LFG: The quest for the perfect PUG

For those of you who do not play MMOs, LFG means looking for group, and PUG means pick up group. See, in MMos, there are dungeons. In World of Warcraft they are called instances and raids. Instances are closed settings for quests, with difficult bosses and good armor and items. They are normally played with a 4-5 people. Towards the end of the game, they are always done with a group of 5, again, consisting of a tank, a healer and 3 damage dealers. These instances can take some time to complete. Some of the newer ones take about 20 minutes to complete. Some of the older ones can take up to 2 hours. The reason is, even though the older dungeons are for lower level characters, Blizzard, the company itself, was still learning a bit. The game USED to be a bit more hardcore as well. People spent...way more time doing this. It's hard to believe, isn't it? But it's true. Then you have raids. Now raids are even harder dungeons. They are normally considered end-game dungeons. Meaning, this is what you do when you're at the top of the game. There were level 60 raids, then level 70 raids and now level 80 raids. Raids used to be for up to 40 people. That's a lot of people. Nowadays there aren't any 40 people raids, only 10 and 25 people raids. They call em 10 man and 25man raids. Suffice to say, these often take hours to complete. The shortest one takes about 45 minutes, and it is one single room with a few dragons in it. It is also not that difficult nowadays. Raids go out of style, as the game keeps progressing, and some of these become redundant to complete, but some people complete them to get good armor and items that will enable them to go on even HARDER raids. Or for shits and giggles. Preparing for a raid is strenous. You have to be good, you have to be well equipped, and more often than not, you need to have leveled your professions up to par in order to contribute to the group. Professions, which I will explain some other day, for my sister's benefit, hehe, entail a few skills, such as mining, and armor making, and leatherworking, and even cooking! Cooking is a much sought-after skill, because you can make tasty meals that benefit the entire group. Cooking goes hand in hand with fishing too! My dad would be thrilled! No, there's no crochetting, but there is tailoring. Anyway, raiding.... it's a long process to be ready to raid. And more often than not it's necessary to do instances, or 5mans, up the wazoo.

Blizzard implemented this nifty tool a few months ago where you'd be able to pair up in a database with other people looking for groups. Before, it meant asking on a general chat in your own server if someone wanted to do this or that. And it could mean waiting around for hours, depending on the day and trend of that day. Nowadays, it can still take an hour or so, if you're just dps. If you're a tank, or a healer, it could take much less time, and if you're a tank AND a healer queueing together, it's basically instantaneous! And this has been basically the case for my gf and I.

Now, when you pair up with random players, with players who are not your in-game friends or are your guild mates, this is called a PUG, because you're looking for other players. You call the group and the random players pugs.

An unexpected secondary effect of a game having SUCH a large and diverse user base, is that you get to meet all kinds of people. Including people who will irritate the feck out of you by: A. Being self entitled B. By being elitist jerks C. By Being thieves (we call them ninja looters- whenever something that's good drops, be it an equipment item, a weapon, a recipee, a gem, the party can 'roll' for it. This means that party members will basically roll from 1-100 on a need or greed basis. Need trumps greed. A higher number wins out. And ninja looters will wait for everyone to roll first and then roll need, when they don't really need something)D. By being douchebags overall or E. By being bad players in various ways ( Any sort of things, such as being bad on purpose, being bad and a jerk at the same time...no one is perfect, a bad player is not a bad thing, but a touch of humility and good manners go a LONG way in this game) Not to say that there aren't decent people in this game, there are, but just like in real life, there are more assholes than nice people, for whatever reason. It's as if the game mimicks real life a bit too well.


Before the LFG tool for instances, looking for a group was a bit difficult, and more often than not, you would end up with douchebags. And it would often deterr you from trying that again for a while. Nowadays...you're basically paired up with douchebags faster. It's not perfect, but at least you have a way of simply dropping that particular group and trying again. It's like speed dating basically: all the awkwardness and regret just comes at you faster, and eventually it all happens so fast, you've rubbed yourself raw and numb, and it doesn't smart as much anymore. Pretty picture, I know.


I remember one evening we had the perfect group: we ended up doing the same labyrinthine dungeon 5 times over. Everyone in the group was perfect: corteous, respectful, and by the 3rd time of doing the same dungeon, it was clockwork, to the point where we were basically a ravenous pack of pixels, or some sort of high fantasy hit squad carrying out a Troll pogrom or something. ANYWAY, it was great. I was sad to have to break for food, because, well, it was perfect. Suffice to say when we came back, we had probably the worst group we had had all evening, and my girlfriend and I ended up carrying the group (meaning, pulling all the weight). Last week we were doing an 'already in progress' 5man. This means it had already been started and the roles we were filling in had been vacated. When we came in, I saw a bunch of corpses, meaning that some or all in the party had died and come back in. I asked what happened, and the party explained in short words that they had a 'noob dk tank'(meaning, an inexperienced Death Knight Tank) to which I said 'ahh. I see' and proceeded to do my thing (my thing being killing chit, as a friend of yesteryear used to say) Or at least I attempted to do so. As soon as we started, we were bombarded by a party chat full of question marks. My gf thinks the spammers were speaking in korean and the chat was not recognizing the characters. Í don't know. And then the real fun started. We had a hunter and a boomkin (a rather large owl with antlers that casts magic, also called crit *for critical* chicken. ) The hunter decided that my going breakneck fast was not fast enough, and started to shoot things for shits and giggles. Which made my job that more strenous. Then the boomkin thought it would be ok to start pushing things away from me with gusts of wind (this ability is more for player vs player action, where distance from another player is desired. In an instance it's bad because A. The tank, meaning moi, could not hit things as I was supposed to and B. He started pushing them into other enemies, so then we all had one big american party where I had to chase everything around) We asked him to stop, and explained this was not pvp (payer vs player) and he proceeded to say it was, and called my girlfriend a slut. I was not happy. See, you should never anger the tank or healer, because you might die. It's like being carried into an ER and spitting at the doctor's face and calling him a pansy. You're not making a case for yourself. So we proceeded to leave the party and left them to die.

Now, if we could only muster the courage in life to leave douchebags hanging, everything would be simply awesome....

Example:

Me: Hey Boss, I don't like this assignment. I know I volunteered, but it's really not great. Can I please drop it?
Boss: Nope. You trained for it, you get to keep it.
Me: But, this is not what I was hired for...
Boss: Suck it up, buttercup

Real Life resolution: I get to keep my job and now I hate it even more than before

MMO resolution:

Me: ok, well, Let me...click this...Leave group...ok, hey, I'm putting you on ignore, have luck finding another schmuck! l2p nub!~


If only...