Thursday, June 6, 2013

What happened to the players?

I'll spare you the apologies for not updating. If you've read this blog for any amount of time, you should realize by now I'm terrible at regularly updating it. To give you a quick update on my guild's progress, we're currently sitting at 2/13H in Throne of Thunder. Which, I might add, is a pretty fantastic raid. Normals are so much harder than they've been in a long time and, as a result, heroics are even harder. This is causing a lot of people to complain about how they can't progress. "It's too hard" and all that is on forums everywhere. Well, I respectfully disagree. It is hard, there is no debating that. But it's supposed to be harder than say, Dragon Soul. Since LFR has been solidified as a progression step for more casual players, normal and heroic raids could be scaled up in difficulty. Let's face it, LFR is ridiculously easy, and it's supposed to be. Could you imagine 25 strangers trying to complete ToT25 normal? I'm talking about the normal people you see in LFR. So people who AFK, people who constantly attempt to troll the raid, or better yet, people who don't speak the same language as others. So you can't even communicate strategies or directions to them.

This leads me to my true subject of this post: player apathy. Let me start by saying that I run LFR each week with guildies for valor points. For awhile, it was to get some upgrades for my off spec that I used in an encounter or two. But now there aren't any upgrades for either of my specs (aside from weapon >.<). In the current LFR, all of the ToT mechanics are dulled to the point where following them apparently isn't worth it to most people. Knockbacks on certain abilities don't even exist in LFR. Standing in fire might not kill you. This type of thing drives me nuts. I'm all for making things easier because of the types of people you'll end up encountering and the fact that you may not even be able to communicate with those people. But there has to be some sort of incentive to actually move from that fire, and some type of penalty if you don't.

But my personal issues about mechanics not being lethal aside (I'm aware that LFR is not designed for the level or raiding I normally find appropriate), the lack of penalty for those who simply refuse to play is what bothers me the most. People who go AFK constantly, put someone on follow, randomly pull things, tunnel into a boss constantly and ignore adds... I think you get the picture. I don't expect people to do amazing damage in LFR. I understand that a lot of these people are on second and third alts, maybe they only have the time to play 2 hours a week. All that stuff I understand. But not being able to damage the things you're supposed to while moving out of an obvious trap that should kill you is ridiculous.

Just last night I ran this with the normal group of guildies and it was a nightmare from start to finish. One warlock decided they were going to pull everything instead of waiting for me or the other tank (from my guild as well) to pull it. And here's where I get really annoyed, when we tried to kick him after he kept doing it over and over, we constantly got the message "That player cannot be kicked for another 4 hours." Wait wait, so this person is intentionally being a jerk and making this harder than it should be, and we can't even rectify that? So... what consequence is there for those who do this? Nothing? I just didn't understand. During Horridon, half the raid tunneled into damaging him for the entire fight. This is normal, as I've seen in other runs. But let me tell you how difficult that makes it for the tanks. Tanking all the adds on the 4th door, grabbing the warbears as they drop, just in time for Jalak to drop down. More adds are spawning, people are still damaging Horridon, the other tank will need a swap swoon, probably can't survive tanking Horridon and Jalak, and I have all the adds. I used Army of the Dead to try to get some pressure off me from the adds while I grabbed Jalak. At the same time, the Dinomancer dropped. Despite my gear far exceeding what is found in LFR, I just barely survived. Not to mention it was a complete mess until the boss died. But again, no one cares.

When we queued for the next section, we obviously got a different group. This one wasn't much better. During Tortos, almost no one was damaging the bats that I was tanking. Plus there were turtles everywhere. They, again, tunneled into the boss. The trash after Tortos is probably the worst spot for a group in LFR. There's a ton of it, and everyone will skip a lot of it. We do in our normal raids, but for some reason avoiding mobs that move is too difficult for a lot of people in LFR. That's not to say people aren't trolling and purposely pulling trash, as we soon saw in this attempt. We cleared to the second bell and move towards the waterfall section as we normally do in my guild. The amount of trash that everyone brought with was absurd. It literally seemed like people tried to pull all of it. I guess to some people that's funny? Yes, fighting a losing battle against that much, dying and then having to run back is funny. I can clearly see that now. Very amusing.

Ji-Kun is always a mess in LFR because people don't want to fly to the nests. Not much more can be said there. Durumu's maze continues to confuse people. Half the raid seems to die during it each week. For Primordius, I still see people never getting transformed for the entire fight and doing very little damage as a result. But all this pales in comparison to Dark Animus. The horrendous mess this is on LFR. I'm sure anyone who has done this knows what I'm talking about.

I've rambled about this for long enough. To summarize, the people I encounter in LFR either play extremely badly and show no signs of improving, or they intentionally do poorly because they just don't care. The latter is my issue. If you don't care, then don't even queue. I'm not saying that everyone should be as obsessive as I can be about learning my class, the fight, etc. But actually doing what you're supposed to be doing... is that too hard to ask?

This is the whole problem here. There is little to no consequence for being like this. You might be kicked from the group. But only if you're doing something obviously bad. Why is this behavior allowed? When someone confronts another about doing something wrong, even if the person is just explaining how the fight should be done, their response is almost always some variation of "lol this is LFR. it doesn't matter".

I leave you with a video from Preach all about how there is a lack of incentive to try. This pretty well sums up my experience.