Other than the obligatory heroic with Spinks to test out Revenge, all of my PUGs this week have been lower level ones on the various alts.
I have theories as to why lower level instances feel more relaxed than level 80 heroics, and it is mostly because people simply don’t care as much. Even if your low level instance is a wash, the chances are you still got some xp so it wasn’t a total waste. Also, low level instances are generally tuned so that it won’t matter if half the group are complete idiots. (This may be true in higher level instances too, but seems more obvious earlier on.)
When you genuinely don’t care too much about the outcome of an instance, LFD becomes the WoW equivalent of chatroulette. It offers a 15 min slice of WoW life, which may include some amusing characters, and at the end of it you move on.
Sorry, I only speak Darnassian
So, in the spirit of chatroulette, I present the non-bilingual night elf.
This was in a run of Razorfen Downs (renamed Razorfen Bore by me, for obvious reasons), and one of the guys in the group never spoke on the party channel. He only spoke via say, and only in Darnassian. I don’t know if he was a new player who hadn’t figured the chat system out yet and had accidentally set his chat language to one that only night elves would understand, or whether it was just some random roleplayer.
In any case, I was the only non-night elf in the group. I did ask him a couple of times to set his language to common and tried to explain how to do that, but to no effect. I feel I have an understanding now of how non english speakers find the game.
Incidentally, the group managed the instance just fine.
Who healed MY tank?
I have noticed that low level healers sometimes get very fussy if another hybrid casts a heal whilst in the instance, as if it was impugning their ability. I can understand this, but at low levels, everyone is feeling out their capabilities.
Sometimes this does lead to truly epic arguments along the lines of, ‘I’m healing here, and I have the union card to prove it! Quit healing, you blackleg, or I’m walking out!”
The funniest instance of this I saw last week involved a healer throwing a blue hairy fit and demanding to know which of the group had dared to heal the tank. Someone suggested that maybe the tank had used a healing potion (he was busy tanking at the time, so possibly too busy to chat) which sparked off another sniffy fit of ‘Well, THAT wasn’t necessary.’
Then the fight finished and the tank settled the argument. “I just levelled.” (In WoW, when you go up a level, your health and mana bar instantly refill.) Everyone had been so busy arguing about who had cast the illicit heal that no one had noticed…
Sorry seems to be the hardest word
It is amazing how much difference it makes to how you view another player if they say sorry when they make a mistake. If nothing else, it shows that they know it was a mistake and will try not to do it again. For example, Arb and I are now in ‘that stage’ where the random finder keeps sending us to Blackrock Depths. She’s been healing, and doing a great job.
So when we got a group where the tank messed up a pull and pulled an entire room full of dwarves and we wiped, surely everyone realised that it was his fault and not the healers? Not that tank. Cue five minutes of him bitching about how a good healer would have handled that pull and completely ignoring everyone else who was informing him that actually it was his own damn fault, not hers. He didn’t once accept that it was a bad pull.
But the beauty of instance roulette is that you just hop out when you are bored and hit the button again. Our next run was with a super group who cleaned out the whole place, including the emperor. And the tank apologised when she made a mistake. And so did everyone else whenever they made a mistake.
I think it adds a charmingly random element to dungeon excursions. What’s the oddest experience you have had with the random dungeon finder?
Welcome to Spinksville! 
heh; so much drama from mmo’s, i miss it 🙂
My weirdest experience involved a Scarlet Monestary run. One person didn’t have any equipment on at one point. I asked them why, and they said their account had been hacked. They were doing a reasonable amount of damage (though maybe they’d had their equipment on earlier) so I didn’t inquire further. They also started saying some random stuff, which I don’t recall. Anyways, right near the end of the instance, this person suddenly said that they’d been letting their younger sister control their character for a while.
I had a funny incident in BRD as well actually. My random group on my alt got BRD – Prison and when the tank zoned in he said “sorry, I don’t have time for this place” and promptly left. I was all “???”, but I quickly realized that he probably didn’t know that the place is split up in smaller chunks now. After all the Prison part takes like 5 minutes.
Haha. I like the Darnassian only night-elf, and the hissy fit “Who dared to heal the tank” healer. Heck, I’d be happy to run into hybrids who threw out a heal now and again when things are getting hectic. It makes a healer’s job easier. All help is good help.
I’ve had many weird pug experiences. The funniest one lately was a hunter who pitched a fit and told me to STOP HEALING HIM because he could feign death. I was doing it because I had Beacon on the tank… and that’s when they all realized I was a paladin and not a shaman at all.
If I had to name one thing, LFD and PuGs teached me, I’d say: Expect the unexpected. So even an even count of puggers isn’t odd. 😉
A bit unrelated, but the funniest thing happening near me last week were the maneuver critics after killing the Flame Leviathan for the weekly with a PUG. During that fight, 2 people died and the RL asked “How the heck 2 people managed to die HERE?” And one replied, saving his place in my book of quotes: “I know, why I died: I was shit’in, came back, stood all alone at the entrance, no vehicle left and died.”
I’m starting to find the hyperfast runs are starting to affect low level dungeons now too. I pretty much gave up running heroics since everyone wanted to run them in record time in lieu of team work and/or fun. So I started leveling some alts and that was fun for awhile but now tanks are gathering up two-three pulls so that everyone can AoE the group down.
I recently did a run of Zul’Farak where the tank gathered ALL the mobs at the bottom of the stairs and we AoEd them all in about 15 seconds and then had to wait a minute for the script to catch up. We ended up wiping when the tank gathered everyone in Gaz’rilla’s room up including summoning Gaz’rilla…. after which everyone left group.
Kinnavieve’s pocket healer gets very upsetified whenever Kinna throws a Lay on Hands on herself. “Why you do that? I had you! Don’ do it again!”
I thinks Kinna does it just ta tease her…
It’s not as much a single experiences, as several similar ones. My priest is also constantly being sent into BRD these days. BRD is a maze even for those who have been there before, I just recently after several years of playing have been able to navigate it confidently.
There must still be new people coming into the game. I’ve seen people get lost in Zul’Farrak, which is in comparison to the other vanilla instances quite small and straight forward.
What usually happens in my BRD runs is that the tank, expected by the group to lead the way, runs of in a random direction hoping it’s the correct one. Most of the time no one seems to mind until I try asking if s/he knows where they’re going. The worst case scenario is when the whole group splits and claiming that the way they are taking is the correct one and refusing to even consider that they might be wrong. *sighs*