Is This Groundhog Day or Something?

Maybe I shouldn't have posted yesterday about my experience in Blackrock Depths.

Last night's BRD run ended up only slightly farther than the one before it, but we had an issue in the Tavern once again. This time we somehow had the entire bar aggro against us, which led to several wipes until we finally cleared the entire tavern. During this time one player would repeatedly drop and we'd have to replace them, which led to one disgruntled person whispering me that our group leader was an ass. If there was stuff going on via whispers, I wasn't seeing it, but I did know that our Healer and one DPS were L50, both of whom could only be carried so far. 

However, at one point during the eternal replacement process a new player joined and I immediately bit back a scream.

It was the Hunter from the night before. 

I immediately whispered the group lead to dump that guy, and he obliged. I had been telling the group about that Hunter the night before, so when I mentioned in group chat that THAT was the guy, the tank spoke up that the Hunter was a known griefer.

So. Not a bot, but someone worse.

Oh yay.

Restoring the Balance

I was due for a bad experience, I suppose.

After all, I'd been playing on the Anniversary servers since late 2024, and I'd had overall a good time grouping with people for instances. Unlike the pugs I'd been in from TBC Classic and Wrath Classic from 2021-2023, I found it far more enjoyable in a relaxed setting since the crowd that rushed to the end had already gotten to max level ages ago. Even now on the Anniversary servers with the Dark Portal having only been open a short time, that crowd was already steamrolling Karazhan instead of working a new toon up to Outland. 

So I was a bit unprepared for what happened last night.

I'd gotten to the point where Briganaa 2.0 could finally go to Blackrock Depths*, so I started looking for a group. Within 10 minutes I found myself in one, and I headed over to Searing Gorge to lope to Blackrock Mountain.

The first indication that something might be amiss was when I began seeing "No, you're summoning me, summon Brig" in Party Chat. Then a minute later, "No, NOT me. Click on Brig, then click the stone."

I eventually did get a summons to inside the mountain, and we waited on the tank to go repair and our healer to get some more water. Both tank and healer reappeared, and we all ran down together and into the instance. 

Except for the Hunter.

"Help me," the Hunter eventually called out.

So we ran outside, expecting to see Dark Iron dwarves beating on him just outside the instance, but nope. Instead of following us down, he ran up and was wandering in the outer ring at the entrance of Blackrock Mountain.

Uh oh.

I had no idea why he decided to wander off, but there it was, Strike One.**

We eventually corralled our wayward Hunter and restarted the instance.

The group was doing okay, making progress, but I did have my concerns. We didn't have a lot of AoE damage in the group, which meant that the quick respawn room, where hordes of Dark Iron conscripts wandered about in packs of about 8-10, would be a big issue. But before we could even think about getting there, however, the Warrior whispered me, "Shouldn't the Hunter be at the top of the meters?"

Knowing how Hunters as a group tend to be infatuated with big DPS numbers, frequently to the point of ripping threat away from the tank, I replied with an affirmative.

"He's only doing 78 DPS right now."

Now, for full disclosure, while I use the Details DPS Meter add-on, I typically use its TinyThreat option to manage my own threat. I've learned since 2019 to not bother looking at my DPS output, because it would merely depress me, but at that moment I thought about switching back to the DPS tab just to see what our Hunter was doing.

But still, our slow but steady progress suddenly made sense. If the Hunter was putting out barely any damage, we were effectively 4-manning a 5 person instance. 

I thought about inspecting the Hunter, just to see what his gear was, but I became too focused on keeping up with the group and managing totems that I let it slide.

That was Strike Two.

Then the Hunter started rolling Need on gear that was most definitely NOT for him.

The Hunter won some Leather gear that multiple people could have used --myself included-- so I didn't complain about that. Hey, that's the breaks of rolls, right? But when the Hunter rolled need and won a pair of Leather healing gloves, I said something. 

"Hey, that's Healer gloves, not Hunter gloves."

I got no response.

After that point, I began keeping a close eye on what the Hunter was rolling Need on. We didn't have any obvious gear that the "Everything is a Hunter Weapon" stereotype would have rolled on, so I began to consider this just a mistake and that the Hunter simply didn't have English as his first language.

Then this dropped off of Golem Lord Argelmach:

I hadn't seen this drop since I first began
playing Classic in 2019, which is saying something.
I have seen Hand of Justice several times, but not this.

I immediately congratulated the Healer on his luck, because this thing has something like a 3-5% drop rate, and is a fantastic trinket for Healers.***

Then I saw "Unc NOOO" in the chat, and I realized what had happened: The Hunter had rolled Need on the trinket and won it.

Strike Three.

The rest of us immediately began telling the Hunter that was simply not a cool thing to do, and I floated in whispers the idea of kicking the Hunter, because he seemed to simply have no remorse at all. He eventually said "sory" (spelled like that), but I didn't buy it. The only real problem was getting another player as replacement, since it was well past my usual bedtime and we were pretty far into the instance. 

We reached the tavern in Blackrock Depths, and we ran over to the storeroom where Hurley Blackbreath's casks of ale were stored. You can start the Hurley fight by destroying the casks, or you could start a fight with the Goblin Ribby Screwspigot and pull him into the storeroom to prevent him from aggroing the nearby bar patrons. The tank ran out of the storeroom to pick a fight with Ribby, and just as he came back inside I suddenly saw our Hunter begin destroying the nearby casks. 

"NOO!!!" I yelled. "STOP!"

The Hunter ignored me and destroyed the rest of the casks, and Hurley ran in while we were up to our eyeballs with Ribby. 

Oh crap.

The Hunter then proceeded to shoot at and pull a bunch of nearby Bar Patrons and then dropped group. 

We might have been good enough to handle some Bar Patrons and one boss, but not both bosses and the Bar Patrons. It was about 12 versus 4, and we quickly wiped.

"Why did he do that?" The tank asked.

"That [expletive redacted] did that on purpose," I replied. "We called him out and he wiped us in response."

"He was barely doing any damage at all," the Warrior added. "The healer was doing more than him."

"More than me? I wasn't attacking at all!"

"Probably totem damage," I added. "Besides, he stole that trinket from you."

"I lost the trinket and the gloves to him."

We gamely made an attempt to finish the Hurley Blackbreath fight, but we discovered that he runs out the back of the Tavern if he defeats you, and by the time we got to the Tavern the random mob that shows up at the back entrance was already there. We tried to kill the mob, but we inadvertently pulled more Bar Patrons, and that was that.

***

I was initially certain all of this was done maliciously and from the standpoint of pure greed, but after a night's sleep I now think that the Hunter was actually a bot. 

The lack of damage output, the rolling Need on blue items that a Hunter could use (but not on gear a Hunter could not equip), the lack of response other than "help me" or "sory" or "lol" out of him, and him following very specific patterns (starting the Hurley Blackbreath fight instead of Ribby, which is the "traditional" pattern for a BRD run), and using multi-shot which pulled nearby Bar Patrons are all things a bot could now be programmed to do. 

After the group broke up, I'd checked to see if the Hunter had vanished completely, but I noted he'd immediately gone to Felwood, not only a level-appropriate questing zone but also a zone where bots are well known to farm Felcloth and other materials.

So yeah, I think we were taken in by a bot who did just barely enough to keep us guessing. None of us also wanted to jump to the immediate conclusion that he was actively sabotaging our group, and our initial reaction to the gradual escalation of anti-social behavior was that it was a language barrier. It was only when it had become obvious did we call him out, and I guess the bot's controller decided it was better to split before anything else. 

Or, as the Warrior put it, "He took advantage of us trying to be nice."

I did tell the rest of the group that I enjoyed running with them, and hopefully I'll see them in Outland. 

Just not that Hunter.

*I typically look for a group to run an instance when I've accumulated enough quests to visit the instance. In the original Vanilla leveling design, you gain access to the quests (and are marked as "yellow" on the Quest Log) when you're the right level for a dungeon. The biggest exception to this rule are the Scarlet Monastery instances for an Alliance player, because the Alliance gains access to a seed quest that leads to Scarlet Monastery at Level 35, easily past the level requirement for the first wing of SM (Graveyard) and on the high side for the requirement for the second wing (Library). Ideally, you'd want to visit Graveyard around L30-32, not L36 (which is what you'll end up at by the time you complete the seed quest on the other side of the planet and head over to Southshore). Library is more about L33-36, so while L36 fits it just barely does.

**The baseball analogy is highly appropriate today, as it's Opening Day for Major League Baseball in Cincinnati. Being the home of the oldest professional baseball franchise, the Cincinnati Reds (Est. 1869), Opening Day includes a parade and all sorts of pagentry. Kids frequently skip school to go to downtown with their parents to watch the parade, see the game, and (hopefully) celebrate an Opening Day victory.

**I don't care if the "official" drop rate is something about 8-12%, because my experience is that it's more aligned with what the community sees as 3-5%.

Some Things Never Change

Last night I figured that I'd take Briganaa into The Stockades, since she was about at the right level and I knew that there were plenty of toons around to run the instance. 

Don't quote me on this, but Blizzard had apparently made some changes to how damage and experience are calculated if someone who has a much higher level is grouped with you, specifically designed to stop the Classic WoW practice of boosting by a max level toon basically pulling and killing off low level dungeon baddies while everybody else stays at the entrance.*

So theoretically there ought to be plenty of unboosted players wanting to get into a Stockade run, and it only took me about 5-7 minutes before I got a whisper.

Typically it's a "Want to run Stocks?" or something to that effect, but this one was:

"Spec"

I blinked. I mean, Deadmines is commonly the second dungeon that an Alliance player would run; would what spec my Shaman is really matter?

Oh why the hell not. "Enh," I replied, meaning I was the melee Shaman subclass, Enhancement.

I immediately got an invite to group.

"If this guy thinks that I can put down a Windfury Totem at L26, he's in for a surprise," I grumbled.**

At least this tank didn't ask me about it, so I threw him a bone and instead of providing a totem giving a bonus to armor, I put down a Strength of Earth Totem (which gives a bonus to Strength and consequently damage) and just rolled with it. 

Okay, I'll admit the dungeon run was fast, and the only death was at the end where the healer had been stunned and couldn't heal the Mage to save her***, but I was constantly drinking trying to get mana back while the tank kept running ahead. It's one thing if you're a Mage and you have to stay back anyway to cast spells from distance, but it's bad form if you're melee DPS is constantly running up about 5-10 seconds after you've pulled. Sure, I didn't have to worry about pulling threat, but come on, man. It's not a big deal to finish a few seconds slower.

As soon as humanly possible I dropped group (after thanking people, because that's how I roll). I honestly don't think the tank really learned anything about patience, but attempting to min/max a low level dungeon like this is... well, really quite ridiculous. When I grumped about this to my friends who were online tonight, my Questing Buddy agreed said that no, it didn't make sense in such a low level instance. 

*I understand the desire to stop boosting of bots and whatnot, but it isn't really a good look if you ban boosting but turn around and say "you can legally boost to L58 as much as you want for $60 a boost".

**A Shaman doesn't get access to the Windfury Totem until L32. Windfury is a buff prized by melee and tanks because of the often extreme bonuses to melee attacks it can generate.

***For the record, I rezzed the Mage while the healer ran out of the instance. Bad form in my book.

You Know What They Say...

Given my years as a parent, I've become accustomed to the psychotherapist part of the job.

You know the drill: somebody is saying something and whatever it is is blown out of proportion. Or that there's an excessive amount of interpretation in what seems to be a simple oversight or mistake (like so-and-so not calling ALL DAY*). Or that intentions aren't perfectly clear, and I have to divine them.

If I charged by the hour for advice, I'd be a rich man.**

But one of the things I'm fond of saying when talking about friendships is the line "If you want a friend, be a friend." Don't assume that people can read your mind and understand that you're a good friend; you have to show them friendship, make that leap of faith, if you want to make that connection.

I was reminded of that the other day in SWTOR.

***

I'd made a point of bringing the Old Man to the end of Chapter One of the Smuggler story for two reasons: so I would be far enough ahead in level to help out the kids with their own toons whenever they asked, and so that I could watch the end of Chapter One again.*** However, my push to do that meant that I had a bunch of quests left over to work on.

Yeah, I know I could simply dump them, but I've got a bit of completionist in me, so off to Alderaan I went.

There, I found someone asking in Gen Chat "LFG Red Handed". I looked at the time I had free to goof around in game and decided to go ahead and whisper for an invite. I got one back almost immediately and joined the leader at Panteer Castle. The third member of the group, a Trooper, was finishing up his class quest on Alderaan and said he'd join us shortly.

So we waited.

And waited.

And killed a bunch of mobs and waited.

Finally, the third guy finished up his quest and asked where we were. "At the castle at the end of the map," I said.

Then the trooper dropped group.

"Shit," the leader said. "I've been trying to finish this Heroic for days and have had no takers."

"Well," I replied, "We're both OP for Alderaan right now, so let's try to two man it. I'm specced DPS, but I can heal in a pinch."

So we trotted off and made an attempt at 2-manning the Heroic 4.

Some Heroics you can solo if you've the right class combo, and others you have to wait until you no longer take damage to solo it. In retrospect, I suppose a stealth toon such as a Jedi Shadow or a Scoundrel (such as the Old Man) could solo Red Handed, but at the time I was thinking more along the lines of CC and healing. It wasn't a given that we would be able to finish this Heroic fighting our way through it, even though the odds were in our favor with the leader being an L37 Jedi Guardian. He may have been L37, but he was still geared with Alderaanian gear, and in SWTOR gear > levels.

But after about 40 minutes of grinding our way through, we finished.

The Guardian was ecstatic. "If you need anything --anything at all-- just let me know. You have no idea how long I've been waiting to finish this."

I assured him I was fine, but let me know if he needed an assist in the future.

***

Then, with some really old Taris Heroics still smelling up my quest list, off to the plagued planet I went.

When I arrived, I pretty much expected to blow through the Heroics, collect a few badges, and clear on out. However, Taris chat on the Republic side (and Balmorran chat on the Imp side) is often quite active with interesting discussion topics. Tonight's was no different, and centered on Heroics. Or rather, the lack of available bodies to run Heroics.

"It used to be that you had no problem getting a group together, but nobody ever responds to LFG requests these days," one person complained.

"Yeah, it seems that nobody gives a shit anymore," another added.

Properly shamed, I piped up that I'd be willing to assist if someone needed help on some Heroics, as did a few other people.

I ended up spending the rest of the evening running Heroics on Taris, such as Fall of the Locust, Knight Fall, and Fallen Stars. Since I far outleveled the content on Taris, I ended up tanking just because it was the right thing to do.

***

You'd think that after the griping in Gen Chat I'd feel a bit of resentment to having been railroaded into helping out with Heroics, but you know, I really didn't mind. I could have just blown it off as so much bitching, done my thing, and left. But really, what would that accomplish? That people shouldn't complain and just suck it up, just because that's how MMOs are?

Or is it that people want to play MMOs because of that middle "M", the "multiplayer" part of an MMO, and get disillusioned when most other people couldn't be bothered?

Remember when Blizz removed most group quests in WoW when Cataclysm dropped? Remember the bitching in the blogosphere about how Blizz is removing all group content out in the world? Perhaps Blizzard recognized that people weren't interested in questing group content, and decided to acknowledge what people were really doing in-game? That to a lot of people, the multiplayer part of an MMO resides in LFR, LFD, BGs, and guild stuff? That getting together and running a group quest was passe in an era where you could hardly find anybody else in the zone you were questing in?

But that's the thing: is it the game that dictates the behavior, or the behavior that dictates how the game is developed?

Rift operated --initially, anyway-- on the premise that they wanted to be even more WoW than Wrath-era WoW was. GW2 emphasized dynamic in-zone group content to generate multiplayer interest. Age of Conan simply made the mobs so hard that it was difficult to finish a questline in a zone without grouping up. SWTOR made group content optional with the Heroic group quests, but encouraged a culture of grouping using Gen Chat.

But what have they accomplished? Becoming niche games compared to WoW? Or have they attracted the players they wanted to attract?

That brings me back to SWTOR and Heroics.

Perhaps the complainers in Taris were right, and that the game was changing and becoming less multiplayer friendly. If so, we as players have a choice: we can tacitly accept the changing nature of the game and just live with it, or we can do something about it. We can be active, help out with groups, and get involved. We can help to make the game the way we want it to be.

If you want to have a friend, be a friend.

*And tell me, you read that with an overly exaggerated voice, didn't you?

**Well, given that they'd be paying me in my own money, I wouldn't be rich, but it's a nice sentiment.

***SMUGGLER SPOILERS (you have been warned): Nok Drayen is totally Machiavellian and totally ruthless, and I'm glad that Risha had ten years away from him to grow as her own person. I respect her far more than I ever could Nok or his ancestor (who set the damn ship in the Long Shadow in the first place).