Attack of the Anti-Pugger

Like it or not, the main driver of play in World of Warcraft is group activity. Whether you raid, run 5-person instances, or PvP in various forms, WoW revolves around the "multiplayer" in the MMO acronym. Easing the access for multiplayer activity has been a driver of the more controversial changes to WoW over the years, from the automated group finder to LFR (LFD's raid level equivalent). 

Given that Blizzard has stoked the FOMO furnace over the years, it's no surprise that raid and dungeon teams have spent a lot of time trying to find the "right" player to help them clear content. We're not talking about friends and family raid teams who raid in a more social manner, but raiders who have aspirations of Heroic and maybe even Mythic clears of content.

Oh, and then there's puggers, who don't belong to a regular raid team for various reasons, yet still want to experience group content. It goes without saying that pugging is a bit of a hit-or-miss activity in MMOs in general without even taking into consideration any "requirements" placed on the prospective raid leads. 

The WoW community has responded to those needs --and the FOMO driver-- by creating addons and websites to "assist" people in finding the best players for their needs. To say that these have been controversial has been a bit of an understatement.

Anybody remember the initial release of GearScore back in Wrath?

There it is, in all its glory.
I had this from another post; I can't
remember which one now.

The GearScore addon caused a huge row in the WoW community by attempting to reduce a player's raid usefulness to a single number --the GearScore itself-- which led to entries such as this in Trade Chat:

"Need 2 DPS for ICC 25 GS 5000+ req"

The irony about gatekeepers using GearScore as a barrier to entry is that all it provided was a compilation of the iLevels of your gear, not whether you were any good in a raid. I mean, by the end of Wrath of the Lich King my Ret Paladin, Quintalan, had a GearScore of something like ~5200 and he never set a single foot in a raid instance. All that gear he got by grinding badges by running random Heroic Instances. 

Could I get into some of these raids with these GS requirements? Certainly. 

Did it mean I was a good raider? Certainly not.

***

Why dredge up GearScore again? Didn't we have a repeat of GS in Wrath Classic? Oh yes, Wrath Classic, where people swore right and left that they weren't going to use it... Until it came out and people used it like crazy once more. 

The thing is, GearScore is just one incremental step along the way to the current status of pugging in WoW. Parse Culture has always been around to an extent, but ever since GearScore and the rise of FOMO, Parse Culture has been pushing the envelope of what it means to be a "good player". Notice I didn't say good raider, but good player. If you raid or run instances and you pug, you have to deal with people who think all of your qualities as a WoW player can be reduced to a single number, a color, or a summary chart.

And now here comes Archon.

From the Archon website, as of April 7. 2025.

Archon is brought to you by the same team that created the Warcraftlogs app and website, and the TL;DR is that it takes all of the searching through Warcraftlogs and places it into a tooltip addon, so you can perform real time analysis of who to take as a pug in your raid. 

GearScore on steroids, basically.

***

This addon has been the subject of quite a bit of discussion on MMO Champion and has seen its share of YouTube videos:

Of course, Archon has been around in Early Access for months now, but a wider release apparently happened last week (ish). The current version everybody can use, but if you subscribe (as in pay real money) you can get more info than what the free users get.

It's not as if gatekeeping is new, but this is making gatekeeping easier than ever before.  Just rolling up and hovering over players allows you to see at a glance what it would have taken people a lot longer to review manually on Warcraftlogs.

Even then, it still doesn't tell you everything. Archon can't tell you if you do the mechanics right in a raid, and if you perform a critical job --which typically also means having a lower parse-- you're punished for it. Look at Vanilla Naxx as an example: I was on Wall Duty on Maexxna and would be tasked with calling out and freezing the scarabs on Anub'Rekhan, both of which are critical tasks for success on those bosses. Both of them also required me to be basically giving up on my parses for the good of the raid. With Archon, however, I'd be punished for such behavior, with a lesson to be learned is that I need to play less as a teammate and more of an asshole. And who wants to play with someone like that?

Needless to say, there have been some interesting takes on this...

From the comments from Bellular's video above.

From the MMO Champion thread linked to above.

I tried to avoid some of the more toxic responses in those threads, especially when you see people pooh-poohing the whole thing as "it's easy to to get XXX parses", basically trolling everybody. And it kind of spiraled out of control in spots from there.

Still, if the best advice to give people is "join a guild and raid with them", well, I have some experience there.

No, this was not me.
From the comments from Bellular's video above.

My own experience with guilds over the past 15+ years of playing MMOs hasn't been that inspiring. The guilds I've been in the longest over this time have been --by quite a wide margin-- the guild the kids and I have in LOTRO (Heroes of the Old Forest on the Gladden server) and Rades' old blogger guild Puggers Anonymous on Moonrunner-US.* The Retail guilds from back in the day either imploded with the the force of a thousand suns or faded away to nothing. The guilds I've been a part of in Classic WoW either faded away or swung heavily toward hardcore to the point where it was unbearable to remain. 

'We want to raid with friends', indeed.

After years of those shenanigans, I fail to see why I'd want to sign up for it all over again just to raid or run dungeons. And let's be honest for a minute: if my experience is pretty typical, I'd say that joining any guild will have issues because of the cliques that have developed over the time the guild has been around. Unless guild leadership makes an actual effort to include new people in group activities, any new guildie will find themselves it a double bind, where they can't get into guild runs and they can't get into pugs.

And really, if the solution is continuously guild hop until you find one that you like, at what point to you decide to go and do something else?

That aside, I think this is just more of the same as far as WoW goes. For the people who seek out drama, they'll find it in spades with this addon. For the people who are part of a guild of any real cohesion, then this is a non-issue for them. For people who stick to LFR and normal/heroic mode instances (and Delves), this won't affect them at all. It's only the people who want to try something different, to push themselves beyond the basics, that will find issues exacerbated by this addon. If Blizzard wants to turn the casual crowd into something more, then this addon --and the community culture-- will torpedo that. 

But maybe Blizzard doesn't want to bother trying any more, because that's not what they measure success at in Microsoft. There, it's all about whether you met your profit numbers, and if another mount or two in the cash shop will get them there, that's what we should expect.

*I had to go login to Retail to make sure I had the server right.

EtA: Corrected grammar and some wording.

An Experimentalist's Survival Guide

Back in prehistory when I attended university, I got my Bachelor's Degree in Physics. While most of the undergraduate curriculum was already defined for a Physics major, there were just enough electives that you could pursue a few classes that you were really interested in. Based on what you liked --and whether you kind of liked working in a lab or not-- an undergrad was lumped into two classifications: theorists and experimentalists. The experimentalists performed laboratory experiments, while the theorists stretched the Mathematics behind Physics as far as it could go. 

I was definitely in with the experimentalists, as I enjoyed --and still enjoy-- puttering around and testing hypotheses. My deck project highlighted that I'm decent enough with my hands and working through issues on the fly that if I hadn't burned out on Physics* I would probably be slaving away in a basement lab** somewhere. 

During my time at UD, I learned how to think critically and how to attack a problem. Sure, it's nice to have resources, but back then Internet access was pretty minimal so if you didn't have all of the resources right in front of you, well... You had to puzzle a lot of it out on your own.***

You can see where this is going, can't you?

Sorry, no cheat sheets allowed for the exam.
Yes, this is Wowhead, as of 12/3/2024.

Yes, between my training, my inherited stubborn streak, and my revulsion at the widespread acceptance at turning a game into a mathematical exercise****, I try to figure things out myself. 

There are exceptions to the rule, obviously, such as when I joined Valhalla's raid team in 2020, but I want to learn to play a game by actually playing the game and learning the rules provided (either in-game or in a rules manual). People who love to say that Wowhead or Icy Veins is the manual for playing are missing the point: just because a game company farmed out some of this stuff to a third party provider doesn't mean that you shouldn't be able to figure it out yourself. 

And with the new Classic Fresh release, I have been taking my time to do just that.

***

Of the nine original Classic classes, I've played five of them: Mage, Paladin, Rogue, Shaman, and Warlock. Three of them, Paladin, Shaman, and Warlock, I've never played in Vanilla Classic past L20, but I am familiar enough with how they play in later expansions that I have a (somewhat) basic understanding of them.*****

Others, such as the Warrior, not so much.

Better get used to visiting dwarves, I suppose.

I thought I knew how a Warrior played until I actually started playing one. Then I quickly discovered just how much that basic attack meant to a Warrior: it builds up rage, which the Warrior can then spend for a variety of different abilities.

It's been a while since I played a class that behaved that way, so once I got used to the concept I began to work on how to play it efficiently. Build up rage, throw on a DoT, then build up rage for other buffs/attacks.

It was at that point that I discovered the next issue with playing a Warrior in Vanilla Classic: timing your attacks. 

I began bitching about the weirdness surrounding Heroic Strike when I went to use that attack. There were times when it would attack very quickly, and others where I sat waiting for a few seconds for the attack to land. 

"What the hell is going on?" I muttered more than once, mindful that my wife was sleeping upstairs. I checked my connection, but my latency held steady and internet speed was still good. I did a quick search as to whether the Classic Fresh servers were buggy, but no dice there for my specific problem.#

I just learned to live with it until about L8 when I finally realized what was going on: it had everything to do with timing. If you time your attack right then there's no delay at all. 

So THAT's why swing timer addons are so popular.

I then proceeded to get flashbacks from my time as an Enhancement Shaman and shuddered. I wasn't going to go down that route if I could help it, so I decided that if I was going to be serious about leveling as many alts as I am, I was going to have to just develop the necessary feel in-game to play a Warrior right. That also meant I wasn't going to take that alt into any instances, because when you see a Warrior in Vanilla Classic, you immediately think "Oh, there's a Tank."

And I ain't tanking. Too much stress involved; that's one job where you absolutely need confidence to do it right, and I don't have the confidence. There's also that trust you have to have in other people to keep you alive (and not pull threat), and let's just say I've got issues there too.##

***

Warriors aside, the basics of attacks and whatnot are pretty self-explanatory. What I've been surprised the most about, however, are the class-related quests and stories. 

I didn't know this NPC existed.

While the class stories don't come even close to the level of detail found in SWTOR --still the gold standard for class stories in MMOs, IMHO-- they are unique enough that I really enjoy their presence.

These were NPCs that I either didn't know existed --like the Bear Spirit (above) for the Druid class quest-- or I never paid attention to them. Yes, yes, I know the cardinal rule of NPCs in a video game is that if they have a name then they likely have a quest or something associated with them, but just what was associated with them was an unknown until I began playing more classes.

The class quests in WoW Classic range from the snarky...

To the earnest...

To the annoyingly mysterious...

While a lot of class quests are 'go there to see person X' and said person gives you a new ability, others actually want you to perform a task before they grant you the ability, such as the Human Warlock having to go 'rescue' a book coveted by your Class Trainer that the Defias had stolen.

All in all, these class quests aren't a lot of effort (so far), but they do provide flavor to Classic WoW that Retail WoW has lost.

***

Just about all of the alts I've created that I intend to level at this time are at L10 (with a straggler or two a couple of levels short), and most of those toons don't even have their major class abilities yet. What does happen at L10 is that the talent trees unlock, and I've found myself swamped by an unexpected desire to get it 'right'. You know, pick the 'right' talents to play the class 'properly'. Or select the right 'pet' for my Hunter.### 

I have resisted that siren song so far, but my desire to explore and experiment on my own wars with my desire to research a thing to death. And being a 'solved game', WoW has tons of that out there floating around that I am deliberately refusing to use this time around. (See Figure 1.)

This won't bring back 2004, but it will allow me to internalize my learnings better than following a guide or reading the contents of a Discord channel. And the one thing it will absolutely do is slow down my leveling process. I realize it's about to slow down the next five levels, and once I hit L20 the brakes will come on even harder, but exploring and learning will allow me to fight FOMO that much better.

I think I found my Holiday shirt.
From Amazon UK.

*And had the confidence to believe in myself. There, I said it. I've been carrying those doubts around since my first semester at UD, because I learned very quickly that unless I got my ass in gear I was going to wash out. "You know nothing, Jon Snow," could have been my mantra if A Song of Ice and Fire were around back then.

**Yes, the Physics Professors' labs were always in the basement of Sherman Hall. It might have been due to the weight of the equipment, but given that the Engineering building had labs all throughout the place, I think it was just because the building was designed primarily for teaching students rather than professors' research.

***Or wait for a week or two for the referenced article to arrive via interlibrary loan. If you thought Fed Ex is expensive now, back then it was so cost prohibitive you could just about forget about using it if you were a student.

****I remember people joking in boardgame circles back in the 90s and 00s that Mathematicians would play Reiner Knizia's boardgames for fun when they came home from work. Reiner was (in)famous for creating a boardgame with a mathematical premise and a theme that was pasted on to a greater or lesser degree. Nowadays, it wouldn't shock me if they played WoW instead.

*****That's all relative: the Paladin got a makeover in TBC, the three versions of the Shaman play radically different from each other, and I cut my teeth on a Warlock strictly through PvP in Catalcysm, which is very different than its Vanilla incarnation.

#There are issues with Friends lists not updating, but I don't know whether it's WoW itself or some interference with the addons I have. Just a note that the only "social" addon I do have installed is Total RP3, which doesn't really interact with Friends lists.

##It's several stories from my youth, and nobody wants to hear them now, except maybe a therapist.

###Somebody asked in Teldrassil's Gen Chat "Which Hunter's Pet is the best?", to which people said "Go to Petopia". Forget opinions, go to The Source and follow that.

Mighty Morphin' FOMO Fighters

You know that FOMO thing? How it was my persistent bugaboo while leveling Briganaa, but at the same time it afflicted people who were caught up in the big wave of people rushing to L70? Well, it's still there, lurking, while Phase 2 draws closer and closer. The thing is, for me what FOMO represents has morphed into something completely different than what it originally manifested as.

After all, I finally got myself attuned and have been raiding Kara and Gruul/Magtheridon, and the gear has been dropping.* I've also steadily progressed through the attunement process for SSC and The Eye, so I only need two more Heroic instances (and our weekly Magtheridon kill) and I'm finished. Slow and steady wins the race.

And, more importantly, I have not gotten on the "get all the alts to L70" or "get a spellcloth farm going" bandwagon that people have been jumping on. I've got Brig, and that's it. Sure, my options can be somewhat limited at times, but the fact that I don't have to worry about leveling an alt and getting them raid or BG ready means I don't have to deal with that aspect of the FOMO again. And when/if I get around to leveling an alt, it will be in such a relaxed state that I'm not going to worry about ever getting into a raid.

Instead, FOMO has morphed into the need to help everybody else on the raid team. 

We have several people on the raid team who are far behind on attunements, mainly due to recent recruitments or that their toon on Monday's raid is an alt, and they need help in getting their attunements done. And all of the raid leads have been trying to help out, making sure that instances are organized/run with an eye toward getting the raid team attuned.

And that means Brig has been running instances too. Not the ones she needs, but the ones that everybody else needs. And on days like Tuesday where I had to log early because of Wednesday's trip taking my son back to college, I felt really guilty having to do that. Yes, everybody knows that family comes first, but that doesn't mean I don't feel guilty about not being there. 

The same thing applies to one of the items I farm a lot, Fire Motes. I farm them to help my questing buddy keep herself in raid potions, and I also farm them to sell on the AH. Well, with the raid team helping to get the resistance gear the tanks need for Phase 2 by everybody tithing a set amount of gold (so that our resident AH wizard can get us the best deal on mats) that means any extra Fire Motes could potentially be snapped up off the AH by my raid team. Which I feel awfully guilty about, since I know what our AH wiz is up to, so instead I've just been donating the Primal Fire I've been accumulating instead. The quicker we get our Primal Fire knocked out, the quicker I can go back to making some gold off the AH.

In a way, my lack of desire to get an Epic Flying Mount means I can afford to not have to aggressively go after gold the way everybody else has, so I can relax a bit. I'm sitting around 3000 gold, which I can maintain by some instance runs and selling my excess Netherweave Cloth off. **

But there's always this guilt and nagging feeling like I should be doing more, and I have to constantly tell myself that if I tried to do more I'd burn myself out and that would be that.

So.... I'm coping. Yeah, coping is a better word than managing at this point in time.

*In a relative sense. There's only been one piece of gear from our Gruul/Mags raid night that I considered rolling on, and it was only after the fact that I was kicking myself for letting someone else handle the Loot Master gig while I rolled on it. Most of the gear that would be considered best in slot (BiS) either come from Karazhan or are crafted. And yes, I've been slowly working on my Leatherworking; it's just not been a priority.

**Seriously, how can people still need Netherweave like they have? The stuff drops off of mobs and out in the field like crazy. I sell about 20 stacks a week, and they're easily replenished. On top of that, I still have about 30 stacks sitting in my mail as a reserve. If I were actively farming Netherweave, I could probably get about 100 stacks in a week.

FOMO -- Discord Style

Discord has been a godsend to the MMO community, and the gaming community in general. It's far more than the old Ventrilo system, or even a Skype or Teams system, as it also replaces many of the functions that guild websites would have been utilized: keeping track of sign-ups, forum discussions, and managing various in-guild activities by the guild leadership.* Add-ons such as Rythm ensure that guildies can be their own DJ, and there are all sorts of other add-ons that come in handy.

So I wanted to listen to ELO. Don't judge me.

To be fair, I don't consider Discord "user friendly" as some people do. I consider it closer to UNIX in that it is extremely powerful, but you can accidentally cause problems without intending to because you're not always sure how to do things without going back to the online manual. Which can suck if you're on the tablet or phone app.** And, given how space works in something such as Google, you're never quite sure --as an end user-- just how much space you're allowed when you're looking at a video you took and whether you should upload it to your guild's Discord server to share with your friends. 

Do you know how long it took me to find
the Disconnect button? Usually I'm in a
hurry to get to wherever I need to go for the raid,
so taking the time to look at the "fine print"
of Discord is just not there.

But another thing that I've had to get used to is that when you pug, you join another guild's Discord server in order to join the audio connection. Yes, it's very simple to do that, but if you leave the server after that event you joined for --a raid or grouping or just to be social-- you have to get an invite to get back in. That can be annoying if you pug a lot, and the sign-ups for those pugs are on the same Discord server you just left. My first forays into raiding were like that, and after the first time you realized you should have hung onto that server you learn to never get rid of them. Just in case.

Oh, and if your MMO's Discord server is anything like WoW Classic's Myzrael-US server, the "Guild Recruitment" page entries all seem to end with an invitation to check out the guild's Discord server.

So, if you're like me, you collect what feels like a ton of these Discord server connections. 

Again, just in case.

***

As those connections have piled up, I've found that I've had to be more aggressive in muting alerts from these servers. I don't want to be a snoop, yet at the same time I seem to regularly get alerts when someone posts in a Discord server to "@everyone". 

And then there's the constant stream of people in raid chats that --despite my best efforts-- make me wonder what I'm missing out on.

I hate that FOMO feeling. Not because I really think I'm missing out on everything --to be fair, you're always gonna miss out on something if you're in an MMO, because you can't be on all the raids/instances/whatever for every guild-- but because that feeling is usually associated with being in the in-crowd.

That's the crux of the problem: you physically can't be doing all the things all the time. My regular raid schedule went from one night a week, to two nights a week, and now four nights a week across two toons. Trying to do more than that on a regular basis isn't sustainable, even with two kids in college and not at home. Spur of the moment raids such as Onyxia, Z'G, or AQ20 are doable, but even then I have to think hard on what I might be giving up both in-game and out-of-game. 

Just like last night.

I could have signed up for an AQ20 run, but decided it wasn't necessary so I was fine with working on some other things in-game for a while. In the end, a friend whispered me for an assist with her guild group, as one of her guildies was working on farming for a wand in Stratholme and needed a fifth. Because I was free, I got to help out and catch up with my friend on how she's been doing. Or, like on Saturday, I got to spend about an hour or more chatting with a friend on cooking, family, jobs, and all sorts of topics while I farmed herbs. There was no pressure to do anything else, despite all of the requests in the LFG channel, and it was a relaxing afternoon.

***

FOMO is always going to be there, no matter what you do, and apps like Discord can exacerbate that feeling. But the trick is to understand that it is an internal pressure, something you place on yourself, and you have to learn to manage it. And if you have issues, talk to people about it. No sense in burning yourself out on a game you love because you feel that you have to be doing all the things all the time.

*One thing I'm eternally grateful is that some people are called to step into guild leadership positions. When I get done with work I want to take off my "team lead" or "[whatever] lead" or "manager" or whatever hat and just relax, but some people have that urge to go out and be the organizer. Occasionally I get the urge to do something like that, but then I remember that I herd cats all day, so why do it at night?

**Don't ask why, just trust me on this one. I'd rather save the embarrassment.