I will stop writing about the Sanity Tap soon, I promise, and I’m sure, at some point, I’ll run out of cute little variations on LFG, with ‘G’ standing for something other than group. In my last post on the subject, there was a story that seemed to attract a little attention – to recap: while running a random heroic, following a wipe, one of the DPS refused to run, I refused to rez him, they kicked me from the group. I wasn’t outraged – the advantage of being a healer is that LFG really is your seedy cruisin ground, and you can pick up whoever you like – but I was mildly bewildered. I’m willing to concede to being as much of a dick as the random DPS, albeit in a different direction, but I would have thought, for reasons of sheer efficiency, you’d kick your dickish DPS before your dickish healer, especially as, I think, people are, as a general rule, too willing to take all manner of shit in the name of the mythical five minutes.
Gevlon argues in his post on the subject that I harmed myself more by refusing to rez:
If I’m the only rez-capable, I have to run anyway. Others are running or not does not make my run shorter or less annoying. However social people have the belief that making others suffer just to be fair is good, even if no one wins. If I get influenza, let’s infect everyone else too!
I gladly rez them. It’s better for me if they chilled a little, maybe discussed who messed it up, than make them run, be more annoyed and mess it up again. This is another example when being “fair” cause nothing but harm without any gain to anyone.
Before I begin, of course I’m acknowledging that there are exceptions to every rule: if someone has a genuine reason to wait for a rez, far better for them to go afk in “down time” while the group is running than keep everyone standing around in the instance.
And, in this specific example, Gevlon is, to an extent, correct: the optimal solution would have been to rez the guy, but it was only optimal given the assumption that we were never going to wipe again and I was never going to run with him again. And, in fact, you might even say it’s only optimal if you ignore the fact that allowing him to just lie there and wait for a rez creates a culture in which “morons and slackers” can lie around and wait for rezzes. In fact, you could even argue that the optimal solution for my perspective was to 4-man it without him – we didn’t need his DPS, the bosses would not have died appreciably more quickly and I wouldn’t have had to go back on a policy I’d made very clear at the start of the run.
I know I framed my original post in terms of “fairness” but, actually, it’s not about fairness, it’s about power. Or, to put it more abstractly, fairness has a very specific function – if you don’t hold everybody to the same reasonable standards, everybody winds up behaving to the same unreasonable standards. If you let one person hold up the group (because it’s quicker to let them do it, than to deal with it) then eventually everyone will hold up the group. Furthermore, having stated my rules clearly at the outset of the run, going back on them represents what Chas would call a “loss of utility” or Gevlon “potential for gain.” By failing to enforce the standards I initially set out, I would be denying myself the option to enforce them at a later date. Ultimately it’s a strategic sacrifice – I was willing to lose whatever time I lost in not rezzing the guy to ensure that I didn’t have to rez him again in the future, or allow other people in the group to get away with shit like lifetapping to 3% and standing in fire.
Let’s look at what “gain” is for me here. Unlike Gevlon, I don’t really care about time – I spend a lot of time in WoW piffling around – but what this means, by extension, is that actually what I’m trying to minimise is stress. And, for me, a big source of stress is other people’s lowkey douchebaggy expectations. Regardless of whether it’s fair or unfair, optimal or suboptimal, having to rez four people who have most likely not been analysing combat logs trying to improve their performance is, to put it bluntly, something I don’t want to to do. It’s annoying. And the moment I am asked to put up with someone who annoys me, remaining in that group under those circumstances is, again, a loss of utility.
I’ve accepted the fact that I am not going to have any fun running heroics using the Sanity Tap. I don’t need or want emblems of triumph and I’ve seen that content so many times that’s no pleasure to be had in it at the moment. Essentially I want the the most amount of emblems of frost, for the least amount of effort and stress – this means, I don’t want to carry lolarthaz doing his 800 DPS in his Tier 9 get up, and this means I don’t want to put up with people who piss me the fuck off.
In short: THIS IS A BAD DEAL FOR ME.
But, let’s put aside my personal selfishness, since I am, after all a Social, and look at the actual transaction at hand in more general terms – i.e. who should be running, who should be rezzing, and who benefits.
It seems pretty clear to me that everyone running is undeniably the optimal solution. If everybody runs, everyone arrives back where they were, with a reasonable amount of health and mana, especially as I’ll likely to be healing en route.
However many people run, the run still takes the same amount of time, unless the rezzer is a nelf in which case they’ll probably save a few seconds with wisp form. And if everything is going the way it should, the healer will die last and, therefore, people could have been running when it was obvious that everything was lost, again saving time. But the more people you have to resurrect at the end, the longer it takes and, furthermore, the time it takes to resurrect is ALWAYS additional to the time taken to run. So Gevlon’s assertion that other people running doesn’t make the run longer is literally true in the sense that one ghost doesn’t run faster or slower than n ghosts, but it does make the run longer in the sense that AFTER the healer has run it takes additional time to do all the resurrections.
If I am the sole rezzer, (and, actually, even if I rez another rezzer, they won’t have enough mana to rez – and probably won’t bother even if they do) this takes me about a full bar of mana and about forty seconds. Add onto this the time it takes for me to heal everybody back up to full, because you can bet your bottom dollar they won’t be eating, and then to restore my mana again, costing me the price of some honeymint tea. We’re looking, on average, at about 2 minutes on top of run time, which is, itself, only about 2 minutes, and a handful of silver.
But, of course, if you are capable of waiting for a rez (a benefit that will never be mine), there are many advantages in doing so – basically you get to piss about, play peggle, go afk, or, unlikely as it is, analyse the wipe. But in my experience the average pug’s analysis is “lol, why u no heal me?” and, let’s face it, if you’re a wiping in a heroic then there’s nothing you can’t analyse while also auto-running. Back on point, the problem is that for everyone except the healer, the optimal solution is for everyone to run EXCEPT YOU. The 10 seconds it takes for you to be resurrected are less valuable to you than the opportunity to piss around for two minutes.
BUT the opportunity to piss around for two minutes is worth less than the two minutes it takes for the healer to resurrect everyone up AND heal everybody up AND mana up themselves.
If you don’t release, you get all the benefits of pissing around for 2 minutes and only a fraction of the drawbacks. BUT the drawbacks of everybody waiting for a rez are more than the benefits to any individual of pissing around. Gevlon mentions Inequity Aversion (or the Ultimatum Game, as some people might know it) – but what you wind up with is a classic Tragedy of the Commons or Prisoner’s Dilemma. Everybody taking the option that’s best for them gives a result that worse for everybody.
Gevlon himself admits the everybody runs policy is standard for a reason but very often enforcing a policy in a specific instance has a cost, and that cost has to be weighed against the overall benefits of having the policy in the first place. It’s always quicker to rez one douchebag than to argue about it, but it is to no one’s advantage to reward people for douchebaggery, when it is so frequently its own reward.
“(…) if you don’t hold everybody to the same reasonable standards, everybody winds up behaving to the same unreasonable standards.”
This should be considered such a basic tenet that it’s a shame it has to be pointed out.
Of course it’s fine when a friend or a polite PUG member asks for a res because they need to run to the bathroom, check on a pet, grab a drink or whatever. But the key word here is *asks*. Someone who makes *demands* as if the other players were just there to serve him can take a hike off a cliff as far as I’m concerned — especially if he died stupidly or even more or less deliberately provoked the wipe.
With my experience as a guild officer, tank and semi-official raid leader’s assistant (before I quit raiding) I have simply become very, very tired of people who think they are entitled to special treatment and that the rules or simply courtesy do not apply to them. I see no sense in encouraging such behavior, all it does is lead to (more) laziness, stupidity and lack of responsibility or respect. It’s a matter of principle and principles are not a bad thing. You weren’t the douche in that PUG, and if I was in a PUG in which a similar situation occurred I’d fully support the healer/ressers.
“(…) if you don’t hold everybody to the same reasonable standards, everybody winds up behaving to the same unreasonable standards.”
This should be considered such a basic tenet that it’s a shame it has to be pointed out.
Of course it’s fine when a friend or a polite PUG member asks for a res because they need to run to the bathroom, check on a pet, grab a drink or whatever. But the key word here is *asks*. Someone who makes *demands* as if the other players were just there to serve him can take a hike off a cliff as far as I’m concerned — especially if he died stupidly or even more or less deliberately provoked the wipe.
With my experience as a guild officer, tank and semi-official raid leader’s assistant (before I quit raiding) I have simply become very, very tired of people who think they are entitled to special treatment and that the rules or simply courtesy do not apply to them. I see no sense in encouraging such behavior, all it does is lead to (more) laziness, stupidity and lack of responsibility or respect. It’s a matter of principle and principles are not a bad thing. You weren’t the douche in that PUG, and if I was in a PUG in which a similar situation occurred I’d fully support the healer/ressers.
I wonder what was going through that group's head after they kicked Tam? I'm sure it was: "What an arrogant healer. Good riddance." But 10 minutes later, when they're still waiting for a healer, was it:
(a) "I'm still glad that arrogant healer is gone. I wonder if we'll get another one before the next server maintenance?"
(b) "You know, maybe you should have just run back, we'd be done by now."
(c) "Dailies for another 3min and then I can queue for another random."
For the record, I think you made the right call. Feralan's comment right before mine is spot on, WRT entitlements, and it bothers the heck out of me too.
For Fuck's Sake.
For some reason, it annoys me disproportionately … I don't know if it's over-used or if people are going to swear and stamp their feet at you they should type it out fully or what…
Gevlon didn't get to be Gevlon by not caring about things that cost a few gold here and there. The amount of Honeymint Teas I drink is consistent and pretty high. It always costs the same everytime I buy it, since not enough drops for me to supply myself that way. I can tell you, I sure don't buy it to save other people the expense of buying food. Money is money, even if it's not gold, I don't approve of throwing it away supporting the peggle habit of dead DPS.
The other day I had a funny PUG in Pit of Saron. The issue started on the hill that bad PUGs hate – Deathbringer/Wrathbringer/Flamebearer. Tank says “Focus on the Deathbringer then the Flamebearers” then charges. Almost immediately the rogue aggroed one flamebearer while the hunter aggroed the other. My pally heals the tank once then has to put to big heals on the hunter and rogue to keep them alive and now both Wrathbringers are beating on me. I last a few seconds and 10 seconds later it is all over. Release, run back, and I sit down to get mana. I’m starting to buff everyone when I realize the rogue never released. My policy on rezzing after a group wipe is if someone asks me to do it before we start running back I will do it only if it won’t endanger the other 4 people in the group. The rogue’s body is sitting under a wrathbringer and hasn’t said a word. So I wait a few moments and heal everyone to full. The rogue still says nothing. So I say,
“I hope you aren’t expecting a rez”.
His response was .. “You need to learn to heal!” to which I responded, “You need to learn not to aggro!” Yeah we had entered a form of argument usually only seen on grade school playgrounds everywhere. Our discussion was cut short when the message appeared.
“Rogue has left the party”
The warriors sees that and says, “Oh good, that hunter was bad.” A few uncomfortable moments pass as I try to tell him that it was the rogue that left when the next message appeared.
“Hunter has left the party”
Now I’m laughing in real life and the final message appears.
“Warrior has left the party”
And now it’s just me and an ungeared deathknight. We both type “lol”, say our goodbyes, and the PUG disbands.
The group had worked well up to this wipe and if I would have just rezzed and not said a thing it is possible we would have finished without another issue. I feel pretty strong about my rez policy and I’m glad to see I’m not alone. If the same situation happens again I will do the exact same thing.
The other day I had a funny PUG in Pit of Saron. The issue started on the hill that bad PUGs hate – Deathbringer/Wrathbringer/Flamebearer. Tank says “Focus on the Deathbringer then the Flamebearers” then charges. Almost immediately the rogue aggroed one flamebearer while the hunter aggroed the other. My pally heals the tank once then has to put to big heals on the hunter and rogue to keep them alive and now both Wrathbringers are beating on me. I last a few seconds and 10 seconds later it is all over. Release, run back, and I sit down to get mana. I’m starting to buff everyone when I realize the rogue never released. My policy on rezzing after a group wipe is if someone asks me to do it before we start running back I will do it only if it won’t endanger the other 4 people in the group. The rogue’s body is sitting under a wrathbringer and hasn’t said a word. So I wait a few moments and heal everyone to full. The rogue still says nothing. So I say,
“I hope you aren’t expecting a rez”.
His response was .. “You need to learn to heal!” to which I responded, “You need to learn not to aggro!” Yeah we had entered a form of argument usually only seen on grade school playgrounds everywhere. Our discussion was cut short when the message appeared.
“Rogue has left the party”
The warriors sees that and says, “Oh good, that hunter was bad.” A few uncomfortable moments pass as I try to tell him that it was the rogue that left when the next message appeared.
“Hunter has left the party”
Now I’m laughing in real life and the final message appears.
“Warrior has left the party”
And now it’s just me and an ungeared deathknight. We both type “lol”, say our goodbyes, and the PUG disbands.
The group had worked well up to this wipe and if I would have just rezzed and not said a thing it is possible we would have finished without another issue. I feel pretty strong about my rez policy and I’m glad to see I’m not alone. If the same situation happens again I will do the exact same thing.
[...] and we were running back, when one guy says “Rez please.” I immediately think of Tam’s refusal to rez one such asshat, but SM GY is so short, and my convictions are weak. The time it would take me to belabour the [...]
[...] this makes me a complete hypocrite. I’ve argued (in response to Tam’s refusal to rez a pug idiot) that behavior from Pugs does carry over. You’re not just acting in a vaccuum in a Pug. [...]
[...] a later post responding to Gevlon, Tamarind acknowledges an exception that most healers would make: if someone has a genuine reason to wait for a rez, far better for them to go afk in “down time” [...]
[...] a later post responding to Gevlon, Tamarind acknowledges an exception that most healers would make: if someone has a genuine reason to wait for a rez, far better for them to go afk in “down time” [...]