evolution creations

There was a post today on HoT’s and DoT’s that caught my attention. Keep in mind that I have now quite World of Warcraft since August, but nonetheless, can’t tear myself from keeping the ear to the ground and listening to the musings of the WoW community.

The basic feel I got from the article was a very righteous view. One line comes to mind:

I like playing with new players. They bring enthusiasm to the game. It’s easy to get jaded when you’ve seen the inside of the dungeon a million times. A new player brings a fresh look and often gets you to see something odd that you never noticed before.

And while this is a very holistic view, this can’t be said to most of the WoW community. What is being missed here is that while this is new and exciting to them, to most of the other players in the game, this is old hat. They have gone through these dungeons 10′s or hundreds of times, and they really just want to get through it with as little pain as possible.

The expectation in this post was one that expects the other players to pick up the slack and to provide information, details, and walk-through to new players. And while some people still have the patience for this, how do you weed out the ones that you would help and will be genuinely grateful, to the trolls in the game that just say they are new to stir the pot of the others in the group. Looking back at my own experience, if it could be said that the majority of people who asked for help both were grateful in receiving it and cooperative to dealing with constructive criticism, I would say I would have probably helped and had the patience to anyone who asked. But the fact remains that this will never be the community of the game. People don’t take information gratefully–especially when it’s expected. They come to the table with the attitude, “I’m new, so either tell me what to do, or wipe, your choice” which is the most absurd thing to possible be expected of a person to a team. Can you blame the rest of the community to look at the statement that you feel like “… you don’t feel good enough” and wonder how much homework you’ve done ahead of getting into the instance? Or people being able to take constructive criticism and be able to work within a group rather than being annoying, mouthing off, or otherwise just rude. Most of the players I’ve run into on my countless random runs I have to think if they were on my team, I’d have voted them off the island long ago. Perhaps you can say that those who don’t work well in teams look for games that are team oriented so they can find new outlets to be pain in the butts with.

From the sounds of it, the guys were in a guild. What we see as a trend in Cataclysm is that the guild is a fairly pivotal part of the game. Staying in a guild is much more likely than in previous expansions, and recruiting for guilds is equally or more difficult to accomplish. With that being said, the guild is a focal part of the game, and as such, the guild should help each other. New guild members who are unfamiliar with the nuances of heroic dungeons or raids should be big enough to get 5 people together to run it as a guild run. This has always been my position that in-game you should always run new content with friends than with random people. Why? Because friends are much more likely to have the patience to both explain and interact with you through failure than random people would be.

The expectations are wrong. The attitude is wrong. And this brings me back to the question at the start of the post, do MMO’s require to much from the casual player? In a lot of games, you could be in a “pickup group” and still have fun. For example, when your playing sports in school during lunch or break times, a lot of the games were pick up games where you didn’t know the roster before hand and whomever was available most likely got to play. But as you get older, the rules of the game change. For example, would you expect to join a pick up group at a paintball range and expect patience and explanation? I’d be probably safe in saying that the majority of those games will end quickly and with you in a lot of pain as the skilled players plow right through you. Hell you’d probably be just as likely to be mowed down by friendly fire than you would be from enemy fire. Or if you were a pickup in a league, any sports game just take your pick, the patience would not be there for you to cause a “wipe” or failure within the group. The expectation is that you have enough subject matter expertise in whatever that sport or game is to hold your own. This isn’t a cheap shot at someone’s character as most times those people are good people. But it is to say that games are about winning and losing. People like the feeling of a swift victory and are not accustom to slowly won victory’s when they previously are use to quick ones. The responsibility is to the individual to gauge their own abilities and stack them against the abilities of the others within the group. In WoW a lot of that is focused on the gear, but just as much if not more of the cases are that if you know the mechanics that is far better than an average or over average geared player. For example, going back to the paintball example, you could deck yourself in thousands or tens of thousands of dollars worth of gear, but that means nothing if you can’t use it.

I think this last fact is something players of WoW seem to forget. Yes it is just pixels on the screen and it is meant to be fun, but when you start working in teams, it is your responsibility to make sure that you stack up to the bar that is set forth in the group that you join–and this bar varies from group to group. For example, you might find yourself in a group that has new people and are more than welcome to helping each other, wiping a dozen times, and figuring out how it works together. But then your next group may be people who are geared in 359+ ilevel and expect that it’s a pull, kill, pull pace to finish the instance as quickly as possible. In both situations, it is clear that depending on your team composition you have to adjust your expectations accordingly.

I’ll use work as an example. Sometimes in a work situation you may approach a situation one way. Let’s take coworkers. You may have one coworker who doesn’t take well to criticism. The fact remains that you have to work with this person, so you adjust your approach to be tactful and as careful with your words so you don’t offend. But then you may have another coworker who works well with criticism and is actively engaged to learn from their mistakes and your approach is much different. Neither one is wrong, and the important take away is to understand that changes to approaches based on the situation is normal. In WoW this is the same. We must look at each situation and gauge our own expectations against those of the group. In the cases where the instance didn’t go to plan, not once, did the writer say that they decided to leave and allow the group to go on. Not once. The expectation was that no matter the struggle they were willing to subject the rest of the group to their own short falls–in effect they expected others to change their approach instead of them. This is fairly common to those who believe that the rules don’t apply to them, or that they are somehow above the rules. But to most we understand that when things don’t go our way, we have to change instead of continue to beat our heads up against the wall. Perhaps the writer continues to feel the sense of inadequacy because they don’t know when to throw in the towel and recognize their own short falls. What’s the old adage, to acknowledge ones own problem is the first step to recovery?

To feel better in this situation I’d take the following approach.

1. Stop using random dungeon finders. You already have a healer and two DPS, find a tank and another DPS from your friends list, realID, or guild and queue up for each heroic dungeon one by one and complete them.
2. If you find yourself in a group that has expectations that you are not ready for, i.e. if the tank expects the healer to keep up and they aren’t geared for it or able to do it, either express this expectation and find out if others are willing to accommodate, but also in the same breath, ask if they want to find someone else and that you’ll voluntarily leave. Don’t just say the first without offering the second. Take the road of humility and recognize your own short falls if the bar is too high.
3. Gear through other means. You can grind dailies, you can purchase gear from the AH, you can get them from raids if your guild carries you, obviously there are other ways than just through dungeons. Also keep in mind, when Cataclysm first came out, guilds in 278+ gear were blowing throw the content in Tier 11. Guilds that got the world first, generally don’t have the gear that they get from those bosses. So being under geared doesn’t mean everything. If you play with a good head and you know the mechanics, more than likely you’ll do ok. 
4. Do your homework. There are countless writeups and youtube video’s on the mechanics within a dungeon. Read, view, learn.