f13.net

I'll flat out say it, I'm a MMORPG neophyte.

I've played more than a handful, but I've never gotten beyond what would be considered the low-midlevel game in any of them. Maybe this is why I lack perspective on this...

I just wasted 7 hours attempting to do the VanCleef quest, and came out of it with just a handful of EXP, some shitty loot, and a fucking pounding headache.

I spent 2 hours in a group composed mostly of theoretical people, whom only 2 materialized out of the ether. As for the other dozen or so people that were in the process of joining us, I do not know.

We piddled around and got roughly halfway through before getting slaughtered. The group quickly disbanded due to a bunch of made-up reasons afterwards.

The other 5 hours was spent with a group that included me, a hunter who glitched into the sky and had to log out, 2 paladins (including 1 extra special guest paladin who was with us for about 3 seconds after the night elf girl poofed), a completely fucking useless rogue, and a mage.

Run #1: The two paladins have no fucking clue what "pacing yourself" means, much less only pulling what you can handle. They both rush off and collect as many mobs as possible before training them back for a slaughter. We usually came out fine, but instead of waiting for their quickly burnt mana to come back, they immeadiately rush for another group of mobs. Repeat until we all die. We respawn, and repeat this process 4 times on the way down to the final boss of the quest.

One of the paladins decides to turn into a pussy at the last moment and bails when the last bosses's cronies spawn. The rest of us manage to kill the boss, but we all die before we can loot it, the wuss paladin soon follows. We spawn in time to notice that the boss's corpse has disappeared and we now can't get the item.

~insert us dicking around outside the instance while everyone wastes time repairing their stuff and walking as slow as fucking possible back to the instance~

Run #2: The Paladins continue to horde mobs and ignore me, the mage, and the rogue's requests to fucking wait, until our first total death halfway through the instance. We respawn and actually pick our targets, which turn out to be engineer goblins who can churn out a limitless supply of robot guardians with shitloads of HP. We all die again.

I look at the clock, realise it is now 4:30 in the morning, and log off in disgust after politely thanking the group for their help.

I'd also like to mention this this is a level 20 elite quest...I was level 21, the rest of my group was no less than level 28. AND WE STILL ALL DIED, A LOT.

Jesus, is this what all MMORPGs are like when you start getting to the large quests?

Many of them, yes.  This is why I whined and complained about these group quests in beta.   They are poorly designed, not solo-friendly, and in any case the game shouldn't be handing them out at that level if I can't do them.

You've also learned the peril of grouping; i.e. most people are stupid.  Your solutions are to either pursue more solo tasks (and more solo-friendly MMOGs), or find yourself a really good guild with really good players who will help you through quests like these.  Sometimes, these groups can be a lot of fun.  Other times, they become cliquish, political, and mostly suck.

Personally, having tried both methods, I prefer MMOGs that are more friendly to solo play, and only group when I really have to.  WoW isn't really that bad to solo play at lower levels.  EQII was supposed to be better, but the quest designs actually made it worse.  CoH was pretty good for solo play, but I've heard that's less true with recent updates.

I would encourage you not to give up on MMOGs.  The VanCleef quest was also the breaking point of WoW for me.  It's just badly designed.

Bruce

At least one person will join in this thread talking about player skill.
At least one person will join in this thread talking about strategy.
At least one person will join in this thread to ask what you're doing writing for us with no less than 10 endgame characters to your name.
At least one person will join in this thread to mention how much WoW rocks and you suck.
At least one person will join in this thread to tell you how much the other random people in your group suck, because they are just high school fuckups.

At least 2 of the 5 above situations will occur even though I'll spit out the truth here.

Almost all MMOGs are like this. And it's not that any/all of you sucked, it's that the sum result of your spreadsheet < the Blizzard spreadsheet for the mission you did.

Until someone comes up with a better system for gaming than what we currently have, you're stuck with this shitty one that every douchebag with an investor feels the need to shove down your throat.

You'll eventually develop a faster firing "fuck this I'm leaving" response when a group doesn't work out for you. This isn't a one-off, sorry to say.

PS: Just got WoW. Well, technically my brother got WoW but that's just semantics. Mine is arriving tomorrow and until then I'm playing on his account while his young self suffers from bedtime.

I haven't done the Van Cleef/Deadmines instance yet so I can't comment on the specifics but the kind of experience you had is not atypical for MMORPGs. And in WoW's case Blizzard has managed to attract a lot of people for whom WoW is their first MMORPG so the "idiot" factor is higher than in the more established MMORPGs. Actually in many cases they aren't really idiots, it's just that a lot of players don't take the time to understand how the underlying mechanics affect gameplay -- even something as simple as "low mana = bad" seems to be beyond some people's comprehension as you discovered.

Part of the problem is that WoW doesn't have low level instanced "starter" dungeons where people new to MMORPGs can learn how to do a dungeon crawl in a less dangerous environment. There are low-level "mini dungeons" but those are designed to be able to do solo if you are patient enough and they aren't instanced so other people can be killing stuff around you which makes it easier to navigate through during prime time hours.

The good news though, if you are type of person that likes to lead rather than follow, is that your experience wasn't a total waste of time since you've learned, somewhat painfully, what not to do in that instance, and the next time you go in, if you are leading the group, you'll have a much better chance getting to Van Cleef in a reasonable amount of time with a minimum amount of dying. And as party leader you'll be able to quickly boot out players who are screwing things up for everybody. If you don't like leading, then you'll need to continue to go through the painful process of playing in pickup groups until you find a good leader and then hopefully you'll be able to continue to group with that person into the future. Or you can do what Bruce suggested and join a Guild, but like he also said that's no guarentee that those people aren't screwups as well.

Any quests I should avoid on Horde side?

P.S. WoW rocks and you all suck. Battle.net was completely populated by Rhodes scholars, playing an intricate game of deception and intrigue.

Who is Fabricated?  I forget.  Why is he a mod?   I have no memory of him at all.

Anyway... MMOGs don't suck as much as the people who play them.    Those quests aren't really bad at all but you have to pick and choose your losers to do them with.  You should be able to do that by this time!  I have rules before grouping now.  If they jump around or emote at all,  say anything other than "hello", "goodbye" or "everyone ready?"  in party chat, or ask me "r u hot fem irl", I tell them my water broke and I have to log off now.

Skip anything and everything with Ragefire Chasm unless you bring a group entirely composed of non-fuckups.  That instance is a pain in the ass and really not worth it.

Other than that.. there's some centaur quests in Desolace that I'd argue aren't worth the hassle.  Honestly, I've just picked and chosen my quests for a long long time.  I've had a near full quest log for the past 25 levels (40 now).

It sounds like the only skill you lack, Fab, is the ability to smell a shitty group.  It comes with time.

I always enjoyed the take one step from the entrance and get squooshed by a rolling boulder trap approach to learning myself. :)

Congratulations. You have just discovered why most smart people in MMOGs prefer to group with known friends and guildmates.

Pickup groups are not always this bad, but too often they are and they are the ones we remember the most. Many people are just retards, loot whores, and immature idiots. They drift from pickup group to pickup group, because no half-intelligent person would group with them regularly.

You are smart and recognizing them straight out. The best thing you can do is try to spot the retardedness early on, and just bail out totally if you see it starting. You also should try to get into a good guild that seems to know what they are doing.

MMOGs are fun social games, if you can avoid the stupidity. It is just the nature of people. You eventually get much better at avoiding the bad.

The experience you had is certainly available in any MMOG.

As others have mentioned all you can do is be ruthless about leaving pickup groups once you know they are doomed.

In most cases you can improve matters somewhat by running your own group.

At higher levels in any MMOG pick up groups have a slightly higher probability of not sucking, but only because some of the people generating the suck have quit by that time. Of course, this will mostly cancel out against the fact that high end games tend to be less forgiving of any retardedness on the part of your group.

Eventually you learn to spot the retards and forget any silly illusions you have about not bailing on your group.  I've done the vancleef instance tons of times from levels 18 to 25 and i didnt fail once because after years and years of playing mmorpgs i know when to ditch a group that has no hope of winning.  Honestly if you stuck around with those idiots after seeing exactly how they operate and listen you have very little reason to complain.  The VanCleef quest is one of the most fun dungeons/quests ive ever gone through, i was still running it for fun long after i stopped needing anything from it probably because im such a huge goonies fan.  A group of level 28's should have absolutely no trouble with it, in fact at level 29 i was able to solo my way to the pirate ship.

Shitty group, and I've experienced my share of them in the VC instance too.  I had that bug where the corpse disappeared when we wiped to the Shredder the first time I went there, then two loot-whores-are-present runs where rogues looted everything (and I mean fucking bind-on-pickup wands) and then left, one before making it past the Shredder, the other at VC, and two successful runs.

I have 4 people on my blacklist solely due to the Deadmines.

Yes paladins tend to rush into groups of mobs with abandon.  I've always wondered why until I played one to level 5.  Compared to my priest at level 5, they're so much more powerful...  they can actually survive with 2 even-cons on them, sometimes 3.

So they get used to that.

As to the game itself, I was gonna be nice and make friends and join a good guild.  Hasn't happened yet, I'm 28.  Made some friends but I'm still as solo as ever.  So I think I'm going to switch to a solo class.  No sense dealing with the priest weaknesses if I'm gonna play solo.

The priest can be an amazing solo class. If you use fear correctly and have a good supply of mana drinks you should be able to kill 3-4 even cons per 30 seconds of downtime. 2 even cons are a bitch mainly because you'll have to drain a lot of mana killing them but remember you have range and pallys don't. It is a lot easier to pull one at a time as a priest than it is as a pally.

I think it was mostly me thinking, "Come on, even a band of retarded monkeys could help me finish this thing at level 28", that, and the fact that they all were actually really nice. The Paladins gave me a handful of equipment, which while being AH crap for them, was better than some of what I had. The mage was no idiot, and he was arcane explosion/frost nova-ing the massive groups of mobs the Pallys trained to us, and he was pretty good at polymorphing when we needed it.

The rogue however...are they really that weak? I honestly don't remember the rogue ever killing anything. She was duel-weilding some decent weapons, and just wasn't doing shit for damage. I was pathetic compared to the pallys, but since I was using a shield I was at least doing useful aggro management by peeling elites off the Mage and shield-bashing those fucking Defias Wizards.

The instance itself is really neat. (also, holy shit, the gigantic tree-grinder + the goblin inside of it is tougher than VanCleef himself)

/agree with everyone so far.

The flipside is that when you get a good pickup group and everyone clicks, they sometimes lead to long-term new friendships.  And that's really ultimately what makes MMOGs better than Xbox*.




*non-Live, of course.  Xbox is a registered trademark of Microsoft corporation and is indeed fun.  No kittens were harmed in the making of this post.

Avoid the tubers quests. They are a huge fucking time sink, and not very good exp. The first one is Blue Leaf Tubers, the second is Red Leaf. Both suck.

Also, inless you really need the quest rewards from Wailing Caverns, skip it. Its long and boring, and since it is a low level instance, if in a pickup group, you tend to have experiances like Fabricated's.

Man, multiple group mates doing simultaneous pulls… …after the first occurence, I squawk loudly… it happens again, well one time could be a mistaken deal or some other slipup, but if it didn't cease, I'd be politely excusing myself to explore some other hunting grounds…

As I approach 25, I'm getting more selective on which quests I'm going to take… …as it is, my quest log seems to be eternally bound to some figure ~20 (everytime I complete a quest, there's another one offered up by the same NPC) and more essentially, I've decided to only pursue those quests that offer a decent reward - a shiny new weapon/trinket/armor I can use or — trying to get goblin factions up, for no good reason…

Wait till you get to stranglethorn vale/booty bay.  I've done over 20 quests in that zone already and my quest log is still full from it, and the more i do the more open up.  Spent most of my 30s there and i have plenty of elite mid 40s quests left to do.

Umm, going to have to disagree here on the Blueleaf Tubers quest.  The trick is knowing how to do it effectively.  You dont go into the quest as the ONLY person in a 5 man team gathering tubers.  If EVERYONE in your group has a gophur, you can kill the critters in the trench and harvest tubers in relatively short order.  Mainly because once one person fills up their 10 tubers, they can stil let their gophur find tubers for other people.  When I did that quest, we got all our tubers and did the escort quest in Razorfen Kraul in less then 25 minutes.

Was she backstabbing and using finishing moves?

I'm guessing so, I've never played as a Rogue. She stealthed in behind enemies a lot and did various attack animations, so I'm thinking yes.

Rogues do the most damage of any other class in the game, except perhaps in a Area of Effect situation (there's a niche Mages can pick up).    If you're noticing really bad damage coming from a Rogue, and it's not from misuse, then perhaps the target had obscene armor points or the weapons are overdue for an upgrade.

As for earlier two gung-ho Paladin situation, that's a fairly sucky one.  Sometimes you have good parties... sometimes you have those two Paladins.   Personally I think those armored self-rightous bastards get a bit overconfident sometimes, what with their massive invulneraiblity powers.   I had one try to gank me today, he was just 4 levels above me but I was in a group with four other people.   Tsk tsk.   He did take quite a bit of killing though, thanks to previously mentioned invulnerability abilities.

I play a paladin and like to think I do so well, but the class does seem to attract a lot of retards.

I believe Geldonyetich is right in his assessment.

I play a rogue and I can do a ton of damage and take down mobs a few levels over mine, even elites. However, because I have crappy armor (leather only) I have to pick my situations carefully. Just getting 1 additional bad guy on me can make for a bad day in areas with higher level mobs.

I think paladins just aren't "trained" that way early on, so they never consider their environment before just bashing everything they see.

I'm playing as a 18/19 gnome warlock atm. I hit the vc quest on Friday night and did about 5 hours worth of killing. We weren't making any headway until a 24 paladin joined our group. Myself, a 22ish rogue, a 20 priest, and a 19ish mage. We wiped out multiple times until the 24 pally joined us.

Even with all the wipe outs I had a damn good time in that dungeon. It is the dungeon crawl of dungeon crawls. I'm hoping that there are others just like it. We rocked all the way down until we hit the first mate, who handed our asses to us twice. I knocked off after the second time, it was about 1 am.

Speaking of hellish quests, I went after the succubus warlock pet. I had to enter the barrens, and getting through the swampland was a bitch. Vicejaws are nasty and more than twice my current level of 20/21. I died 3 times trying to find the quest giver, which I consider an extremely well done job on my part.

I've done VanCleef, the Stockades, and Gnomegeran instances so far up to level 34. I did them all with majority if not full guild groups. We got rocked by the shredder in the first run on VC, and in the second one we completed it in about two hours. I enjoyed it very much and found that it was one of the most fun instances in the game. I give VC an A- overall.

The Stockades, while fun, is made less so by the fact that it has respawns unlike VC. To me, once I've killed something in an instance, I don't want to see it again. That's an advantage of having an instance, so it should be utilized, especially when i can't rez at my body on a corpse run if I die. Stockades gets a solid B, would be a B+ without respawns.

Gnomegeran is awful, and in many ways I think the pathing is fucked. It's incredibly huge, and overly complicated for a group in the correct level ranges. I've tried it twice, and I've been wiped twice in the exact same place by what I can only assume is a terrible pathing error. All of a sudden a train of literally 20+ elite lvl 30 mobs rushes up a staircase and sends us to our doom. I hate that dungeon, it gets an D- saved only by the grime machine area which I found amusing.

I was there once, and we had the same thing happen to us, probably in the same spot.  When we ran back, instead of going down the stairs, we went down a ramp that sort of parralled the stairs and didn't get trained.  That was the only time I've been there, and I don't remember the layout that well, so I can't be more specific.

Welcome to Fantasy MMOG's. Make sure your credit card bill is paid up, you fucking walking credit card, you wouldn't want to be denied all this FUN!

Ultra ding!

The more you play, the more you'll trust your "this group sucks" meter. It's not about patience or giving someone a chance. It's about you projecting whether they're going to waste your time.

VC is tough, but a great first instance for WoWers. It's huge, backspawns patrols and you've got two times to try it before it completely respawns. It also lulls you into a false sense of l33tness because the first half of the place is a joke at level 21-23. The second half is full of underconning (as they all do) Elites.

It took me three tries. The first two were in a 20-22 group of guildies. We knew our shit but got wiped by a huge train on the boat. The second we wiped at VC himself. The third, the next night, had us all at 22 to 25 (yea, some have more time than others in our guild) and we pWned the place. Even VC, though our Rogue got that can't-loot-if-you-die bug they recently fixed or said they would.

The Stockade which follows is comparatively easier by being smaller, while harder for the respawn.

Anyway, get out of a group the moment you get bad vibes. It's not worth it. Those vibes are telling you these people are either incompetent or a bunch of soloers unused to or disinterested in being led. Nothing you can do within the confines of your time with them will change that.

Yeah I can solo something a level or two higher than me, but it must absolutely be alone, and non-elite.   I'm having trouble with elites 10 levels lower than me simply because my spell-based damage cannot cut through their 2x HP before I go OOM.

Yes I can single-pull, especially with this one nice spell that reduces the aggro radius of mobs, but it's amazing how many people do NOT understand the concept of proximity-pulling.

Easy enough for me to tell the good paladin from the bad one:  overdo it on aggro, see if they notice the monsters on me, and even better see if they regain aggro.

But, back to the topic, yes, it's standard fare for MMORPG's, there are idiots and asses in the game, and while they tend to flock to several specific classes (idiots -> paladin, asses -> rogue), you cannot make generalizations like that and must develop your sense of detection on an individual basis.

I just can't and won't deal with shitty groups anymore.  I swear, you can tell if the group is going to suck before you even pull your first mob.  I can't bring myself to group with random tards unless I'm waiting for the same mob and I know from some experience that they aren't completely braindead.  I did my first random group in about 30 odd levels the other day, it last all of 5 minutes and I parted ways after getting my drop (well, we all did).

Now, my WoW setup at the moment is nearly ideal. I have 2 people that I play with currently.  One of us has significantly more time to play than myself and my ex-roomie.  He now has agreed not to get more than 3 levels ahead of the lowest in the group (we're 40 (blah, 4k from level), 41, and 42 now).  With 3 people (2 of us shaman), we can take down just about everything we've encountered.  Sure, we have to do instances a little later than ideal, but just a couple days ago we were able to handle 5 mobs at a time in Scarlet Monastery.   If we could ge a non-retard for a fourth (any class, doesn't matter), we'd be damn unstoppable and we'd only be able to blame each other for our failures instead of "that guy was a fucking worthless moron".

I've yet to log off in frustration and it's been bliss. We did have one hiccup back in Wailing Caverns when we took on 2 warriors as insurance.  They managed to overpull, roll on loot after we said "don't roll unless you're going to use it" (3 goddamn times!), and manage to DIE (and release, the moron) by getting lost no more than 10 feet from the group.

Hell is other people. But thankfully I've been able to avoid it in a setting that's just ripe with stupidity and immaturity.

It'd be easy enough to auto-categorize people into idiot and non-idiot.  Even a simple K/D ratio at even con would be a good start, and you could gussy it up with performance in groups and so on.  Then it could automatch people or put flowers next to their names if they're good at what they do.

Or even better, add player feedback.  "PwnHammer seems nice, but his client  magically crashes every time we get an add.  Avoid"

Basically grouping is like EBay. .but you're shopping for DPS instead of ugly garbage.  So it should have the same features.

Player feedback would be a good idea as long as you were grouped with the person to do it. Otherwise you'd get a ton of moron spammers with "HE'S A N00BL3R!!!11" as the majority of comments.

This isn't even specific to MMORPG's. Any group oriented game varies a lot on the quality of the people playing. It's fantastic when you're in a tight and competent group and it's hell when you feel surrounded by morons. Admittedly WoW does aggravate this a little because many of the people are new players (especially on the alliance faction) and have become used to the "easy" solo mobs. So moving into an instance forces a mental jump that many of them don't come close to making.  On the positive side, and unlike EQ, at least corpse recovery and the "death by group" penalty are quite light.

I've done ragefire chasm, wailing caverns, shadowfang keep, black fathom deeps and razorfen kraul so far, mostly with guild groups, and must say they're some of the finest dungeons in any MMORPG. Complex design, story elements, good loot and some interesting tactical challenges. Wailing caverns, while perhaps a little long, is beautifully finished by the event at the end that gives a real sense of completeness.

I fucking hate Blackfathom deeps.  Water dungeons are complete bullshit, have been that way since zelda, and will continue to be so, forever and beyond.  Fuck blackfathom deeps and it's stupid shit.

I had fun with deadmines, though, despite having to do it multiple times because of dipshit pickup groupmates paving the way for my deaths, target dummies that fail to function 90% of the time, and general life-related obstacles to my digital crack.

I just found this, and it cracked me up.

(http://img156.exs.cx/img156/5382/wowisfun6uq.jpg)