Tobold kicked up a stir yesterday by opining that dps deserve their long LFD heroic queues (40 mins or so, compared with much shorter queues for healers or tanks) because they are shirking their social responsibility. Commenters on the post have been even stronger, claiming that dps are antisocial and that it’s all because hybrids aren’t using their socially responsible roles.
Apparently socially responsible people play tanks and healers because those roles are more in demand. I just wanted to point out the words ‘socially responsible’ and ‘demand’ in the same sentence. Because it shows that there are two ways of trying to use game mechanics to equalise the roles, and neither are working.
- Social responsibility. This is the stick. The idea is to guilt people into playing the little used roles. And to suggest that people who value how they are seen by ‘society’ will tend to veer towards them.
- Demand. This is the carrot. And this angle is all about letting ‘the market’ correct itself. Tanks and healers get rewarded via smaller queues so more people will play those roles, is the argument.
Personally I’d rather have people playing tanks or healers because they enjoy it, but there you go.
Anyhow, I have a few issues with this argument:
1. Social makeup isn’t the same in LFD as it is in guilds. In guilds or raids, a good dps is at least as valuable as a good tank or healer. Arguably top dps are currently the rockstars of the game. (Actually in LFD a good dps is at least as valuable as a tank or healer too, as you will find out if you end up in a group without any.)
Gevlon noted in an earlier post that the better players had tended to gravitate towards tanking and healing in his raids. Similarly, we have lots of good healers in guild at the moment. In that case, it’s probably just as socially responsible if not more to roll what your guild needs.
2. You have to be a bit crazy (or at least have tons of time and enjoy herding cats) to tank LFD heroics right now. Hats off to those of you who do it. Lots of tanks don’t. It’s not because of being socially irresponsible, it’s because it isn’t fun. Does socially responsible have to mean not fun?
So in this case, it doesn’t really matter how great the reward is, it’s not enough. People are making their choices, and that choice is that they’d rather wait 40 mins than run a random heroic as a tank or healer.
As to those pure dps who don’t have a role choice. Well, if you did, you’d probably make the same choice as everyone else for the same reasons.
3. It’s another angle on the old argument that hybrids shouldn’t be allowed to play as dps. Apparently it’s socially irresponsible. Never mind if you hate it, or if you’ve just run an instance with your guild as a tank/healer and would like a rest.
4. The ‘thin end of the wedge’ argument. It’s only a short step from saying that people should play more socially responsible roles to saying that only good players should be allowed to use LFD. I’m sure a lot of people would be down with that. And it would make queues even longer than they are already.
In any case, the bottom line is that if people are faced with playing a role they dislike or waiting hours for a group, they will probably go play another game. The reason this is more marked now than in previous WoW expansions is partly because of the availablity if the random dungeon finder, and partly because everything in the game seems less permanent than it used to do.
When you feel that what you can accomplish matters longterm, you’ll be more willing to weigh that up against a few stressy dungeon runs. Or rather, if you could get a permanent benefit to your character, it would be worth a bit of grind or ‘pain’. Nothing is worth anything, so no one can be bothered.
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Yet another great post from you, Spinks.
I think the whole thing has gone wrong when we players started to evaluate the performance by numbers. DPS is very easy to measure, and it’s the most used measure there is. But how do you measure tanking or healing in numbers, and how can you promote a good tank or an exceptional healer through LFD system?
There is no other ranking system in the PvE game than DPS ranking, really.
If there was a sort of performance value which would take into account the relevant performance of each class and would rate that into one, simple graph, then we would see something else. There are some made for Recount, I know, but they go don’t take all activity into account, really.
To recap: as long as DPS is the only thing we can measure ‘properly’, the DPS meter is the king. Great tanking or exceptional healing will not count as much, because they are the public servants of the 5 man party: great when not noticed, scorned the moment something goes wrong and never appreciated nor applauded for their good performance.
As long as there are no comments on my tanking or healing, I’m doing good. That kind of takes the wind out of a good run.
C out
The issue with judging Tank or Heal quality is they’re so binary. There’s ‘Good’ tanks, who don’t make you wipe and there’s ‘Bad’ Tanks who let the mobs go on a little wander. You can’t really say there’s such a thing as an exceptional and you can’t really say they’re mediocre either. You either do it or you don’t.
DPS has a great deal more of a gradient. This leaves you both a lot more open to criticism, since you aren’t as good as ‘that guy’ and a lot more focused on reaching your benchmarks. The bottom DPS is always the bad dps, regardless of how high their numbers actually were.
I think we’ve gone a fair distance past vanilla where the tank was the only really ‘active’ role to the point where it’s become fairly sedate in comparison to say, melee DPS.
I disagree. The issue is that mediocre or passable tanking/ healing is often viewed as something to be grateful for, and exceptional tanks/ healers are not demanded. However, much higher standards are applied to DPS.
There ARE exceptional tanks and healers; ones who can and do take on additional responsibilities and can shift tactics when situations change, and save the raid from wiping when they should have. (Example: tank who picks up the off-tank’s mob/ boss when off-tank dies, and manages his CDs and kites in such a way that he still doesn’t take too much damage. Oh, and he interrupts the boss, too. Healer who knows exactly when to use his CDs to keep everyone up, even when his co-healer in the raid dies, and even manages to kite some adds on him–that nobody is peeling off–while doing so.)
I have to disagree with you about tank quality being binary. I don’t know if it is because I play a healer some of the time – but there are definitely gradients of tank skill.
Some are outright awful, some are a bit dodgy slipping up here and there.
Some are ok – they don’t really mess up, but they are not going that extra mile either.
Some are good – they might add marks, actually communicate a bit, they execute their duties very well.
Some are exceptional – they tell everyone what they need from them (CC/stuns), anything that on the off chance gets loose they pick it back up immediately, they use all their cooldowns to make things smoother.
I think the difference in tanks that Tufva is referring to here is definitely there. But there’s one HUGE problem, which relates to all the stuff said so far.
Usually, it’s a difference that only the healer notices. 😉
Definitely agree. If I can’t play a game in a way I think is fun, what idiot thinks I’m just going to stick around playing a game that isn’t fun for me, just for their benefit? I’m obviously going to simply not play at all.
Can you expand on what you mean by things feeling less permanent now? Most everything makes sense, but that’s one argument I can’t interpret well.
Sure, gear changes hand and is temporal, in a sense, but I think that’s only gotten better now that upgrades require more effort to acquire. Titles and tabards and mounts from achievements are just as permanent as they were (even if everyone can move at the same speed, my sparkle-pony looks different from your sparkle-pony ’cause I did 5,000 reps of X!).
Is it the cataclysm thing, taking away what we knew? Or is it something more innate, like the jadedness we’re all getting with this fantasy world that feels… worn, after so many years of similar gameplay?
> Sure, gear changes hand and is temporal, in a sense,
> but I think that’s only gotten better now that
> upgrades require more effort to acquire.
Gear requires way less effort then before. It might require more effort if you need it now, but it’ll be easy to get in a few month. With patch 4.1 all gear from the valor point vendor will be available from the justice point vendor. If you don’t get your T11 now, you’ll get it later.
We all know that if we don’t raid now, we’ll be able to start in T12.
The various factions will be capped soon. It’s not like in vanilla where most people haven’t capped Argent Dawn when TBC hit.
> Titles and tabards and mounts from achievements are
> just as permanent as they were (even if everyone can
> move at the same speed, my sparkle-pony looks
> different from your sparkle-pony ’cause I did
> 5,000 reps of X!).
Yes, but the Egg from the Oracles was reduced to 3 day cooldown and a higher chance to contain the drake. There’s no point in rushing for your 117th mount because it’ll only get easier.
> Is it the cataclysm thing, taking away what we knew?
> Or is it something more innate, like the jadedness
> we’re all getting with this fantasy world that feels…
> worn, after so many years of similar gameplay?
The game doesn’t have any barrier anymore. Blizzard will take them all away, at a later time. You can therefore choose which one you would like to overcome yourself and which you wait out.
But the one you wait out now were the ones that made you feel the accomplishment. Capping Argent Dawn felt like you reached a goal. Capping Ramkahen feels like you should switch your tabard.
Yeah, this just sounds like jaded worn-ness to me. Accessibility doesn’t make content less permanent; patches have been released every 6 months or so for a long, long time. Perhaps one of the widest windows was during 3.3, which is the most recent window. If you simply pass on taking on challenges as they are because they’ll be easier later, that’s an accessibility issue – not a permanency issue.
Maybe they’re related. But for stuff to feel truly permanent, wouldn’t the game’s content just need to be a lot more static?
> If you simply pass on taking on challenges as they are
> because they’ll be easier later, that’s an accessibility
> issue
That’s not what I meant.
The Cata heroics are challenging once, maybe twice. After that it’s just an hour long grind for 70 valor points. If you stop running them at this point and wait for your gear you don’t pass on challenges. You pass on grinding.
It’s a good point and I’m thinking of examples.
In Wrath, we became used to a setup where you can run heroics to get the previous tier of raid gear. So when a new patch came out, the heroic badge rewards were updated. In TBC or vanilla, the only way to get that level of gear was to run the actual raids (although they did give out some better badge gear in TBC towards the end.)
Knowing that rewards are going to be updated gives another option for gearing — just wait. And knowing that it’s not really worth putting in too much effort right now, because the reward only really lasts until the next content patch.
Some people won’t mind or will still think it is worth it. Lots of people are grinding Archaeology for the ilvl359 epics, for example. For me though, if I’m going to spend hours either grinding or doing something I would not have particularly chosen, I want something that lasts a bit longer than that. (I grant that cosmetic pets or mounts do last – but how many do you really need and why do you need to keep getting more? if I like my nether ray, why would I care about a sparkle pony?)
We are also now used to a setup where reputations are fairly quick and easy, aided by tabards and daily quests, and rewards are specific to the current tier. Back in Vanilla, there were fairly grindy reputations where the rewards might be valid throughout the whole endgame and several tiers of raids. So yes it was a grind, but you knew that what you got would be useful for a long while. Now you kind of expect new reputations to be added quickly, no one cares about the old ones or ever will. So you only really need to bother with the current tier of reputations.
It’s hard to argue that anything we do now is useful beyond the next patch, beyond making social ties and possibly crafting skills, but even the crafting skills are dependent on what recipes Blizzard decides to put in the next patch.
DPS are often undervalued because:
a) There are 3 of them in the group, rather than 1 (so losing 1 DPS doesn’t necessarily mean the fight is over)
b) There are so many more of them than tanks or healers. Oversupply leads to people thinking they are easily replaced. However, DPS are not all created equal (same as tanks and healers).
Real-life example:
Tank suddenly dies in fight. Druid brezzes tank a microsecond after tank dies, goes bear and growls to temporarily tank the boss as tank has not yet accepted brez for whatever reason, buffs tank after tank gets up, hits tranquility to heal everyone up as everyone is half dead, and throws healer an innervate.
Druid then goes back to interrupting boss casts and rooting loose adds, throwing the tank a Thorns to help him get aggro.
How is this druid “shirking his social responsibility”?
All around us in various PUGs, there are good DPS who just like DPSing and using their role to make everyone’s life easier. DPS does not automatically equal freeloader. Why is it bad to prefer playing, say, enhancement to resto shaman? Enhancement shaman don’t have any identical playstyle counterpart in pure dps classes. This is intended. Are ‘hybrid’ dps then supposed to just reroll in shame if they prefer the playstyle of the dps spec of their chosen class?
I’ve never heard of anything so ridiculous or narrow-minded in my life.
Interestingly, DCUO has taken a very different approach. Essentially, *everybody* is DPS; then depending on your power choice you can be tank, controller, healer.
Which pretty much removes the issue of “Who does most damage”? It’s completely down to “Who is the most skilled player”, as weapons all seem to inherently do the same damage.
Neither Tobold, nor you mention the core problem: the legions of idiots who play DD since they can’t do other. They can’t be healers, can’t be tanks, and can’t get into a pre-made group. They are the LFD fodder, and they make LFD terrible for everyone else.
Blizzard either nerf the dungeons to their level (did it in WotLK and didn’t work well) or don’t let them in.
Seconded.
There are a lot of DD types out there that do it because it’s easy and there is less required of them. Some still seem clueless about CC or getting out of the bad.
The one failing of the LFD tool is that it kills the community and doesn’t really allow people to separate the folks that know how to play from those that don’t.
I’d love to see the LFD tool get bolstered to include options so that when I queue up I can select ‘mentor’ option that lets them know I’m willing to kill some time with new folks to the dungeon. Or deselect it if I don’t mind waiting a little longer for a non-new-to-dungeon group.
I’m sure they’ll eventually leverage the achievement system for this or even mimic a rating system like they have for Arenas (I think they have some of that happening under the hood).
They did say they might plan on allowing feedback for players so they can actually learn what they’re doing wrong instead of just getting booted.
“did it in WotLK and didn’t work well”
You mean bloggers complained. The VAST, VAST majority of the player base clearly voted with their dollars and playtime that they loved it.
As a business, Blizzard must regard Wrath heroics as a success and Cata heroics as a failure.
Nah, the big problem is people who can’t accept that LFD is random and they should set their expectations accordingly. It’s silly to demand that 4 random others will all be good, be happy if they’re good enough.
“…be happy if they’re good enough.”
Good enough for -what-, though?
I mostly tank and heal, so I have a fair number of opportunities to observe dps and their various failure modes. Sometimes I come away from the LFD experience impressed, but more often I’m badly disappointed.
I agree that expectations should be set accordingly, but according to what? Some players expect perfection, which is clearly too high a standard. The LFD system, by contrast, expects only an average ilevel of 329, which seems to me a bit low in the absence of skills. I think it would be reasonable to expect players in the queue to have some demonstrated ability to move out of fire, move into buffs, run an effective rotation, use a variety of abilities, and switch targets. These are (some of) the skills necessary to complete the content for which the group was composed.
Random things will happen when a random group of players is assembled, but the frequency with which a heroics group has one dps doing <6k dps suggests to me that the system has scope for improvement.
I think Tobold’s applauding himself for something he’s not doing.
He’s always liked being a tank or a healer. He played those roles even back before all this queuing business became an issue.
To decide retrospectively that he’s chosen his roles because he’s socially responsible is pure humbug. It’s a side effect of the way he plays and if he preferred dps he wouldn’t let concern for the billion faceless scrubs of LFD land alter his choice.
He’s not, as far as I know, doing other socially responsible chores like organising pug raids or public RP events.
I think social responsibility is one way to look at it. Liking to feel needed is another. They may even be connected.
Lots of people ask what the guild needs when they roll a new alt when what they mean is ‘I like to feel needed, what can I roll that will make it easy for me to group up with you?”
And then again, some people just enjoy the roles. I don’t see the need for a rant against dps though really. Sure, some are arses but I thought we were over the whole ‘tank 4 life’ thing with dual specs and all.
What does make me laugh is the people who are like, “I’ve played a rogue since day 1 so all you hybrids should get out of my queue dammit!” And I think, “Well I tanked all last expansion so maybe it’s your turn now, buddy.”
Indeed! Gevlon is being scarily socially responsible, if we’re going to talk about that. O.o
Whoda thunk!
*salute goblin*
You have to be a bit crazy (or at least have tons of time and enjoy herding cats) to tank LFD heroics right now. Hats off to those of you who do it. Lots of tanks don’t. It’s not because of being socially irresponsible, it’s because it isn’t fun. Does socially responsible have to mean not fun?
I do it every day and it’s not much a problem, really.
1) For trash I burn cooldowns so not CC is needed. Is much faster and generally strategies that are more reliable are better then less reliable strategies that work better if they work.
2) Before a boss I generally remind everybody about what is to do. Usually that’s not much. It’s something like:
“Get out of green clouds, all dps on adds, interrupt, run away when they die, they explode. Phase2: full dps boss, get out of those clouds”.
3) “Stupid players” get kicked. They get replaced instantly if dps. The chance for a healer being stupid is only 1/4 and even they get replaced within a few minutes.
Often life as a solo tank in LFD is easy, because you meet full guild groups which just miss a tank. Those groups are subject to peer pressure and work just fine.
Generally LFD works fine for me. It’s just the fact that I never see those people again which bugs me. That’s just not the way a MMORPG is supposed to work.
@Stabs: I agree. Sitting in a house of glass you shouldn’t throw stones. Tobold is the last one who would alter his gaming habits for ‘social responsibility reasons’.
If you ask me he is really good at starting contentious topics in the blogosphere. But don’t take him too seriously; his commenters are often better than is posts *grin*.
I don’t know about “better”.
Tobold is the Jonathan Ross of the MMO blogosphere. He’s very good at getting discussions started (as is his arch-nemesis Syncaine).
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In fact, a hybrid is most valuable to the group when queueing as dps and then offering their services as a second tank or healer for any fight where that will make things easier, which in the case of heal/dps hybrids is an awful lot of them.
Even when I’m not specifically a second healer and playing in elemental spec, the fact that I can throw some heals when the situation calls for it has saved a lot of wipes now that the non-raid content is actually challenging again.
> I can throw some heals when the situation calls for
> it has saved a lot of wipes
So has a good timed interrupt, stun, fear, knock back, death grip, earth elemental, frost nova or else. I think your point is that a good player, who uses all his tools, is more valuable to a group then an average player.
I can’t really think of any fights that need a second tank, maybe if you’re doing achievements or something?
When undergeared or don’t have the necessary CC, you have to improvise… some trashpack have real nasty opening-dmg, so splitting that up isn’t as crazy as it sounds.
This entire discussion is precisely the reason I have left ‘traditional’ MMO’s in search of something different.
I’m not saying that those that enjoy the whole Tank, Healer, DPS mechanic are wrong, it’s just not right for me any longer.
In fact, in some ways, the pressure and intensity that is often placed on players to spec and play their class in a very specific manner, made me feel like I wasn’t playing a game…it felt like my job. And I don’t like my job very much.
So the ‘socially responsible’ thing I did was leave. If I’m not having fun, chances are I’m probably ruining the fun that others are having around me.
Now where did I put that Scrabble board?
And here I thought Tobold wrote that post with tongue firmly in cheek. Fascinating to see all the serious responses to his facetious/satirical post.
Part of the problem is the aforementioned lack of a bozo filter in the LFD tool and the inherent designed in bozo filters ( TPK moves ) built into the heroic bosses.
In my eye the use of the LFD tool is the bozo filter. Good players that know the encounters and have friends can run 5mans painlessly. Those in the bozo filter are bad. Occasionally my friends and I will be short a dps and pick one up out of the LFD tool. We don’t give them any responsibilities and don’t expect anything out of them. If they do manage to muck things up too much we just boot them and get a new random instantly.
Part of the problem may also be that ‘running a random’ vs ‘running a preformed random’ through the LFD tool makes no difference in rewards. I’m still going to get my Raid-Tier badges no matter how I do it. The only difference being the 5% damage/health/healing buff, and well it’s simply not significant enough to matter.
Two things that probably make this problem worse in WoW than it might have been otherwise:
1) small group size. With only 5 players, after a tank and a healer you’ve only got 3 spots, so 60% of spots are for DPS. More than 60% of players queue as DPS, ergo longer queues. Not something WoW can fix without having to redesign all of their group content, but maybe food for thought for other designers out there.
2) Hyperspecialisation. WoW has evolved to a game where a character is a tank OR healer OR DPS, but only does one of them at a time. Dual spec means a character can potentially swap between two of those roles, but not mid-fight. Hybrid has changed from meaning “character who can do stuff from two or more roles at the same time” to “class that has the choice of which role to spec into, but don’t try spreading your points to do both at the same time”. Being very specialised is optimal for a character that’s part of a 25 man raid, but in something as small as a 5 man group that loss of flexibility can hurt.
RIFT is going to be interesting – 5 man groups again, but a lot more flexibility in builds and roles. If your tank is a melee cleric, two of the mages are chloromancers (who heal by DPSing) and the rogue has sunk some points into Bard, you may not actually need a dedicated healer. And if several characters have a build that has enough tank in it to be be quite rugged and a few aggro management tools, you may even find you can do without a dedicated tank by ping-ponging aggro between a couple of tank/DPSers…
Great read. Finally some clarity on this topic 😉
I think a big problem we are having in WoW now is the fact that people who like to heal and tank are really not feeling up to it in Cataclysm. Thus making queues longer.
Sure they have always been in demand but it feels worse than ever waiting in the queue. The new mechanics where healers run oom and tanks have to work a bit harder for aggro, it may turn some away.
People can’t say well it’s the right thing to do, play those classes in demand even if you’re not having fun. It’s a game after all and many people seem to forget that.
I think this all comes down to a lot of people not enjoying heroics much right now, whether it’s because of the length, the hassle of wrangling people through who don’t know them, or the difficulty.
I’d bet good money that a lot less people in general are using LFD right now than used to in Wrath. It’s just that we’re seeing it in a disproportionate amount with different roles. I’m going to have to test how the queue time differs for normals, which are a lot less hassle to tank or heal.
The “irresponsible” elemental shaman who doesn’t play resto isn’t any more “irresponsible” than a “pure dps” mage who could have rolled a resto shaman, yet rolled a “pure dps” mage.
There’s no difference.
It’s the pretentious so called “pure dps” who feel entitled that “someone else” tanks and heals in their groups.
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I can see both sides of the story. I’m a MS DPSer and OS tank. Now, when Cata hit, it was close to the holidays.
Within a week, we had quite a few folks able to do Heroics. However-our tank situation was lacking, due to said holidays. We have several MS tanks, but many were not able to really play often due to winter vacations, family, and the like.
Thus, I would not group-by my own choice-with other tanks. Because we were trying to get guild runs going, I was a perfectly acceptable tank gear wise. Say we had 10 people online, but only 1 tank. If I grouped up in my MS with one group, the other group would be not only left with needing to LFD, but one person would have to be left out on top of it. Helping guildies, IMO, is a good thing to do. I like tanking though-I wouldn’t have a tank OS if I did. (DPS are not FORCED to take an OS they dislike in our guild. It’s highly encouraged though hybrids do take a different OS for raid flexibility. Tanks are required to have offspecs in priority of healer-ranged-melee.)
This goes for raids as well; If someone can’t make it and the raid’s short, it’s just a good gesture if someone steps up and takes up the missing role. I admit I’d frown at someone who would absolutely refuse to use their OS(which they geared up) and let the raid be cancelled because of it.
Again, I see both sides-some people like DPSing, and don’t like tanking or healing. But at the same time, it’s a known fact-queues for tanking and healing are much shorter than queues for DPS. If a DPSer has a heroic viable OS, but insists on always queueing as DPS and KEEPS COMPLAINING about the long queues, yes, I would say something to them.
In other words, it’s perfectly okay to be a hybrid but only take DPS specs. But by doing so, IMO, you give up the right to complain about long queues. Want a shorter queue? Go as a tank or healer. It’s a choice-a spec you prefer and a long queue, or a spec you dont’ quite prefer but a short one. Sadly, if you’re a DPS preferred person you can’t have both. (This goes for pure DPSers as well-I mean, DPS has a long queue.) This is where i can see the plight of the pure DPSers however-they CAN’T queue as anything else, and due to the fact so many hybrids also play as DPS, their queues are longer.
It’s a back and forth thing and IMO there is no real right answer as both sides feel entitled. It’s a bad situation on both sides; DPSers who play hybrids who dont like non DPS specs are made to feel guilty and that’s not good, and DPSers who WOULD play another spec aren’t able to due to the class design. The only way I could see a possible fix to this would be to really-redesign/scratch the ‘holy trinity’.
I hate tanking. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. And I’m a Death Knight. This means I can tank if I want to. I do not think I am shirking my social responsibility by refusing to queue as a tank. I’d rather have a 40 minute queue as a dps and do the job I actually enjoy, than have a 1 sec queue as tank (and a barely competent one) and do a job I hate.
In fact, I think it is socially responsible of me to queue as a DPS! Why would I do a job I’m barely competent at? How is that responsible? When I don’t queue as tank, you don’t wipe through any fault of mine!
However, I do disagree about the healing meters. The healers in my guild compete to get the highest on the healing meters. DPS is not king to them 😛
Makes perfect sense. I also think that maybe it is socially responsible for good dps to queue as dps, given how many poor ones there are around.
The other thing ofc is that even if you did tank, people would raise hell if you rolled on dps gear so what’s the motivation anyway?
I read through Tobolds post and all the comments, mostly because I couldn’t believe what I was reading.
I ended up commenting at the end, that I suspected Tobold was trolling us all, but then I see him mentioning his whole idea about social responsibility in another post, and I guess he wasn’t kidding afterall…..
I found the whole thing so blantantly flawed, and the comments so full of clever counter arguments and insight.
I wonder how Tobold would tackle the concept of playing for fun in his theory.