A Good Day in Westfall

Well, I tried again last night, and had a much better time. After perusing the WoW forums for a little bit, and finding a relevant thread, I realised that a lot of people objected to people using the team invite if you haven’t spoken to their character first, either in a whisper or locally. There are people with similar feelings in CoH, but CoH gives you the Looking For Group flag and the unwritten rule that seems to have evolved in the community is that it’s rude to send a “blind” invite to someone without the LFG flag set, but it’s perfectly acceptable to do so for anyone who has it on. (Not that there aren’t people who violate that assumption in both directions: if you’re a defender you’re going to get blind invites no matter what your LFG flag says, and there are people who hate blind invites even when they’re looking for a team. I think the technical name for the latter is “pricks.”)
So, anyway, this time I tried to form a team and encourage RP by walking up to a level 16 Paladin and asking “Do you have any advice for a young Paladin?” This led to our teaming, speaking mostly in character, and joining with another team hunting the same area who also spoke mostly IC. It was much more fun, and I managed to hit level 14 before we broke up for the night. I’m hoping that this wasn’t a fluke, and that I’ve actually cracked the social code for how teaming works in WoW. We’ll see. I’ll probably try again tonight.