FFXIV: Tales from the Duty Finder – Deep Dungeon Dork
Maybe it’s just old age. But I just don’t have a lot of tolerance for people who have no intention of being nice to other players in Duty Finder anymore.
I tell myself I should be understanding and non-confrontational and work towards a good experience for everyone. But the truth is, I’ve learned that there’s just some people out there you can’t stress over.
Deep Dungeon Diving
Last night, the Posse was in the Deep Dungeon for a variety of reasons. Vix and Xaa needed Scripture Tomes. I was leveling my Paladin and practicing tanking in a group environment… so I was already playing in unfamiliar waters and a bit on the edge from trying to perform well for my group.
We cleared floor 10, and Syn needed to go for the night. I was a little nervous about picking up a random because I’m still new at tanking, but we did. Floors 10-20 went just fine, so I was feeling slowly more confident about things.
Then Floors 20-30 happened.
Deep Dungeon Dork
Dork is a kind word for this guy, George Magnusson from the Cactuar server. The first thing I noticed is that the guy is wearing nothing, and has dyed his trousers the same color as his skintone… to appear naked.
At first, I thought this was one of the Emporer’s New galmours, but looking at his Lodestone profile, it appears he was actually, truly, wearing nothing. Even though the game gives a fresh Machinist gear.
This doesn’t matter in the Deep Dungeon, I know, since gear doesn’t count. But it just shows the guy’s mindset.
Alrighty then. I’m not one to judge someone’s naked glamour. So we get going.
I noticed he already had a red weapon. Which means his gear was 60/60… and I was curious why in the world he was running a floor 20-30 when he would have gotten a lot more out of a level 51+ run.
That was a hint that this guy wasn’t there to sightsee.
For the Posse, Deep Dungeon is a leisurely bit of content. We’re there to search for treasure hordes, level our classes, learn our jobs, and have a low-stress time.
This guy wanted to rush. And I mean rush.
I saw this was his intent, and started skipping rooms without treasure that we would have otherwise cleared for DD experience. But that wasn’t good enough for him. He’d go and sit on the transporter while we were clearing rooms for gold chests.
We shrugged that off and did our own thing. He became impatient and camped the transporter more and more.
It wasn’t that we were really that slow in clearing things, he just wanted to bully us into skipping content that we wanted to engage with. He didn’t take the hint that the rest of the party was going to do this whether he liked it or not… and it would have, you know, actually sped things up if he’d helped us instead of sulking on the transporter.
Finally, on Floor 24, he was impatiently camping the teleporter again, and decided to command the party to do his bidding.
We were clearing a room for a chest which ended up giving us an Intuition Pom. Using it, we saw there was a horde treasure on the floor, which we had previously cleared. We had all intentions of finding it (all of 30 seconds to do), since that’s what we were there for.
Xaa was being his optimistic self saying, “Oh, certainly he won’t mind us stopping to find the horde chest!”
But of course, this made George get more salty and demanding.
I could have… should have… probably been polite and explained to him that we were here to clear for content and treasure, and that he would just have to wait. But you know, I’ve just seen so much attitude, it was after midnight, and a whole host of reasons… he just got my dander up.
I let him know we didn’t plan on doing what he demanded, and if he didn’t like it, he had options. It wasn’t as if we were trolling and holding back the party on purpose. We were just playing content as it was designed.
If he wanted a speed run, he should have gone in with a fixed party that would give him that. When you hit the Duty Finder, I’m sorry, but you have to give and take. We’d already been skipping rooms for him, so he was going to have to deal with us looking for our loot.
Floor 25
Things came to a head on the next floor. We cleared the first room, but then had a patrolling minotaur — the kind that does the 100-tonze Swing. That was fine, except a lure trap was triggered, and that spawned 3 more minotaurs!
Now, I’m a noob tank, so I’m not so practiced at knowing my emergency buttons… if I had very many at all at level 43. I put on every cooldown I could and jumped into the fray, grabbing all the aggro to protect my party — yeah, even the jerk.
I tried to avoid the Swings, but the mobs are large and their range is large, so I ended up getting ping-ponged across the room, eating 2 or 3 of them. Another minotaur came down the hall and I was shot outside of the healer’s range, so that was it for me. I bit the dust.
Vix, thankfully, had things under hand and popped a Rage to clear the room.
Meanwhile, George was making himself useful by sneering “GG” at the party, even after I risked myself to save his sorry butt. I was the only death we had.
While Vix helpfully used the Rage pom on clearing other rooms, George decided to stand over my body and laugh at me.
Well, he just earned himself a Vote Kick at that point. Hope he had fun making up the lost time of re-running all those floors again in another party.
We went on to clear the floor just fine with the three of us.
This is why tanking for randoms stresses me out.
By the time we cleared it, it was pretty late, but I was flustered from the incident, and not sleepy. The Posse was going to run another set of floors, and I was close to level 42, so I decided to go ahead and go with them one more round.
And you know what? That one went fine, too, despite getting another random Machinist. Which made me feel better.
It’s called teamwork.