Warcraft – Looking For Rage Finder

So Patch 4.3 has been around for a few weeks now, as has the Dragon Soul raid. Along with 4.3 came Blizzard’s new Looking For Raid (LFR) finder tool, which works similarly to Looking for Group (LFG) and there are some good and bad things with it as usual.

One of the main issues with LFG was that it tended to group people up with the undesirables of WoW most of the time as well has having flaws in how it assembled the groups. A lot of times as a healer or tank you would end up over-gearing the rest of the group causing you to bear the majority of stress on runs.  For example, as a healer with good gear it tended to lump you in with slightly under-geared tanks and DPS a lot of the time with what I can only guess as the concept of “if heals are good, the tank can take more damage and killing things can go slightly slower”. Well, that doesnt work. A mana bar can only take so much punishment before it runs dry and plus as healers we play for fun, not stress and strain and when each hit a tank is taking reduces them to half health or below, we cant stop to recover for any accidental foolishness DPS does and someone will die.

Aside from those little quirks though, the majority of the badness came from just player personality and just a complete lack of respect for others on the part of many other players. Now, I’ve been playing WoW since 2006, so I have the benefit of being able to see the rate of change in personality of the typical WoW player outside my guild in Pickup Groups (PUGs). Since I started playing WoW, the general helpfulness in dungeon groups has plummeted and the overall annoyance level as well as the total amount of assholes has skyrocketed. I used to PUG a lot and in the past a lot of my problems within them stemmed from what I mentioned above, lack of gearing, poor play style, people not understanding the encounters or their character, and basically just technical issues that sometimes could be overcome with explanation. Now however, its more personality and people being juvenile assholes than technical flaws. The average arrogance of the WoW player has just jumped by leaps and bounds over the last few years and its rather annoying and aggravating.

Now, anonymity and hostility go hand in hand and I know this from years on BBS’s and playing around in mIRC rooms, as well as other sources of chat and public interaction like forums. The Internet breeds assholes because people are more inclined to be jerks to one another when the consequence of knowing who they are in real life is removed. Basically most humans are chickenshits is what it comes down to. If these people had to give a real name and address to their nicknames online you wouldn’t see even half of the hostilities you do today. Penny Arcade did a great representation a few years ago describing this effect known as the “Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory” as shown below:

Again though, this I don’t believe is a good excuse for people to behave like assholes online, specifically within WoW, but sadly they still do. I’ve wrestled for a while on why this seems to be getting worse every year and I can’t say its entirely WoW and LFG/LFR tools to blame. I think it has a lot to do with society as a whole and how the newer generations are being raised by parents, or rather not being raised by parents in this case. While this is definitely a discussion of another type, I think the newer younger generations have less respect for everyone than older generations. They simply want things their way and now and are used to being catered to by lazy or weak parents and so it carries over online when they interact with others. I don’t doubt they even act similarly in person but probably are good at controlling it some depending on the size and intimidation factors associated with the person(s) they are targeting. Online, these aren’t factors at all so its basically 100% unchecked asshole behavior.

Anyhow, last Saturday night out of boredom I decided to run LFR, which would make it my second time total doing so, first time on my Druid. The first LFR experience was on my Warrior tank which actually wasn’t too unpleasant, people were nice save 1 or 2 people on that run. Saturday though I seem to have been the unfortunate winner of some asshole lottery and the run was filled to the brim with people from the realm Thunderlord who seemed to know one another well and all behaved exactly the same way, like assholes. Im not sure if they were in the same guild or not because to be honest, I didn’t and still don’t care as it has no impact on explaining why they behaved as they did but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they were a group because people of that sort seem to flock to one another.

Now, we got through the first boss in Dragon Soul, Morchok, with some difficulty. For some reason every single healer ended up being a Resto Druid on that run. Unfortunately though myself and 1 other Resto Druid ended up carrying the weight of the healing as the other 3 just weren’t for some reason. Why? I have absolutely no clue, I looked briefly at my Skada meters to see what they were using as a primary effective heal and for one I saw [Wild Growth], and another I saw [Regrowth], which both are extremely ineffective and inefficient heals to be using at all as a chart topper. I don’t proclaim to be a WoW or Resto Druid expert, but I’ve been doing it long enough to know those 2 spells shouldn’t be at the top of the list of abilities being used and most effective heals for anyone.

Anyhow, fast forward to the second boss, which for this group was Warlord Zon’ozz and well, we wiped. It was pretty clear it was gonna happen because that is a highly intensive AOE healing fight and even in LFR which is scaled down a lot, 2 effective healers just wont be able to keep pace with the damage, and that’s exactly what happened. The 2 of us who were effective, just couldn’t heal everyone for what needed to be, and overall we both ended up carrying 24+% of the healing total on that attempt each, which would have been fine if the other 3 could do the same, but they didn’t and so we wiped. Apparently though that was the catalyst needed to infuse people from Thunderlord with the excuse they needed to be assholes to everyone, more specifically the healers. The first round of Vote Kicks ensued and the 3 bad healers were removed. Why they were bad, idk, maybe uneducated, under-geared, I can’t say and sadly LFR just as in LFG doesn’t always offer up the opportunity to talk with them and find out, especially when you have assholes in the group. Unfortunately for those 3, the very assholes in question were running the raid, all of them had either Raid Leader or Assist .

Following those 3 being kicked, the other Druid who was on par with me left on their own, probably because of the verbal attacks that started against “healers” in general and how much “we suck”, etc etc. Below is a transcript of the chat log if you care to peruse, I finally got tired of listening to them and threw the 2 main problem children on ignore (Hamerofdoom-Thunderlord and Gelhan-Thunderlord). My chat log however still recorded their juvenile behavior even though in game I no longer could see any of it.

I have to note on this log there are references to meters. I don’t like meters but they are a good way to see when there is a problem what it might be. Unfortunately some people look solely at numbers and on our second try, the pally at the #1 spot had so much over healing it was disgusting. But, its big numbers and to some people its like penis envy, the bigger the better regardless how much of that total might be a waste.

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Click to expand the LFR Nightmare Chatlog

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Now I know this isn’t an example of every LFR, but it is an example of a common issue within LFR and LFG. This is the reason why I disliked how Blizzard basically makes people dependent upon this new system to get offset pieces for normal raiding. There are many of us who don’t want to put up with this kind of treatment or situation when we play WoW which is why using Justice points and the like to buy pieces of gear we couldn’t get fortunate for drops on raids was a great alternative. Now I can either hope my luck on raids holds out and I get the tier tokens I need and want or I can alternatively put up with this bullshit every week. Forgive me if I cling to hope instead because no one should have to put up with this kind of harassment just for a chance at some offset pieces of gear.

For the WoW players out there, stick up for people who get targeted like this. So many people in that 25 raid who weren’t part of that little clique remained silent, with only 1 of them jumping in to put the assholes in their places. 1 other person showed support in tells and that’s it, which leads me to believe that there were likely more who felt bad at how I was being targeted and treated in the raid but none said anything or did anything. Someone tried a vote kick on one of them which failed because some people placed DPS numbers above civility and I was told that there was an attempt to vote kick me 2 times which failed both times so they showed support there, but c’mon. There was enough people in that raid to kick those 2 assholes easily and yet no one did it.

I can hold my own and defend myself when need be, but seriously folks, this is why the state of social interaction in WoW has deteriorated so much. Everyone would just rather ignore everyone else and get through things for loot than stand up for whats right. Sadly its a good example of whats wrong with society in the world today as well. Head down, mouth shut, who gives a damn the guy I just passed was being mugged at knife point.