I’m finding the most difficult part of running instances with the new random LFG tool isn’t necessarily in handling other players of varying skill and experience. No, it’s deciding what to do when someone else puts up a vote to boot someone.
Or even worse, being in a situation where I wonder if I ought to kick off the proceedings. The vast majority of my groups have been great. But I did run one heroic which threw up the amazing combination of a rogue who put out 800 dps and a mouthy death knight (1200 dps) who insisted on pulling every group in sight because apparently that’s what dps do on his server. Hint for the clueless: If you do pull massive amounts of extra trash, make sure you have the nukage capacity in group to kill them in a reasonable amount of time. That run would undoubtedly have been a lot more successful if I’d actually booted at least one of those players. As it was, we wiped twice on Loken and then I left to go play with some guildies instead.
Like most players, I’m not fond of drama. If I’m running an instance, I want a nice fast smooth run with friendly people. I don’t want a shouting match, I don’t want to have to share virtual space with people who offend my soul, and I really don’t want to be the person to tell Ms 800 dps that she isn’t good enough to group with me.
But I wouldn’t hesitate in a moment to boot someone for sexism or homophobia (for example). I’d even mock them as I did it.
I’m not sure why the idea of booting someone for not being a good enough player bothers me so much, but I have no problem with booting them for being a twat. Surely if the group will fail if they are there, that’s good enough reason to find a replacement. The needs of the many, etc.
I can only conclude that it’s a form of geek social fallacy: ostracisers are evil – I wouldn’t like it if I was thrown out of a group just for not being good enough, so I don’t like doing that to other people.
How about you? What would you boot players for? Or in fact, what have you already booted them for, and why?
Rudeness? Stupid name? Didn’t want the competition for a drop? Poor play? Poor gear?
Welcome to Spinksville! 
Rudeness and stupid name, yes. Poor play usually comes as a result of that, I’ve found. It also often came down to my mood, but towards the end I’d happily kick whoever displeased me – as WoW players (or MMO players in general) you can only take a certain amount of crap before being fed up with it for good.
I guess the lucky thing for me was that most instance runs I’ve made I either made with guildies or the tight-knitted group of IRL friends that played together. We had a tank and a healer in that group and when we had to PuG a member it was usually for an extra DPS – and every server has a large community of DPS. Poor gear was never really an issue, at least not back in Vanilla, but do something incredibly stupid and I’d happily kick you out of the group in an instant.
I don’t think we should be afraid of kicking people – the only rule I think should be followed is if the person is detrimental to your fun, kick him/her.
I am more a joiner than the group leader, so I rather leave the group than that I boot someone else.
I do not even let people join if I do not like their name, vulgar or totally silly names get not even a chance. I think neither poor play/gear or rudeness alone are enough to boot someone, it needs to be both to make me angry.
“I’m not sure why the idea of booting someone for not being a good enough player bothers me so much, but I have no problem with booting them for being a twat.”
Uh, because you’re a decent human being? It is, after all, a game. If everyone booted the poor players, then the poor players would never get any better.
Being a twat has to do with a person’s personality, and that transcends the game world. There’s no reason to keep a twat around.
But when you keep a poor player around, you might help them get better. And even if not keeping a poor player around is good karma.
It pisses me off when I get into a group, such as Occulus yesterday, and there’s a half-ass in it. This time it was the healer. Sure, he’s in blues, I can deal with that. But he had empty gem sockets. 2 of the DPS had quit before I even put the vote up. Granted, I’m sure they left because they were afraid of the instance, not the healer as I was (Occulus has been nerfed, people). It does truly bug me if someone can’t even put up the 20 gold to get green gems. Come one, I know you think you’re gonna replace it all, but not with me in your group, pal.
This was yesterday. Second example. TOC with 4 guildies and a random DK. DK puts out less DPS (2k) and less damage overall than myself, a prot warrior. Then he proceeds to tell me how and where to tank the last trash pack before the second boss. Seriously? I was rude to him, I said “Protip: I don’t need protips from a 2k DPS DK.” He didn’t speak again, and we kicked him after the run, which went smoothly despite.
I like the kick system, but I would like it more if the party leader still had some power. I mean, still allow the members to vote to kick a tyrannical leader, but if you are failing, I should not have to consult the membership to boot you out of MY run.
I also played with ungemmed items. Sometimes you just prefer to run another instance before gemming the item. Or even worse, you might have to invest some time to decide which gems to replace to stay at the hit cap and get the best socket bonus.
So, yes, not gemming is bad. But I would not kick a healer with a 50 SP enchant who is missing a belt buckle.
If every socket is ungemmed, that’s a different story. But even then, maybe it’s his second spec and he plays it only to do all a favour (including himself) and get the group running… who cares as long as he keeps everybody alive?
In the case I was referring to, it was every socket. No enchants at all.
Knowing that I’m most probably not the best player in any PUG nor the most experienced, I’m usually at the receiving end of the crappy tank cussing. I’m very tolerable to bad players, crappy mouthing and such as long as I feel I’m not performing up to the standards of the group: I feel more bad about letting the group down than from the people calling me names. There is a history in this, very personal one which I would rather not share.
Anyhow, it’s amazing how rude and selfish some people get when things are not going the way they would like to see them going. Instead of trying to correct things by guiding, helping or nudging the ones not en par, they start names calling, cussing and basic being jerks things.
I haven’t been in a situation in which I would have had to think about kicking. Thankfully.
C out
“I’m not sure why the idea of booting someone for not being a good enough player bothers me so much, but I have no problem with booting them for being a twat.”
Because – like all socials – you prefer “niceness” over “professionalism”. However ask yourself: if you’d be a serious medical patient, who’d you prefer? Dr House or a very nice doctor who failed his exams more times than legally allowed and got his diploma due to affirmative action?
In other words: you are a TANK. You can 2 man the instance with the healer. Keeping the useless along you lose like 5 mins. You prefer being nice than having 5 mins.
If you’d be a selfish rational, you’d prefer 5 minutes over “being nice”. If you’d be a selfless RATIONAL you’d think about the 5 mins of the 3 other people and the 5 mins of 4*N people where N is the number of instances this guy is going to run (there is a non-0 chance that if you boot him he either stop playing or learn to play)
True, if it’s life or death I’ll take professional competence more seriously.
If I’m being operated on by a doctor in a life or death circumstance, then I will, of course, choose the more talented professional.
If I’m playing a round of golf for fun, I will ABSOLUTELY choose playing with a guy who has a wicked slice and a guy who typically 4 putts, both of whom are good friends that I enjoy socializing with, over playing with Ernie Els and Vijay Singh, both of whom are competent (but reportedly very grumpy) professionals.
Guess which analogy is RATIONALLY (ooh, there’s that word!) closer to World of Warcraft?
I was on my kitty druid and we had a tank in H-ToC who wasn’t def capped [found that out after the fact via armory] and he kept spamming a vote kick on the healer [which kept not passing] because the healer couldn’t keep him up so we vote kicked him.
Interesting comments that so well illustrate why I avoid grouping in MMOs. Folks like Gevlon who equate playing a game with needing health care? That just boggles my mind, really. (No offense meant… we just have very different world views when it comes to playing a game.)
And unlike Copra, I’m not good at letting name calling roll off my back. Having some little fucker give me grief because I pushed the wrong button by accident can piss me off for the whole day.
But like Copra, if I let down a group I’m in, I’ll beat myself up about it for hours.
So if you avoid grouping, what do you do? /hug squirrels?
Squirrels are cure.
And since they removed the nameplates they don’t get killed as often as before! Good change.
@Pete: the kid who plays WoW will one day be a professional. Maybe your doctor. Don’t you think it’s best for us if he learns ASAP that professionalism is needed?
What makes a game a GAME is that there are no serious consequences. If you wipe the group, no one actually hurt. If you are kicked from an instance, you can still pay your bill. It’s a safe environment to learn useful skills like not making jerk comments and pulling your weight.
Professionalism IS needed… in a profession. Professionalism isn’t needed in a game. Games are not, by and large, professions.
Sure, it’s ok to decide that you want to treat games like jobs, but that’s not the only way to play games, and it’s not the only rational way to play games either. Rationally speaking, games are entertainment and can be dropped at any time. They’re hardly the same as careers, especially ones that require vast and expensive training like medicine. You’re confusing ONE rational approach for the ONLY rational approach, to your detriment.
Games are also a safe environment to have fun. Speaking as someone who works in the medical field (I design devices used in cancer surgery), I’d rather play games to relax and enjoy myself, and get rid of some stress, than to pretend that I’m training for another serious career. Would you rather be operated on by a doctor who’s in a good mood and well rested, or one who’s angry, twitchy, and poorly rested, because he’s soooo driven to get slightly better gear in an online game? Don’t you think it’s best for us if he’s able to relax a bit in his free time and not be stressed all the time?
Note: I’m not saying I like playing with rude people, or unskilled people – I don’t. I like to succeed, though I also like to goof around sometimes. PuGging isn’t the time to goof around, admittedly. But I also don’t treat games like my career. In my career, lives ARE at stake. In a game, nothing is at stake except a little free time.
I’ll kick people for being rude, or for being both unskilled and unwilling to improve themselves. I won’t kick someone for not having optimal gear; if their gear was good enough to get them into the group in the first place, that’s not a reason to kick them. In some very gear-driven games (e.g. WoW) it’s important to decide what gear is needed for a specific goal. In a lot of other games, gear is less important and not a gating item at all. The ability to work in a team and a certain level of skill are what I really look for in group members.
What makes a game a game is that people are playing it for fun.
game
1 /geɪm/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [geym] Show IPA noun, adjective, gam⋅er, gam⋅est, verb, gamed, gam⋅ing.
–noun
1. an amusement or pastime: children’s games.
The only person I’ve kicked was a tank who kept blaming his failures on the healer.
@gevlon Making jerk comments, I think, falls under the twat umbrella. So I agree with you there.
But what it sounds like you’re saying is that if a person isn’t very good at one thing, it means they can’t be very good at another? The kid who sucks at WoW because his main focus in life is getting good grades, keeping up with his duties as Class President and doing his part-time junior internship at a law office is going to fail at life because he fails at WoW?
I think that’s a bit of a stretch.
I suggest arguing with a wall. But really though, you’ve done nothing but pull out the ‘life’ excuse. I’d hope that responsibilities don’t make a person suddenly incompetent in other areas.
I have only so far had to kick people for being DCed. When I had the sole power, I’d kick smartasses and the DPS pulling sub-1k if I saw meters and there had been any problems.
It’s not really that much of a stretch. Saying that “because they are bad at WoW, they must be bad at everything,” is a stretch, but stating that professionalism and passion about doing something well carries over is not. If you’re going to commit to joining a group, you should expect that people are supposed to trust that they can rely on you to have at least a little ability.
That said I won’t kick for sub 1k DPS, I’ll kick for sub me. I can pull at least 2200 overall in a given heroic, as a tank. If you can’t beat me, you need to reconsider. I can pull 3.5k EASILY in my sub-par, not even hit-capped DPS gear. Clearly there’s no professionalism carry-over.
Do you put your “professionalism and passion” for WoW on your cv when going for jobs?
If you do you are in a tiny minority.
Most Human Resources professionals believe that professionalism and passion for mmos is something people have in inverse proportion to their professionalism and passion for their real world jobs.
That’s pretty silly, no I would not. Maybe it’s presumptuous to make such a large leap outside of gaming, however it you suck at wow for 5 years straight and never improve, it’s a fair assumption that same skill carries over to any other video game you play.
I think equating behaviour in games to behaviour in a professional situation is silly and unfounded. A lot of people don’t treat games as seriously as they do their careers; games can be places to blow off steam, to mess around, to be a bit goofy, or to experiment. Games are not the same as careers, for most of us anyhow, and I don’t expect any sort of correlation between these behaviours.
I think the thing about booting people for being bad is that it’s easy to cross the line into being a dickhead.
If you boot somebody for pulling 800 DPS, do you boot them for pulling 1000? 1200? 1800? Do you boot the tank for having a mere 30K HP?
If nothing else, by the time you can actually *tell* whether somebody is grossly underperforming, you’re probably halfway through the instance anyway.
Easy to cross the line, sure. But where is the line? 1k DPS will not down a boss before the healer goes OOM in many cases. People were pulling 2k on patch day 3.0 at level 70, in greens. Telling me that it’s dickheadish to boot an underperformer tells me a lot about you.
I don’t think it’s dickish to boot somebody for underperforming. I think it’s dickish to boot somebody who isn’t underperforming so that you can make a big deal out of how totally hardcore you are.
If somebody’s doing 800 DPS and it’s slowing the group down, sure, boot them. If somebody’s doing 1500 DPS while the rest of the group is doing 5000, who the hell cares? You don’t actually need the damage, all booting them will do is hold up the run.
I think it takes a fair amount of experience (and in PUGs) to be able to say definitively that one person would make the difference between success and failure. I know that as a raid leader, I eventually get a sort of feel for where people’s dps needs to be in order to be viable for a raid.
So really in the example I gave, I should have booted the 800dps person. It’s just not enough unless other people in the group are seriously overgeared.
But a lot of people either don’t have the experience to make a judgement call or just want to play it safe. I understand it, even though I hate the idea of booting someone who would have been considered fine in heroics 6 months ago.
I’d absolutely defend your right to boot somebody for pulling 800DPS, I just suspect that the reason you were unwilling to do so is that a lot of people out there are too eager to boot people for being merely adequate.
Hrrm, I don’t think I’d kick someone for not being a good enough player. I’ve had off nights, and as someone else commented, it’s a good way of helping people improve, if they need to.
if they were offensive or annoyed me, I’d be less worried about kicking them, for sure.
I booted a guy for being a jerk a few days ago– a mage in heroic HoL who had a major attitude for a guy in all greens and quest blues with no gems or enchants. We had some concerns from the start, but figured we’d give it a shot.
We kicked him after we wiped on the first boss. He didn’t back up when we said to, pulled the boss and all the trash, then lay there and waited for me (resto druid) to run back and rez him (“wtf rez”). I’m pretty sure he was just wanding too, because there’s no other way his dps could be so low. I’m happy to help undergeared and inexperienced players, however, they have to actually care and not just want a free ride.
Most of my vote-kicks so far have been after people disconnected or went AFK without warning, I didn’t feel bad about that. When people want to kick someone for underperforming on the other hand… eh. Yesterday I was in a heroic HoR group that wiped a couple of times on the Frostmourne event, then someone asked to vote-kick the pally healer. I was unsure what to do but there had been so many avoidable deaths already that I clicked yes. The pally was removed but then everyone but one other dps dropped group as well, wtf?
Also, in heroic PoS we had a druid healer who only used nourish and rejuv and claimed to know all the fights, but wiped us repeatedly on Forgemaster Garr without explanation. I really thought about kicking that guy but the tank seemed to make an effort to be patient and I figured if the tank can stand it, who am I to argue?
Anything sexist, racist, harrassing, complaining, ninja looter, need on everything, afk a lot, distracted, DCing, pulling when people are not ready, not being repaired after 1 death, swearing, rude, looking at me funny, telling me what to do, not bringing proper gear, and drunk
Until now I vote-kicked afkers only.
Haven’t seen many dumbass healers (most healers seem to play that class because of their social attitude). So the only person I have to take care of, is my personal healer. For everybodyelse, I got my internal ignore list and even better a long repair bill: 1st and 2nd aggro is free, 3rd is BoP.
I think, it’s much better to silently punish them a while, than to release them into the market…
> most healers seem to play that class because of
> their social attitude
god complex?
SCNR 🙂
Kicking someone for being a jerk or causing drama in a group is easy because it’s fairly simple to determine and for all the other people in the group to be on the same page. If you get a reputation for kicking people because they are homophobes, that’s something you can live with because it’s something you believe in. You can handle people attacking your for something like this, again, because of the strength of your beliefs.
Kicking someone for low DPS or pulling huge amounts of trash at the wrong time is a way of saying you know better about the game/instance and that you are a better player. Being better gives you the right to make that decision. Many people are wary of that kind of arrogance and hubris. It puts you in a place where you can be the target of personal attacks, which is uncomfortable for many people.
The only thing I am intolerant to is lack of skill. I would take misanthropic misogynistic racist that does 7k DPS over nicer 2k DPS person anytime.
x2
Yeah but then think about how many different random people you’d have to try in the LFG tool before you got one who did 7k. I think you might settle for the 2k guy and less time waiting around.
If I thought we could beat the instance I would not kick someone for not being good enough.
It unfortunately leads to role-prejudice: I would vote out a green-geared tank or healer but wouldn’t care about an undergeared dps.
Having said that I think I have a different notion of what’s possible to many current WoW players. I remember beating these instances in blues or level 70 epics back in January with an entire team full of people who would have been vote-kicked by modern wow players. And they were harder then too, many have been nerfed since.
I would vote out rude people in a flash.
What I think is particularly nonsense is the notion that playing with someone who has terrible gear is bad for the world. Most WoW players have the same levelof ability, that slacker in greens will gear up into a vote-kicking elitist.
I think that’s maybe the real reason I don’t like the idea of vote-kicking for gear – I’m an egotistical veteran who believes my superior skills can carry us through despite people’s gear and inexperience.
It’s also important to mention that the first 3 raids were beaten by folks sporting all level 70 epics. It showed just how trivial Naxx, Malygos and Sartharion (drakeless) were. The Tier 6 and up level 70 epics are better than most of the quest blues you’d get leveling up, at least until level 75 or 76. And let’s not forget at 3.0’s release a hunter in greens could pull 2k without batting an eye.
Level 78, or even 80. Most T6 doesn’t get replaced until 80. My BC raiding mage had only 1 piece of T6, a pile of ilvl 141 non-tier drops, badge and crafted gear, the S2 staff, and a few pieces of lower ilvl (105-128) gear. The first piece I replaced was at level 77 from some quest (might have been available earlier but that’s when I did it). The second was at level 78 (where I replaced 3-4 pieces with crafted blues). My T6, and some of my tailoring craftables (equipped the second I hit 70) were my max dps gear until level 80.
As a tank it was getting harder to stay defense capped as each level, the rating became less and less. So after gemming up my t6 level epics with green 12 def gems, I had to resort to leveling blues from instances and quests around the time of running non-heroic Old Kingdom.
OK, this advice is coming a bit late for you then, but the absolute easiest way to manage the defence cap while levelling 70-80 is make liberal use of crafted gear.
The cobalt set and tempered saronite are great tanking gear for their level. Also I don’t think you really need to worry about being crit too much in normal instances.
I would play with Spinks any day. Some of the other commenters though … hrm.
There are players in my guild who are bad. Like, Ulduar-geared but still not putting up 2k bad because no matter how much time we put into helping them with rotations/gems/gear/etc, they just don’t get it. But they’re good people and we carry them along in heroics and have a good time playing together. I mean come on, really? It’s HEROICS.
As far as random groups go, as long as you’re not doing stupid things, and you aren’t mouthy, or afk, or otherwise rude, you’re in. Doesn’t mean I want to stay grouped for more than one run, but it’s certainly no reason to kick.
I was in a Blood Furnace group on my Death Knigget, I was tanking and our healer dropped off. Within moments a vote had been started to kick from the group. I said no, after all, I drop every now and again and if I logged back in to find the group hadn’t waited the 5 mins for me to get back in I’d be upset. However, looks like I was the only one that felt that way as lo, the healer was booted and another called in. We completed the instance fine but I felt bad for th person that dropped, although we don’t know the specific reason behind the d/c. If things were not going so well over all with low DPS I’d be more inclined to remove people who shouldn’t be there. However, I’d give them the chance to prove themselves before initiated any action against them.
First of all, great name, youyankityoutankit.
I’m for booting for antisocial behavior and rampant incompetence. I won’t boot if someone is trying and seems to be learning. We all had to do that. If they seem to regress as we go along, I’ll probably look for another group. I’ll also boot the terminally critical. Tell me something I don’t know and I’ll thank you. Tell me everything I should have done and you’re gone. It’s only fair, I don’t come down to McDonalds and tell them how to make french fries.
Non-social doesn’t bother me. If someone is quiet, then someone is quiet and I don’t think socializing has to be a part of the deal.
I’ll try to roll more instances if the group is brisk, (not ridiculous, that stresses out the healer who happens to be my wife) social, competent and funny. I’ll try to do all they will do in that case.
That’s a fair assessment, and I agree with your criteria.
For me the test is not to beat these instances. It’s to beat them with ‘these four guys’.
I healed ~25 pugs yesterday including a Pit of Saron 2 hour special (I never quit). Unfortunately most tanks in pugs are raiders right now.
The only ‘challenge’ left healing these is madness such coming 4th on DPS (you can see the desperation in the 5th place DPS, it’s never a tank for some reason, as you get close to the end, lol), off-tanking adds when you get lucky with a rubbish tank, beating your personal best melee DPS on bosses, etc.
Just keeping Renew up on these overgeared tanks and hanging around was killing me.
You’d probably all kick me for messing around no doubt. I think they just thought I was stupid mostly, the default assumption in Wow about anything or anyone that doesn’t follow The Plan, especially Gevlons 🙂
I never boot anyone for being a lousy player, but I sure give them a lot of talking to. I do however boot people for being jerks, or stealing and refusing to give back, or fighting with other people. (this goes for guilds as well as groups)
In addition to booting afkers, I’d votekick someone who /needed on all the loot.
Funny I might have missed that in the comments, and I usually don’t even pay attention to what everyone else is clicking, but if someone /needs all, I’d probably comment first, and if they were unrepetant, then I’d votekick.
And yes, I’d kick for extreme rascism/sexism/inappropriate language/behavior.
As for skill, I don’t care. I can dps with a tank and healer and clear any heroic very quickly. I don’t need skilled dps and don’t mind having undergeared players in the run that can actually use the gear. If the tank is terribad, I can put on my tank gear and tank it in dps spec. If the healer is terrible, we could be in trouble. If they were so bad we wiped more than once, I’d consider leaving the group, but not kicking them.
Quite a lot of comments here about this question “why would you boot someone”.
So far I’ve initiated kicks on people who are excessively AFK for the most part. The only other guy was someone who kept complaining about things not going fast enough and telling the Tank to pull faster. This must have annoyed the majority of the group because someone else actually initiated the vote.
This could, surprisingly enough, be a gender thing. Men tend to orient towards hierarchy, so they would kick the low DPS non-contributors. Women orient towards dyadic relationships (I forget the exact word usually used), so they would let people stay around who are low on the hierarchy, but they would not tolerate untoward interaction.
There are definitely exceptions to this tendency, but I find it interesting how perfectly you fit it, Spinks. 🙂
That sounds entirely possible 🙂
I think being online does give people a lot of freedom from traditional gender roles. But we’re still a product of our conditioning, and so on. (I also think that it wouldn’t hurt game designers to read blogs written by female gamers if they do want to understand how or why we behave the way we do in games, but I still think we’re all gamers under the skin and probably have more in common than we think.)
I do think it’d be interesting if what criteria people use to kick from a group in game somehow reflects qualities they feel are unacceptable in real life society.
Who would want to read a silly GIRL’S blog? It’d probably be all about dressing up in the prettiest armor and talking about feelings instead of important things like tanking or group dynamics.
Now if you’ll pardon me, I have to go put together some more outfits for my characters in LotRO.
I don’t much care if people are rude to me, giving the tank or healer grief is never a reason to kick them, I’ll normally whisper the healer and we just let them die a lot. If they don’t get the hint and leave, they get a big repair bill. Works for me either way.
I’ve only had to votekick once so far, but that was at the start of the instance when the guy had been afk for 10 min after running in without saying anything first.
There’s a significant problem with the vote system, and that is that you can’t initiate a kick before you down the first boss.
The first random dungeon I tried to run, I was on my 70 dk to tank in uk. We had a hunter who would run in and pull the first mobs while everybody else was buffing and making sure we were ready.
I tried grabbing aggro, which worked and then I died. Because of course, dumbass hunter had pulled like 6 mobs and, hmm, smart healer is smart, saw dumbass hunter and slipped out of the instance.
So I make a little speech about how people who are not the tank, need to stay behind the tank and not pull things, or I will vote to kick.
next try, hunter does the same thing. I vote to kick and it doesn’t let me.
After a third try of the same shit, with other people cussing him out, we are openly discussing why we can’t all kick the asshole, which I figure out later (can’t kick before a boss). I try to let him die then pick up the adds, in hopes that we can just run it around the jerk but healer is not up for it, zones out and I die again. Group disbands and I have 10 minute debuff.
This is the problem. The only people I’m always going to kick for being not good enough are the kind of people who make the run harder than if you ran with four. Pulling shit you shouldn’t pull, somehow pulling aggro while doing less dps than the tank and then freezing the mob in front of the healer, etc. This is the kind of thing that can keep you from downing a boss so that you can kick them.
I was tempted to boot the 200 dps hunter in another normal uk run, but never bothered since we cleared stuff anyway with a few wipes because the healer also sucked.
Good to know, I’ll stop spamming at start now 🙂
It’s actually time-based, not boss-based. Something like 5 minutes before you can kick someone (which, for a good group means around the first boss).
A lot of it comes down to communication. If someone is a jerk – and believe me, it takes a lot to get under my skin – they get booted. I like giving people the benefit of the doubt. Still. I don’t know why. Nonetheless…
That said, if other issues arise, such as low level gear, not enough gear, forgetting your EFFING food and drink or some crap…I calmly talk to the seemingly offending player before I kick. I do so in the spirit that they may learn something and not go away with a bad taste in their mouths. I would like the same courtesy.
This is an amazing lot of comments (per your tweet).
Yup it certainly is a lot of comments.
I think posts like this are popular for the same reason as reality TV is. There’s no logical reason there should be more comments than on the rather adorable cat photo but threads like this just engage people.
Well in FFXI experience I boot players for:
-poor gear. It isn’t hard to get decent stuff. Show up with empty slots in FFXI and it isn’t just less DPS, its a lot less.
-poor skill. Not so much poor as in “having a bad day” or “Newbie learning” but poor as in “Not trying.” if you are a level 40 paladin, you should by now at least know you do more than voke every 30 seconds.
-missing abilities. This one newbie or not, you show up with no utsusemi: ni as a ninja at 37, or no refresh or erase as a healer, you get booted.
-constant afking. Even if it’s justified by taking care of the kid, you shouldn’t be seeking and trying to play in group if you cant give it undivided attention, with occasional breaks.
-being an idiot. Racist, bipolar, willfully clueless, or doing stuff for the lulz.
Yeah you feel bad, but unfortunately in any group based activity, all you need is one person to make 5 others fail.
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I’ve only played WoW for half a year. When I started gearing for heroics, my guild and many pugs I was in showed startling amounts of patience and willingness to help me learn. I’ve really tried to get my DPS up for some months now, and due to the kind nature of a lot of players, it’s getting there.
It’s unthinkable for me not to do the same thing to people who now are where I was a couple of months ago. You could make a reference to Kant’s Categorical Imperative or something here, but really, it shouldn’t be needed.
We treat people with the same courtesy we ourselves want to be treated. Finishing instances in a short time is merely one of many objectives we have while playing. Building a warm and stable community is another. D’uh’.
– E
I vote to boot people who don’t try. If they are not bothered, then I tell them it’s not a charity.
Basically I expect people to buff themsleves and others if their class can. Mage replenishment is nice but not compulsory. I expect over 1k DPS in heroic. I expect warlocks who lifetap to be able to regain that back on their own. I don’t tolerate the behaviour of ADHD children.
If 70% of people play their part in a group, then the 30% who doesn’t don’t need to be there leeching.
Unfortunately in groups where 2 people are slack, only the worst can be booted. If 3 or more people fail in their role then it’s time for me to leave.