A Halls of Origination story

I just noticed that almost all of my posts this month have been of the more thoughtful variety, so I think it's about time to have a plain old pug story.

This morning I decided to queue up to tank a random heroic on my paladin since the Call to Arms for tanks was up. I know others have ranted about how much of a failure that system is, but on my server at least it's actually been working better than I expected, so that half of the time CtA isn't even active because the queues are short enough already. I was hoping to get Grim Batol so I could finally complete my Cataclysm Dungeon Hero achievement, but ended up in Halls of Origination instead. Oh well!

I immediately noticed that there was another Earthen Ringer in my group, a warlock called Spiffy (that wasn't actually his name, but it was something similar) who had in fact also been in my Ahune group only about five minutes ago. "Hello again, Spiffy!" I said happily, though I got no response.

Actually, let me go off on a tangent here right away, in regards to the changes to the dungeon finder that are supposed to make it more likely for you to get grouped with people from your own server. Personally I haven't seen it make much of a difference, but then Earthen Ring isn't exactly a high population server these days. Only when I'm tanking or healing do I occasionally get grouped with a dps from my home server, presumably because there's a pretty large pool of them to draw from.

However, what's been more interesting to me is who I don't get grouped with as often. I used to get grouped with people from Stormscale all the damn time for example, and they didn't have the best reputation. They practically seemed to own the dungeon finder in my battlegroup. Lately however I've hardly seen any trace of them - presumably they all get grouped with each other. I'm not sure whether that's actually made a difference to the quality of my pugs, but it does feel to me as if players from the smaller servers tend to be a bit more laid back.

Anyway, back to Halls of Origination. Zinn wrote a nice guide the other day on how to handle the first trash pull in there, and I completely managed to mess it up. Mobs were all over the place, but thankfully the rogue had been clever enough to sap one of them, which limited the ensuing chaos at least a little. Oh well. We progressed reasonably smoothly anyway, and killed the first boss without any problems.

At one point during the trash Spiffy lagged behind for a bit, and explained afterwards that he had been disconnected for a minute. The same thing had happened to him on Ahune earlier and almost left us with too little dps to avoid a third add phase, but he came back in time and it was fine, so I shrugged it off in this case as well. However, one of the other dpsers made a comment about wanting to kick him once their cooldown was up. I said nothing, but when the vote actually came up I voted no and it failed. Spiffy seemed a bit flustered, apologising for his connection problems and offering to leave if people wanted him gone. I told him that no, it was all right, and nobody argued. Sometimes it's good to be The Tank.

To go off on another tangent... kicking someone for disconnecting once on trash? Really? People really ought to put some more thought into these things. No wonder that there are so many complaints on the forums about the vote-kick cooldown being too long. I don't even have a cooldown, and I've never had a problem getting rid of someone who acted like a douche. I've even kicked multiple people in quick succession if they were a problem. However, fact of the matter is that in the vast majority of runs, I have no reason to kick anyone. Someone disconnecting briefly is not a reason. The system is working fine. If you've got a two hour cooldown on your vote-kick function, the problem is you. End rant.

Back to Halls of Origination, again! As we moved up to the elevator, I asked whether anyone wanted to do any of the optional bosses but didn't get a single answer. One could consider that rude, but I prefer to think that people were simply stunned into silence by a pug tank actually asking for their opinions. I told them that I took their silence as a no and made straight for the Vault of Lights.

On the trash pull in the hallway leading up to it I borked up once again and faceplanted, as the healer couldn't keep me up through the crazy damage I was taking. I immediately apologised, assured him that it wasn't his fault and told everyone else that they were doing a great job finishing off the rest of the mobs without me. I guess it's very obvious that I'm mainly a healer.

I was slightly worried about Spiffy disconnecting in the Vault of Lights and getting eaten by troggs, but nothing of the like happened. In fact, I don't think he disconnected again for the entire rest of the run. We killed Anraphret without any problems and finished with Rajh. I didn't actually look at Recount, but the dps seemed pretty low, considering that the latter went through two of his AoE phases before dying, while some groups can kill him before he even finishes the first. No matter, it was good enough.

Now, some people drop group as soon as they get the dungeon complete message and don't even wait for the loot rolls to finish, but I tend to hang around a bit for no real reason other than that I want to still be there in case anything unusual happens. Also, for some reason I don't like being the first person to leave - it's as if I need confirmation from someone else that we're truly done.

In this case this turned out to be a good thing, as I noticed that nobody else was leaving either and people started to move down the stairs back towards the centre of the floor. "Let's do the optional bosses!" someone suggested and I quietly shook my hands at my monitor in exasperation. Why did nobody say anything when I asked about this exact thing earlier? But hey, my offer still stood, so we ended up going back to do most of the instance after having officially completed the instance. Not something you do every day!

I half expected someone to drop out and leave us stranded and unable to replace them, but nobody did. It was only then that I noticed that the three people who weren't me or Spiffy were all from the same server and guild, which explained why they were so happy to stick together. How did I make it through the whole run without noticing that? For shame. At least it explained how my single vote had been enough to prevent Spiffy from being kicked.

Doing the optional bosses in Halls of Origination is always quite funny in my opinion, because you pretty much inevitably end up with someone who's way overgeared for the place but has no clue about the boss fights because they've only ever gone straight for Rajh. Setesh is and was very good in this regard, as I saw the feral druid clumsily going after the adds instead of attacking the boss for example. Again dps was low and my game was starting to lag from all the adds I was tanking but eventually he died after all and I laughed with relief.

They were even happy to go back downstairs and kill Ptah, as I had noticed that I didn't have the camel achievement on my pally. Of course then I ended up losing my camel just before the boss died, but such is life.

Overall this was one of those runs that made me feel really good. What friction there was ended up being resolved amiably, and the fact that the entire party happily stuck together to clear out the rest of the instance after Rajh was one of those things that always gives me hope that at least some WoW players still care about other things than simply getting the optimal amount of badges per minute.

Pugging Pains

Every cloud has a silver lining, and what goes up, must come down - or in other words, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that my recent string of happy pugging experiences was quickly followed by a lot of awfulness.

My rogue finally hit Outland today, but before that I did some more pugging with him... and it was painful. I haven't actually had much fun since he outgrew Sunken Temple, except for one perfectly smooth Dire Maul East run and one BRD Emperor run where I ended up completing most of the instance with just a protection warrior and a disc priest, after we had booted some troublesome elements and it didn't seem worth replacing them.

It's not so much that anyone in particular acted more horrible than usual, but the overall standard of behaviour was just shockingly low. To give you an example, I think I had more runs with people ninjaing loot than runs where everyone used the need/greed system as intended. One or two ninjas actually stopped once I called them out on it, but most just completely ignored my comments and continued their random need rolls on everything. Only in one Dire Maul East run the tank and healer decided to kick the ninja after he didn't respond to my comments about it twice. More often than not the tank and/or healer were the ninjas.

A lot of people also just came across as incredibly impatient. Maybe we simply have very different ideas of fun, but I don't particularly enjoy abandoning every other instance halfway through just to start a new run. In one BRD group someone kept spamming us with attempts to requeue for a different dungeon halfway through the run (even though we were progressing fast and smoothly) and when he didn't get his wish he went AFK until we kicked him.

During my only attempt at Lower Blackrock Spire, our tank, who seemed to be the only one who knew the way, eventually dropped group and left us somewhat stranded. When we got a new tank and couldn't immediately find our way around, again the group wanted to start over with another random instance instead. I declined, telling them that I had queued for LBRS in specific, and got the boot before I could even blink. Not that I think that they didn't have the right to enforce the majority vote, but I would have liked to at least try to convince them or else leave on my own... but no, they had to requeue now now now. What is it with all these players having the attention span of a gnat? Surely actually completing an instance run is not considered too hardcore these days?

And then of course there were the ones doing plain dense and stupid things. Like the tank who pulled mobs until he died while the healer hadn't even zoned in yet and then complained about lack of heals. Or the tank/healer duo from the same guild that had zero communication, with the tank again pulling everything in sight repeatedly and then wondering why he died. One particularly stubborn death knight tank managed to wipe the party in exactly the same way three times in a row (by aggroing the Grim Guzzler patrons with blood boil spam) before the group disbanded. Generally a lot of players seemed to be completely unable to deal with anything that made "just AoE everything in sight" a bad strategy, and I saw healers catching a lot of crap when they got silenced or things got out of control otherwise, as if it was all their fault.

I'm not sure why I've suddenly had such a streak of terrible pugs, but I have some theories.

For one thing, I noticed that Blizzard has started to merge the EU battlegroups as well now (edit: found the official announcement), though I don't know whether they are entirely done yet. You'd think that one battlegroup is already large and anonymous enough, so that adding some more wouldn't make a difference, but to be honest I was actually starting to get a decent feel for Cyclone after a year. With all those different server names popping up in my pugs all of a sudden I feel like I'm completely lost at sea again. Maybe it's just xenophobia, but I wouldn't be surprised if at least some of these new servers really did have a higher than average percentage of annoying players. Maybe it's time to start taking notes again.

Part of my chagrin definitely came from being a pure damage dealer and feeling awfully powerless in the dungeon finder group dynamics. I mean, even when I pug with my death knight as dps, I don't have to take any crap from tanks because if it comes down to it I can take over the tanking role. But as a rogue... I'm nothing. I definitely can't tank, I can't even off-heal, I'm totally dependent on the mercy of the tank and healer and can only hope that they don't act like complete douches. As it was I'm surprised that I didn't get kicked more often for calling tanks out when they behaved badly.

Still, I'm hoping that things will get a bit better in Outland, because at least the instances there are closer to Blizzard's more "modern" instance approach than all the old level sixty dungeons. I mean, I can appreciate BRD's good sides, but I do agree that the corpse run back to the instance is tedious as hell, so I can at least somewhat understand why people are more prone to dropping group there if we wipe. Plus, Outland is where the loot roll rules get a bit stricter I believe, which might curb the ninjaing tendencies at least a little. We'll see.

Return of the search terms

More strange search terms that led people to this blog:

cap the amount of death knights allowed in one pvp match - You know, I could totally get on board with that, especially for the 50-59 bracket. I shudder to think back to my shaman's Warsong Gulch experiences in that level range...

celestial steed floppy legs - I believe the word that I used to describe the sparkle pony's legs was "spindly", but yeah, I agree that something about its legs looks off.

drakes oculus cannot dismount - Well, there is this button with a big red arrow on the right side of the vehicle interface; pressing that should dismount you. That said, I have heard of cases where it bugged out for people and pressing the button seemed to do nothing. Puggers that I ran with seemed to be able to solve this problem by either reloading their user interface (/console reloadui) or by relogging.

eu stormscale jerks - Now, now, no need to be so harsh. As my almost scientific observations of pug composition showed, Stormscalers simply like to pug a lot in general, which is why you seem to meet more rude players from that server - simply because there are a lot more of them around. Don't judge them too harshly.

humminghippies.com - I had to go and have a look at that website after spotting this search term, but it only has a front page that seems to have been under construction for several months and nothing else. Just going by the overall look of it, I'm guessing that it's probably meant to be about proper hippies though. I'm only a hippie in the eyes of certain rage-quitting tanks.

lalapala - Okay, I made fun of a guy with that name once, but am I missing something here? Is he someone famous? Or is this actually a proper word in a language I don't know? I'm not sure why people would be googling for this repeatedly...

lfg tfa/cit - Assuming this wasn't meant to go into general chat instead of Google, I'm guessing that people searching the internet for this are trying to find out what that acronym actually stands for. It means "looking for group for Threat From Above/Battle Before The Citadel" (though on my server they tend to shorten the latter to bbc instead). These are daily group quests in Icecrown that become available once you've become a champion of your home city at the Argent Tournament.

old guild feels betrayed - Yes, yes, we do. Especially if you've been raiding with us for a year or longer and then just leave without as much as a word of goodbye. Hmph.

pukaja sport day - Pukaja is the name of my tauren hunter, and upon reading these words I couldn't help picturing her in a tennis outfit - something that makes for a very bizarre mental image, let me tell you. My curiosity was piqued enough that I investigated a little further and from the looks of it pukaja is actually a word or a name in a language that I don't speak. Anyone happen to know anything more about that? I think it's kind of ironic, since her first incarnation was called Pünktchen (German for "little dot"), but when I mentioned this to a friend he told me that it was against the naming rules for roleplaying servers, so I deleted and re-created her with what I considered a completely random name instead. Seems there is no escaping those pesky real words.

running around zul drak and sometimes all objects disappear and and i only saw the main frame of the terain i hope this is only a 1 time error - Holy convoluted search term, Batman! I really don't know what else to say to that.

tail sticking out near the drakkari colossus / elemental room in gundrak - Well spotted, though it looks more like a giant snake to me. One of my friends pointed this out to me during one of our earliest Gundrak runs and we got all excited about what it might be, but there's nothing in the game that gives us any further information about it. I've only heard vague speculation about how it might have been part of a scrapped plot for Zul'Drak involving a raid instance, but nothing official.

what is the weekly raid quest this week - I really hope that this one was meant to go into general chat instead, because Google isn't going to tell you the answer to that one, buddy.

A plea for more stable servers

You know, I'm generally not too fond of just making rant posts that don't have much of a point, but I just have to get this one off my chest: What in the world is currently going on with my server (Earthen Ring - EU) and with its whole battlegroup for that matter? I tend to be pretty laid back about things like lag and overloaded instance servers, but the way ER has been completely and utterly broken in the past week is seriously bordering on the ridiculous.

Last Monday we went to ICC, killed Putricide, continued to Valithria Dreamwalker... and then the server went down. We stayed on TeamSpeak for fifteen minutes or so but eventually had to call the raid since there was no way to tell when the server would come up again.

On Wednesday we had a great raid and almost downed the Blood Queen for the first time. I was hyped again.

On Thursday I wanted to run a ten-man. Since we were short on signups it took a while to get the group together, but after half an hour or so we finally found a tenth person. A mere minute later, the server went down again. All that work for nothing.

Yesterday, Sunday, we struggled to get enough people for a twenty-five-man together but the officers pulled it off. We intended to start with clearing the plague wing, started by killing Festergut, but just as we were about to pull Rotface a bunch of people - including myself, the raid leader and the healing leader - got booted off the server. This time the server wasn't down and the majority of the raid was still online, but the people who had been kicked off for no reason were unable to log back on and so another raid had to be cancelled.

I checked the official forums and I could find nothing, absolutely nothing about those issues on there, apart from a few resigned posts about dead hamsters on our realm forums. The people of Earthen Ring are used to their server not always working properly, but come on!

I love this game and I want to keep playing it. With the next new and exciting major patch a long way off, it can be hard enough to motivate people to attend raids as it is, and all this nonsense with servers going down or randomly booting a quarter of the raid is not helping. When you finally get enough people together to raid and then it doesn't happen because Blizzard won't let you, people are even less motivated to try again - because how do they know that it won't just be a complete waste of time again?

For one of our warriors, last night was the straw that broke the camel's back and he decided to call it quits. With three out of four raids having to be cancelled due to server issues this past week, I can't say I can blame him.

Cyclone EU battlegroup ponderings

Tamarind made a post about the new dungeon finder the other day, in which he noted as an aside that Crushridge seemed to be the one server in his battlegroup where "the tards come from". As I read this I nodded my head in agreement and thought about how I had observed something similar in my own battlegroup, except that I couldn't remember the exact name of the server at that moment. It was something starting with an S though.

So I went to have a look at all the servers on Cyclone, to see if I would recognise the culprit... and had to realise that no less than eight out of the fourteen servers in my battlegroup start with an S. Three of them start with "Storm" too. D'oh.

The problem was, now I was really curious. Which server was it that had caused most of my unpleasant experiences in pugs? So I started to take notes. And after grouping with more than one hundred and fifty different puggers, I came to a couple of interesting conclusions.

First off: Man, the official list of realms in the battlegroup as posted on the European forums is so outdated. I spent quite a while wondering why I never met anyone from Shadowmoon in my pugs, until I realised that that server was actually shut down over a year ago. It used to be one of the inofficial Russian servers until Blizzard created some official ones, and after everyone had transferred off it was shut down. Hello there, random piece of trivia!

After a while I started to wonder whether Silvermoon had already ceased to exist as well, but just as I was about to write it off, a Silvermoon player ended up in a normal-mode Ahn'kahet pug with my shaman. Still, she remained the only one. What's up, Silvermoon? Every other server showed up in my groups at least five times since I started counting. Is Silvermoon just that dead or are there any other factors at play? I can't help but wonder.

Enough yapping about dead servers, you say, which one ended up being the "black sheep" where all the jerks came from? Well, I feel a bit silly saying that, but there actually wasn't one. I mean, looking back at it now I was probably thinking of Stormscale, because I noted three negative experiences with Stormscale players during my "experiment" - however, one player also stood out as particularly nice and no less than thirty others simply did their job without leaving a mark one way or the other.

The thing about Stormscale is that for some reason it's massively over-represented in my Cyclone pugs: out of my one hundred and fifty-six puggers, no less than thirty-four were from Stormscale. (The second most represented server was Shattered Hand with twenty, which is already a fair bit behind.) My point is that when you run with a lot of people from a certain server, it's automatically also more likely that you'll run into some bad apples among them. I mean, the five players from Ravencrest and the five from Spinebreaker that I met didn't leave an impression one way or another, but does that mean that those servers are better or "nicer" than Stormscale? In all honesty, when you've only met such a small number, you can't really tell.

Also, contrary to what we people on roleplaying servers tend to believe sometimes, PvPers aren't all jerks and social rejects. I mean, Stormscale is a PvP server, and nobody does more pugging on Cyclone. In fact, nearly two thirds of my fellow puggers came from PvP servers. How surprising is that?

Before the release of the new dungeon finder there was some talk about how cross-server instancing would destroy the "local" server community. I can't really say that I've seen this happen yet, but only time will tell. However, after observing my fellow puggers from other servers in the battlegroup closely over the past week or so, I have to say that they don't quite feel like such a big anonymous mass either anymore. It's not that the battlegroup is becoming the new server, but it's like... having lived in the same city for all of your life and then travelling through the rest of your country. Some of it is strange, if you go far enough west the people start to talk funny, but some things are also familiar and there are certain cultural points of reference that you share. I'm curious how that will pan out for the WoW community in the long run.

How do you feel about your battlegroup?

The continuing conundrum of frozen orbs

Whether to need or greed on frozen orbs at the end of a cross-server instance run was a question that already came up in my very first post about the new system, and one that was also commented on in other places. I believe that WoW.com had an article about it too, but I can't be arsed to find it right now since their search engine sucks. Overall I got the impression that people explained different rolls away as the result of different server rules and that many were of the opinion that eventually, everybody would just settle on needing.

Over a week later, this is so not what's been happening in my battlegroup (Cyclone EU).

First off, I really can't fight the feeling that the argument about different server rules simply doesn't apply, or at least not on Cyclone. I've mostly been running with people from the same couple of servers, and there's been no rhyme or reason to their rolls. Sometimes I'd have multiple people from the same server in my party and they'd all roll differently. So how do you explain that?

I sort of already mentioned this in my previous post, but my theory is that it used to be "all greed" on all servers, but that some people started rolling need under the new system out of a mixture of fear and greed. You can't trust those strangers from the other servers, they'll surely try to ninja the orb so you better roll need to get ahead of them! Except that if they all end up rolling greed as usual, you are the one who'll end up looking like a ninja. Oops.

If this is indeed people's way of thinking, for everyone to switch to need-rolling, everyone would have to be sufficiently scared and greedy. This doesn't seem to be the case however; most people still roll greed simply out of habit and because they don't seem to be that bothered about what others do. I've had runs where a single person blatantly ninjaed the orb and still nobody even batted an eyelash. With the current frequency of pug runs the damn things are practically raining from the sky anyway, so who cares?

I have to admit that I'm still a greeder myself, and in a fair number of runs it works too - the ever growing pile of orbs in my bank is a testament to that. Just before rolling I tend to throw a quick look at what others have rolled and if I see nothing but needs I'll roll need too... but this is rare. I'm not very thorough either; sometimes I look at the rolls, see a greed, hit greed as well, and then it turns out that the other three people needed. Still, I just shrug at situations like that and continue to roll greed because I really don't care that much about winning, and needing on a fairly common BoE crafting item simply doesn't feel right.

I just find the whole thing damn fascinating.