This past weekend, I zoned in to a Heroic Grim Batol that was already in progress, on the second boss. There was a player DC’d who was summarily kicked out. After the next wipe, I started to see what was going on.
The healer, who had the Dungeon Guide tag, immediately started laying down the blame for the wipe. Berating the tank, making fun of his gear including a green or two. The tank dropped.
We went again, with the new tank, and another wipe. This time, the healer started heckling the lowest DPS, who also dropped. 10 min into the instance and I had already seen this person make nasty comments to and bully out the entire group other than myself.
His behavior continued. As the healer, no wipe (and there were several) was ever his fault. It was all the fault of the bad DPS. Or someone standing in something. His tirades went on and on. After one especially nasty run of his mouth, I put forth a vote kick, which did not pass. Apparently, the abuse he was heaping on everyone was OK by the rest of the group.
As we got towards the end of the instance and his name calling and blaming escalated I asked him to chill out. “This is actually a team effort. You have cycled through more than a full group of players so far today; you need to hold up some responsibility on your end as well for the success of the group.”
I detailed for him how if he was running out of mana mid fight, he should consider using his mana replenishment tool at half mana, not waiting until he was out (which was his M.O., and when we would lose a player.) I also pointed out he could ask for an innervate from the druid and a hymn of hope from me — we have a number of mana replenishment tricks, but all need to be managed and planned for — not done at the last minute.
After that discussion, things went more smoothly. Until the final boss. Our little LFD tyrant sprouted an extra head. He changed positioning of players multiple times, and when I tried to confirm which side he wanted me on, I was blasted with 15-rows of “Priest shut up and move.” I’d really about had it with this brat.
We had several tries, and saw his placements were not working– one side was not getting down their add. Somewhere in there, I died early, during a shadow gale (where it looked on my screen and others as though we were all stacked in the middle) and thus started to get a rain of abuse heaped upon me. I was a moron. I should stop playing. Am I blind? And worse. The litany of insults was shocking and left me stunned. I had honestly never encountered this level of nastiness in my five years of playing this game.
Pages of this abuse from some foul mouthed LFD healer who had bullied out almost two full LFD groups worth of players. Who then complained he could not vote kick me because we were on the final boss.I asked him to calm down and stop being a bully, to which he retorted I must be 5-years old. I held my tongue. And I did what any rational player would do when confronted with an extreme case of jerkiness: I put that person on ignore.
I took to whispers to organize strat with the good players. They finally started telling the nasty healer to shut it. And we defeated the boss.
And I avoided the LFD queue for the rest of the weekend. I don’t have the stomach for another run-in of that kind.
What is interesting to me, is that player was the dungeon guide, and clearly felt that he was the most qualified person in the group to lead us through the dungeon. But he was not, despite knowing the fights in a general manner (everything was a tank and spank plus something everyone other than him needed to watch for.) His primary deficit? A total lack of leadership skills and subpar communication abilities.
Shouting down other peopls or bullying them into leaving is not productive in any scenario. Name calling doesn’t help anyone identify how a pull went wrong. Yet in this guy’s mind, he was in the right and we were all a bunch of morons who couldn’t have gotten through it without him.
People like this bully are why I am not a fan of the new crop of player rating tools that are cropping up, both in action and in discussion. From his POV, everyone he grouped with, including myself (and I was doing 11k DPS and kicking ass other than my one death for whatever reason) was a total moron whom should never be allowed in a heroic.
And from my POV, someone who behaves the way he does, with such a negative attitude and a taste for doling out abuse on strangers, should never be subjected on anyone else.
I love the idea of the LFD tool, and its ability to help folks find a group when there isn’t enough interest in their own guild, but incidents like this, make me wish we were grouped only with folks on our own servers, whereby we could have a little bit of recourse if hit up by the crazy rants and insults.
I love to do instances, and my 85s are all at the heroic level from gear and performance standpoints, but I’ve lost my taste for randoming without buddies. Because waiting in a 45 minute queue to have a truly awful hour with some horrible person is just not my idea of fun.
Sorry to hear you had to deal with such an idiot. I’ve come across this kind of behavior and I typically (sometimes, a little to rashly) put them on ignore the first instance of bullying or insulting behavior. I don’t like spending my WoW time reading garbage.
And good for you for keeping your head on straight and standing up for your bedraggled group. Not many (as you have seen) people will do that.
I’m in the same boat as you with regards to running dungeons with only friends. Which is sad, because I really want to heal things. I’m just not “there” yet to take abuse from idiot PUGs from the Dungeon Finder. The closest I’ve gotten so far was a tank in regular Stonecore who kept pulling when I wasn’t ready. >.>
Good luck in your future dungeon crawling! 🙂
Fyn and I haven’t got our gear up to heroic level since we’ve been jumping around on various toons, but we’re working on it. You won’t have to run with these jerks for too much longer.
I’m pretty close myself. Not that its likely any consolation xD.
On the other hand, yeah, the universe-wide LFD is a hair nice for queue times, but there is no recourse for stuff like you mentioned. Would be helpful if we could flag for ‘realm-only’ LFD.
Unfortunately, we can’t add any sort of player rating system, bots and total a-holes could vote you down for no reason, even if you single-handedly carried a group, etc.
I don’t pug for this reason. I know my gear sucks as a result, but it beats suffering idiots like that. I have zero patience for fools :t
The rewards of the possibility of loot and some justice points are just not enough to put up with crazy, abusive behavior like this. It’s a bummer though, because sometimes you are online and everyone else is occupied. But I am not game to wait 45 minutes for a slot then have a repeat of that mess.
I am incredibly excited that we can start dungeon crawling again as a team.
🙂
Unfortunately I do not have a clone of you two for horde-side.
I love that AF has set up set heroic nights — I like knowing I will have a chance at some friendly groups a few nights per week.
It’s seriously not a big enough payoff to put up with mean/selfish/crazy.
I definitely would have reported them for their abuse, if they keep getting reports they’ll receive a temporary ban.
Sorry to hear that happened to you, you’re a great team player and it sucks when others simply don’t know how to act. Part of me thinks them being anonymous makes them feel it’s ok to act like that, then again I’ve met some people who are real life jerks to and they wonder why no one wants to be around them. 😉
I have been in a few groups like the one you’ve mentioned but fortunately in my case the others were all to happy to give them the boot. Then again, a few of the times I was playing a hybrid class so had sets for tanking/healing. I told people I was voting to kick the ‘person’ and could swap out to finish the run without them. In one case the abuser shut up real quick when he learned people were more than happy to kick him and would if he kept up his attacks. The others weren’t so lucky, they kept on and got the boot.
Here’s hoping your buddies level soon so you don’t have to deal with that anymore.
/cheer
I think if the bully had not been the healer, they might have kicked him out. It was gratifying, however, at the very end of the run, when the other members finally stood up to him a bit, and the tank told him that he had the worst attitude he’d ever seen, and needed to get over himself.
/cackle
I just wish they’d done that standing up before the run degraded into the awful. Ah well. better late than never.
And I totally wish that more of my friends were playing in SHP, or playing during the times I am on. I get home and log in and peeps are already in heroics.
🙁
Alliance side I have better luck at least. But I would prefer to be playing Anexxia more than I have been.
Maybe there should be a ‘rate up/rate down’ system similar to how vote kick works. Someone initiates a rating request and 3/5 (or maybe all 4 other players) have to agree to it, then rating goes up or down. Rating down too far? Can’t use LFD. Rating high? I dunno, get 5% extra healing/dps/stamina. Or a cookie.
Ideally it should also work after a player has left a group – one of the issues I’ve come across in LFD more than aggressive bullies is totally silent players (mainly tanks) who make NO effort to communicate with the group or work through problems but just silently drop group if something goes wrong…. so frustrating!!
I have seen the most tank drops in HoO — after insisting on killing the final boss first. This is especially irksome as the quest in HoO that requires you to kill the final 4 bosses awards great rare quality 333 cloth bracers, and a 33 rare quality caster druid helm iir. So I’ve done it twice thus far, with 1 more toon to go through it.
I think I’ve only run one RDF heroic on Glog. There’s just too much potential for what your post describes and I play the game to have fun, not stick a gun in my mouth.
Unfortunately right now the whole key to getting into all-SHP runs is to sort of be lucky and online when one of the tanks asks in gchat if anyone wants to run something. Some nights I luck out and get in a couple runs, other nights I just work on leveling alts or farming mats or doing dailies.
The good news is we’re getting faster at doing the heroics, so even if your friends are in a run, odds are it won’t be for hours and hours. 🙂
I had so much fun doing heroics with you and Tox the other night! I am at a disadvantage thanks to work hours and time zones. I rarely get home before 6 p.m. server/PT, except on my work at home day. Thankfully, we have a 3-day weekend coming up…
I’ve had fair to good luck with my PuGs, particularly with the low level stuff. I’ve only had a few idiots and it was easy enough to speak up and get then to stop harassing the tank or even just get them booted. I have a low tolerance for a holes.
That being said, the two heroic PuGs I’ve run with my rogue have been horrendous! So much so that my brave PuGing self wants nothing to do with them outside of the guild. The worst kind of verbal abuse that had me dropping moments after my 35 min queue had popped. Ugh.
I totally agree.
I’m curious to see what my internal stats are for dropping group… I should make a macro:
/p %t, you’re being a total douche and I’m not going to waste my time reading your insulting filth.
/ignore %t
/leaveparty
I wonder if that would work? Would certainly make me feel a little better.
H Grim Batol seems to bring out the worst in PUGs, I’ve noticed. I had a similar group last week, except we never got past the first boss because each new tank wouldn’t listen to us when we told him to tank the boss away from the purple add so we could CC it. Finally it just fell apart.
That said, I have also been lucky enough to run into some wonderful PUG groups too. I had an amazing group the other day for H BRC – the tank was patient and used CC, no one yelled or rage quit after wipes, and we all calmly discussed strats and how to fix things that were going wrong. I’d never wished so badly for a cross-server friends list, that would make it more likely for people to end up in the same groups if both in the queue at the same time.
I’m happy to come along if I’m available and you want a pug-buddy for Anexxia. 😉
Yeah, this is why I hate pugs with a passion. If I run them as all I make sure I have 2 guildies along. But I am at an advantage here as my main role is tanking, so I never really have a lack of people wanting to run (maybe too many wanting to run in fact:)). But I know how much it sucks for DPS, I hope it starts to even out soon.
As others have said about a rating system, I read something on wow insider that was suggesting the same thing. But as was pointed out there as well, that could be rife with abuse too An entire group rates a player badly just for kicks for example. They could be innocent and have the equivalent of digital Scarlet letter.
It is hard to say what they can do to improve LFD, or at least make sure the behavior of tools like this is curtailed. If there was a way to limit their rewards if they were a jerk, that would be awesome. No idea how you could put it in in a way that could not be abused 🙁
I totally agree with you on the heroic nights. I refuse to do a PUG heroic.. i just dont’ have the patience for people like that. I hate random regulars too for the same reason but its much less stressful. I look forward to our heroic nights!
I honestly don’t understand why nobody kicked *the healer*. We are not so rare in LFG that you have to tolerate us regardless of how obnoxious we are! And, as well as being a stain on the nether regions of humanity, he was clearly a bloody bad healer. I don’t know if he actually signed up to be DG – sometimes I get this role thrust upon me despite not ticking the “I will do this” box… but it’s always deeply unpleasant to read about these sort of encounters. Glad you conquered him though, and much more politely and usefully than I would have done.
<3 I am hoping to get in some heroics over my 3-day weekend, and will definitely keep on the lookout for you.
:)
It was funny to me, that he was sure, due to his role, it was not him — it was everybody else. And especially the 4 people he’d kicked before I got to the group. Even after my path of questioning about his mana conservation showed him as not having a clue, which, given that I haven’t played his class at all or healed anything in a year, made me laugh to myself, he was consumed with the righteous fire of his convictions that everyone else was a moron or slacker…I wonder how his big fat head fits through the doorways…
;p
Griefing is against the TOS and results in a (temp, at first) ban. Stick the kid on ignore, and report via /gm. If you do not see a ? where is name was in the next few days. Then s/he is a Blizz Employee’s private account. And will not be punished as required.
Double Standards in the game 🙁 Learn to love them.
Seems to me you should like some of the ‘social ratings’ ideas being tossed around — unless you think everyone else in your group thought that guy was a good player.
IRL people are significantly more likely to complain about something, such as bad service, than they are to praise good service. Similarly, I think nasty people like the bad attitude healer are most likely to use and abuse social rating services. There’s no way to check the validity of the ratings. And it’s unlikely that you’d be in a PUG with a group full of folks who all used the same social ranking service, to actively combat something like that (i.e. to use correlation/consistency of rankings in an instance as your validator.)