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.
4 Comments
I thought I would use Blizzards ingame adding notes to friends alot more then I have, as I was looking for a way to keep track of randoms that pop up in things.. specially since your friends and ignore list can’t be shared cross toons.. but I might look into doiknowyou as I get confused sometimes when I get random Heys from people who remember me.. ( or a weird apology note in the mail.… )
I have written a couple of times about DC issues… my last post linked here… But I am sick and tired of it… I would like a realm rating system that everyone could get access to.. then we wouldn’t be put in the situation in the 1st place.
http://gnomeaggedon.wordpress.com/2008/07/19/post-curator-black-hole/
@Zahrah: I love doiknowyou, especially because it’s account-wide, not just tied to one toon like Ignore/Friend and notes are.
@GA: Your excellent article was in my mind while I watched all these people disconnect. I expected the same at Curator, but not throughout the whole instance.
Back in the days of FFXI, when you had to wait 5 hours to get a group together and spend another 3 hours killing three mobs… if you had to leave the group, it was considered the height of realm-blacklistable offense if you didn’t find a replacement for yourself first.
The nice thing about WoW is that you can usually find a replacement in a very small amount of time. :)