The Cranky Old Gnome

Ok, so I’m sorry I keep doing so many prefaces/making excuses/etc but I just need to say: I’m still getting my blogging voice back.  So this post, and probably plenty to follow, is a little all over the place.  Not quite the caliber of my previous posts.  But I’ll get there.  I promise.  Also…I’m sorry I seem to be letting the obscenities fly a lot more lately.  I hope nobody gets offended.

So, as I mentioned, I recently had a pretty bad accident, which resulted in some head trauma.  Because of said head trauma, I’m have some normal, expected memory loss and trouble processing things.  Needless to say, it’s taken a little bit of a toll on my tanking.  Where once I was a fantastic multitasker, able to process lots of information, coming in very fast and furious, now there seems to be a hard cap on the amount of info I can process.  It’s like it isn’t even happening.  Pretend I’m tanking a group of 5 and one of them breaks away and goes after the healer.  Then a patrol comes by and joins the fray.  Suddenly it’s as if there is no patrol.  It doesn’t even exist.  I’m so busy trying to catch the mob after the heal that the patrol doesn’t even register.

As the days and weeks go by, the amount of info I can process has gone up significantly, in fact it’s not really noticeable any more.  But that’s just so you don’t worry, my brain is getting back to normal.

But let me get back to my story.  I logged in to wow about a week ago to see if playing would take my mind off how stir crazy I was feeling.

Oh wait! Side story!  I totally forgot!  Word of advice: If you are going to get into a sever accident and end up in the hospital, make sure someone logs in for you so your guild doesn’t toss you to the curb.  That’s right.  That new guild I joined?  Booted me.  Because I hadn’t logged in for (count them) 4 whole days.  4 days! And they booted me! Ridiculous right? Good riddance I say.

Ok, so after getting over the initial confusion of no longer being in a guild, and stopping myself from sending a very snarky, guilt-filled tell to that guild leader, I decided to stick myself in the random dungeon finder and see what the fates had in store for me.

The dungeon of the moment? Heroic Ahn’Kahet.

I’ve done this one quite a few times, so I didn’t foresee any problems.  Nonetheless, I decided to issue this warning to the group: “I’m currently recovering from brain surgery so I’ll need to take it a little slower than most of you are probably accustomed to.”

Pretty simple and straightforward explanation right?

No response from the group…

“Ok, well, anyway, I’m going to do my best, so here we go.  Ready?”

No response…

I go for the first pull.  No problem at all.  We clear all the spiders near the first set of stairs.  The dps is super high and the mobs are going down fast.

We get up past the first set of steps and I’m lining up for the pull in the next room, and I just completely forget that there’s a patrol.  I don’t even think to look.  I’ve done this dungeon many many times, and yet I forgot about the patrol. I charged right into the group in the room and pulled the patrol right along with it.

Now as far as every day tanking foul ups, I will admit, this is a pretty stupid one.  First, even if I didn’t remember that there was a patrol, I should have checked to see if there was a patrol coming around the corner.  I should not have charged headlong into the room without even looking.

However, the dps and healing in the group was high enough that even though I totally screwed up the pull, all the enemies went down and none of us did.  So I figured that everyone surviving, combined with my earlier warning, would have earned me a little slack.

It did not.

Now, I am going to relate to you what the rest of the group members said and I promise you, I am not making this up.

DPS 1: Dude what the hell? Are you retarded?

DPS 2: Yeah, what did you have brain surgery for?  Stupidity reduction?

Healer: haha yeah, if I were you I’d get my money back, clearly they fucked up that surgery.

DPS 3: Hey come on guys, you don’t know, his stupidity may be unrelated to his surgery.  He’s probably always been this stupid.

Healer: You probably didn’t even have surgery, you just use that as an excuse because you’re a dumbass.

You have been removed from the group.

Before I could even process what they had said and respond at all I was sitting back in Ironforge.

First of all, in hindsight I probably didn’t need to tell them I was recovering from brain surgery.  Maybe a little bit too much information.  All I really needed to do was say, “hey I like to go slow, so don’t expect a speed run.”  But I was still a little woozy and not thinking quite straight.

However, that one PuG has pretty much destroyed my faith in the WoW community.  I know, maybe I’m overreacting, and probably should lay everything on this one group.  But their reactions were so horrible and so out of line that I just lost it.  Seriously.  What kind of mouth breathing low life ass whole fucking dougebag cock ass says shit like that?

Sorry…sorry I don’t usually let the obscenities fly like that but it pissed me off so much that I haven’t played since.  First off I don’t think that being that angry is good for my head injury.  But regardless, I just don’t need stress like that.

It’s just amazing that a group of people could be so arrogant that when a slightly difficult situation arose but everyone lived, they could react that way.  They just expect that everyone else in the group (tank, heals, or dps) be perfect, rocking tier 9, and able to pull at least 5k dps.  Do they not remember that everyone had to start somewhere? Or are they all just warcraft savants that just instantly knew how to rock the game, and had their gear gifted to them?  Yes, I know, your gear level makes it super easy to go into the original Wrath heroics and faceroll.  I know that in ilvl 225+ gear you could auto pilot yourself through an instance, skill or not.  But guess what?  Not everyone is in your same situation.  Some people are still starting out and are in blue gear.  Some people just don’t have that much experience, and are still learning how to run these instances.  And some people are recovering for fucking brain surgery you goddammed obnoxious twits!

I hope they die in a fire.

So I have decided that, at least for now, I am done with the random dungeon finder.  First of all, I don’t want to get stuck in another PuG.  Secondly, I don’t want to do another “vanilla” Wrath mess where the only communication in party chat is “gogogogo”.  And third, I’m just not interested in running instance after instance for no real reason.  I mean, I’m not in a guild, so I’m not raiding.  And I sure as hell aint gonna PuG a raid.  So there’s not a real reason for me to need to upgrade my gear.  It just feels like a long pointless grind.

Man I hope Cataclysm comes out soon.  I could use something else to do in the game.

“[Insert clever sign off phrase here]”

~Fizz

So as I watched yet another super cool dude showing off his pvp mammoth mount (by standing on top of the winter veil presents in Ironforge on Christmas morning) it occurred to me that a I’m not sure if a brief ban is really a good punishment.  Oh sure, when the ban/suspension lasts more than two days it’s probably long enough to actually disrupt the persons game play enough to actually feel like a ban.  But when it’s short (like the common 3-hour ban for spamming trade), I’m not sure as if it’s really all that much of a punishment.  Except for the most die-hard, addicted, WoW-crackheads 3 hours out of the game is just a quick break.  It might even be bed time for them so all they have to do is sleep it off and everything is fine in the morning.

Because of this I have come up with a few punishment ideas that are a bit more…creative.

The 3-hour ban:

This is a revamped version of the classic ban.  Only this time instead of not being able to log in to the game, you log in and get a debuff that lasts 3 hours.  The buff would be visible to everyone and called “Banhammered.”  This debuff would be applied to every character on your account.  The only way for it to wear off would be to actually be logged in for three hours.  But you couldn’t go <AFK> because you could still be auto logged out for inactivity.  The effect of this debuff would be that you couldn’t do anything. Except walk around.  And your movement speed would be reduced by 99%.  Your action bars would be grey out so you couldn’t use them.  You wouldn’t have access to any form of chat.  You wouldn’t be allowed to interact with any NPCs (including, but not limited to bankers, auctioneers, flight masters, etc).  You would just have to walk around at 1% speed, waiting 3 hours for the debuff to wear off.

You would receive this punishment for minor infractions like (non-gold) spamming or other chat related things.

The day-long ban:

A harsher version of the 3-hour ban.  Same effect just lasts for 24 hours.

You’d get this for more serious offenses like minor game hacks or player harrassment.

The multiple day ban:

This would be as it works now, you wouldn’t be able to log in at all for however long they decided.  But this would end with the 3-hour debuff.

The multiple day ban would be for the most serious of infractions that violate Blizzards Terms of Service agreement. (You know, the agreement that shows up each time there is a patch, the one you have to scroll all the way to the bottom off in order to get the “agree” to light up? Yeah that one.  I bet none of you have ever read it, let alone read it each time a new patch comes out.  In case you were wondering, yes, I read it each time.)  You’d get it for game hacks and botting and gold spamming and other really bad things.

Community Service:

When a player is banned because they were impeding the gameplay of others, they would required to perform community service.  The cause of this punishment could be anything from harassing other players, to ninjaing loot; from being a racist/sexist/etc jerk in trade to standing on flight masters/mailboxes/etc.  Basically anything that would classify you as a ‘fun sucker’.

People with this punishment would have a choice of community services.  The could:

• Pass on all loot in one randomly chosen heroic dungeon. (All loot, not just loot that is rolled over.  Even vendor trash and money.)
• Group with 20 randomly chosen low leves (below level 10) and help them get up to level 15.
• Clean all the trash around the capital cities. x number of hours sweeping things up.
• Lead 10 randomly chosen old ladies across…um…some sort of street I guess.
• I thought I had more ideas….I guess I’m out.

Anyway, just some thoughts I was having, mostly because I want the punishments to be more of a deterant.  I want it to be a much harder decision for them to decide that the consequences are worth engaging in crappy actions.  Yeah I’m sure a lot of you disagree with this and thing that these punishments would be unfair or unreasonable.  But it’s not like I’m the one deciding on them or applying them.  Blizzard would still be enforcing them….although if they wanted my help I’d be more than happy to wield the ban hammer for a little while.

“[Insert clever sign off phrase here]”

~Fizz

Edit: I’ve decided that there needs to be a unique punishment for mount blockers.

• First offense: 24 hour debuff that reduces character size by 50%.  Cannot use large mounts.
• Second offense: 48 hour debuff  that reduces character size by 50%.  Cannot use any mount.
• Third offense: Permenant debuff that reduces character size by 50%.  Also all mounts have their sizes reduced proportionately so that they can’t be used to block mailboxes.

I also think their should be some more unique punishments for people who ninja things (although it has to be very clear that the stuff was ninja’d–not just an accusation.

• If an item from a heroic is ninja’d, character must pass on all loot for the next random dungeon.
• If an item from a raid is ninja’, character must pass on all loot for the next raid they enter.
• Raid and Heroic level (and accompanying item drops) must be proportionate to the item they stole.

I was inspired by a post Big Bear Butt made where he described the key bear tanking abilities with a simple one line explanation, and decided I’d make my own version of this for warrior tanks.  There are plenty of great in depths guides out there, and most of them can be found over at Tankspot, but this little guide is meant to be a quick reference.  A way to orient yourselves to the vary basics of warrior tanking.  This quick-reference doesn’t involve any theory crafting, number crunching, or long winded discussions of the combat table.  It’s just a quick and dirty explanation of the ability and where/how to use them.

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