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

Wait.... what?

That screenshot is fairly self explanatory. Doesn't even need a caption. You know a picture's good when it doesn't need a caption.

Sometimes I get in PUGs where people say the damnedest things. Gotta do a double take cause whatever they said was either so stupid, or so unrelated to the current conversation that I get a little "WTF?" bubble above my head IRL.

The situation that prompted this post happened in one of the new dungeons- the ones that feel the the dungeons did at the end of Wrath. The group was fairly decent, aside from being on the low end of dps and the tank facing the demons towards the group. I was healing, so the entire group taking about half their HP in damage every 15 or seconds was a bit annoying. After the first few times, I moved myself behind them so I could focus on the group and not myself. Anyhow, then somebody was all "hey, tank is out-dpsing the dps- lol!"

You can see what happened from there. When I attempted to explain how to not damage the whole group, he responded with "there not dragons".

...what?

Who cares if they're not dragons? It's a mechanic. You see wave of pewpew killing everyone, you turn whatever critter away from the group, even if it's a squirrel.*

Especially THIS squirrel.

*Exceptions of course being that one guy in that one raid where the wave needs to be split by the entire raid in order to survive.

Live fail feed!

For those of you who keep up, you'll know that I'm in a new guild. Really pew-pew paced and whatnot. My group was having issues and somebody, not sure who, thought up "hey, what if we feed it to the rest of the guild for constructive criticism and feedback and whatnot."

A few people kinda mumbled something about "maybe we'll try it out." I made that video guide awhile back and knew that my comp could handle making a video without lagging, so why not stream one? I screwed around with xfire for a bit, with terrible fail results, and went back to google. Google presented me with www.livestream.com. Pretty cool little tool. Free, too. After fiddling around with it a bit(it doesn't like dual monitors) I got it to work.

I now present you a nice little live feed, whenever I feel like streaming it. It's low quality, but if you're sitting here camping my stream, then deal with it.

SWTOR vs. WOW

SWTOR has lightsabers. End of story. Here's to hoping this doesn't turn out to be another Rift.
Don't get me wrong, Rift was fun, I enjoyed the time I spent there. But it didn't manage to hold me. In fact, I was back to wow within two months. When I was playing it, I just felt like something was missing. I still, to this day, don't know what it was. No idea.

But Star Wars... Star Wars has potential. Forget that I'm a complete Star Wars fangirl. Forget that I've been yearning for an awesome Star Wars game. Galaxies didn't cut it. We're not even gonna talk about galaxies. SWTOR: I got my beta invite, and I was having a blast. I tried a bunch of different classes and was just enjoying the hell out of them all. The starting areas and story lines are amazing. When playing it, it feels like a mmorpg, but it also feels like MY story. The game makes you feel like this is YOUR adventure. There's one small detail that I really liked and that, again, made it feel like it was "all about me": The crawl. Occasionally, on a loading screen, the star wars crawl popped up, and it was about me and my adventures. HOW COOL IS THAT?!?!?!

...I was excited.

Still am. I'm so antsy for the game to come out. I feel like a fat kid outside a cake store right before they open. I feel like I do when I'm at the front of the line at Blizzcon right before they open the doors.
Fingers crossed that SWTOR measures up and delivers!

Fuckin' with the space time continium...

I really love wowcrendor's stuff.

4.3

I couldn't find a cool picture, so here's the new paladin tier. It's so fucking ugly. Thank god for transmog.

So 4.3 hit. Lot of stuff to do. A LOT. There's, what, 5 new dungeons? Or something like that. I dunno. Transmog- thats fun, but it won't let me transmog my lightsaber for my sword. Made me /sadface a bit. Soul bank or whatever the fuck it's called. I haven't even fiddled with that yet. Raid finder. Did that the other day- more on that later. Oh right, and last but not least, the new raid- Dragon Soul. woo!

...When you read that whole paragraph up there, be sure to punctuate it a lot with sarcasm.

Back to what I said before: 4.3 hit. I left one shitty guild shortly before... Like, two or three weeks before. It was terrible, I'll spare you the details. Hell, I didn't just leave the guild, I left the whole fucking server. Never go to Ner'zul. Ever.
New guild is fun (queue obligatory brown-nosing in case any of them discover the internet) and I got into one of their raid groups as a MT. 4.3 hit and I was supposed to go but something happened and they had enough tanks without me so I got to sit bench.

This is not about benching- I really don't mind, especially since I hadn't studied.
*LE GASP* I know.
When patches and stuff hit, and the guild you're in is kinda competitive about killing shit, you're supposed to study and be ready to kick ass and take names. I totally did not do that. But like I said, I was benched, so no biggie. Kinda glad for it, too. I think they mighta been a bit mad if they tried to pull me in and I was all "eeerrrrr... so guys, you know when you said to study... you meant study kama sutra, right?"
It's all water under the bridge now, anyways. I googled. This week I'll be all prepared and whatnot.

During the first week of the patch (last week) I went and did the raid finder with a bunch of guildies... It was therein that they deduced&discovered that I hadn't studied. I had watched like... the first three, and then the last two... but the ones in between... no idea. Anywho, they asked me some question about a shaman boss and I was all "dduuurrrr...." at which point I realized that I looked like kinda a tard when the guild leader called me out for not being prepared when I was benched, but could have been called in. To be fair... It's not really a shaman. Just sayin.

Anyways, besides that, sometime that day it was mentioned in guild chat that people were totally exploiting by using the raid finder thing. Dunno how, some weird combo of DCing, relogging, dancing nekid under a full moon, etc. But they were using this exploit to get their gear pimped out and then go down deathwing.
And, rumor goes, it's a bunch of the TOP raiding guilds doing this!

First off- where did they even find the time to discover this exploit? Shouldn't they be glued to their chairs, in dragon soul, grinding relentlessly against the forces of evil in order to come out world first or server first or whatever?
Secondly- They're a top guild... don't they have any integrity with their kills? It like hiting a 20 point buck with your truck, and telling people you shot it from three miles away. Yeah, the bitch is dead and mounted on a freekin wall, but you still lied and now your truck is jacked up.
Thirdly! Exploits have come and gone. and EVERY time a guild has used em, their goodies have been stripped, and some of em even got banned. Did they not consider that at all? ....Dumbasses.


Edited to add- I totally forgot. The new 5 mans are fucking amazing.