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.
Unpleasant people online. There’s a lot of them! In my experience, block/report them and play again. If everyone did that, eventually all the unpleasant people would just be playing with each other :-p
I do wish that the blacklist in FFXIV worked that way. Sadly, even if you block someone, apparently it doesn’t stop the game from adding them to your random Duty Finder parties. So the only thing it’s good for is muting people you don’t want to hear. Seems a little useless to me. :/
Though, I do like the idea of unpleasant people playing with each other!
I’m sure there are more than a few games that have a “jerk pool” of sorts where people who have poor reputations or regularly quit out early are put when matchmaking. It would be pretty tough to do with an MMO beyond having a party agree to never have the person again if they’re randomly added.
Since I swore off multiplayer gaming I’ve been a much happier person. But then I don’t have a posse so for me it was all randoms, all the time.
I’m surprised you didn’t vote to kick him well before that point!
I try to give people a chance before I kick them… I rarely, rarely vote kick a person unless they’re being pretty toxic. I should have been less snarky, but the guy was camping the exit to rush us out of the rooms, and that already had me annoyed.
Usually, my Free Company fills in the slots for this dungeon, so running with randoms is rare for me. I understand the desire to not play with randoms though, absolutely!
You have the patience of a saint. I was ready to vote kick the first time you said he was camping the transporter and not cooperating with the party. This is how everyone who has to rely on PUGs winds up becoming short-tempered, mean and “elitist” after a while. :/
Yeah, I try to give people time to turn it around, and sometimes they do when they see the rest of the team is going a certain way. I’m not sure if this guy didn’t realize the rest of us were a pre-formed group, or he actually wanted to be kicked at that point, but verbally scoffing and making the run miserable is where I draw the line.
See, this is the dilemma of our hobby for me. These kinds of encounters distress me! People say just move on, but emotions don’t always perform on command. Random negative experiences like this stress me out and can leave me upset for a while! On the other hand, teamwork and supportive experiences are awesome! It’s anxiety lottery; am I going to have a cheerful, positive experience that makes me a happier and more productive person on this dungeon run, or am I going to randomly draw a terrible, abrasive encounter that will wreck my head? Sigh.
I know what you mean. This happened shortly before I’d go to bed, and it had me so flustered I couldn’t get to sleep until much later than I would have normally. I told myself I shouldn’t let it bother me, but it still works me up.
@Athie – I’m the same way. A bad experience like that can leave me stressed out for hours, sometiumes even days. I obsess over it.
You’re not alone. I guess that’s why I try to laugh about it and let some steam off by blogging about the situation.
It does sound like you were more than patient. I’ve not played since this dungeon came in so the implications of what he was doing are somewhat lost on me but it is sad to read this. We generally avoid pugging any places in MMOs thesedays because the overriding norm seems to be to “rush” everything, which I hate.
The FFXIV devs seem to have done a pretty good job of incentivising players to rerun older group content, so that new players and alt characters can actually get groups. Even with the social mechanisms in place though they haven’t been able to eliminate this kind of selfishness.
I also hate rushing everything. This dungeon is fairly short, and the rewards for taking it a little slower are often worth it. It’s not your standard FFXIV dungeon. For someone to sit on the teleporter that will take you to the next floor was basically like someone not contributing to what the rest of the team was doing while sitting by the exit tapping their foot with impatience. Sorry, I want my loot! XD
I hate when people just assume you want to skip shit in PoTD and then stand there while everyone is killing mobs. Good on you for vote kicking him.
I think this is only the second or third time I’ve vote kicked someone from a group like this… in over three years. Not a bad record. But I do put up with a lot of crap before I kick.
You have my condolences. I would like to say it’s the intersection of farmable rewards and instanced group content that brings out the “gogogo” people. When I was a full-time cat paladin tank doing the duty roulette and raids with, somebody was usually a first-timer. In that context, enhanced rewards and the commendation system provided (additional, extrinsic) motivation for focusing on co-operation and helping each other out. Your Deep Dungeon experience seems to have spawned a random NPC who thought they were on a basketball team where the goal was to see who could score the most individual points. Not fun.
I’m to the point where I straight up refuse to do instanced group content with random people. (I actually had a meltdown while co-tanking a TSW raid with mixed friends/randoms and stopped playing “endgame content” altogether because the non-friend co-tank was being a hardass.) I just now got kicked from a level 3 (out of 100) fractal in GW2 because I was in the fractal already (and told everyone so in party chat) instead of standing next to the rest of the group outside. Like, what? I’m so done with that.
Find more friends to run with! George Magnusson and other psychic vampires are not worth your time and attention. If I still played I’d run with you but that ship has sailed. 🙂
xoxoxo Karinshastha
I usually try not to group with randoms, either. This party started out with four Free Company members, but one had to drop out to go to sleep. So we decided to keep going (the experience was good), and pick up a random. Thankfully, there were three of us and one of him in this instance.
You’re more adventurous than I am, that’s for sure! I’d rather do the rest of it with three people if possible or not at all.
Trolls be Trolls:/ met a couple of people just like that guy. I’ve tried saying, dude get a a fixed party if u don’t want the chests and hoards, but nooo, rest of the word is doing it wrong, not them ;). Now I just ignore em and/or just boot em. Feel my miqo’te boot far up yar arse.