Pugs Over Easy

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Pugs Over Easy

eggs

If you have read my blog for very long at all, you will know that I am extremely gun shy about grouping with strangers.  Namely in my time tanking I have had some pretty horrible experiences both as a tank and believe it or not healer in the various games I have played.  Prior to World of Warcraft, I did this all the time… but with the advent of the dungeon finder everything seemed to go downhill.  Today’s post is not really a reflection of any real or imagined events that have happened to myself recently, but instead spurred on by finding the most perfect analogy that wraps up my feelings about pugs.

My friends have all been following the release of Jinx the new champion for League of Legends extremely closely.  Midday yesterday they linked me this thread on the forums posted by someone called Dread Pirate Arbuthnot.  The intent was to explain what ranked play is like, but for me it rang true of the vast majority of my pugging experiences.  As a DPS you can fade quietly and anonymously into the background and just do your job… but as a tank or healer… you always end up to blame for whatever failings the group has.  On with the copypasta!

Look I can describe ranked play in a really simple analogy

So you want to eat a cake, right, but you only have eggs. So you have to find four other people who have milk, sugar, a blender, and chocolate. But you show up, and the blender guy throws his blender to the ground and screams EGGS OR I FEED, and then the other three people start yelling at you to give up your eggs. Then you have to piece together the broken blender, and it’s not really working properly, but you found some tape so it’s working. Except the beaters are kind of wibbly wobbly now, so it isn’t mixing the batter very well. The other four players start to scream at you for not blending the cake well enough, since that’s your job, and then the milk guy has to go leave for 15 minutes because his mom just made dinner.

Are you understanding this so far? Ok good

So any ways once milk guy is back you have the cake, and its time to put it in the oven. The problem is that there are professional baking teams who just played a world baking tournament, so everyone wants to bake a cake like theirs. Even though your cake is chocolate, they want to cover it with icing meant for a vanilla cake, because that’s what the Asian cake bakers do. You try to insist that your cake would be much better with chocolate icing, but they tell you to commit suicide. Finally, your shitty cake monstrosity comes out of the oven and it isn’t even edible because of the whole process, and apparently cakes need more ingredients than just eggs and milk and chocolate.

Then you go into the post cake lobby and everyone unanimously agrees its your fault

Then you immediately hit the ‘bake again’ button and pray that this time you can just ADD THE GOD DAMN EGGS

This seems to happen regardless of how many guild members you bring into a pug.  Last week at some point I got drafted into trying to get one of our healers and her dps hubby through the Cutters Cry instance in FFXIV.  I knew I should tank it, but I could really use gear on my Bard at the time… so at the nudging that it would be okay I stayed in as a dps class and we attempted to pug a tank.  I knew this would be a decision I regretted. 

Tolerance for Frustration

ffxiv 2013-09-18 21-08-51-19

We proceeded to go through the instance with the tank only ever trying to hold aggro on a single target in each pull.  Additionally it felt like he was going out of his way to stand in every bad thing he could.  We limped along and did not manage to finish the dungeon before the timer ran out… and at the end… the tank was raging against us for somehow holding him back.  We kept our cool and didn’t respond in kind… but this just bookends every experience I have had in pugging.  When I saw the above post, it explained the feeling so well. 

Granted there is a lot of league of legends specific stuff buried in there…. but the thrust of it is true.  Doing a successful dungeon run with random people involves a crazy juggling act and if any one person doesn’t bring their specific ingredient it falls to hell quickly.  Without a doubt the person that gets the blame is almost always the tank or the healer.  In the case of the single target tank, I am pretty sure he all his rage was directed at our healer…  who could not keep him healed because the adds kept killing her.  While I and her husband did as much kiting as we could to keep her alive… and we made it as far as we did because of this… there was only so much you could do when the tank only wanted to tank a single mob at a time.

I guess after years of really good guild groups I have found my tolerance for frustration extremely lowered.  On a regular basis I have one of my less patient friends asking me to queue for various things with him… and my answer is always the same.  I will only do it if we have a full guild group.  Ultimately I would rather wait weeks to make that happen, than to step foot into and tank another PUG group.  Granted I am exceedingly lucky in that I generally DO have a large guild group that I can rely on.  As a result I try my best to help the other members of the guild with whatever dungeon they happen to be needing at the time.  It just works better when you have a non-judgmental group of friends doing something, than a bunch of strangers.

9 thoughts on “Pugs Over Easy”

  1. @Belghast – yup yup! Must be why I don’t really get this whole tanking business. 😀

    Prior to GW2 I had never heard of “the holy trinity” – and then it was only because GW2 *didn’t* have it. 😛

    Part of the reason it doesn’t really make sense to me though, is that in an armed conflict why the heck would you focus all your resources on the strongest point of resistance (the tank)? Even in nature the first things they go after are the weak and the young. Silly AI. I suppose it makes for interesting game mechanics though?

  2. I am guessing by NWO you are meaning Neverwinter Online? If so that is a really odd beast and does not really follow any of the normal MMO roles. Namely in that game tanking is not needed at all and Guardians are considered the next best thing to useless. In a traditional MMO tanks exist because they can take more abuse than anyone else.

    Namely in dungeon encounters the boss mobs regularly deal enough damage that it would one-shot any other class. However the tanks are especially designed to soak up that damage. They can either mitigate or soak the damage with high armor or high health pool. However this health pool is not unlimited. In that case a dedicated healer exists to keep the party and namely the tank alive as he/she focuses the hate of all of the mobs on themselves.

    Games like Neverwinter and Guild Wars 2 blur the lines and attempt to make every single player responsible for their own health and healing. It is a completely different way of thinking. I prefer the traditional roles, but folks who tend to mostly play DPS seem to greatly enjoy the blurred models like Neverwinter.

  3. Why can’t the tank heal himself, or rather why is he so flimsy he needs healing?

    Ok I don’t know how that game system works but in NWO, I play a squishy rogue.

    Despite my ability to stealth though, I -DO- grab as much aggro as I can to make it easier for my party.

    How do I stay alive then (especially with no healer)? A mixture of potions, tricks (stun moves) and simple dodging. Stealth is there when I want to do more dmg or things are getting -too- hairy.

    So far I’ve had no complaints that I’m not doing my *job*, which I suppose is DPS (which I do lower of than other rogues because half the time I’m dancing around the room).

    Fun to party with 4 mages though. I keep everything busy and give them the time to explode all the mobs to hell. 😛

  4. I dislike grouping up with random people, but for different reasons. I don’t like relying on others and knowing that there’s a possibility of failure outside of my control. But I’d rather take the chance for a great group and a fun instance than level another class or my old fallback: running around a town spamming guild chat. The biggest benefit of PUGs to me is timing. I’m lucky enough to be in a great guild of people I like: but part of the charm is its size. Its small. Everybody knows everybody, really. But the small number of people and the various time zones and commitments makes grouping difficult. A PUG will always be there: even if you have to wait in queue for awhile. I know there’s the ongoing joke about me being “impatient,” and its true… But the big problem is that I want to play and enjoy the game, and leveling a new class often doesn’t cut it. In FFXIV especially, the big appeal are instances, so I PUG. A lot. More than I normally would in any other MMO. I find it funny, that ultimately my acceptance of bad players has only gotten better. I’ll often offer advice and be kind, and even take some hostility with a grain of salt: if its bad enough I’d get upset, I’d gladly leave and eat the 15 minutes.

    To be fair, though: I’m at an entirely different part of my MMO addiction than most people I know. When others were in the prime of their addiction with WoW and EQ2, I was ignoring the genre. Now that I’m finally into it with an almost life-ruining level of interest, everybody else is aware of their previous addictions and in the post-hype cooldown where the games are still fun but not in the “gotta play play play and do the end game content over and over and over!” way that I’m finding them… So I try my luck and hit the Duty Finder again and again.

    • Yeah I guess that is true… this is your what? Second MMO? This is my god knows how manyth? I think the excitement dies down with each new MMO that comes and goes. I guess the sense of immediacy disappears… because I know the only thing at the end of being max geared… is boredom and a sense of malaise over being “done with the game”. I try my best to ration the content to slow down the eventual disappointment.

  5. This is why I start every game as DPS now. I tanked in WoW for years, and got so fed up with the blame. Your group succeeds? You took too long, and it’s the tank’s fault. Or you went too fast, and it’s the tank’s fault. Can’t find new party members when one drops out? TANKS FAULT! I heard it all. Most of it just rolled off my back, because whatever, it’s just a game, and who were these pricks to tell me I was doing bad when I thought they were doing just as bad as well?

    In the end, I made the conscious effort to stop blaming others, but also not to really blame myself either. If it didn’t work, there are a LOT of variables why that could be, so just placing arbitrary blame on others is just immature. I just tried to be the best I could be, and if it didn’t work… eh. But that didn’t stop others from leveling all the blame on me.

    Sad thing is to this day, I hate grouping. HATE IT. It’s my least favorite activity in MMOs, and I can’t help going into any group feeling that they’re all ready to jump on me, and if it goes south, I should be prepared to lose a lot of gaming friends. Overreacting, maybe, but when it’s happened before multiple times, it can certainly happen again.

    • Hehe I just end up working to bring my own guild with me into other games… or at least a full groups worth of them 🙂 Sometimes I follow rather than lead, since I had no real intent of playing FFXIV, but the bulk of the guild was.

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