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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsDrama Mamas: Tank entitlement
by Robin Torres 
Aug 6th 2010 at 4:00PM
There are many kinds of tanks. There are skilled, geared, uber-tanks and just-learning-how-to-taunt tanks and OMG-I've-never-meleed-before tanks and I-queued-tank-so-I-wouldn't-have-to-wait tanks. There are tanks of various personalities, talents and patience. But this week, we only concern ourselves with the tanks who think they're entitled to do whatever they want because groups are at their mercy. We have two letters that ask about this issue.
Drama Mamas,
In the past few weeks I have noticed a disturbing trend in with the dungeon finder. At least twice a week I will get into a group where one player will pull everything in sight then leave. I play a mage so this means I get killed in milliseconds, which is no fun at all.
I hate to say it, but it's usually -- OK, always -- the tank. So far the only "solution" I've found is blocking that particular player so I don't get grouped with him again, but that won't keep it from happening with other jerks.
Have either of you experienced this, or am I just extremely unlucky?
Instadeath
Dear Drama Mamas,
I'm an old hand at WoW, but recently, I decided to try something a little different. Since my husband and I started a small guild of our own, we also decided to roll a couple of characters that would basically be us in WoW form -- two orcs, his a warrior, and mine, a shaman.
So here's my problem: I'm trying to learn to heal, and shaman are the most efficient healers I've seen. However, I'm still low level, only 18, and I know that I won't be getting really useful skills to heal until I'm a little higher. However, I want to practice, and I've been trying to use low-level dungeons PUGs to do so. Most of my experiences have been pretty nice, as the first thing I say is, "I'm new to healing, so can we please go slowly and not aggro too many things?" However, that all changed two days ago, and I've been afraid to try healing again because of it.
I was in the Deadmines, and I was brought into a dungeon in progress. As soon as I arrived, I could see the problem -- the tank was aggroing too many of the goblin engineers in the foundry area. We immediately wiped, and I suggested that we try to skip the goblins in the center of the room. When we got back, we wiped again, and the tank blamed me, then left. Then we got a new tank, and she did the same thing as the first one, causing a third wipe. She began yelling at everyone for "pulling adds," and at this point, the group fell apart. Unphased, I rejoined the random dungeon finder, only to be put into a new dungeon with Tank No. 2.
She immediately started yelling, "Kick that healer! She's lousy; she let us die in the last dungeon!" A few people asked what happened, so I explained -- but all the whil,e the tank was yelling, "She's lying, she's just horrible, she can't play healers!" I ended up leaving that group and putting Tank No. 2 on ignore, but since then I've been afraid to try again, and my shaman is sitting forlorn and lonely in The Barrens.
Is there any way I can convey just how new I am at healing to future groups so I can continue to play my healer? I don't know enough people around my level on my server to make a teaching group, and I'm terrified of trying to run in a PUG now. Any advice you can give me would be greatly appreciated.
Shaman Scared Silly
Drama Mama Robin: I put these two emails together because I feel they both stem from the same cause: Tank Entitlement, or TE. TE has been a problem since the dungeon finder first appeared on the scene, and it's not going away any time soon. Though both tanks and healers are in demand and have shorter queues, tanks are the ones who set the pace of the PUG and therefore can make or break the experience. Of course, tanks should go at the pace of the healer. Duh. But those suffering from TE go at their own pace, regardless of level, dungeon or skill. Let's look at the the possible mindset of those whose brains are addled by TE:- "I don't have to wait in the queue, therefore I have the power to quit any group I want to instantly join another."
- "Everyone else has a wait in the queue; therefore, they have to do what I say if they don't want to wait."
- "Everyone is a baddie except for me."
- "I am miserable in the physical world, have no control over my non-virtual life and therefore, I grief people in game to make me feel powerful."
Instadeath, griefers grief and funsuckers suck. Though I haven't personally experienced your issue, I'm sure many have, and I'm also sure it will continue during this whole summer-break-boredom-before-an-expansion thing we're going through. TE makes griefing easy in random dungeons. Put the tank on ignore and move on. Try not to let it bother you.
Scared, you're learning, and the majority of players at lower levels are learning. This is common and, as you've already found, most people are more than happy to work together in the lower levels. The bad experiences that keep you from enjoying PUGs are due to TE. Again, put the nasty tanks on ignore and try not to let it bother you. Just like with Mr. Too Sexy from last week, there is no point in arguing with those who suffer from TE. You'll just increase your own frustration as well as cause more drama for everyone else.
There is only one way I can think of to avoid TE altogether and that is to always make sure you only random with a known, good tank. This is easier said than done. But if you are planning a duo to take through dungeon leveling, plan for a healer/tank combo. If you have some guildies with baby tanks, make playdates with them. Since TE is a common problem, you could even advertise for a tank in trade chat and hold tryouts for tanks on your server with similar schedules to yours. Your queues will be shorter, too.
Drama Mama Lisa: Instadeath and Scared, I would echo Robin's advice and add an additional strong word of advice: Don't allow these boorish bullies to make you feel shoved into a corner. We've talked before about every player's ability -- your ability -- to set the tone and influence the player community. Let's take that idea for another spin.The way you react to vote-kickers and bullies is every bit as influential to the tone of our online community as the screechings of the problem children. If group members are going way over the line with criticism and attacks, stay calm; your restraint makes it painfully obvious what shrieking harpies they really are. Don't argue with these creatures, which gives them the platform for displaying their bullying and egos that they so desperately crave. Keep using your ignore list, just as you have been. A light, well-timed comment ("Whew! Another worm leaps free from the apple barrel!") can help restore calm and establish solidarity among those of you still left in an abandoned group. What's most helpful in the long run is not to cause a commotion over how horribly you were wronged, but to counteract the effect of the bullies and spread an attitude of empowerment and respect among other players. Immaturity and callous disregard for others aren't the only forms of behavior that are contagious; your reactions can be equally powerful in creating the online world you want to live and play in.
Dodge the drama and become that player everyone wants in their group with a little help and insight from the Drama Mamas. Remember, your mama wouldn't want to see your name on any drama. Play nice ... and when in doubt, ask the Drama Mamas at DramaMamas@wow.com. Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Drama Mamas
Reader Comments (Page 5 of 13)
James Aug 7th 2010 12:20PM
In fact when it comes to raids the demand for healers is higher than tanks, especially 25-man.
winterhawk Aug 6th 2010 4:40PM
Judging from the way things are tank-wise in the beta right now, there are going to be quite a few rude awakenings come Cata time. It's simply not going to be *possible* to pull huge groups of mobs and AoE them down anymore. Any group that tries (whether it's the fault of the tank or overzealous DPS) is going to be in for a world of hurt. Although it was quite jarring to step into a level 80/81ish normal instance (Blackrock Caverns) and have trouble with trash packs when I'm used to tanking ICC25 (12/12 normal, 8/12 heroic), I think it's a well-needed wakeup call. Instances are just stupid easy nowadays, and not just for the uber-geared. A little challenge will keep people on their toes.
I do weep for what LFG groups are going to be like for the first few weeks, though.
Grovinofdarkhour Aug 6th 2010 5:10PM
This is the way it's been sounding. The people who yell "gogogogogo" because they need to complete 5 heroics an hour and bitch at anyone who doesn't follow their pace can only do so because we all overgear the content by so much, and they are going to get eaten alive by 5-mans in Cata if they approach them the same way.
(Of course, then they'll blame the tank, blame the healer, blame the dps, blame whoever wasn't going at the exact same pace they were, scream like a 2-year old, nerdrage until blood pours out of their eyes and smoke pours out of their nose, log off in a hysterical fit, cry for an hour, wack off to hentai, and scream upstairs for Mom make them a bowl of ice cream because someone on the internet just hurt their feelings, pleeeeeeeeeeeeeze?????)
Kaphik Aug 6th 2010 4:39PM
Dear Shaman Scared Silly,
Don't worry about learning to heal in instances at level 18. I've got two 80 priests I raid on, and I'm leveling up a paladin and a shaman for healing. I found the best thing you could do is learn your class, and you'll learn your healing capabilities as you level up. Five man groups don't really start distinguishing roles until you get into Scarlet Monastery, from my experiences. That's where things really start to shake out, and a good place to learn to tank or heal.
Another thing I noticed in the past few months is that a large number of people running low level instances think they can run them like they do Wrath heroics. When things don't quite work out, i.e. a tank not being able to hold threat on an entire room or dps aoeing right off the bat, people get stupid and start blaming everyone else but themselves. However, lately it seems that people are much more forgiving and cooperative to new 80s in heroics. At least in my battlegroup..
The best thing you can do as a healer is learn to ignore, and /ignore, the outright rude and disrespectful people and just do your job. You'll find people that are willing to let you work on your skills, and you'll get better each time you do run as a healer in a group. Remember that in many random groups you won't be seeing the same people again if you don't immediately requeue. Don't let negative criticism bother you, because healing is pretty damn fun. Soon enough you'll be in demand, you just have to have a bit of patience. At level 18, you're just getting started!
Have fun!
throttlesays Aug 6th 2010 4:42PM
There's no easy solution to this, but there's a very simple answer to the cause of the phenomenon. Throughout WoW's lifespan, the game has been made increasingly casual, easy and youth-friendly to the point where it has had a profound impact on the playerbase as a whole. Several things have happened:
As the game was made significantly easier and more accessible to new gamers, more and more of the hardcore and veteran gamers started to leave, especially throughout TBC when WoW moved away from the believable, immersive and difficult style of gameplay that Blizzard had originally tried to emulate from Everquest 1. The game started to become less a world and more an entertainment machine, and this is the case to an even greater extent today. Many aspects of the game have been turned into something more akin to vendor machines, like how you mindlessly sign up to instances to recieve your automatic reward of tokens that you turn into gear in assembly line fashion. The game is no longer difficult, and this fosters a mentality that causes many players to shun anything hard or demanding. The players who cared about the challenge and the achivement (actual achievement, not the structurized in-game placebo achievement system) are largely gone, and in their place is a vast mass of players who lack that pride in accomplishing something challenging. They just want the end, and the means are best done in the easiest way possible.
There are still veterans, hardcores and prideful players in WoW, they've just become a tiny minority in a sea of frankly horrible players. There's a reason WoW is known to everyone who doesn't play it (or no longer plays it) as having the absolute worst playerbase of any online game, and that reason is the fact that Blizzard caters to that type of player. The "good" players now tend to keep to themselves, interacting mainly with their own guilds so as to not have to expose themselves to the painfully stupid, insufferable or hopelessly unskilled majority. This is a trade-off Blizzard has willingly made, and they cannot be blamed for wanting to attract more customers at the expense of the quality of its players, but the effect it has on gameplay is massive. The standard has dropped so much since the first year or two of WoW's lifespan that only older players can truly fathom this.
This, in turn, creates an environment where a) very few are willing to take on the greater challenge and responsibility of tanking 5-man dungeons and b) a disproportionately large number of the players you encounter in random dungeon groups are what can politely be called simpletons, because the game caters to them moreso than to mature gamers and because the remaining mature gamers are less inclined to associate with that crowd. This is essentially why tanks are often shitheads. It's the result of the steadily changing goals of Blizzard, their gradually increasing ambition of being the game that attracts all the teen and preteen players, as well as incidentally attracting all the ones who are too unskilled, unintelligent, or too socially inept to succeed in other MMORPGs; and the playing environment clearly reflects that change.
Many of my veteran gamer friends wouldn't dream of signing up for the instance group finder or joining a PUG raid, for the same reason that they wouldn't associate with people half their age or IQ in real life. Many more of them have moved on to games where this choice isn't a necessary evil. WoW is not a worse game than it was once, it just has a different design mentality, a different target audience, and a different type of playerbase. The type of player who would once have been the laughing stock of the server is now the average guy, the once average player is now highly skilled, and the once highly skilled is a tiny, shrinking minority because the game no longer caters to them at all. The same thing goes for maturity; there was a time when 20-something was young for a gamer, and I believe Everquest 1's average player age during its first years was closer to 30. I venture to guess that the average age of the WoW population - that portion of it that doesn't keep strictly to its own guild or circle of friends without interacting with the "outside world" - is half of that. I am not anti-youth, and I'm not even that old myself, but there is no denying than dealing with a fourteen year old is a lot pleasant than dealing with a mid-twenties player, both in terms of their social graces and their ability to play a game at an acceptable level of aptitude.
So this is why you have so few tanks available today, and why they tend to be pricks. The cripplingly large population of DPS players are no less douchebags, they just don't have the luxury of instant queues and crazed demand and thus don't behave as much like mouthbreathing troglodytes, insulting everything around them and demanding to be treated like kings because of their choice of spec. A practice which, by the way, was almost unheard-of in WoW's infancy when the game still catered to rational people.
RetadinMan Aug 6th 2010 4:48PM
Because everyone who hasn't played since Vanilla is bad, amirite?
Rakah Aug 6th 2010 4:51PM
It always irks me when people try to say that something that takes a long time is the same as something that is hard. That is not the case at all. For a good example of something that is short but hard play demon souls, particularly on harder playthroughs.
Vladeon Aug 6th 2010 4:58PM
Elitist much?
I've been playing the game since right before tbc came out and I don't really agree with your thesis that the influx of new players=an influx of terrible players. Sure there are some people that will bear tank in balance spec because they don't know any better, but the majority of tanks that I've seen in the LFG interface that are bad are kingslayers and people with pvp titles from back in the day. And every tank that has pulled too much and died at lower levels have been BoA tanks. The people who fail aren't the new players, but the older players who just see the LFG as a means to an end and want to do it as fast as they can, using the entire group as a means only in the Kantian sense of the word (see? even 18th century philosophers were against this sort of thing, and we still haven't learned).
el ranchero Aug 6th 2010 6:50PM
I don't think that's true at all.
You know why tanks are jerks in heroics? I can give you several reasons why:
1. Cross-realm instances. Back when everyone in your heroic was from your realm, word got around if you were a constant dick. Your reputation and your guild's reputation could suffer. Now there's no incentive not to take out your frustration on your instance mates or just be a jerk for the hell of it, because chances are you'll never see them again.
2. Tanks give it because tanks take it. Tanks have to deal with A LOT of b.s. in instances. Yes, there are the really bad players, but more to the point are the people who pull mobs to make the tank go faster, people who say "gogogogogogogo", healers who whine about the tank's numbers, dps who don't attack skull and pull aggro, etc. Of course that doesn't justify being a jerk to people, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying tanks often enter instances on the defensive and can develop a bad attitude pretty quickly.
Mayah Aug 6th 2010 5:11PM
You guys can call me elitist, but I kinda agree -
Doing an ICC raid should mean something - it shouldn't be the type of thing you can PUG out of trade chat. All I see on my server are people running ICC pugs. Since when should end level content be something that everyone can run? I much preferred it back in TBC - if you were in Sunwell, you really earned it - you worked hard for it.
End game raiding content should NEVER be puggable in trade chat - not ever, not any boss.
StClair Aug 6th 2010 5:11PM
Uphill, through the trash, both ways.
CrimsonEyedDeath Aug 6th 2010 5:23PM
In blues and resistence gear.
Grovinofdarkhour Aug 6th 2010 5:37PM
And all we had to fight the monsters with was a level 12 thrown weapon with 1/35 durability and we... liked it!
Heeden Aug 6th 2010 5:37PM
I've been playing since vanilla, I am a good player (courteous, understanding of newbs and capable of laughing at wipes as well as being competent with my class) and I often have good experiences in the LFG tool. Frequently I meet pleasent people, either newer players who are just learning or other "veterans" who like to remenisce about the old days.
Of course veterans are making a minority now because numbers can only expand by new players joining, but that doesn't mean they are all disappearing.
Also, back in the day, tanks were exceedingly rare. You could go for hours in Ironforge waiting to find one and then there was a chance they would absolutely suck or be a completely prima-donna jerk. It was just a little more tolerated then because tanking was a much harder job.
Pauguster Aug 6th 2010 5:43PM
So the content that the developers work the hardest on. The End game stuff should only be encountered by the most elite players, that according to you make up a tiny percent of the games population?
Thats why they created heroic versions, for the elite players you are talking about. Cuase even though you could pug Arthas, its highly unlikely people will successfully pug the heroic version until well into Cata.
Loreana Aug 6th 2010 6:35PM
There were 'undred and fifty of us livin in 't shoebox in 't middle of Molten Core...
thebl4ckd0g Aug 6th 2010 4:42PM
This topic is awesome, as we've been talking about this on the ventrilo i hang out with friends on recently. I have a pally tank, and when I play it, I wait for people to be ready. I've got a DPS of every other class, and I've been trying to gear them up with T9 and T10 equivalent pieces lately, but only with badges and such. There are so many fail healers and tanks in the random dungeon finder, my /ignore list is full of people not from my server. :(
Burnaphatone Aug 6th 2010 4:43PM
As a hardcore tank who loves his job, I must admit, I have left group at least once during a pull. The time I vividly remember it, was during midsummer festival, doing my Ahune daily. We had a DK would would not dps at all, and I was on my lunchbreak, so I was strapped for time. When I told him to start attacking the adds and dps the boss during the crystal phase, he told me to go have sex with myself. So I dropped group, I didn't have the time to deal with his attitude or his lack of team synergy, so I left. I don't feel bad about that occasion one bit, and the other 3 players can blame the dk for the tank leaving, not me being a jerk. To this day I have not once pulled and quit just to be a jerk, and if I do have to leave, i make sure it is after a pull and that the group understands why.
Cyno01 Aug 6th 2010 7:50PM
I've only done it once too, it was early in the morning, and I was up about 5 hours before I normally am because I had to be on a confrence call for work. I like to do my dailies and maybe a random or two during these so I hopped on my dk. He's my 3rd alt, but he's pretty well geared. Anyway...
Something easy, I think H-UK or something couple pulls in, nobodys died, haven't lost aggro once, this dps dk (in a mix of blue and pvp gear) starts giving me crap "lolol u suck, ur hp is crap for your gs", which is true, 4pc t10, 38k unbuffed, but that's in my frost aoe spec, but I have about 60% avoidance. Anyway, it's more than fine for heroics. He said this right as as we started the gauntlet I think, and I just replied "omg, you're right!" and dropped group.
Mayhew Aug 6th 2010 4:43PM
I recently had a similar experience to the TE situations described above, but it didn't come from a tank. I got put in random heroic with 3 people that belonged the same guild (tank, healer, and dps, I think), and one other pug dps player. The dpser from the guild group is the one I had the dialog with.
Me: Hello :)
Him: stfu
Me: Wow! A real, live, in-game troll! And on the Alliance side, no less!
Him: Oh look a gay kid
Me: We have confirmation, folks!
Him:
The other two from the same guild remained silent through that whole exchange. I don't know if they were embarrassed by their guildy or what, but I was impressed by how well the light, well-timed comment seemed to work in that situation.