So, I got kicked from a raid for the first time in ages, for basically… being bad.

Here’s the setting.

Icehowl. Being tanked in such an odd spot that, when he does the knockback, about half of the group end on the same spot. My camera angle ends up weird, and I can’t see anything, like, the DBM skull I have to see to know where to run away from. I don’t even know if I should run or if I’m safe.

And Icehowl appears to be turned towards us. Well, shit, sayeth I.

And randomly pick a direction to run to. That happens to be in his path.

Tank gets twoshotted, we wipe.

I summarily get yelled at in /ra, and mortified, I try to explain why and how I couldn’t run away, suggesting if he gets tanked in the middle I can know whether to run or not.

(Basically, this is how I did the fight previously. He would get tanked in the middle with everyone spread in a circle around him – if DBM didn’t have your name, you didn’t have to run anyplace, because everyone was already spread.)

I get screamed at yet more. “RUN. AWAY. FROM THE SKULL.” “Just run, it’s not hard ffs.” I apologise and say won’t happen again. Raid chat is quiet. I get ressed, buffed, drop a Fish Feast.

And summarily am removed without a word.

I was the only PUG in a group of guildies, so I pretty much expected being ridden hard for my mistakes, both real and imagined. What I didn’t expect was being removed after making a single mistake, for which I apologised profusely and explained reasons for.

Part of me says “well, fuck that” – had I been the group leader, a single mistake, politely explained and suggestions made for, wouldn’t have been grounds for removal. I’d probably feel happier knowing that, you know, someone owned up to their screwup and explained why. The other half says “well, it’s their group, and you did fuck up”.

I do feel totally depressed because… it’s been ages since I singlehandedly wiped a raid. I might just have acted with the best of intentions, and obviously it wasn’t deliberate, but it happened. And now I have an entire raid probably thinking “Lol, she was bad.”

Correspondingly, part of me just wants to explain “Look, I really don’t always do things like that, I swear.” And another part just doesn’t care because, hey, if you remove someone who made a single honest mistake and apologised, without even bothering to tell them anything, I probably don’t really want to group with you anyway.

But yeah. Sigh, indeed.

Lately I’ve been reading many accounts and listening to many, well, stories in trade. These sob stories inevitably deal with how some person was not accepted into some PUG or the PUG fell apart because his gear was not deemed adequate, even though the person in question firmly believes that their gear was adequate.

Here’s the thing.

Your gear might well be sufficient for the instance.

That doesn’t mean that the group has to accept you. No really, it doesn’t.

Groups of well-geared people generally seek other well-geared people to steamroll the instance. This might not be the most fun way of doing things, but the really well-geared people in question are usually already tired of running the same instance over and over again. They probably don’t want their agony prolonged by having someone around who will slow them down. They just want their Conquest badges to get whatever item they didn’t get.

You might think they’re being funny, asking for your [Epic] to run a couple of heroics or “loleasy” raids. They’re not. They’re merely saving themselves some time and pain, especially with the new badge system bringing everyone out to PUG these days.

They could of course accept you, and try you, and then decide which wrist to slit first when they wipe, because some guy in the group isn’t keeping up the pace. Or because they’re running a speed makeup and someone is not performing as they should.

Don’t take not being accepted as a personal affront. Most of the time, the guy on the other end of the line doesn’t mean it as an insult. No one is laughing at you for not being clad in epics. And if they are, they’re probably dicks.

If you’re not accepted, you’re not accepted. It was the group leader’s choice, and they opted for a no. If your gear is adequate, surely there are other groups out there that will take you. Do not despair.

(P.S Please note that I rarely decline people with sufficient gear – on the other hand, I completely feel the people who do so for speedruns and odd makeups.)

How can a team have 1661 in team rating, while both team members who have 100% of all games played have 1646 rating?

No other people have played in this team since the start of the season, other than Rinny and me.

YET WE WERE DENIED OUR RINGS TONIGHT, BECAUSE PERSONAL RATINGS ARE %$#&ING %!^$ED UP.

/emo

Now that we’ve fallen back to sub-1600 again, battling many a full S3 druids, I bid you all goodnight.

At least we got a really sweet 25 point win off of a warrior/druid team. We love overarrogant teams. We really do.

Sometimes I really don’t understand people.

Take, for example, the people who queue for AV at 5 in the morning in my battlegroup.

I was in a series of about five matches where literally everyone turtled.

Everyone.

Imagine getting into the match, and ten minutes later looking at the scoreboard to see only Galv and Balinda are dead, with zero towers/graveyards contested. That kind of match. For reference, the average 61-70 AV in my battlegroup lasts 13 to 15 minutes with about 300-350 honor for both sides upon ending.

The entire Alliance was bottlenecking near Icewing and Horde at Iceblood, and anyone who tried to get past got dismounted and killed in short order. I tried to stealth past, but considering a LEVEL 9 GNOME saw through my stealth in Ironforge the other week… argh, don’t remind me. Still have no idea how that happened. I’m saying screw Thick Hide and respeccing into Feral Instinct. Anyway. I couldn’t get past. No one could get past. I eventually just gave up and joined the mindless killing group near Iceblood. Ressing, healing, dying, ressing, healing, dying over and over again. I think someone eventually won via reinforcements around 45 minutes later.

Why, oh why, would you join a battleground and insist on not achieving objectives? This is AV, it isn’t exactly world PvP.

And then there’s the people who yell “noobs go cap db bunkers lolololololkekbur you suck l2p” while farming HKs midfield, the people who dismount and chase you across the field (I had a moonkin chase me literally from Iceblood to Stormpike, he could probably have gotten 5 other HKs during that time with a lot less effort… but who knows what makes people tick, really), the people who put an entire set of dots on you while you’re riding past and collect their free HKs 18 seconds later, the people who cap a bunker and walk straight out while you just know that 20 seconds later you’ll read “The Whatever Bunker was taken by the Alliance!” in your chatbox…

…and of course the people with the retarded AFK mods reporting the entire battleground AFK.

Seriously. This deserves its own post. Because it’s maddening. In the aforementioned series of terrible AVs, there were quite a few of those reporting basically everyone AFK. Sort of like crazy old ladies eavesdropping on their neighbors and calling the police on every little noise they hear. Needed a bathroom break, took a couple minutes to get a drink? Reported. Did you stand still for more than a minute? Reported. God forbid, you’re stuck defending a bunker or a graveyard? Who cares, reported anyway, report them all and let Blizzard sort them out.

In those couple of matches, basically the entire defense consisted of a series of pink dots until they started begging in /bg for whoever was reporting them to stop reporting, because they were trying to defend. And still it didn’t stop. Those weren’t people in the cave, either – they were people in Frostwolf Keep who were recapping the towers and Relief. People who, you know, had to not do anything for a few minutes while Alliance regrouped for their next attack.

In one match I ran with the pack to Icewing, helped these two warriors cap it – then two mages came and we put up one hell of a fight, but the warriors were really poorly geared and couldn’t nail the mages before they got me. So I ressed at Snowfall and thought ugh, the run to Dun Baldar, I’ll just go grab a snack and come back. Raided the fridge, came back with a plate, and what do I see? Reported, and this one guy has spamwhispered me with “leecher”.

…wait, this is the warrior I just healed in Icewing….

/facepalm

What’s horrible is that you run into some battleground Nazis who think people should just AFK out if they need to go to the bathroom/grab a drink/take a phone call. I was reading a thread in the official forums awhile back, who suggested you should do just that. “If you are AFK for even 10 seconds, you are not putting 100% in the battleground and should be replaced with someone who should!”. Because battlegrounds = srs bznss. I wonder if these people regularly leave their raidgroups too because they need to respond to the call of nature. “Sorry guys, need to go to the bathroom, please invite someone else who can give the raid their 100% instead!” Oh wait…

My suggestion is to ban the use of any and all mods who auto-report people. While I agree that sometimes leeching gets out of hand (hello botters who botted their way to full S1 and nonset epics), this self-righteous reporting does, too. When your defense needs to speak up and say “hey don’t report us please, we are defending here” when it’s crystal clear they are defending, there’s something wrong right there. Everyone gets the occasional Inactive debuff – sometimes because they really deserved it, sometimes because they had to hit the bathroom/kitchen and some no-lifer with an itchy reporting finger decided they had to be reported for that. There needs to be a distinction.

Most importantly, there needs to be less stupid people. That would solve the problem all by itself, guaranteed.

In other news: Starlet landed herself a Light’s Justice along with the Moroes offhand tonight, and finally had enough honor to buy the S3 boots. Seeing a ~100 healing boost in one night is pretty sweet – 15 badges short of the PvP cloak, too.

Already bought all the mats for Boar’s Speed and most of the mats for a 81 healing enchant, though, and ended up spending around 300g on enchants in one night, which does not amuse me. Because lately I’ve just been spending like mad with no attempt to make it back. SSO dailies with a resto druid = Q_Q of the highest degree. Simply unpossible unless I manage to drag Zilli there with me. I haven’t even specialised Starlet’s alchemy yet (multiple BM runs, just ugh) so I can’t proc flasks to make some money. Dailies have killed crafting, anyway.

Quoted from a wow_ladies post, which was quoted from a post on the official forums in turn:

The thing in question is changing the rewards to require much less effort to get the exact same thing. It’s not elitist or selfish to believe that is bad. No one is saying that you should have to work *harder* to see Black Temple, just that you should have to put in the *same* effort, even if it takes a longer period of time. I don’t expect your path to be any harder than my own, the posts here saying this are requesting equality – not special treatment for high end players. Selfishness is expecting to be given the same reward for *less* effort than others. It is not being unfair to expect everyone that spends $15 a month on this game to play by the same rules.

I could not agree more with this.

Honestly, I’m sick of all raiders being labeled special snowflakes because they want everyone else to put in the same effort to get where they got – and I can entirely understand where they are coming from (although I myself have just had a little taste of T5 content before I quit my guild). I quit a while after the SSC/TK attunements got lifted, so that meant I could actually go see TK. I still hated it back then, and I hate it now.

First off, it does undermine my personal feeling of accomplishment, please and thank you. Getting to raiding instances can and should be a challenge. Why should my green and blue geared alts be able to stroll through the door of Hyjal (even if they won’t succeed, but that’s beside the point). No, the so-called casual is not “entitled” to go see those instances because they pay the same amount of money as others do. Like with everything in life, some things have a price, be it time commitment or a certain amount of organization. If you can’t deliver what is needed, sorry. Raiding high-end instances is not for you. You don’t deserve it because you simply exist.

I don’t see why this feeling of accomplishment is begrudged to the raiding crowd. Yes, people want what the majority can’t have. That’s what makes them special. Why does the majority not think that completing a heroic or killing Gruul is an amazing accomplishment now? There was a time when completing heroic Shadow Lab or Shattered Halls made you someone (that is, before all heroics got nerfed to hell and back and the key requirement got lowered – god I remember literally crying in frustration because of the pre-nerf Murmur). There was a time when Gruul or Lurker loot was omgawesomesauce and it made everyone admire you.

Then more and more people started doing them, they were nerfed in some way, and they lost their value simply because of the sheer number of people able to run through said content. People PuG even the harder heroics. Karazhan is regarded as “heroics plus”. Most guilds don’t even do Gruul anymore because it’s a waste of time to them. Now BT and Hyjal are where it’s at, and come 2.4, it will be the Sunwell encounters people ooh and aah over.

And yes, those people worked their butts off to get into BT and Hyjal. Kael is still regarded as being a harder encounter than most of BT and MH. People beat that, put in the necessary time and effort, and got where they are – why should others just be given an easy ride, and the raiding crowd should be insulted to boot? Even if you haven’t killed Kael, Rage Winterchill is the Loot Reaver of Hyjal still, and the first few bosses of BT are regarded as equal in difficulty to that. I believe the top Horde raiding guild on my server spent more time on Kael than they spent getting the first five bosses of BT down. This was a reward in and of itself – because they beat a surprisingly hard encounter, the game rewarded them by a sense of accomplishment AND making the next couple of encounters fairly easy by comparison. Why should the so-called “casuals” have access to that? Isn’t the effort you spend supposed to be proportional to the reward you get, the reward being the right to be in those instances and have access to better gear?

Another reason why I feel lifting the attunements is wrong, but this one is a little personal (I’m probably just still bitter, heh): My guild had just gotten around to killing Gruul by the time the attunements were lifted to SSC and TK. Most of us were already attuned to SSC, not so many to TK due to Magtheridon still being quite the challenge for us. I felt that was wrong. That we simply did not deserve to be in SSC or TK yet (you would be amazed how many people had not mastered “do not stand in the &%!^ing Cave In”, I felt it was pure luck that we killed Gruul at all) . That we should follow the natural progression order and that it was there for a reason.

Did the management share the view? No. As a result, we got to spend some time on Hydross because they insisted we could take him without resistance gear, that we just needed to “focus a little harder”. We got to spend quite a few nights wiping on the so-called Loot Reaver – surprise, if you can’t move out of Cave In, you can’t dodge big flying orbs, either. Not to mention most of us were lacking in gear.

Likewise for Hyjal and BT at the moment – there is “I should be there because I got attuned the proper way, and picked up required skills and gear along the way”, and then there is “oh look I can get into BT and Hyjal now, let’s go!”, and a whole world of pain as a result.

wow_ladies member Yueni has also made an awesome post on the subject here, which I believe is worth reading. I especially agree with the way she differentiates between casual and hardcore – like she put it, it’s not how much time you spend, it’s simply how you spend it.

I personally view the hardcore mentality as a constant desire to improve in every way. As simple willingness to put in effort to learn about an encounter, learn about your class, learn about the game mechanics. This is how people get where they get when they get there. A casual guild might wipe on an encounter over and over and over again and just get it down by repetition – a hardcore guild might stroll in, take a look, get a feel for it, and down the boss in a couple of tries.
Why? Because they probably have done their homework on the boss, watched videos, tweaked their character, gotten the required gear. Whereas a casual just won’t bother because the ingame accomplishment simply doesn’t mean as much to them.

To me, casual is “we don’t take this as seriously as others” and that’s perfectly fine – it’s not an insult. Some people play the game for the sole purpose of downing bosses on the bleeding edge content. Some people play to have fun and don’t care where they are or how they get there. Some people are in the middle. It’s a “to each their own” affair. One side is not superior to the other, they just take delight in different things.

However, returning to the original point, the effort (read, not time, effort, for time is not always equivalent to effort – I think a lot of us know how easy to be mentally AFK in raids) one puts in should be equivalent to the reward one gets. If you spent extra time gearing up, learning game and boss mechanics, farming the consumables and gold needed for raids, the bosses you get to see and the purplez you get to wear are your rewards. If you simply don’t have the will or the time for that, as I am at this moment, that’s fine too, like me you end up running Karazhan once a week, taking sneak peeks into Zul’Aman, leveling alts and PvPing. And generally having as much fun as a raider would have downing Illidan. No one has a problem with that.

But if you come over and start crying because you don’t have the time, can’t be bothered to put in the effort because this is “just a game”, insult the entire raiding crowd because they obviously have no life, and overall act like you are entitled to seeing some of the best content the game has to offer, then you can just GTFO. We have a problem with that.

And that’s what I have to say on the matter.

Time for more bitching… about arena.

Last season, things were all peachy. We pushed hard, found a setup that we really liked (and became popular to boot, although we were not aware of that at the time). Rogue/disc priest for 2v2 and the infamous rogue mage priest for 3v3. Not because they were popular, mind you, but because that was basically the selection we had from our friends circle.

I spent one full season gearing Ely up from head to toe, doing AV until I was close to throwing up, completely completely squeezing every little bit from my gear, speccing into a very strange disc build solely tweaked around playing 2v2 with a rogue. We ended with a 1700ish 2v2 and 1800ish 3v3, gonna do better next season, vows and all that.

Come next season:

My 2v2 partner starts talking about how he sucks at rogue (pre-TBC Lt General, used to run with premades in the honor decay days, and he’s a damn mfking good rogue), and how much he loves his warrior. Starts spending more time gearing up the warrior when his rogue could use the upgrades more. Eventually pretty much exclusively switches to his warrior.

…all is good and well, but I don’t want to play with a warrior…

We have perfect 2v2 sync on rogue/priest, lots of practice, lots of work gone into our beloved team. We know how to play together, after so many matches of dragging ourselves up from the 1400’s to the 1700’s. We know each other’s playstyle, strengths, weaknesses, we work well together etc. If only he actually played and worked on his gear.

Meanwhile, our 3v3 mage loses interest in the game and disappears.

Result = Zero matches played in my beloved 2v2 since the start of the season (long queue times also figured into this, I guess), and a sub-1600 rating in 3v3. This with all 300-400 resilience players.

I guess I sort of feel cheated… after doing all the work on one character one expects to reap the rewards, not just sit there and wait for others to do the same kind of work, or be disappointed because you no longer share the same goal.

I’m forced to look for new teams as is, or bench Elysiane and all the work I’ve done on her. And it saddens me. I want to play with people who share my goal, but not just random people, friends whose competence I can trust. Arena was always an awesome time for us, a truly adrenaline-filled, fun time in which we got to accomplish something. Among all the yelling and screaming and laughing and debating setups and talents over Vent, it was fun. With randoms it’s every man for themselves and a blame-fest. :/

Just read a post on the LJ World of Warcraft comm, regarding the Stormstrike US battlegroup Alliance AV protest.

Well, let me just start by saying that ever since this whole debate started – I don’t agree. I don’t agree that the map favors Horde. The map may not favor the tactics employed by the Alliance side, that’s fair. Then the Alliance side simply need to stop employing said tactics.

This problem seems to be prevalent in only some battlegroups. On my own battlegroup, I certainly see no such imbalance (and I grind AV rather a lot – I find that even if it’s a loss, it’s a lot more honor/time spent than any other battleground can ever be, premade or no premade). And there are a lot more battlegroups that have no such problem than the ones who do have such a problem.

It seems that the protesters got their way anyway – with the buffs to Vanndar and Belinda, it seems that once again, as the OP said, it’s safe for Alliance to come out and play. Will I start QQing if Horde can’t win? Will I blame the map? No. There is incompetency across the board on both sides. We just gotta learn how to live with it, and how to not be a part of it.