, revealing intricacies like the layers of an onion. WoW is just the opposite; hard to learn, easy to master. Imagine having no one to tell you about resources like elitist jerks, tankspot, and wowhead; it would take a long time to make an even decent talent spec, much less know the exact right way to use your abilities, and what to do on each encounter. But once you are armed with this information, it becomes easy to follow. There are very few challenging specs to play, and Cata aims to make most of them easier: e.g. slower rune generation and no dot clipping worries.

This means skill, or the accumulation thereof, is not what sets the bads apart from us good players (possible exception for Arena). It's knowledge; no other kind of game demands we keep learning like WoW does. One might keep learning in Starcraft, say, by fighting skilled opponents and seeing them use unconventional techniques, and in turn developing a counter-strategy. WoW keeps adding content, new bosses with unknown mechanics that we research how to defeat. They also change our classes in subtle ways, like buffing haste, or changing coefficients. A new player has no in-game way of ever finding any of this out, and ends up totally clueless, or drowned in the dense sea of information offered by EJ. We bring our game up largely by independent research, which is very unintuitive.

WoW does need to pick up the ball, and they are in Cata. They're making dungeons harder, which in turn makes players learn how to be clutch. They're also forcing players to invest solely in one tree before moving on, and taking out a great deal of the bad talents that just acted as traps to snare newbies. They're also implementing a difficulty curve to leveling itself, so the 80-85 experience is harder than Northrend. Difficulty curves are our friends, they make us perform better and make the game more entertaining.

As players, we aren't doing any favors either. As a symptom of overgearing everything and AoE-fest instances, we've become intolerant of ignorance, and the bads have become complacent, because they can still finish instances. For good players, it's too much of a hassle to explain what someone is doing wrong, because 90% of the time they'll insult you for trying to help. And why should they care; they still finish the dungeon and get all the same rewards that a good player gets. Players generally only get as good as they need to be to clear content, and plateau after that, so it's not surprising that 0/0/71 DK gemmed for spell pen can succeed in such an environment.

The upshot of this analysis is that we as players should start exercising our power to kick much more frequently. I've often tried to kick a bad, only to have everyone vote against me, saying we can still do it with him. Um, are you guys unaware that we get a new person nigh-instantly? Even a tank takes under a minute, why should we suffer through a willfully terrible player when we can change him out at no cost to us? It's also a bit of needed tough love for the bad player; if he can't finish groups because of terrible spec/gearing/playing, he will have to bring his game up, because he wants to get the rewards. See, everybody wins!

Addendum: remember, I'm talking about the willfully ignorant and bad, not the new. Anyone willing to learn and improve absolutely would not get my kick vote, all else being equal.