Dear Old Friend: L2play

Dear Old Gamer Friend;

I’m not sure if you’ll end up reading this, or if I’ll end up linking it to you. I know you don’t like to read, you’ve complained about it before, and you never bothered to go to our guild website back when we were a guild, or to our metaguild website once we became less organized after we started playing WoW.

I haven’t been doing much gaming with you for the past few months. What’s happened in the past is that I’ll go try to help you out with something, you’ll try to direct the action and then we fail.

Last night, you wanted to go farm the brewfest mount. You wanted me to 2box tank and heal, along with you and your wife. I said we’d need another dps. You insisted. You want the loot and I don’t blame you. So I said okay, although at the back of my mind, I still thought we would need dps. I asked if your wife would be at the keyboard, to make sure you weren’t trying to 2box also. I asked if you were sure, a few times. What I should have done was flat out state “no way, Jose – get some good dps or I’m not coming.”

I remember a time when I went to help you with something back in Burning Crusade. You’d helped me out with dps previously, when we had Anatalos tanking. Anatalos was a damn good tank. I don’t know if he still reads this blog, he’s given up WoW to focus on school and more power to him for that. But anyway, he had his tank gear and his tank spec, and we work well together, and we made the quest look easy as pie.
We went back to try it again later. No Anatalos, this time your wife was tanking. Except she didn’t let me know she wasn’t tank spec, she was half ret and half something else, and she kept dying and running back. I had some damn good dps with me, from my guild, but that didn’t help the fact that the tank couldn’t stand up to the damage, and we failed, and never did get through that quest. My dps friends left irritated with me for summoning them to failure, and you and your wife were upset because for some reason, easy as pie had turned into hard as nails. And you didn’t quite understand why.

Now normally after we set out on these expeditions we wind up pissed off at each other, so I’ve been just refusing to go along. I’ll talk, I’ll hang out, I’ll share tips, we can reminisce about games from the past or talk about music, but I don’t want to run things with you. It just leads to ill will.

Last night was more of the same. Now I can solo that particular boss down to about 30%, but then he hits the enrage timer and goes berserk, and that usually does me in. Maybe if I were soloing it as a pally or druid or something it would work, but not while I'm playing a warrior tank and a priest healer in windowed mode on adjacent monitors. I’ve tried it with one extra dps, from my guild, but we failed. I figured that maybe you guys could do that additional 30% and we could beat it.

But no, fail resulted. I had asked you just before the pull not to pull agro. That’s good advice most days, but it’s especially effective when you’ve got one person trying to tank and heal at the same time, which admittedly is not really effective for same-level encounters, although it serves me very well on lower level type stuff like hunting that guy in ZD that drops the tiger mount. (No, don't ask, I am NOT taking you to hunt the tiger mount guy, you'll probably cause a wipe.)

We were doing okay until the end part where the tank got stunned. And then . . . your missus pulled agro, and dragged the mobs far away from the tank. So I was going back and forth between my healer and tank, trying to keep them both up – uh oh, now I’ve also got to try to heal the death knight that pulled agro while at the same time making the tank take agro back, while healing both of them. Then you get into the act. You could have used your tricks of the trade move to put agro back on the tank but no, you grabbed it for yourself, and you died too. I tried to keep things going but it was no use, and we wiped when the boss was a lousy two or three hits from dropping the loot.

And I wished you luck finding a nice pug and hearthed out of there, and logged off, and made an omelet, with some ham and green onions and asiago cheese. It came out pretty good; I’ve been trying to figure out how to make omelets with my new omelet pan, and flipping them is tricky, but finally I’ve reached the point where they come out in one omelet-shaped piece. And I went off to my alliance server, where a friend helped me look you up in the armory and post mortem the fail.

We discovered that you use a spec that’s dependent on having other people in your party score critical hits. Even though you mostly solo. And that your hit rating is very, very low, which means you don’t often hit at all, let alone crit. Now I don’t know a lot about your particular class, rogues. I don’t play one, truthfully I don’t really like them, although I know a few good ones. Typically they do very high damage. Your damage, though, is really low. I’m used to seeing rogues do raid damage above 4000 dps. You do about 1300 dps. My healer can outdamage you. While healing. We had a pugger do that kind of damage in a raid I was recently in, and the guildleader had a fit, and said he didn’t want to see that person in a raid again ever.

Frankly, old pal, you’re pretty bad at the group player-versus-environment features of the game. You’re okay for soloing, but your grasp of your role in a group seriously needs some work. Unfortunately, you don’t take direction, you insist on giving it instead. Now I’m not suggesting you take advice from me on how to play a rogue because I have no idea, but I think you need to either do a little research or start doing more group activities while taking more of a passive role, following directions and asking advice.

I don’t suggest you ask my more elitist guildies. Some of them are pretty smug and insufferable, although if you catch them at the right time, they’ll probably give you some great advice. I gather you’ve encountered smugness from others when you’ve tried to group and I don’t blame you for being defensive. We’ve both probably run into bad players who give bad advice (cough), or good players who turn advice-giving into a power trip, and unless you really know the game well, it’s hard to tell them apart. I’d suggest you do what I did and continue to do – look for players who are a little better than you at what you’re trying to accomplish, and see what they’re doing different.

Also . . . I understand that you like to brag about your achievements, whenever you loot a rare pet or make a good deal in the auction house. I like to be celebrated for my achievements too. A lot of mine have to do with being good at working in groups. In fact I have clocked a great many hours in groups. That’s where my epic gear that you snidely dismissed the other night comes from. It’s very nice gear for our server; I’m one of the best geared people on it. I could link you to websites saying as much, if I were that kind of person and if you were the type to go to websites.

But I’ve been content to leave it at I’m awesome because I’m a twilight vanquisher in 3/5 T9.5, and you’re awesome because you looted a rare dinosaur hatchling, and Blizzard allows us each to travel in our own spheres of awesomeness, rewarding us frequently with virtual decorations, and problems don’t really arise until we try to do things in groups, especially complicated things.

True, you’ve been playing WoW longer than I have. And you are indeed awesome at some aspects of the game, like collecting. But dude, you are seriously bad at group play. Never ask me to group with you again until you get the kind of achievements and numbers that tell me you’ve figured out how to overcome this issue. I’m willing to help you learn, but I’m not willing to fight with you for control of a situation you’re not equipped to lead, and I’m tired of getting killed because your playstyle is ineffective, and blamed for the wipes that result.

Plus I have authority issues. I'm very picky about whose orders I'll follow. Sometimes you get around my boundaries, because we’re friends, at least until you start telling me to do counterintuitive things and it takes me a second to realize “waittaminute, the bad dps guy is giving me directions on how to fail again, I should tell him STFU, we're doing it this way” but by then it's usually too late. In the past I've thought "well, maybe he's finally putting out some dps, he does have some better gear, and it's been months since the last fail, I'll give him a chance." No more.

So I’m going to resume not grouping with you until you l2play better. I’ll still talk to you, and this time I’m not going to bother with the seething resentment, and maybe this long blog post is TMI for a general audience.

But this blog is sort of about social adventures in MMOs. You’re the kind of guy I’d like to have as a neighbor. We disagree about some things, like politics, and food, and we agree about others, such as early Nine Inch Nails and the awesomeness of the Star Wars movies. Your wife is a sweetie too (and while her dps isn’t great, it’s higher than yours). And yet the nature of WoW means that we probably would not be in the same guild, and that our different styles lead us in directions that can clash to a friendship-severing level.

And I think that’s a damn shame. We managed to get along much better back in SWG, where it was far easier to carry players with bad dps, and where there were plenty of activities that didn’t involve a hand-eye coordination face-off. We do fine just having occasional conversation in our chat channel. It’s not until we get to the actual “playing the video game” part that problems arise.

Some of the people that I enjoy playing the video game with are outright asshats. If they were my neighbors I’d put more locks on my door and perhaps get a big dog. But their dps is high, and their level of involvement with the game is equivalent to my own, and we can get through an encounter without any failing or bossiness or seething resentment. We come together, we rapidly mash keys, we win, we collect loot, we bid each other a cheery farewell. No drama, no stress.

That’s the MMO paradox I’m still exploring. What is it that makes us compatible with other people, and what kind of people attract us when we’re blindfolded as to race and gender and money and region and all those other details. I still haven’t figured it out, even though I know that logging into a guild raid with a bunch of rude strangers shooting rapid fire wisecracks at each other makes me feel warm and happy inside, and so does having a nice long chat about music while I’m wandering through some virtual swamp doing repetitive tasks.

Maybe someday there will be a game better suited toward socializing than WoW, which funnels us into narrow little enclaves defined by a narrow range of aptitude.

For now, keep your bad dps on your side of the fence, neighbor, and I’ll keep my raid pets from crapping on your rosebushes. And I’ll see you at the BBQ on Saturday. Just don't ask me to tank. Or heal.