Welcome back to Politics in Plate Mail, in which I (eventually) apply lessons from World of Warcraft to real world situations.
Patch 3.3 was released almost two months ago. That was the one where they finally replaced the "looking for group" tool that has been badly broken since the game started.
I'm not alone in saying that this was a significant advance for the game. As is probably obvious from my post on tanking, doing dungeons has long been one of my favorite in-game activities. At low levels it was nearly impossible to find a group, especially in low level content while leveling up. Now, you are automatically matched with a team of players in the appropriate role, and your teammates may be drawn from one of several servers.
Suddenly I'm able to play lots of dungeons with all kinds of strangers, regardless of my class. It's a fascinating social experiment, seeing how people interact with each other when they have no connection or attachment to others in the group.
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Tanks can find a group within five seconds, or a few minutes at worst if the level is low and it's a bad time of day (e.g., early in the morning). Grouping as a healer usually takes a few minutes or more. Grouping as a DPS can take half an hour. But bear in mind that even a DPS player benefits greatly, as it is at least possible to join a dungeon or several every night. It just requires a little more patience than the other classes. Before the patch, you could wait all night for a dungeon at your level before giving up in frustration. So lots of people are taking advantage of this great feature.
One thing that has surprised me is how the players are generally high quality. I mean, in my estimate you'll get one fairly bad player on your team for every two groups of five you play with, and a player who is so bad that he ruins the instance about one out of four times. However, I remain impressed by the fact that most dungeons are fun experiences.
And then there are the exceptions...
The thing is, I don't mind unskilled players. There are a lot of them out there, and they all have different reasons for being unskilled. I have personally coached five of them. My fiancee, despite being a deadly awesome gamer who destroys me at laser tag and writes guides for semi-obscure real-time strategy games in hard mode, had never touched Warcraft until we met. Today she's among the most effective healers in our guild. My son, while still being consistently behind on the meters as a cat druid, still impresses a lot of teammates when I tell them that he is seven.
My mom's last gaming experience before WoW was text adventures. An old school friend of mine had never touched any kind of RPG, and his girlfriend had never played any computer games period. They're all enthusiastic players now, and I'm even training my school friend to tank.
So in fact, I like it just fine when I land in a group that has some bad players who turn out to be willing to learn. I have played some of every class, and I can't help offering recommendations. Many people wind up being good at following instructions, so they get noticeably better at the game over the course of one run. To me, that's just as satisfying as collecting gear and such.
Does not play well with others
The real problem players are the dangerously anti-social ones. In fact, those people may even be highly skilled as individual players, but they are aggressively oblivious to any considerations about teamwork. Often they have a play style which does not tolerate any less than perfection from anyone else in the group. Everyone is required to be a flawless player, and if they're not, all kinds of trouble ensues.
Most of the problems show up when there is a player who's in a hurry, which is a frequent affliction. There is a perception that dungeons are "easy," and so they don't pay attention to group mechanics. There are examples of this in every role. Most frequently you'll find a DPS rushing ahead of the group, pulling before the tank does, and counting on the healer and/or the tank to chase and rescue him. You get tanks who charge blindly ahead pulling unlimited amount of enemies, not even noticing or caring whether the healer has mana left. And you have healers who declare they are bored when the action is light, demanding that the tank pull bigger groups... never thinking about what will happen if a badly timed patrol walks in when the group is pushing the edge of their abilities.
The more haste, the less speed. I don't care how good your group is -- unless everyone is ridiculously overgeared (and not just that one mage wearing a full set of heirloom clothes) you can die. The thing I hate most when tanking is hearing players complain about not moving fast enough. If I'm attracting the number of monsters that makes me comfortable with, going faster is only going to cause stupid mistakes. My son hates it too -- he's still learning the game, so he gets pretty upset if I am running ahead of him and he gets stranded and lost because he was trying to loot something.
Remember that it takes at least five minutes or so to recover from most group wipes, given all the running and mana recovery and rebuffing going on. So if you pick up the pace enough to save two minutes, but you also make it 50% likely that the party meets a situation they can't handle, you're not helping. You're not getting your badges faster.
There are lots of reasons why players might want to pace themselves, and rarely is it because they are losers. From what I've seen, weak DPS is rarely the cause of death in a casual instance. Impatient, rude, and antisocial players cause death. If we're lucky, it's only their own death. I sometimes have to teach impatient DPS a lesson by refusing to rescue them. It is actually quite funny to see that overeager hunter racing ahead of the group, fighting for a minute, and then realizing he's all alone.
What's surprising is, that actually works for most people. I want to have fun in a dungeon and I want my teammates to have fun, and nobody has fun when they're stressed. So if I see a problem teammate behaving badly, I feel it's my duty to communicate first. (Insert clever analogy here about invading Iraq.)
Step 1: "Hey," I'll say. "Stop pulling before the tank is ready, please." Most of the time the response is "Oh, sorry," and the rest of the dungeon goes fine.
Step 2: The player doesn't respond. So I say again "Please stop doing that, you are putting us in danger. If you do it again I will let you die." Then carry out that threat. Many players just weren't reading the text, and will be apologetic AFTER getting personal consequences. No problem.
If that doesn't work, though, some players get abusive. At this point, expect to be hearing the reckless player say how stupid the healer was for letting him die. Even understandable mistakes such as the tank failing to pick up three extra adds become massive sources of drama; the one guy who dies will explode at everybody if the entire raid doesn't wipe. When it does wipe, the guy with anger management issues is usually the first one to start throwing blame around when it's his own fault.
I favor a pragmatic, tit-for-tat approach to random groups. Because there is such a diversity of player skill levels, it's good for my blood pressure to assume that everyone is going to be competent and nice, and therefore treat them that way. Unskilled but friendly players are likely to thrive when given good advice.
But if I'm grouped with a jerk, watch out. If all communication fails, that's the time to either vote a kick (after clearly explaining the reason to the group), or drop out if you are outnumbered.
Playing to win
From my perspective, I'm in the dungeon to win it. As long as we are moving at a reasonable pace, and as long as we are not dying frequently to dumb mistakes, I'm happy. I don't care who's topping the DPS meter. I expect everyone to do their best and be civil.
And yet, there are some people who have a different interpretation of the game. And now I must link the post that was my real inspiration for starting this diary:
"If you can't beat them join them" by a WoW blogger who calls himself Gevlon.
I subscribe to a few WoW blog feeds -- not this one, but all three of the ones I do read wound up discussing the above post. In brief, it infuriated me. Check out how Gevlon treats his group, and I'll be back to discuss it tomorrow.