I am not a dedicated raider, but I love raiding. Since I can never commit to the raiding schedules that guilds require of their raiders, I am in a constant state of pugging. When I'm not actively in a pug, I am scanning the trade channel looking for one that will have all the qualities required to be successful- gear, experience, patience, and maybe a little bit of luck. When I find such a group, I'm ecstatic. But more often than not, I face group after group of impatient, inexperienced, and under geared scrubs who simply want to be carried to the final boss so they can get their [EPIC LOOT] Those groups often end in a way that everyone who has ever pugged is familiar with- people getting frustrated and leaving. But every now and then, there is a group that fails so bad, the fail is almost a win, in and of itself, for being such a unique level of fail.

Those are the groups this blog is about.

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

The Chicken or the Egg?

I was talking with some of my guildies a couple weeks ago while they were in a looking for raid group, and it was going pretty damned rough. I could hear their frustration with the fails in the group, the seeming resolution of the whole group to not follow any strat. One of them even mentioned that he didn't even try because he didn't care about it because it was LFR.

That led me to wonder....Are the players in a LFR actually terrible, or are they just playing terrible because they can get away with it?

People walk in there, and if you check inspect them, you know that they know what to do. They're accomplished raiders, rocking out gear and achievs that far outweigh their performance in LFR.
Unfailingly, you'll see that same person standing in fire, splitting into eight different groups to kill three slimes, standing off in a corner doing their own thing when they should stack, etc.

Are those people actually bad and terrible, and carried to all their gear and achievements? Or are they playing badly because they're in a LFR and there is no accountability?
In guild raids, those people would be verbally admonished(abused?) and possibly replaced. They would not be on the receiving end of any loot. But in LFR, there is nothing that will judge their performance, nothing to reward good players and punish bad ones. It's an environment that just breeds people playing like jackasses.

You Give PUGs a Bad Name