For everyone.

The vote kick system, in theory, is an excellent idea. Someone’s messing up your heroic run, so you can cast a vote to remove them. It takes three people out of the remaining four to agree to remove the person in question, and since  you cannot whisper people cross-realm, it’s hard to negotiate a vote kick behind the scenes. You can’t remove people until their dungeon cooldown debuff runs out, so that stops the *inspect* “OMG HE HAS BLUES!?!?! KICK NOW” kind of crazies. However, in its current incarnation, the system seems to be designed to punish people who perform, while rewarding those who don’t.

As I’ve mentioned, you can’t cast a vote to kick someone who still has the dungeon cooldown debuff. That’s all good, but no sane group needs fifteen minutes to discern whether someone’s going to be a good addition to the group. The people who are so bad that they need to be weeded out as soon as possible – you can smell those in about a minute. Full T9 but no gems, no enchants? Yup. The hunter with a 71/0/0 spec and spellpower mail? I don’t need to carry this guy for 15 minutes.

I’ll stop here and explain something – there will be people reading this and going “WTF, how about if you try to teach them instead of lolkick?” I’m big on personal responsibility. There are a ton of resources on the internet that explain how to play, gear, gem and enchant any spec of any class. Anyone who’s somehow managed to get to level 80 and wants to be a part of group play should be researching how to do that effectively.

It’s not my responsibility in a random heroic to teach someone the basics of their class, and if we stopped so that every newbie we got in our group could get a lecture of “How To Play Class X 101″? The number of heroics I can get done every day would be about halved. I don’t mean one can never ask questions or receive advice from more experienced people, but if you haven’t bothered to at least get the basics down? You haven’t bothered, why should we?

Going back to the point, so you have one of these people in your group, and you want to remove them after a couple of pulls. You can’t. Worse, perhaps you have a non-participant, which seems to be a trend these days. You get someone joining and going AFK without saying a word, putting another character on follow. There’s nothing you can do.

Most people finish the majority of an instance, if not all of it, in the 15 minutes it takes to be able to vote kick someone. No one wants to wait around just to be able to remove the troublemaker and get a replacement. Everyone’d rather just move on one man short. And most people are counting on… precisely this. So what if you’re put on ignore? Plenty more where this PUG came from, just collect your badges while going about other business.

And again, let’s say you have that semi-AFK huntard who pulled barely 400 DPS through the entire thing. You’re almost at the last boss and the timer is about to run out. You could initiate a vote kick, but most people would think, what’s the point? The instance has been smooth, no one died, just let the guy get some emblems.

The point is that you just carried someone — and if he didn’t know he was bad, he didn’t learn. If he learned, or already knew, that he was not up to standards, who cares? There was no penalty, he did the heroic fine, so he doesn’t really need to improve, does he? He’ll just join another party, secure in the knowledge that his playstyle is just fine. Congrats, the lack of a solid vote kick system just encouraged another “noob” to stay a noob.

So how to fix? First off, it’s clear that 15 minutes’ wait to be able to vote kick is way too long. Lowering it down to 5 minutes is fair – 5 minutes are enough to know whether someone is an asset or a liability. It also encourages people to perform right off the bat.

Second, the implementation of a Deserter-like debuff for being AFK too long. Again, the principle is simple – if you need an AFK of longer than five minutes in a heroic, you don’t belong in there. IRL > badges, sort it out before joining a group.

Third – the way people think! It’s not wrong to vote kick people for legitimate reasons, but I see people feeling like this very, very frequently on wow_ladies, dear_gnome, or other blogs. There are many posts that basically go “This player was not up to standards, and it really annoyed me, but I was too shy to start a vote kick.” You don’t have to carry anyone who isn’t up to par. You don’t have to feel bad for them because “we’re so close to the end”. The system doesn’t even tell others who initiated a kick. Again, not kicking them will encourage them to stay bad, and you don’t want that!

Another Love Vendor production… Lineup: Prot paladin Roch, holy paladin Mahad, fury warrior Zilli, rogue Kaldar, warlock Juicydots.

Result: Kael deaded and stripped of his Commendation too, Rochalie is a happy happy tankygirl.

He dropped the Shoulderpads of the Silvermoon Retainer and the offhand sword – the shoulders went to Mahad for his retlol set, and the sword to Juicy for RP value, good times. Kaldar also dinged exalted with SSO upon the Kael kill, that’s what I call dinging in style.

First off.

I have no idea what on earth is wrong with people.

BUT IF ONE MORE PERSON WHISPERS ME WITH “SPEC?????” “HEALER????” “heroic daily need healer last spot???????????” WHEN MY LFG NOTE CLEARLY STATES “Shadow priest”, I MIGHT GO ON A MURDEROUS RAMPAGE.

My LFG note exists for a reason – it is to stop such whispers coming at the rate of five hundred times a day. If you can’t read that, I don’t want to be in your group anyway, you’re probably the same brand of nubcake as the mages who pull with PoM Pyro or the warlocks who insist that the soulstone should be on the healer instead of the resser.

So I add a DND. /dnd I am shadow. If you can’t read my LFG note, I don’t want to group with you. And take my usual spot near Shattrath battlemasters waiting for an AV to pop.

At least 5 random people standing near me whisper with “testing dnd” “dnd test” “dnd?” or variations.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH EVERYONE PLAYING THIS GAME?

No seriously, I want to know what prompts people to whisper a random stranger to test their DND message. Because I want that particular type of inner urge to be exterminated. Possibly by means of a delicious Mind Blast crit followed by a series of Flays to the face.

Anyway. Now that that is off my chest.

I’ve been doing a lot of heroics lately. My shaman was grinding them out previously for the badge gear, since I don’t know when she will get to go to Karazhan – I want my hunter to be exalted first as well as pick up the last few pieces she wants, and also perhaps Ely to get to go for some upgrades and badges. Since I can set aside time and patience for a single run per week, my only option for my shammy girl is badge and PvP gear.

Now, Kaliah isn’t the best geared shaman, as can be seen, but for her level of progression, she has pretty decent gear. Coupled with a good tank (Zilli, I’m looking at you), she is more than capable of healing most heroics, and has done so on numerous occasions, receiving compliments along the way.

So today, when one of my favorite mages hit me up on Elysiane and said “Hey, my friends and I need a healer for heroic Mech, you on?” I accepted right away and logged Kali. I know said mage and his tolerance for nubcake is about as low as mine, so I reckoned it would be a smooth run.

I wasn’t wrong – aside from the odd death here and there, caused by overeager squishy DPS, it was smooth as you please. The tank died once, which I admit was my fault because on a tough pull I was slow with starting a cast (and ranged was not focus firing, gg). I died once because something was wrong with the hunter’s trap and the tank was slow on grabbing aggro, but eh. Nothing an ankh won’t fix, mistakes happen.

So at the end of the run, we portal off to Shattrath, and the mage whispers me with “Sorry about the tank, he wasn’t a good one, I know.” I replied saying that I had not noticed anything wrong with the tank, but that the rogue was hard to keep alive because he aggroed almost every pull, and that it was fine anyway – it was a good run, fast and without hassle.

That’s when my mage tells me that the tank had been bitching about me on Vent the entire run, going on and on about how I’m not a good healer.

I just sat there and went “WTF?”.

Uh okay, granted, he died once, it was a mistake, I was distracted. My bad. But what was that about? It’s not like people died every pull, it’s not like the tank was consistently dangerously low on HP. I put in my best effort at any point, I’m the kind of healer who feels insulted when people need to pop potions/healthstones/Last Stand. (Except when Zilli is tanking, that’s when I’m yelling at him on Vent to SHIELD WALL LAST STAND OMGWTFBBQ DON’T DIE – but that’s another matter entirely.) I consider “you are a bad healer” an insult of the gravest form, since it’s my specialty – it’s what I constantly read up on, what I’m known with, basically what I do.

The mage reassured me saying that I was the best healer he met on this realm (/flex) and not to worry, the healing was just fine, the tank wasn’t a good one anyway. We exchanged a couple more words about how it was a pleasure running together as usual, and then I logged Elysiane.

But meh, I’m still pretty riled up over it, I wish he had actually said something in /p if he had a specific complaint so I could discuss with him whatever his problem was. Knowing people, it was probably a variation of “lol we have epax and you don’t so that makes you a bad healer automatically”, but eh.

I’m thinking I should probably start focusing on Kali again at one point, I really enjoy shaman healing. With Elysiane I always felt like I had room for error due to so many instants and ohshiii buttons, but when I’m healing a heroic on Kaliah it requires a lot of attention all the time. In between totem micromanagement, precasting, AOE damage, and Healing Way stacking on the MT, I always have a lot to pay attention to.