I guess I'm going to be the one who starts it off, but GP, Olek and I are doing a 1 for 1 (for 1) blog thing, where if one of us blogs, the other two must also blog (within 24 hours, I'm guessing?). I don't really know the reason behind it, but I guess it's reason enough to end the blog drought.
Since it has dominated most of my life for the past few months, I guess this blog is going to be a bit WoW related, but I think people who don't play can still comment. Just need to set the context though, so bear with me!
Some background first. With the most recent patch (3.3), Blizzard have introduced a new emblem, Frost Emblems, that you can get from doing random heroic dugeons and killing raid bosses from the newest raid Icecrown Citadel. Raids and heroics get 'locked', so that once you've done one, you can't do another until the locks reset. For heroics it's everyday at 3am, for raids it's every Tuesday (not sure what time, I should really find out). So you're limited in the number of Frost Emblems you can get each week due to the locks. In addition, you can do the weekly raid quest, which also awards Frost Emblems. Players can exchange emblems for items used for end-game crafting, recipes or new armour.
The structure of the locks is such that once you kill a boss in a raid (or heroic dungeon), you become locked into that particular instance, along with the other members of your raid. For instance, if I joined a raid and killed the first boss in Ulduar, and left the raid, if I went back into Ulduar that week, the first boss would be dead for me. However, if Olek, assuming he wasn't in the raid with me, went into Ulduar, he'd be in his own 'instance' of it, and the first boss would be alive for him. Although, there are two different raids, 10-man and 25-man raids. The instance is similar in both raids, but 25-man raids can be harder as the bosses do more damage (though you have more people to carry you if you suck). So if I did Ulduar10 and killed the first boss, and then joined an Ulduar25 raid, the first boss would still be alive as they're considered different instances.
So this week, the weekly raid quest was to kill the second boss in Ulduar. With all the new gear that people have access to from the new patch, players tend to be really overgeared for instances now, and so Olek and I joined an Ulduar25 raid for the weekly, which should have been a cakewalk. The second boss is really just a matter of not standing in the fire, and not standing next to guys who whirlwind, which was apparently too much for a majority of the raid, and so we wiped. So the raid made the corpse run back to the boss, and we prepared to start a second attempt when we realised someone was still dead. A few ressurection spells later (which he didn't accept), he got the AFK tag.
A few raid members were suggesting we kick him from the raid. So taking into account a few things, do you think it would be right to kick him?
1) Everyone was so overgeared, he was just a DPS paladin, it's not like he was playing a major role. We could have easily done it without him.
2) If we kicked him, and he was locked out of Ulduar10, then he'd miss the chance to do the weekly raid.
3) In the first attempt, he was the first to die from a whirlwind, even though it was mentioned repeatedly which adds were to be avoided by melee DPS (of which he was one) because of their whirlwind attack.
And in retrospect 4) On our second attempt, which was successful, he died from the whirldwind again not long into the fight.
One one hand, I think it would have been mean to kick him, for the first two reasons.
On the other hand, I believe that if you're going to join a raid, you should have an idea of what's going on. You have a responsibility to the other raid members to not do stupid things, and even if you don't know the fight, you should at least listen to what other people are telling you. By letting him get Frost Emblems, he would get access to higher level gear, and for some reason, gearscore (a number indicating the quality/rating of your gear) seems to be intertwined with skill level.
While the whole gearscore/skill level thing may have been valid previously, I don't think it's a useful indicator right now due to the flux of high level gear introduced by 3.3. Most people can get a gearscore of 4800 simply from farming random dungeons, and so the new cut-off gearscore for 'skilled' people seems to be 5200, which is really overkill for things like Ulduar considering people were doing it with less than 4800 gearscore before 3.3. I've been in parties with people who have 5600+ gearscore who have been complete morons and people with 4000 gearscore who have been amazing. The problem is, with people being so overgeared, other players can get carried and get 4800 gearscore not long after hitting level 80, without struggling through dungeons and raids and really getting to know how to play their character.
Which brings me to my next gripe. Players and HoN and PSR. PSR (pub skill rating) is a bit like chess ratings in that you gain and lose points when you win or lose, and how much you can gain or lose depends on the PSRs of the other players. Unlike DotA, HoN stores the number of your wins, losses, kills, deaths, assists, and various other stats which leads to stat retards who only care about their stats/PSR. So you get people who like to concede a game when they think their team can't win, and if their team disagrees, they'll sit at the fountain in base so that at least they won't add more deaths to their profile. You get people who refuse to initiate fights even though their hero is best suited for it, because they don't want to die. You get people who are so concerned about stealing kills that they're not really helping the team fight (like a scout does nothing but ult someone who is going to die anyway, and now we've lost the chance to slow someone else).
Weirdest of all I think are the people who don't want to remake games after someone on the other team has disconnected in the first few minutes because they want the "free PSR". I think that's so stupid because highest PSR just means you'll end up playing other players with high PSR, and if you really aren't skilled enough to get to that level on your own, you're just going to lose to those players and drop back down to a lower PSR. So I really see no point in PSR inflation, unless you like to take screenshots and brag about it.
What I do like about HoN is the no-leaver option. If you quit or disconnect from a game, it gets added to your profile, and since the game can't tell if you legitimately disconnected or your PP'd to avoid a loss, it counts them all as leaves, but gives you a leeway of being able to leave 9% of your games before you are flagged a leaver. If you become a leaver, you can't join games which have the no-leaver option. And that brings me to my last gripe of the night, people who ask their teammates to kick them from a losing game because they don't want to get a loss, but they don't want to be labelled a leaver. If you want to leave a game before it's over for that reason, you're a leaver. End of story. Go play with other people who like to do that and see how it feels to be left in a 3v5 game. Don't ask to be kicked so you won't marr your pristine profile, because it's a lie. Just because the Tempest doesn't know how to use his ult doesn't mean the game is over. Give him suggestions on items, explain his spells to him. I'm pretty sure nobody is born knowing how to play DotA/HoN so there are people who have had to do the same for you when you were a noob, so it's only fair that you do the same for others in return.
So QC, if all of my blog posts from now on are going to be gripes about games, do you really want me to post everyday? =P
