No, not gear as in loot. I just haven’t had a good rant post in a while, and was inspired by a recent re-run of Family Guy.
I hate PUGs. Really, truly despise them, more so in the summer months when the ruddy little spawn get out of school and infest the servers. Playing on my old US server with a +6 hour offset means that I’m unable to group with my old guilds, so I don’t have much choice but to run with PUGs for the most part.
I was organizing my screenshots directory recently, throwing away much of the cruft, but keeping the evidence from a few of the more amusing and depressing runs I’ve been in in my day. Here are a few of the best, plus a few general gripes that I unfortunately (fortunately?) have no screencap evidence for.
People Who Aren’t Sure If They Have To Leave
Here’s a rule of thumb: if you aren’t sure if you have to leave, you have to leave.
This one disconnected on us a few minutes later. Thankfully, he was a ret paladin so it took about 3 seconds to replace him — with another ret paladin. Who also dropped group.
Seriously guys, you’re not helping to break down the stereotypes here.
People Who Think I’m Giving Away Gold
This one is equal parts funny and stupid. I ask in general chat if anyone needs a level 62 group quest, and someone immediately joins my group. Over the next couple of minutes, it becomes clear that he thinks I was offering him 62 gold for no reason at all.
People Who Can’t Handle Competition
The Red Sword of Courage is a nice item, to be sure. Since patch 3.1 came out, it’s not that flash, as you can get a guaranteed equivalent from the Argent Tournament for 25 Champion’s Seals, but still a nice bit of kit. But some people insist that they have no competition for it, which is just silly. The person who dropped group here was the one who started the group.
People Who Say They Won’t Compete, Then Do
After the first dropout, the above group re-formed with a plate-heavy mix. One of them insisted that he wouldn’t roll for the Red Sword. Then proceeded to. Thankfully, the RNG took a dump on him that day, but why say you’re going to do something, then do another? Does your word mean nothing?
People Who Won’t Run Back
It’s a simple rule: if the healer has to run back, everyone in the group runs back, modulo emergency bio breaks or a giant squid attaching itself to the side of your house. It’s just common courtesy. At least it is for most people:
People Who Don’t Understand How Disenchanting Works
Whenever I’m running a group with a character who can disenchant, I put this blurb in party chat:
I can DE, so need/pass and I’ll need/greed. Anything I win by greed we shard and roll on at the end.
Pretty simple instructions, and it’s been the norm as long as I have been playing to do it this way. Yet without fail, someone who can’t DE always rolls greed for at least one item. At this point, everyone who passed has been screwed out of a shard. I repeat my instructions. Next time, someone else screws it up. Now we’ve been screwed out of two-thirds of the shards on average. At this point, I give up and tell everyone to go need/greed.
Why can’t people understand these simple instructions? And is it just me, or did they used to understand this without much issue only to get much worse at it some time in the last year?
People Who Name Their Characters After their Class, Spec or Role
Please… Healzbot? And you’re spec’d ret without a dual spec?
Please, please please: don’t make your character name contain your class name, spec name or role name. Not only does it make you look stupid when you end up playing another spec, it just shows a complete lack of imagination and (more importantly to me) a lack of investment in the character. You don’t have to be into roleplaying or on a RP server to view your character as an entity unto itself as opposed to just a goofy mask for you to run around in making fart jokes.
If you’re really truly unable to think of a good name yourself, I recommend this: namegen.exe (disclaimer: the link goes to wowui.incgamers.com and it’s a Windows executable, but I’ve scanned it and been using it for a couple of years with no ill effects). This lets you generate names by combining different name dictionaries. I’ve always found it to create better names than the in-game randomizer.
Endless Children
I realize that WoW attracts players of all ages, and that the average age drops during the summer months. I’m in my 30s, and I freely admit that I do not tolerate children well.
But you have a unique opportunity when playing an online game: you don’t have to act like the ass-wipe that you are in real life if you don’t want to. So next time you’re in a group that includes people you don’t know, perhaps you might want to think about not calling your girlfriend a “hoe” and talking about snapping someone’s nut sack:
Assumimg this guy has a girlfriend, I’d love to see her reaction to being called a “ho”.
Oh yeah, and moron? It’s “ho”. Not “hoe”, unless you’re into some freaky garden sex.
Do I Know You?
As I haven’t seen this addon get much press, I should mention how I avoid these people in the future, regardless of what character I may be on: the addon Do I Know You. This lets you add a positive or negative rating to a player, along with an optional note. If that player says something in chat, you’ll see their name annotated with a green or red !! suffix. If they whisper you, or you join a group that they’re a part of, your chat log will show their reputation and the stored note.
While useful for a solo player, the addon also lets you synchronize with your guild. The ratings become additive, so if two people mark down a player but one person marks them up, their net rating is -1. The database is stored on a realm basis, so you’ll see the notes regardless of which character you’re on and even if you play a character on the other faction. Using this addon, I’ve been able to avoid groups with people who stole ore from me while I was playing a character on the other faction.
What Grinds Your Gears?
Did I miss something that really gets on your nerves? Have any amusing runins to share? Leave a comment.
Until Next Time
Lead Image is from Family Guy, copyright 20th Century Fox Television and/or Fuzzy Door Productions
#1 by Malnar on August 8, 2009 - 12:17 am
My main is a Resto Shammie. While leveling I had to PuG a few instances both to complete quests and to get a feel for healing groups. One group in particular had a mage that kept pulling aggro off the tank. So I politely told the mage to watch their aggro and if they continued to pull threat that I’d stop healing. To which the response was “Then you don’t know how to heal. I’m a mage I go pew pew. Heal me!”
So at the next pull I let the mage die. Then I got cursed out and again was put on notice that my heals were awful. We kicked him, found another more intelligent dps and cleared the instance.
#2 by Chowmaine on August 10, 2009 - 9:10 pm
I was levelling my DK alt for tanking since my guild is lacking in reliable MTs/OTs, so I was running normals to get a feel for how to tank as a (then) Frost DK.
My first run into normal Old Kingdom, I’m with a holy pally, a ret pally, a rogue and a 77 mage, while I’m tanking the instance at 73. Somehow, I’m still holding aggro no problem, maybe a loose mob here or there that I taunt or DG back, no problem.
We get to a pull and we wipe one time, and the mage bitches me out. Me being the calm person I am, I automatically check my combat log to see if I did anything wrong, got crit ect. I was fine, and then I checked to see if I was healed, ect. Everything was normal, but we later found out that the mage assumed he had a reduced aggro radius and ran way too close to another group and yelled at me because I failed to see it. So yeah, I say, sure, my bad.
Then we down the pull, and the mage is at 20% mana. Healer’s at 70%, and he’s not drinking. I pull the next group before the first boss, and we start killing him, and mage starts freaking out. “WOW UR A FAIL TANK I NEED MANA”
Being also a bit of a trouble-maker, I casually respond, “L2 Evocate or wand, nub.”
So, we down the group and he leaves group, after saying I’m bad, the rogue’s bad, and the holy pally healling was bad. All because he wasn’t allowed to regen mana as dps before combat.
#3 by Karatheya on August 11, 2009 - 7:24 am
That aggro radius bit made me remember a SteamVaults run back in the day. The group was trying to skip as many groups as possible leading to the first boss, and a ret paladin swore that Blessing of Salvation reduced your agro radius. We all told him to go first, so he blesses himself, runs up the hill by a pathing water elemental….
and gets massacred. The remaining four of us recovered and we moved on – not a word from the retardin for the rest of the run.