I suppose this post makes me an official blogger. Blizzard post something, and the blog-o-sphere reacts, including me. If you haven’t read the details you can read it on MMO Champion.
First let me just say, I like this concept but not because I think it will make a huge difference in queue times, but because I like the psychological aspect of this change. Biggest gaping hole in this is the location of the notification. Tanks aren’t queuing, but they’re going to put the notification in the LFG window? That would seem to me that they think thanks are thinking about queuing and then not. Really they should be popping this up like they do for automatic quests. Get the bell ringing for Pavlov’s dogs the right way.
Now onto the heart of the matter. Lowering the barrier to entry for tanks. You want to know why Blizzard hasn’t done anything to reduce the barrier to entry for tanks? Because the responsibility isn’t the factor. If it was responsibility alone, they could easily retool things to share responsibility between group members. I’d argue they have actually done a bit of that already. Now that different people are CCing and the healers job is a little less mindless, there is more responsibility on the other roles to play their parts well.
You want to know the real barrier to entry for tanks? You. Me. Everyone in the community. Have you ever rushed a tank to go through an instance faster than the tank wanted to? You just made that tank think twice about queuing again. Want to be the guy who pulls for the tank? You just made your tank switch to a DPS role permanently. Blizzard can’t code around the abysmal behavior by the WoW community since the inception of the LFG tool. I can attest to it, I’ve been a part of it, on both sides.
All Blizzard is doing is trying to offset the perceived risk for tanks. A tank who queues has to put themselves out for ridicule and aggravation every time they do so. Blizzard is hoping that pets and mounts can be a big enough perceived reward for players to accept that risk.
Want to lower the barrier to entry for tanks? Then lighten up inside your random groups.
Final part, you really want to incentive tanks? Forget the pets and mounts, let a tank who queues alone during a Call to Arms vote kick at will. They don’t get the rewards if they don’t finish, and they can push the morons who make LFG so bad back into the queue themselves.
I was a tank back in Wrath, and I hated it when people pulled before me, did stupid stuff like dps the CCed target or just run and facepull everything in the instance. Not to talk about the gogogo people. Those are the worst.
This expansion I’ve done very little tanking, thanks to burning out on it in Wrath. It’s one of the reasons I went back to my old warlock. (That and loving her) Tanking is just too stressful these days and you have to put up with so many horrible players. Not horrible in skill – but horrible in manners.
I rolled two tanks in Wrath, one was a Druid which ended up a healer by the time I hit Northrend mostly because I liked tree healing so much.
Then I made a DK tank. It was the most stressful experience of my life. Then piled on top of the stress was ridicule because I was tanking an original heroic with 1 trinket green.
I just ramped up my Druid again because my guild needs more, and I still haven’t queued up, not even for a normal because it was such a bad experience.
>Want to lower the barrier to entry for tanks? Then lighten up inside your random groups.
Alright, since we know this will never happen because “you’re the problem, not me”; what’s the real answer? I don’t believe that increased ‘pay’ will be enough incentive in the long run. For random dungeons, I think they honestly need to ‘break’ the model in FAVOR of the tanks and healers. It’s clear to understand why this shouldn’t happen in raids, you’d skew the “core” game and people would breeze through the content. Personally, I don’t think re-incorporating CC reduced any responsibility on the tank; they’re still the ones people look to for marking, and now you need to not only know the abilities of every mob, but the cc abilities (and who they work with) of every spec.
>I can’t sheep that, it’s undead.
>LOL noob tank
Is this really what they thought would make tanking more ‘fun’? And now there’s the constant motion and fear of breaking the cc (who broke that?), with the sudden requirement on picking up the loose mob (who now comes pre-loaded with plenty of aggro on the healer and cc caster). Getting the opportunity to integrate survival tools in with these other challenges is just … too much, in my opinion.
I’m not sure your suggestion about infinite power on kicking would help much, either, though. Many tanks already have thick skin and/or a superiority complex. Do you really want the tank kicking the guy in all greens who’s putting out 8K because he wants the minimum to be 11K?
It took me a long time to come up with an answer and this is the closest I can come. My objective was primarily not expecting anyone to change and not requiring more out of them than the game already currently does.
I feel like this solution not only fixes the queue time dilemma, but may also fix the other gripe and that is that DPS won’t ever get these cool little BoA satchels unless they roll a tank. Best part is, all it requires of Blizzard is to give us what we’ve asked for a long time.
Infinite ignore lists. We live in the world of Twitter and Facebook, you can’t tell me it’s beyond the technological possibilities of Blizzard to allow us to ignore as many people as we want. The issue for them, I believe, is a fundamental issue. They feel like this game is a MMO so no one should be an island. You shouldn’t be able to opt out of the social experience of an online game for them, so they want to make sure we stay in the community. I’m sorry but when you’re player base is this large, that demand is way to unrealistic.
For this to work I’d want to be able to ignore people after a run. So I want to be able to see the players I’ve run with during my current logged in session. Not all time, but while I’m currently logged on, or maybe for the last 6 hours. I’d want these names to be shareable, because if I have someone I trust tell me not to group with this player, I want to avoid them without ever having seen them.
In my magical land where this is implemented and works exactly like I think it will we could actually reach a point where all the crappy DPS have been ignore by all the competent tanks and tanks and healers are sitting around waiting for a DPS to queue.
Now there’s ramp up for this. Your ignore list is going to have to be built. But imagine if they rolled this out with the incentives? So the incentives are a temporary band-aid to get the jaded ones to buy back in with the promise of a better future to hold them over. Sure you could reach a spot where someone keeps ignore people, but they probably have way too high of standards. You’re also going to have people who refuse to understand they’re “that guy” and have to wait forever for someone who hasn’t ignore them yet. But that’s the beauty of the bell curve Blizzard. Those cases are edge cases and even if they unsubscribe won’t really hurt your pockets. Plus think about the possibility of luring back people who have been jaded by this sometimes wretched sometimes wonderful community?
Alright, now that I have replied as if this were a blog post, I’ll end it here, but I do encourage more comments!
I’ve made it to 85 on a rogue, and I’m a 76 Warlock. So, I’ve gone through most of the content… TWICE, as DPS.
Wanting to know what “tanking” was all about, I started a warrior (I’m not counting the 4-5 instances on my DK, because Hellfire Ramparts is almost as bad as Ragefire Chasm in the “tank not needed” department).
Here’s been my experience: DPS is stupid and pulls stuff too often. I can forgive the hunter who tab+targets mobs and hits tab one too many times, it happens to all of us. I’m talking about Rogues (yes, I play a rogue, so I’m most critical of rogues) who think they can sneak through an entire dungeon not understanding that your stealth only works on mobs YOUR LEVEL AND LOWER…. No, they go around thinking they’re “Joe Cool”, and end up pulling a pack while our healer is getting mana, and we end up wiping!
DPS is stupid! The thing that infuriates me more than anything, Arms/Fury warriors. They go rushing in, despite the fact that I was heading towards the mobs to pull. Hey, Fury/Arms – IF YOU WANT TO TANK, GO PROT AND TANK, OTHERWISE, YOU’RE DPS, STOP PULLING!
Early dungeons are stupid: The early dungeons in the game have so much forgiveness in them, that a tank really isn’t necessary. The problem: This type of behavior gets bred into people, and when they hit 85, they think it’s the same world, and it’s not. when the tank asks for time to mark mobs, plan the pull, etc, they get told to hurry and pull.
I’ve started doing something new: I have a macro that I only hit when I enter a dungeon on my tank, it simply prints text to /p. “You tank it, you spank it. I WILL NOT COME TO YOUR AID. If you die, you’ll learn that your job is not tanking, that’s my job”. More than once they have thought I was joking… More than one person has died while I “lol’d” their corpse.
No, it may sound like I’m a “prick tank” like “all the others”, but in reality, I thank the healer after almost every pull. I make sure to tell the DPS that they are doing a great job (usually by some snide joke like, “Don’t hit so hard, makes it harder for me to keep aggro… LOL”). I try to make the experience as pleasant for everyone as I can, because in the end, we all need one another.
You want to fix the queue problem: 1) Remove LFD; or implement some sort of “permanent mark” on the player so that there are now consequences for their action. 2) Tanks have a larger responsibility for the group: Give them a larger say in the group. Vote-Kick only works if 3 people agree (notwithstanding the guild-queues), well, give tanks 2 of those votes. Now if he and one other person agree you’re being an dick, you’re removed, and a “black mark” goes on your record.
These are just my thoughts poured out, but this whole Call to Arms thing really does bother me, because I don’t like tanking, I’ve done it, I continue to do it, but it’s not something I rush home to do. There are those who do like tanking, and for them, the CtA is unnecessary, there are those like me that done, and the CtA won’t change my queue habits, then there are the morons who think they can tank, but can’t (like me), who will ruin my dungeons runs when I get my ‘lock to 85 and start running heroics.
Great, can’t wait
This story is so common it’s scary, and it started almost immediately after the release of the LFD tool. I can’t convince myself the WoW community at large is a lost cause, but it doesn’t seem to be getting much better and imho it should have started to rebound a bit by now.
Not being much of a console gamer, I wonder how people deal with this kind of stuff on like Xbox Live. That’s allegedly full of abusive vitriol and that’s using voice communication!