The functionality of the Vote Kick feature in the Dungeon Finder will now behave differently according to a player's history with the system. Players using the Dungeon Finder who rarely vote to kick players from a group, or rarely abandon groups before a dungeon is complete, will find that the Vote Kick option will have no cooldown. For players who frequently abandon groups or vote to kick other players, the Vote Kick option will be kept on a cooldown. This functionality will adjust itself as a player's behavior while using the Dungeon Finder changes.This looks like a small, if welcome change that doesn't matter too much outside of the world of farming heroics for badges. Dickheads get to be dickheads less often; dickheads trying the patience of a saint will get kicked faster.
Why is this a big deal? The Dungeon Finder tool and random daily rewards made forming random 5-mans simple and reliable, and added a new layer to the social interactions of WoW gameplay. Before the cross-realm tool was introduced, players relied on friend lists, guilds and trolling general to do a daily, and were socially constrained by the relatively small world of their single realm and their reputation within it. Now, groups are throw-away formations: You're unlikely to run into the same people twice unless you're back-to-back farming, and even then a repeat match is uncommon.
Forming a random group creates some behavioural constraints (tanks must hold threat, healers heal, DPS need to not suck, and not ass- or face-pull), and Vote Kick helps players enforce those constraints, but to date, there's very little feedback in this mechanism: you kick or don't kick, get kicked or don't get kicked, and the choice has been purely human.
Let's take an example: you're in a group with a DPS who's barely holding his own, not using interrupts or dispels, and generally failing. The group's going to make it, but this one DPS is essentially being carried. Do you:
A) Kick the fail DPS and get someone you won't be carrying, or just 4-man it.
B) Keep going, but berate the DPS in party chat. Maybe they'll leave, maybe they'll improve, but who cares: they're bad anyway.
C) Keep going, say nothing, suck it up, get your badges.
D) Keep carrying, offer suggestions in whispers of ways the DPS can improve.
(FWIW, I'll typically opt for C or D depending on the circumstances and how much I'm chatting in guild or on vent.)
Until now, there's no game difference between any of the options. Gameplay is identical whether you choose A, B, C or D. With the Vote Kick change, there's an obvious incentive to avoid A: if you over-use the kick when you don't really need it, you won't have it available when that shitty Retadin turns up as the tank and asks who has a tanking spec.
There's also, now, a more subtle incentive not to use option B: there may be a saint in your group who never uses the Vote Kick, but finds your carping irritating, and decides to shut you up. Real ID may end up making this even more of an incentive if you can form cross-realm groups with real life friends.
In other words, there's now a meta-game mechanic that penalizes behaving like a dick. In itself, this is kind of a big deal, but it's not a really big deal yet.
It gets to be a really big deal when there are game mechanics that penalize behaving like a dick, that reward 'desirable' behaviour, or that cause changes in the environment based on covert analysis of what you do beyond the trivial mechanics of quest phasing and faction reputation changes.
An example of how this might work is a new realm type: Pv?, where the indigenous response (think capital city guards) to PvP is algorithmically determined by the behaviour of people in that zone over time. Starter zones where lowbie-gankers are dealt swift high-level player justice become heavily game-world-reinforced zones where lowbie-ganking spawns hostile elites. Combat zones where heavy inter-faction fighting gets reinforced by matching (or balancing) numbers of faction-relevant NPCs.
Another example: Phased zones that only appear based on appropriate good (or bad) play: a complex, covert algorithm combining reputations, kill counts, recent kill counts, time spent in groups, time spent in raid zones, herbs gathered or recipes learnt.
I doubt WoW will be the game to implement adaptive game mechanics of this nature, but the Vote Kick change is definitely a step in that direction.
