Are PuG’s getting worse ?

By rui barreiros • March 22, 2008

Yes, definitely….

On my casual daily forum reading, i found a post in EU forum, Raid & Dungeons, with the title ‘Is it me or are PuGs getting worse?‘ and read several opinions around but i think most of the posters forgot about a very important issue that actually influences how much the PuG’s indeed are getting worse; the amount of new players post-TBC.

There are several reasons there are bad players, one can find children, yes, children’s in 10~12 years old (or even younger) that aren’t that wise kid that understands game mechanics (i found some of this young children playing better than 50 years old too, rare though), but instead play 15 minutes a day, in his brother account, and during those 15 minutes spend 5 trying to get a group set-up to go to a dungeon, then 5 minutes to actually start, and watch them leave 5 minutes later because either his parents or his brother wants him to leave the game, and the person forcing him to do so is a <insert an incredible ammount of foul words here> and sorry sorry etc, this happened to me more than once, and guess what, it’s predictable, it happens usually during the day, lunch time, early morning or middle afternoon, we can only choose better the times we PuG really, i found that late night PuG’s tend to have better players, or at least more mature and (although not all) more receptive to hints and tips from others than during the day.

Another reason, and most relevant of all, is the amount of new players after TBC was released, and i mean months after it was released, like last christmas. It’s very easy at the moment for this new players to reach 70, and if you guys notice (specially those that played or play other mmorpg’s besides World of Warcraft) the main goal in other mmorpg’s is to reach level cap, whatever it costs since very few have instancing content while levelling and barely have any quests, the grinding mmorpg, and this new guys playing World of Warcraft resemble this stereotype, they just rush to 70 because they actually aren’t expecting any other content before 70, and of course, it’s worse when they choose servers where they barely find anyone else levelling and just can’t get people to do so. The end result is obvious, you get into outlands, where most players are, enter you first instance like Hellfire Peninsula : Ramparts, and the player fails at all levels while running it, be it the complete unawareness of threat, moving, usage of utility skills to crowd control, fast thinking and reaction, all this things should have been learned through the dungeons in a slow growing learning curve according to level to ease the progression of the character and to prevent frustration.

I’ve tried several mmorpg’s, and personally, there is no mmorpg at the moment that provides what World of Warcraft provides in terms of playing flexibility, it’s all about moving, several skills can be used while moving contrary to several other mmorpgs where you need to stand still for the duration of the fight if you want to heal or output dps through long casting spells and amazingly beautiful and useless animations while doing so. No other mmorpg I found at the moment has the complex threat system World of Warcraft has, some don’t have any at all, it’s just the guy who tags him first is the guy that ‘tanks’ it, or there isn’t even the concept of tanking as any class can actually get hit by it and be healed through either from the use of non stop potting on games without main healing classes or with any kind of healer.

If a player of this games changes to wow, he will think the game acts exactly the same way, he won’t have any sense of threat in a dungeon, he’ll just unload all he has on the pull to see big flashy numbers and expect to be healed or will whine because pots have cool down. He will whine on forums asking for other classes skills that exist in that way since day 1 of the game to be nerfed because he doesn’t know how to circumvent them, he will whine because the dungeons are too hard since he has 14/14 epics (read it, PvP Season 1 epics) and the gear alone should make the difference but then the 4 players with him equally geared can’t fly through it.

I also detected an increased amount of account buyers, either levelling buyers or auction char buyers, it’s normal honestly, due to the amount of success WoW is getting, this things will increase, only thing we can do about it really, is to keep next to us a paper and pen writing down this guys name and promptly run away from them, or even through the usage of add-ons to do so. This kinda reminds me when i was levelling my Mage alt, he was around level 60 or 61, and i went into ramparts to get that quest done, all the other 3 players were alts, and knew what they were doing, OK, they’re not 100% proficient with that class yet since they’re still learning (pretty much like me) but we understood the game and all. And for our misery, we had a tank which was level 60, and main char, i kinda noticed that through the dungeon he never switched stance, but never gave much importance to that until we reach the last boss. Situation: several wipes during the dungeon, but we (the other 4 players) managed to prevent allot more, mostly due to agro loss, crowd control breaking, and lack of space and distance awareness (pulling adds during fight etc), we reach end boss, and well, let’s do this, the warrior managed to be the last one to die. We repeated, but this time, me and some others, very politely, tried to teach him to generate threat and to taunt etc, when we noticed he took a long time writing something back, standing still on the char, we all started asking if he was there and all, suddenly, after 1 sentence, i think everyone reacted the same as me, I stood looking at the screen, reading that sentence 1000 times trying to understand if I was awake or actually dreaming; “I can’t find ‘Taunt’ in the spell book, I’ve been using this ‘Mocking Blow’ skill to make them hit me”. Summary: Although he never admitted (obviously) this char was power levelled, and never quested, only grinded mobs botting, because he had only 1 stance (Battle stance) and trained only those skills, he had no defensive stance nor berserker stance, no sunder armour, he was just spamming HS/Mocking blow (when available) and a few other insignificant skills. Obviously, he left on his own will, we invited a guildie of mine that came on-line a few minutes before this happened, and killed the boss without any hassle.

Personally, I know how hard it can be to prevent this situations on blizzard side, yes they earn allot of money, but man power is not really the issue here, the big issue is evidence, it’s not enough to check a character spell book and not to see there skill X at level 60 to label him a power level buyer, they have a very hard work, even when all evidence point out to be something that breaks the EULA, they need proof. Granted they’re tools are getting better every day, but, this is inevitable, there will always be people trying to exploit the way game works, it’s in they’re blood since they’ve done it so many times in other mmorpg’s they played before.

So, who to blame ?

Personally, I blame the other mmorpg’s, not because they let people do things they’re not supposed to do, but because they were designed in a way that induces the people to do things they’re not supposed to. Using bot’s for example for levelling purposes, there are an immense amount of mmorpg’s, that they rely only on grinding to level (for those that don’t know, grinding is something called to the task of killing game NPC’s over and over in order to get experience to level), leaving no room for lore, history, questing, all this makes them want to use bot’s, it’s TERRIBLY boring to grind 60 levels. The amount of experience to level is absurd in those games as they want to force the ppl to play as much as they can. The end content is scarce, games with armour and weapons without diversity; class X has 1 armour set at level 10, then another at level 20, and so on till level 60, and can only ‘upgrade’ this armour with the risk of destroying it to improve it, games where you LOOSE experience when you die, all this things are the main reason we get so much more bad players in world of Warcraft every day.

Indeed PuG’s are getting worse, if you want better ones, I advise to work mostly with the time when you want to do dungeons, look at guild names, and above all, don’t be an ass also, although many of this guys are bad players from the start, many want to learn and do learn fast, teach them politely, who knows, you actually might end up with a very good player in the end, and most importantly, a very good friend.

Best regards,

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