Thursday, December 10, 2009

Looking For Guts

is what I call the LFG system now. Even faced with most certain anonymity, I still cannot bring myself to go into dungeons.

To preface, the new LFG (Looking For Group) system will match you up with 4 others(from yours or other realms in your battlegroup) who want to run a random(or specific) dungeon, teleport you to that dungeon, teleport you back when done, and give you gold and stuff for doing this while using this system.

And I still cannot do it.

Why? Because I am absolutely certain in my head that one of three things will happen:

A. I will suck, and everyone there will tell me that I suck, and they will use the "tribe has spoken" feature to vote me off of the island.

B. They will all hate me, even if I don't suck, just because everyone hates me. And they will all go back and post on every message board about this horrible player that they grouped with, and it will be me.

C. I will hate them. Probably because they talk like this "dood ur so bad n im so l33t!" or their names will be XximthebestxX or Ursodedhaha or some crap like that.

Or D. All of the above.

Whatever. I'm making lots of money selling gems and other things. Not boatloads mind you, I'm not ready to buy a Chopper or anything, but I'm doing okay.

So will I ever make the leap? I can't say really. I've opened the feature and perused it a dozen times or so on different characters. I just cannot bring myself to click the "Find Group" button at the bottom.

But hey, I soloed the last few parts of my Dwarf Pally's Charger questline today to get the Feat of Strength! Yeah, it really doesn't mean much to most, but at least I was able to do it alone.

3 comments:

Darth Solo said...

Oh boy Scout, have to read the follow-up to my PUG article? I know you're more anti-social than I am but you really have to give the new tool a try.

I decided to just click that button and to hell with the consequences. I didn't regret it. It's wickedly fun. Great way to experience all that content you've missed all along. And it's quick! You won't waste more than 30 minutes - 1 hour.

As for feeling bad that you're underperforming... now it's my turn to tell you that you shouldn't feel like that. For one thing there's a very high chance that those people are not from your own server and that you won't meet those people again.

So don't worry about that. If the people in your group feel that you're really bad they can vote to kick you out. But usually those of us who are so afraid of screwing up end up over-performing. That's what happened to me. I was rocking that DPS like there's no tomorrow.

Best thing to do is just click the button. Do that at least once and use the random dungeon option. Or, try The Culling of Stratholme which is a really cool dungeon with lots of lore behind it. That was my first. Good luck and stop being so shy!

Skaut said...

Thanks for the boost Darth, but I just don't think I can do it. I can't really stop being shy, I've been intensely shy since the first grade-and that was 35 years ago! I don't even have any friends outside my husband and daughter-I literally talk to nobody all day, ever, except them(or if my mom happens to call).

That said, I really really wish this wasn't an MMO-I *really* cannot wait until Diablo 3 comes out. In fact, when I was first introduced to WoW, I didn't really understand much about the "MMO" part of it. And once I figured it out, well I was hooked and it was really too late to quit. And back before BC, the only dungeons I ran were with a friend of my husband and friends of his-and it seemed like I *always* got blamed for everything.

See, I wouldn't be able to just shrug off being kicked from a group. If that happened, I would probably log out and never log in ever again. That would be the final straw.

I read the message boards, at MMO, at Allakhazam, the official ones-there are far too many people out there who are not interested in "window lickers" getting "boosted" and getting all of this gear that they clearly do not deserve. I don't want to be the next person that someone runs to the message boards and either complains about or ridicules. If I don't put myself in that position, then it won't happen.

The way I see it, I'm just sparing four random people a waste of their time. It's along the same lines as to why I've never understood killing enemy NPCs in towns-I'm not interested in wasting someone else's time or ruining "their" game time. I hate when it happens to me, and I would never do it to someone else.

That's great that there are so many people who are getting to experience all this content-that was certainly Blizzards intent. But I think I'll just stick to being solo and seeing how much I can accomplish on my own.

Darth Solo said...

I won't try too hard to convince you but here's what I think. I'm not as anti-social as you, though I'm more anti-social than most people. Having said that and also considering that I've been playing WoW alone for a very long time, I believe that the new LFG tool is particularly well suited for solo people and those who don't like the hassle of grouping in a regular PUG or guild group.

Playing in a group setting is a novel experience. So what if you suck? I'm sure you won't. I've read a few of your posts about gear and such, and I think you know how to play your class very well. You just need to do what you normally do when playing on your own. You don't even need to speak in these random PUGs. So what if you get kicked? Those people don't know who you are and won't meet you again.

I got kicked once from a random PUG, though it wasn't my fault, and just tonight I quit a group because I died a couple of time and I felt that I hadn't researched the strategy properly. I excused myself and that's that. I won't shed any tears over that.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that the LFG tool has finally allowed us solo players to experience an aspect of WoW that some of us never hoped to see.

These groups can be quick (15-30 min), fun and will reward you with better stuff than you'll be able to acquire on your own.

One last thing. If you're playing as DPS you shouldn't have anything to fear. Your responsibilities are much less than those of a tank's or healer's, as long as you don't do stupid stuff like pull the entire instance or such.