After doing a quick search on the topic and not finding anything I decided to put one together… mostly because it has become more and more irritating to do pugs lately.

A PUG (Pick Up Group) in WoW is a term commonly used to refer to a stranger that just joined you via the LFD (Looking for Dungeon) tool. As such we assume that the Pugs are people that we will most likely not interact with again (unless they are from our server… which I see once in a while but not very often.)

The following are a set of rules that if followed could lead to a more enjoyable experience to all involved.

Don’t Que for stuff you are not ready for
Seriously, don’t do it. If you are going to under-perform with strangers they will have a right to call you out. There is nothing more irritating that someone bypassing the gear requirements with PvP gear and under-performing. Stay in regular dungeons a little longer, practice with your guildies. Overall don’t expect people to carry you through content. Most people would be patient until they have to pay for repairs.

Before you Que up
While you might be fishing or questing while you wait, please be mindful of other players time. If you need to go to the bahtroom, get a drink, check on your children, etc, etc, do it before joining a que. While I do understand that DPS que’s can be horribly long, don’t wait until you get the que to pop up to go do what you have been neglecting. Some people abuse the fact that they cannot be kicked from the group for a period of time to let the group kill all the trash up to the first boss while they are AFK.

The 5 Second Rule
Never judge a book by its cover. The first 5 seconds of a pug are crucial. Say hello, let the group know if you are switching specs and gear if you are (some people que up as 2 different roles). I have seen the trend more and more lately when people just check for health and mana pools or gear and instantly leave the group.

BRB – Bio – AFK – Phone
If you are going to be away from the game for more than 60 seconds, the ones listed above are not appropriate. I have had everything under the sun happen in pugs… even a couple that kept on stringin the group along while the other one would go AFK and put the toon on follow. Who knows, maybe it was someone multiboxing and pretending to be 2 people. Bottom line is that if you are going to be away for an extended period of time, just leave the group. Don’t wait to see if people kick you.

Don’t be a Ninja
I don’t believe on having to always greed anymore. All I think is fair is that if you are going to need on everything that drops in the run, be up front about it so others can too. While you might get that item by being a Ninja (a late roller that waits for greeds and then hits need), it will most likely get you kicked out of the group. Be up front, write a macro and people will appreciate your honestly.

Unwanted Advise
You might play all classes at top of the world raider level, but unless asked, don’t give advise on how to play someone else’s toon. You can whisper someone once, but if they don’t want the advise, don’t press it. If you really want to help, keep your comments to yourself. A Pug is not the place to give someone a class on how to do X or Y. It has to be something that everyone else agrees on, or you will have an unhappy group.

So… what about you guys, what other rules should I add?

—
From Grumpy

Speak up
It is better to ask about a fight that you have never done before the fight then to say you didn’t know after you caused a wipe. Myself, and many like me, would gladly explain everything you need to know but don’t take kindly to our time being wasted. It is not a waste of time to explain the fight but it is a waste of time to wipe because you did not tell people you have never done it before.
Beware: There are some jerks that will kick you because you do not know a fight but be sure of the fact that they are, excuse the language, low life scum. You are better off not playing with someone like that anyway.

Be Decent
Take some time to at least have a basic knowledge of your class. Someone doing 8K that looks like they are trying is better then someone doing 8K that doesn’t look like they are even trying. Good players can tell the difference. You do not need to be a great player, but at least try your best.

Be Nice
Say hello at the start, say thanks for the run at the end. If you feel so inclined you might even add a have a nice day as well before you leave. As small as those things are it is a proven fact that good vibes (as well as bad ones) are contagious. If you are nice to other people even in passing they will be more likely to be nice to others themselves and the community needs more people like that.

“If anything can go wrong, it will.”
-Murphy <- Got to love that dude ... but really it was not him, it was This dude…

So one of my busiest week in recent history is the week that my shared topic gets featured in BlogAzeroth. Go Figure.

So Navimie gently cattle-prodded me into posting something… and since I am late to the party I get to talk about it from a different point of view.

Martha, as always is keeping a too tally of what is going on. So a quick read on her post will catch you up about what is being said. If you have not visited that blog don’t just go to one post, get lost! it has many different topics and one you will sure enjoy exploring.

Before we get into the meat of the post, I don’t miss the days of having to ask people to join you via trade chat if you were missing someone. Most of the knowledge I gathered about the game was done via research because a lot of people would oversimplify things. I became a tank because it was supposed to be easy and a two button rotation. I guess some people really think that about tanking… but it was not that simple. I was also blessed with a group of healers that were not just patient while I was learning but also willing to travel to a meeting stone. Getting DPS at that point was a lot easier and more often that not I got used to having everything we need from group creation in a guild. Those days I never really pugged.

Even though the guild I was in those days fancied themselves raiders, they were pretty much Kara raiders during most of BC. Visiting other places had to be done with pugs. Most guilds had set tanks so I spent more time in dungeons than in raids in the BC days. Those days were never about pushing progression and when I did get to see or participate on anything requiring it… well it left a very bad taste in my mouth.

During wrath I had a way better experience in pugs. Naxx, Ulduar and ToC allowed me to pug as one toon and bring the knowledge back to our guild. So as long as I stayed a little ahead with pugs, it was easy to then get our guild through it. That is kind of how I started leading raids I guess.

So the community really helped at that point because it was almost like my LFR. Going with people that were ahead of me, but where I was still able to help them advance.

I also like to think that we came of age as a group of casual raiders during ICC. Entering Cata we had a better understanding of raiding and now our alt runs is where people that were a little behind us get a chance to see things. That progression worked well from a community stand point and for our guild.

So for me raid leading knowledge was really gathered from being part of raids. LFR totally does away with that because there is really no raid leading in LFR… trust me, I have tried and before I even type (we are short 3 healers, someone always pulls.)

It scares me to think that LFR will kill the creation of new raid leaders. It is a job at times thankless but a very exciting and rewarding one when it goes well. I know plenty of people don’t want that job, but maybe LFR will totally let someone bypass something that they might truly enjoy.

Lets hope that LFR is not the end of most people’s raid experience and it actually brings more people into trying and savoring new end game content.

I learned a lot of my spoken English from Beavis and Butthead. It was an easy show to understand for someone that did not know English. Not a lot of words, very repetitive. So bun-hole is not something new to my vocabulary.

Our vent (voice chat communication program) is pretty tame. There are a couple of people that will swear here and there for the “shock” value of a swear word here and there. I personally don’t like it because there are kids around the vent sometimes that could directly or indirectly hear the language. I am more comfortable with innuendos and humor than straight F-bombs non-stop.

PvP is full of profanities. While some people think that LFR is trolls R US, it really does not hold a candle to a WSG where you are already 2 caps behind. That does not even account for the people that are not typing their discontent. The people in vent that got killed by the same rogue, yet again will eventually deal with their anger somehow.

I completely understand the need to vent some frustration when something is really going south. I just don’t see the need to share a stream of profanity with others.

I know for our raid nights, plenty of people have strong words after a bad wipe. It is normal practice not to ever push the button. With PvP it seems that the opposite happens and the expletives drown the person calling out things. Running a BG is harder and more chaotic than a raid, but somehow people feel that they have to announcer that the f*%$^$%^ rogue killed me again.

One of my biggest pet peeves as a RL is when someone announces they died. I can see you died, the healers can see you died and the DPS will eventually see if you are a DPS yourself. It seems, at least right now that we are not used to doing BGs because the chatter is all over the place.

It might be a growing pain of getting into a new thing, but my fear is that PvP and profanity go hand in hand. I am not ok with that though.

I think a lot of our members right now see PvP as a “fun” activity, but we have a new person that wants to get us to the next level of PvP and I want them to be able to do that. Some of it will come with credibility and when we are geared and actually doing it, but I think some of it is tone as well.

So the question goes out to those people that PvP. Is profanity just a normal thing in PvP? do rated BG voice chats are just like FPS voice channels?

Excuse me while I sound kind of Gran Torino like. I love, love, love to read a “kid” that is just coming out of college talk about software development and how they understand how Blizzard works. Granted, there are some exceptions to this rule where the young person has been coding in large teams since high school developing free software in Sourceforge (I actually know a couple.) But trust me, when it comes to software development your VB, C++ classes or 3D animation do NOT equal to you knowing about SDLC. Let alone any idea on how Blizzard development works.

I laugh at conversations like this all the time. Partly because I have been connected to software development for more than 10 years now. I know how different approaches are applied to very different end result. Every software shot is a little different and the more moving parts the worse it is. I have often wanted to just interject on some of the conversations and pull out my (e-peen) but until today I kept it in my pants.

One of the arguments I have heard recently about how the “nerfs” do this or that, or how Blizzard should do this or that is very, very short sighted. Unless the code is existing, you have to rewrite code. The WoW code base is not a small one either. Just think of how much we have in our computers and that is just the client side, it does not include the server side information and calculations that happen. While most people think like amateur hacker wannabes (codemonkeys and script kiddies), I laugh at the “isn’t that some config file that I switch”.

What makes it more amusing some times is that it is not dumb people making these ridiculous claims, but people that are actually are better at math than I am. Figuring out the calculations and numbers of theory-crafting takes brain power, so how that they be so short sighted?

I don’t know anything about encounter design, and I try not to break it down in my head or I would probably stop enjoying the game. “Tuning” a boss, encounter, a simple mob takes coding time, testing, etc. It takes a lot to implement. The time spent by the people “tuning” or fixing “broke”n encounters is time that those same people are not spending on new content.

Blizzard has come short of actually spelling it out for everyone. They have their culture, they have the way they do things and their developers and artists are not just gears in a machine that are easy to replace, or buy more of. Having gradual nerfs was something that they had to plan for and code for. It is probably freeing up a lot of development time for building encounters for MoP.

So just think about what you are saying or asking from “the” company. Nerfing the whole instance is not easy, they had to plan for it and were smart at developing it. They are also smart about how and when they are doing it. You personally might not like the timing, but it is a lot better than having to waste resources tuning encounters already released.

With MoP in the horizon and Dungeon Challenge Mode coming, my brain has started to think of what player reputation could be really like.

Ever since I started playing WoW, players would gain notoriety because of their armor. If you had purples you were obviously raiding or PvPing at a high level. Mounts also made it so that people could recognize what you had accomplished in the game. Another form of reputation that many take seriously is your guild tag. Even though we left an old underpopulated server, I never wanted our old guild name to be used by anyone. I always felt we had a pretty good reputation as a guild and that mattered to me.

Today’s WoW is a lot more anonymous. Your DPS/Healing numbers can do some of the talking for you, but overall there is really no chance, or a low chance that you will see the people on the LFR or LFG ever gain. Even now that it tries to pair you with people from your server, you say hi and that is about it.

You still get to know people in pug raids in the server and can make a name for yourself as a good player, but it is rare that you can do it on your main if you are raiding with your guild already.

I think WoW is seriously missing a player reputation system that can be affected by each other. While this opens up a whole can of worms and tons of opportunities to be misused, hear me out.

What do we value as a community when playing with others?

Some might say that ultimate skill and completing content as quickly as possible is the mark of a good player. So the new challenge mode will go a long way towards that.

What about people that are willing to go slow, help others and maybe give some advice? Shouldn’t that be sought after or compensated in some way. Not by blizzard, but by the community.

What if besides the bag you get for tanking you could check a flag that says, will help new players. Sure the dungeon guide is kind of supposed to do that, but it seems like people don’t use the flag for that. I know that even as a tank I sometimes have a hard time setting up the pace. Even when I try to slow down an LFR because someone said they had never been there it is met with LOL – look at the LFR-RL trying to Lead.

I think player reputation, even if just positive reputation, could go a long way. If perks came with it, even better. An implementation where you could build your reputation as a helpful player in randoms could get you faster ques, or more rewards. You would get something back for giving back to the community.

I know it might be a crazy idea, but I think it has some merit. We need to counterbalance the go-go-go mentality if we ever want to bridge the gap between the “noob” and the “elite.”

Would you give positive karma points to a good player? or to a player that went the pace of the group?

The second part of making the LFG feature better would be to also pick the speed that you are willing to go at. I know I have mentioned it before, but that is really lacking right now.

Yesterday a guildie and I thought about going for a ZA mount run. Before we qued we asked the guild, but it was just him and I. When we came in we asked the group if they were up for a mount run. One player said sure and the other two never replied. We proceeded to basically 3 man that instance. We never made the timer, but at the end of the run the spam of achievements told us that the other two players had never been there. They never even said a word.

What if we could have signed up for a “gold” run, where only people that had already earned that badge could sign up. I guess the argument at that point would be that why would you ever go bellow your highest speed… and that is when I say, to build karma points

The conversation lately in the WoW blog world has revolved around the “casuals” now being handed the keys to the kingdom with the new Raid Finder (or LFR – Looking for Raid, which seems to be what everyone calls it.) It made it hurt a lot more for some people when it was announced that “nerfs” were already coming to Dragon Soul. While I could go off on a tangent, I am not going to argue about something that has happened to most raid (eventually get nerfed) and no matter what blizzard does, they never seem to win.

The “elite” player looks down upon people that don’t have the time commitment or dedication that they do. I thought it was that simple, just a time and skill vs reward thing. However I was very wrong. In an group that include over 10 million players there are bounds to be a variety of people.

There is another player in WoW that also wants to raid but it is often overlooked by everyone. The guy that does not know where to start.

Many of us learn to play the game and quickly learn that resources like tankspot and elitist jerks are invaluable. We might have read forums before and understand not only the format but how to find information inside of it. What about someone that does not know how to navigate the internet like we do? Do they not deserve to take the steps towards getting to the end game raiding?

When I started playing, while there were resources there were not as many as we have now. There was no Mr Robot and WoWHeroes did not really paint all the picture, neither did MaxDPS. Sure you can read what the right rotation is, or priority list is. Words in a page or even a video do not answer questions. Many questions we take for granted.

Our group of friends and guild have helped many people bridge that gap. Sometimes people take it for granted that it does take someone at least pointing you in the right direction to start the process. I just encountered a person that has been playing WoW for years, has probably put many more hours than most people and has yet to do any endgame content. It has nothing to do with his ability, and all to do with not being at least pointed in the right direction. So I decided to put something together to bridge that gap a little.

I looked at a post I had written previously (Am I ready to raid?) but while I found the information there relevant, it was missing a lot. I know some would simplify the answer by also telling the player new to raiding, purple yourself out through heroics! but it is really not going to help them.

I started a series of post about DPS which is what a lot of new players start out as with. Healing and tanking are a lot more difficult and responsibility at an end game level. So concentrating on DPS I think is a better path.

So if you are new to raiding and want to get to that LFR that everyone seems to tell you is for the noobs, you need to start with your rep!

Before someone tells you, LoL just run heroics and purple yourself out there is a lot of great stuff to be had from rep rewards. One of the things many people don’t realize is that rep rewards are not just gear to complete your sets, but more importantly your head and shoulder enchants are something you will need even when your gear level is way past 359.

If you are a player that likes to quest, you most likely are already half way there to exalted. If you finished Deepholm you probably have Therazane unlocked. That means shoulder enchants!

Plate DPS get their head enchant from Twillight Higlands, Casters from Hyjal and Leather from Uldum. So step one towards raiding is that you have all the reps you need for your basic enchants there. They are not too expensive and will take you one step closer towards your goal.