I've done my fair share of raiding in pick up groups and its always a crap shoot. Sometimes they are fantastic people (rare but it happens) and others they are a nightmare. The nightmare groups come in a variety of forms ranging from people not having the slightest clue what they are doing in the raid or on the toon they are playing to simple asshole-ish actions by various members of the raid. Any soul that has PUGed knows its a risk and sometimes you just have to know your limits and cut your losses.
Today was not a day to cut my loses as I did pick up a nice ring and some shoulders to play around with (that I doubt i will ever use but again they are to play with and nobody else wanted them). The raid itself was almost completely PUG with a few members knowing each other and the run itself was pretty drama free in terms of the group itself as all players were up to snuff and very pacient as we trucked along to down KT. So why have I made a post about PUGing if everything went so well? Well its the social part of the PUG that was my issue with the run and it wasn't so much fustration with the raid itself but more of one with the guys running it and the vent they used. The leads were nice enough guys and perhaps that was a bit of the problem.
I made the mistake of raiding with a headache but I was all by myself today and planned to take full advantage of that fact so I sucked it up and ran my run. Now my problem with the socail in this group was the constant chatter of a lower leveled guildy of the raid leads butting into our raid chanel and never shutting his trap the entire run. Now let me break this down for you valued reader (i know somebdoy has to read this stuff). First as we all log into vent the gemtleman welcomes himself into the channel and procceds to not do this only once but under several different names as to cause painfully loud feedback to all those in the channel. This contnued for a while and at the time it at least seemed like this was a consern to the raid leads as they quicky began to try and figure out which people where his (hard to do because many people do not use the name of the toon they are playing in vent so its kinda hard to know who the hell is who). They failed to shut him out but he left on his own taking the loud noises with him and all was fine for a while. As we got further in he did feel the need to return and give updates on his progress to 80 though only 2 people in the vent actually would have even cared enough to want to know how he was doing. Again though this was irriating it was not a huge problem. His activity really picked up however when another fairly annoying gent joined our raid to replace someone and began to chat with the guy and brag about how far he was in ulduar as we ran into problems with trash in arachnid wing. Now as the late mention warrior was a pain to listen to at least he was IN the raid and some of the time the things out of his mouth actually pretanded to the situation at had the other "genius" began making his own quips in random areas and sometimes in areas were he seriously could have messed us up.
Now this is by no means the first time I have had to deal with this but the guy was REALLY loud and with my headache getting worse from hours of sitting in this raid it really began to grate on my nerves. By the time we reached Sath and get ready to pull he even starts yelling in vent he wasn't ready almost confusing the entire raid. I am sorry but if about 85% of the raid dont know each other's voices it becomes hard enough to tell wahts going on without some ass adding to the complexity of the situation by throwing a new unknown person into the mix in which you have no idea who he is. We then have a bit of troiuble with people dying on the frozen bastard of a dragon and though I can not say for certain if he was at fault I am sure it didn't help with people's focus during the fight.
Nerd rage began to kick in on KT and the warrior semi flashing the raid with his e-peen also pushes my last nerve as we wipe twice on KT before downing him tearing down raid members ired from the long haul for mistakse that can happen when you are tired and a little too focused to get done and yelling at our melee for being frozen when the majority of our dps was melee (not smart for KT but I was not the one in charge). I have to comend them for not freezing him along with each other with that kind of crowding. This is not the end of the problems with the vent durning the fight. Not only is the warrior basically taking over the vent bossing people around but he and the raid leads began talking about the more random things when vent should be clear so we can cut down on ussless deaths. That at the end of the day was about my breaking point and raises a intersting question for a PUGer.
When exactly is a PUG a BAD PUG? Its very obvious when the group cant even get in the door without about 10 wipes on trash in the first room or numbers look WAY to low for the people there or your raid lead is wearing greens, but is it a BAD run when you have this kind of organization issues in raid communications? Yes we had a good group of people in the PUG but we even had issues with buffing because people couldn't even hear what others needed as the vent was practically unuseable the majority of the run for useless chatter. The run itself ran probably about 2 hours longer than it would have with clear channels and communication as many wipes probably could have been avoided. For all the chatter going on I would have been about as well off not in the vent at all rather than getting irriated at the loud nonsense asaulting my ears. Even without the headache I would have seriously thought about leaving the PUG even though thing were still going fairly well. Had the group be a slight bit worse or not done as well in the early wings I dont think I would have been alone in wanting to get out at that point. Its a bit irresponsible to not control your raid's communication channels like that. Its irritating enough to deal with overly chatty raid members as is when they talk about random things in important areas but to have a guildy disrepect the raid itself because he couldnt "go" is way worse. WoW is a socail game. I might be thinking a bit much of the people that play but at some point you have to realize there are things you should and shouldnt do social situations. Perhaps i just expect too much from people. After all most act like this in there everyday life its just a bit more over the top in the virtual world I suppose.
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