pass my soapbox

Okay. L2Read, Tam. Apparently we are getting an insta-vote kick. Errr. Woot. This rant is now totally irrelevant. But I’ll leave it here as … a fossil … of my thinking

You know, I’m really not looking forward to the 15-minute LFG deserter debuff becoming a 30-minute deserter debuff. Well, actually, I probably won’t care because I pug so little these days. But, dammit, the principle bugs the crap out of me.

I know why they’re doing it. It’s to stop tanks being dickheads. It’s to stop these dickhead tanks leaving a group in the lurch after the piece of tanking plate they wanted drops in HoR. It’s to stop these dickhead tanks taking one look at the OK loading screen and buggering off.

In which case, given that it takes your average tank about 0.1 seconds to get a group the moment she sticks her defence-capped nose into LFG and given that dickheads will not miraculously stop being dickheads if you politely endeavour to discourage them, do you really think a 30 minute desert debuff is going to make ANY DIFFERENCE?

To save you checking the back of the textbook for the answers, I’ll tell you: NO.

All it does is put yet more social pressure on the non-dickish to suck it up for the good of the group when, err, confronted by dick. So to speak.

These days, for the sake of my pride and sanity, I don’t pug all that much. But I’ve had a couple of badduns recently that were not very out of the common way of badduns but what rendered them particularly galling was not so much the lack of in-game defence mechanisms (Tam’s a big boy, he can can look after himself) but the way Blizzard’s attempts to provide in-game defence mechanisms actually render ragingly impotent those they would seek to protect.

Pug the First

We all zoned into HoS and the retripaladin immediately greeted the tank – also a paladin – with “GIEF KINGS PLOX” (I wish I was joking, or exaggerating, but that’s exactly what he said, I swear to God, and without a trace of irony). And while the tank was, y’know, getting herself ready for tanking as tanks do, Our Irritating Friend proceeded to spam every chat channel available to him with “kings plz” “tank buff kings” “kings”. GAH.

“Give her a minute,” I said.

“KINGS!” said OIF.

The tank pulled the first group. She was entirely silent but I had kings and wisdom so I presume she was deliberately not buffing him because he was screaming at her like somebody with paladin buff tourettes.

“KINGS!” insisted OIF, as we killed the mobs. “GIV KINGS!!!!!!!!!”

“What is wrong with you?” I asked. “Live without kings, or does your DPS suck that much?” (Yes, I was being inflammatory but I’d just server-transferred, I was footless and fancy free and in a really fucking bad mood).

“Retard,” he replied.

I resolved not to heal him but, sadly, being a paladin it didn’t actually cause him much of a problem – despite his inevitable aggro-monkey ways.

At this point I think the tank decided peace was worth more than principles, and I don’t blame her, so she buffed him. She pulled the next group. For the record, she seemed a perfectly decent tank to me – not over-geared but sensibly geared, gemmed, enchanted, knowing her stuff, but I think she must have been a bit stressed out because she mis-handled the pull. I healed us through it though.

“You really fucked up there, tank,” chirruped OIF.

The tank dropped the group. Again, can’t say I blame her. She had no reason whatsoever to put up with that kind of shit.

I was feeling … I don’t know … masochistic, perhaps, and it wasn’t like we were getting another tank any time soon, so I decided – out of sheer curiosity – to poke the specimen. Our conversation went something like this:

ME: You do realise that was completely unnecessary, right?
OIF: ?
ME: You just laid into that tank for no apparent reason, after bugging the hell out of her for something as trivial as buff.
OIF: Retard
ME: (armory-ing away) I notice you don’t tank
OIF: Lol no
ME: That being so, don’t you think you ought to consider behaving with some modicum of gratitude towards people who are willing to help you in the game by doing something you yourself are too shit to do.
OIF: Retard

I know I should just have left it … and screaming at Dickhead of the Week wasn’t going to make anything better but … what can I say … fresh server, putrid mood.

ME: Okay. Look at it this way. How long did you queue for this dungeon.
OIF: Bout 25 minutes.
ME: You know how long I queued
OIF: Silence.
ME: I SAID do you know how long I queued
OIF: No.
ME: 40 seconds
OIF: So
ME: You know how long the tank you just treated like shit queued?
OIF: No
ME: 5 seconds. Do the math fuckwit.
OIF: Retard.
ME: You know how long you’re going to have wait here for a new tank? I’ll save you calculations because you’re clearly not over-endowed in the brain department. At a generous estimate, about 10 minutes. You know how long you’re going to stand around waiting for a new tank AND a new healer? Well, you’re about to find out.

I dropped the group. I know what was unfair to the other DPS but sometimes the gah is just too much to bear.

PUG the Second

A rather similar situation to the one Jakkru describes here. The instance is VH, we all appear, the tank immediately greets the mage with “table plz” the mage takes longer than 2 seconds, the tank responds “fuck you, bitch” and runs off to pull. I find this mildly upsetting, and am tempted to quit the group, but I think to myself the mages badges not a squeamish preux chevalier. However, in the next between-pulls-pause, the tank begins again: “Mage, you are complete shit.” I ask him to leave her alone. The tank continues in this manner for some time, getting nastier and nastier until I actually can’t stand it and drop the group. I just can’t be complicit in that kind of thing, even if the victim chooses to take it.

The Moral of these Stories

In each situation the really infuriating thing was that I (we) were powerless to do anything about this pair of stains on the toilet bowl of Azeroth. We couldn’t kick either of them because you have to spend 15 long fucking minutes in their company before you’re allowed the privilege of kicking a dickhead to the kerb.

Again, I understand the reasoning behind this. You can’t have people just kicking people for shits and giggles or because they’ve got a pair of blue gloves or a dodgy enchantment on their cape. But, hell, if somebody is going to try and do that to somebody else they’re blatantly going to do it ANYWAY, and they might as well do in the first second of entering an instance than drag them halfway through UK before announcing “the hunter sucks” and initiating a vote-kick

But it does mean that if somebody makes an arrant cock of himself (or herself) in the first 15 minutes (which, let’s face it, nowadays is the time it takes to do most instances, and significantly less time than it takes an arrant cock to reveal himself) it means you’re actually stuck with the fucker and there’s really nothing – NOTHING – you can do about it, short of drag his worthless, repulsive arse through a dungeon with you, netting him badges and enchanting mats, until you’re allowed to vote kick by which point it isn’t worth it anyway and you’ve still had a dickhead in your life being dickish at you without check or retribution.

Nowadays my refuge of choice from the awfulness of pugs is The Silent Departure. The first time I did it, I felt terrible – those poor people queuing for another healer, how I let them down – but it’s been easier with each successive vanishing act. Yes it seems on one level unfair to “punish” innocents for the behaviour of one dickhead but it’s not about punishment, it’s about self-preservation. It’s not called Looking For Abuse (although it might as well be) and, ultimately, whether I’m there or not, they’ve still made an informed decision to take shit for badges – an informed decision I most assuredly have not taken, and moreover cannot be expected to support with my personal sacrifice.

However, with 3.3.3, the penalty for dropping a group is potentially extremely high. For a tank or a healer the debuff is essentially 30 minutes, but for a DPS it might as well be an hour if you take into account the queue. And, of course, no guarantee that the next group you get won’t be QUANTIFIABLY WORSE than the last one you fled. This naturally means that the prevailing mindset will more than ever be “shut up and put up” which strikes me as a pretty serious problem. Systematised doormatism, in fact, since Blizzard have essentially denied us the ability to self-regulate our pugs. Dropping a group is increasingly problematic, vote-kicking somebody – although effective – is basically gimped, so more than ever you have a system in which, well, the best lack of all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity – AND THE ANTI-CHRIST IS COMING, I TELL YOU. Sorry of this sounds incredibly histrionic (and the Yeats reference was self-ironic).

I mean if you’ve got a dickhead in your group there’s nothing to stop you all teleporting out of the instance, going on your merry way for 15 minutes, teleporting back in and vote-kicking the bastard. But oh no. Heaven forefend we actually stand up for ourselves. Heaven forefend we unite against dickheads instead of giving them free reign by bitching out anybody who dares hope for better treatment. Heaven forefend we’d rather spend 15 minutes doing something we were probably going to have to do anyway (Chas recommends farming meat in the Storm Peaks, by the way) than put ourselves through merry hell for 2 shitty badges.

A while ago I inadvertently opened one of those many wow worm cans by refusing to rez a guy who wouldn’t run, and thus holding a whole group ransom to my excessively social sense of what is right and just. And I argued it back and forth for a few days via inequity inversion, the prisoner’s dilemma, and the actual time-saving mechanics of all running versus one poor bastard running etc. etc. But the thing that emerged pretty comprehensively across the board was, although the rightness or wrongness of refusing to rez was comprehensively unprovable, holding a group who only wanted their daily badge allocation at moral-point was Not Okay.

And the more I think about it, the more I conclude this: groups hold themselves to ransom. They ransom themselves to dickheads and to frustration for badges and so great is the “just get through it and take your medicine” pressure that it is generally considered WORSE to rock the boat than fill the boat with killer crabs and poo.

The problem ultimately is not the dickheads. They are merely lone individuals who ought to get chewed up and spat out. The problem lies in a system that reinforces socially demanded self-sacrifice. Take it on the chin – or up the arse – for the good of the group, we tell each other, and we get very angry when somebody, pushed beyond endurance, snaps and abandons a group or puts, ye gods, their personal in-game comfort or their principles over the convenience of 4 strangers they just met and will never meet again. I agree that in entering LFG you are an accepting an implicit contract to perform your role in that group to best of your ability towards a joint end (badgers!) … but I also think there’s an equally implicit assumption that the group itself is functional. When the group fails to function – either due to ineptitude or unacceptable behaviour of the individuals within it – your responsibilities end. Quite frankly: fuck the group. A group with a raging dickhead is no group at all. This needs to be recognised. One cannot break that which is already broken.

tl;dr: WTB INSTA VOTE KICK.