Posts with tag annoying

I like Ambrosyne's Vent chart, even if it is a little harsh. It's true, when you're not part of the raid leadership (and especially when you're a talker like me), it's sometimes a little hard to tell whether it's ok to try and crack a joke in the middle of the raid on Vent or not. Usually: no. I've learned the same thing by my own experience -- no matter how easy the fights are or how your guild is doing, the raidleader probably won't appreciate you trying to play some "Safety Dance" over Vent during Heigan's dance-off.

However, in my experience, there usually is a place for joking during raids, and it's the guild chat channel. Actually, that's where I do most of my communicating -- I leave the Vent chat open for raidleaders to address the whole raid with the actually important stuff, and the rest of us hang around in the peanut gallery of raid chat, grats'ing each other on good loot and slipping in some commentary for the raid. You've got to have fun, right?

Raidleaders, are there any good times to open up Vent and let everybody talk? And everybody else: have there been problems in your raids thanks to an unwanted Vent outburst, or does your guild pretty much understand that silence is golden?

Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.

All the great new content in Wrath has brought a number of my guild members back to the game. It's great to see their names lit up in the roster again. But I imagine that, in some guilds, players have come back that no one is particularly happy to see logging in again. This week, one reader wants to know how to handle a member that annoys just about everybody.

Hey Scott!

I'm an officer in a pretty big, casual guild (roughly 100 people). One issue that [. . .] has caused quite a lot of discussion in officer chat and forums alike is a few of our members. These members are disliked by many people in guild, due to their overall behavior, as in repeatedly asking for the same things in chat, and complaining during raids (among other small things, that over time drives people crazy).

Now, this have gone on for a fairly long time, and we have come to the place where most officers just want to get rid of them. Problem is, they have not actually broken any of the rules. They are close to at many times, but they never actually cross that line and do something that is clearly against the rules. We don't have a "no annoying people rule."

I was going to ask a question today about dual-heading (that is, using more than one monitor to play the game), but Amanda has already covered that topic very well. So instead, we went to Twitter for a question, where sw0rdfish came up with paydirt:

Hey WoW Insider. What's the joy in ganking lowbies over and over?

-sw0rdfish

I agree, great topic for you readers to break down for us today. What's with all the ganking? It's just a standby on PvP servers -- you're going to get ganked, and at least once, you're going to get camped again and again and again. I play mostly on PvE servers, so I've never had to worry about this stuff, but if you've ever done it, what exactly is it that drives you to camp lowbies? Are you doing it just for fun, are you just completing the circle of ganking because you were ganked while a lowbie, or are you just doing your part and grabbing your sword to fight the Horde?

Good question. And there are definitely certain times when a fragile truce arises -- usually when new content shows up (expect a PvP truce in early Northrend later this week). What say you, readers?

And if you have a question for the readers of WoW Insider (we need as many as you've got -- the buffers are low!), drop us an email at ASK at WoW Insider dot com, and you might see it here next week.

Previously on Ask WoW Insider...

I don't like to call attention to trolls on the internet; I think they're vile little beasts who need to be put out old-school DnD style with a roll of a six sided die and a cast of a flaming arrow. But one thing in particular some trolls are doing has caught my attention: a fake WoW guild being as annoying as possible on the forums.

I won't name this guild's name, or tell you where they're from, since I don't need them tracking me down in game or getting a bigger head. What they do to annoy the frack out of everyone (and that was my obligatory Battlestar Galactica reference for the week) is pretty lame - they post updates to bosses they haven't killed. For instance, right now they're claiming they've downed Brutallus. They even have a clearly photoshopd kill picture to prove it. However they haven't, and if you look at their armory profiles no one in the guild is above Kara level gear.

This guild will go and post in progression threads, taking up page after page of space. Eventually these threads have to be closed since they become full, and new ones started. However the trolls are right there to start everything again. 99% of the people on the realm ignore them, however there is always the 1% that gives them the attention they desire.

What can be done about this?

For some reason on my home server, Eldre'Thalas, when folks see a tank standing around in Shattrath without anything to do, they immediately start sending tells asking if I want to go tank such-and-such an instance for them. I don't mind it when my friends or guild mates do it, but it does get a little annoying when complete strangers do it constantly.

So I've come up with a solution: spirit and intellect armor. Whenever I'm doing anything other than fighting, I'm wearing bright yellow spirit and intellect armor that I got off the AH. I spent about a hundred gold on this dastardly set. It looks awful, it smells awful, and it's a great repellent for annoying unsolicited LFG tells.

I got the idea from looking at people's gear who are apping to my guild. Some of it was just plain nuts – spirit gear on Warriors, "of stamina" gear on Priests, things like that. Of course, they might have just been logged out in that gear the same way I'm logged out in mine right now. But when you're apping to a guild and one of the requirements is to log out in PvE gear for the next week, well, too bad so sad for them.

Last week reader Jay sent me a screen shot of something I hadn't seen in a while – a gold seller using /tell to spread their wares. For a long time Blizzard has maintained this is illegal activity, and has taken substantial steps to negate the spammers ability to do this. In game spam protection done behind the scenes has been working well. However it looks like the gold spammers have found a way around this.

Initially I was pretty surprised to see the screen shot. After all, this hadn't been happening much. However a couple of days after getting this, I found some gold spam in my chat log as well. I was floored. Now they're back to their old tricks, and even some new ones.

Like Sniffledoo, I'm done with it. This ingame gold whispering is getting worse and worse, and it's time something drastic was done about it.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you can consider yourself lucky, but I'm guessing it's become pretty widespread by now (at first, I'd just chalked it up to being on a high population server). Spammers are almost constantly sending whispers ingame to buy and sell gold and powerlevel characters. Blizzard has of course said that they are banning players who get reported as spammers, but, also like Sniffledoo, I think it's time they went another step-- it's time to go after the sites that are doing it.

As always, IANAL, but clearly we know where these spam messages are coming from-- they are being sponsored by the sites advertised (I can, unfortunately, list a few of them off the top of my head, but I won't link to any of them, because they just don't deserve it). Does Blizzard have a legal claim against these sites for ruining the player experience and consistently breaking the TOS? If they have documented this activity, couldn't they take it to court and at least sue these sites for ruining the game experience?

It's gotten to the point where I would almost be willing to agree to a TOS that says "I agree to be sued for spamming" if it means Blizzard has a better legal footing against these idiots. Reporting these players is the best thing to do right now (even though these are alts that are just created and deleted, maybe even in a matter of minutes), and there are even addons now that will block and report this stuff for us, but why can't Blizzard do more? Why haven't they gone after the sites sponsoring this junk?

Update: A couple of people have already mentioned the gold links on this site-- in case you missed it, we are constantly working to get rid of them. WoW Insider does not condone or endorse any activities that are against the TOS, including powerleveling and gold buying and selling.

I've never recruited anyone to the game (I have helped convince a friend to play, actually, but the truth is that he didn't need much convincing), so I've never imagined a situation like the one that faces Aerna: she and another friend recruited a third friend to play WoW with them, but now he's become nothing but an annoyance. He begs for powerleveling, doesn't know how to play his class, and generally makes a mess of things, forcing her to run away from him to play Horde (so it's not a complete loss..).

So what can she do? I'm trying to figure out why they're friends in the first place-- can it really be true that someone you like hanging out with in RL can turn into a menace inside Azeroth? It could be that he just needs some guidance on ingame etiquette and strategy. On the other hand, I can definitely see how two people who don't have much in common (co-workers, maybe) might find their relationship pushed to the limit when brought to the world of Azeroth. Have you ever recruited someone to play the game that actually ruined the experience for you?

Impossibility over on the WoW Ladies Livejournal is, I'm sure she'll agree, a newbie. But she did just finish Deadmines (grats!), and she was surprised, after completing the instance, to see the message above. Her rogue ripped her off!

Now, as she soon learned, she didn't really get pickpocketed-- rogues can only pickpocket mobs, not players. But she did get emoted-- what happened was that the player typed "/e successfully steals.." and it appeared like that above. You can do all kinds of fun things with emotes, because although they always appear in orange (in the default UI), players, even experienced ones, can get them confused with all the other messages coming by. The most common trick is usually "/e rolls 99 (1 - 100)", which looks like you got a really nice roll (except for the color, of course, which makes the trick easy to spot in a big list of rolls). Another good one is "/e receives [Sword of Awesomeness]," or just shift-click whatever item you want it to look like you just looted something cool on your own.

A warning: Just like the old Piccolo, lots of players usually find this more annoying than funny, so use it at your own peril (and you should never use it to try and rip other players off-- alert players will know exactly what you're doing, and then you're in real trouble). But a little levity sometimes goes a long way, and it's a fun trick to use once in a while.

With every new expansion comes a new mob to hate. Pictured here is my most hated mob for The Burning Crusade. Found in the Shadow Labyrinth of Auchindoun, these Fel Overseers hit cloth really hard, and have a very annoying Intimidating Shout fear effect that is annoyingly resistible and resets aggro on the tank until the tank is back in melee range. When I say "annoyingly resistible" I mean that I often resist it, and the tank doesn't, so the tank is halfway across the room and I'm being stabbed at for for 1,200 to 1,900 hit points per swing, with a very nice critical hit one time of 4,796. My favorite part is how this thing is classed as a "demon", but immune to both Banish and Enslave.

The best method I've found for dealing with them is to make sure everyone is in very short range, so everyone gets feared, including the healers. Hunters are excused if they can feign fast enough to achieve the same effect. This generally means the mob will follow the tank around. Since there's no warning, and he hits so hard, trying to stay in berzerker stance to have anti-fear abilities up is somewhat hazardous. The cool down on the fear is very short, on the order of 30-45 seconds, so even fear ward and berzerker stance will eventually be on cool down when the fear hits. If I don't get feared, I either will try and drain-tank the big guy, or simply run after my tank, so the tank is in melee range as soon as the fear fades. Either way has about a 75% success rate, where success is me not needing a rez at the end.

So, The Burning Crusade has been out for about a month now, have you found a new most annoying mob?

Everyone thinks it's so easy to be a warlock these days. Sure, we have dots that will kill you long after we ourselves have died to your teammates. Sure, we can have a pet that is essentially a small warrior attack you while we sip Foster's in the shade. Or we can ... we can ... I'm not exactly sure what the Destruction 41-point talent is because no one uses it. Some kind of AOE? Whatever. Anyway, the point is that life as a warlock has its annoyances. Take this conversation my level 51 lock, repairing her armor in Undercity, had with a level 16 warrior in Thunder Bluff today.

Warrior: can you please summon me to undercity?

Me (figuring the guy at least said please): Sorry, I don't have a group right now.

Warrior: how hard can it be to find a group in UC :P

Me (thinking I'm not going to find a group to summon this guy without payment): How much are you going to pay me?

Warrior: 0.00

Me: So basically, you want me to use my own soul shard and my own time to find a group so I can summon your lazy behind?

Warrior: um ... yeah

Me: Hell no. Walk.

The average warlock has this conversation many, many times before hitting 60, and an interminable number of times thereafter. In a raid, you have to summon stragglers, dispense healthstones, soulstone important people and make sure you have Curse of Elements up or your mages will eat you alive. Speaking of mages, they also have it rough when it comes to being bugged -- they have to portal people places and create food and water for the whole raid!

Warlocks, mages, how do you deal with the annoyance of random tells for "summons" or "wtr plz" when you're chilling in Ironforge?