Disconnectors: Internet Impaired or Pug Menace?
I went on my first pug raid in quite a while: a full Kara clear with my mostly-battleground hunter. It was decently fun; Kara’s a good time although by now I’ve spent entirely too much time there. This being summer and all, the raid chatter tended to center around genitalia and bodily functions.
Over the course of the 3.5 hour run, a total of five of the ten initial raiders left during the raid, every one of them by disconnecting without warning.
I don’t want to say that it’s impossible that all five of them–never mind, it’s pretty much impossible. A warlock disconnected less than a minute after the lone Nightbane wipe, a rogue disconnected immediately after getting a zomgepic from Curator, a mage after looting Moroes dropped no caster loot, a druid while we filled that spot… you see what I’m saying. Not a lot of ambiguity; it’s not like any of these people left during a boss fight, or while fighting between boss fights.
There were genuine connection problems in the raid a couple of times, but every time those people got back online straightaway.
The strange thing to me is that none of the five people who left via disconnect said one word before doing so. Not even anything obviously false, “Cat’s on fire, got to go”.
Do any of them really think that the rest of the raid shrugs and says “Wow, that’s really unfortunate that this player got disconnected right after looting that epic ring. I hope their internet comes back and they can rejoin us.” Pssh.
What I do is open up DoIKnowYou and give the person a minus-one score with a comment “unplugger”. While this doesn’t globally reconcile karma and gets very little emotional reparation…
(”oh you sir, YOU are being marked down as MINUS ONE in my book, hahahahaha!”)
…it does help me remember who is likely to be less than stellar in a future endeavor. DoIKnowYou puts the note right in my tooltip, every time I see them, as well as in other text-based triggers. “diky: Silenceikillyou has come back negative: unplugger”
The raid leader seemed completely at ease, if not happy, with this happening throughout the raid. “Looks like the rogue bailed. One sec while I find a replacement.” The call goes out to associated guilds or the LFG channel gets a ping, and in ten minutes or less we’ve got a new person summoned and the raid is rolling again.
To me, unpluggers feel like a pug menace, but it could also be that I’m just a raid-pugging newbie and this is standard operating procedure. Maybe it’s just this way because Kara is an alt raid now, and nobody’s going to bother to connect the dots to associate that jerky behavior with their main.
Still, a stark contrast over a guild raid, with people you know.
