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!

There has been a massive ongoing discussion on LJ’s wow_ladies, which can basically summed up as follows:

Let’s say you’re randoming a heroic as a tank or healer, and you ended up in a group with a couple of DPSers who are not pulling their weight, but the instance is going smoothly. Do you comment on it, or do you let it pass because it’s all good anyway?

I’ll sum up my stance with an anecdote from the other day.

Lumi ended up in a heroic Strat group through the random dungeon option. I was tanking. Lumi was fairly well geared at that point, rocking an unbuffed 38ish thousand HP, and other appropriate stats. The healer was one of the top guilds on Grim Batol, with the best raid gear one could get. It looks all fine to me, we go ahead and begin.

Meathook seems to take his sweet time dying, and I take a look at Skada. I’ve done an average of 1300 DPS and I’m right there on top of damage done. Um, really now?

After Meathook died, I inspected my fellow group mates. All of them were in a hodgepodge of greens and blues, with the occasional ilvl200 epic thrown in. This much is fine. What wasn’t fine was the all the empty sockets glaring at me from their gear, as well as the lack of enchants even on the higher quality pieces. Really, how do you win an epic helm that is leaps and bounds better than any of your other pieces, and then think to yourself  “Nvm, don’t need to socket or enchant that”? How can anyone not afford all of three gold needed to buy a green quality gem from the AH?

I asked my group members to please up their DPS as they were all really low (DK, arms warrior, and hunter, for the record). The responses ranged from “We haven’t even wiped, what’s your problem?” “I’m a new 80, lol” to “I’m an alt”.

Does one need to wipe in an instance to notice that they have to get better? Why is it that most people don’t bother to go above that minimum “do this, else we’ll wipe” threshold, and think that this is fair to everyone else in the group? Since when is “I’m a new 80″ or “I’m an alt” an excuse for subpar performance in a heroic?

To me, all of those responses indicated a gratuitous lack of respect. As one of my friends put it, manners don’t seem to be included in the new patches. You are disrespecting your group members when you’re in a heroic with unenchanted, ungemmed gear, with full knowledge that you don’t belong there, not trying to squeeze out the best DPS you have. You are telling strangers “I know I’m not good enough, so please carry me through this, okay?” in an extremely cheeky way.

I have a friend. She dinged 80 a couple of days ago, a moonkin who had to reroll EU from US, leaving two years of investment in her character. Even while she was leveling, she was planning out her gear at 80, ranking pieces, eyeballing things she could cheaply buy from the AH. She had a set of gemmed, enchanted gear waiting for her as soon as she dinged 80, a mix of blues and cheap 200-219 epics. The results? ~1800 DPS sustained on a target dummy the day she dinged. She had 1600ish spellpower at this point and was fully hitcapped.

This, my friends, is how you respect others.

The four of us, our little friends group, take her along to heroic runs now. Most of the time she’s dead last on the meters. Does it bother any of us? Hell no. We all outgear her by miles, but even more important than that, she has already done the best she can to improve her gear, tweak her rotation, and to get herself to an acceptable level for heroics. The rest can come with time. She has shown respect for herself and for everyone else she’s going to be grouped with, and that goes much, much further than any epic loot can ever take her.

In the same vein, if everyone in my Strat group had bothered to enchant and gem the shinies they had? Even if they did less damage than Lumi afterwards? I wouldn’t care. Not at all. They’ve already shown some respect, so I’d gladly “carry” those people. We were all new to 80 once. No one is expected to do 3k+ DPS sustained the day they hit 80.

If you’re ever a fresh 80 on any character out to do heroics, ask yourself this question: “If everyone’s gear, performance and knowledge were equal to my own, would we able to get through this instance smoothly?” The answer you want to this question is a resounding yes. No ifs, no buts, no maybes. If the answer is anything but yes, go back and try again until it is.

This whole debacle does, though, get the goat of all the people who legitimately earned their gear when people don’t bother, which is part of where the whole casual/elitist debate stems from. Here’s news, guys – when you don’t bother making some effort towards pulling your weight before grouping with other people? That’s not being casual.

Casual is not an excuse for being bad. Casual is when you have limited time to devote to the game, and I’m pretty sure you can still conjure up some respect for others with that limited time. You’re oh so busy with whatever things you do in real life, and can’t be bothered to read a wiki page or one forum thread before you engage in group play? Fine. Then you don’t really belong in group play, so don’t be surprised or hurt when you get removed. You can take a few minutes to read up on your class and the instances, spec properly, gem properly, enchant properly. There are a great many “casual” people out there who do that, moonkin!friend being just one of them.

When you’re playing in a group, in a MMO no less, you make an implied promise to others that you’ll perform your assigned role to the best of your ability. You end up taking on responsibilities, and not fulfilling those responsibilities shows a great lack of respect towards the people you play with – and this is what gets me and a lot of the people who kicked you out of their party.

Dear 70-79 AV players of Rampage,

If your healer is repeatedly faceplanting while trying to heal Balinda… I somehow don’t reckon the problem is the healing, you know?

I’m sure you guys feel totally awesome because you’re top of damage done, but yeah, Balinda still isn’t dead, and she won’t be dead for a looong while because in this bracket she’s impossible to get down without multiple healers. She outlevels all of you by at least four levels, and she hits like a truck.

Incidentally, so does her water elemental that no one cares about at level 80. I’m getting Frostbolted for 2k a pop, and I only have 11k health.

So it makes you look slightly bad at this game when you charge right in and furiously smash your damage dealing buttons, die after I die because none of you could be bothered to get the elemental off me, then yell in/bg “OMG, healer fail at Balinda AGAIN.”

In conclusion, L2P.

Love,
Baby!tree Starlet, who heals her little branches off every match, trying to keep all of you ungrateful DKs and rets happy.