group-etiquette
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Lichborne: Dungeon and LFR group Etiquette for DPS death knights
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. At this point in the game, max level 5-man dungeons may feel a bit superfluous. Even most newbies and third or fourth alts at this point are running them primarily for VP, having gotten most of their real item upgrades on Timeless Isle already. That said, this has lead to a bit of chaos. I know some of my tank friends are getting those end-of-expansion blues, in which they find that DPS are so over geared and so lazy that they are constantly stealing aggro, running ahead, and otherwise making the tank's job difficult. As a tank class ourselves, we have no excuse for doing this, if only as a courtesy for our brother and sister death knight tanks. This week, we're going to go over some basic dungeon etiquette for a death knight tank, designed to make your healer and tank not completely hate your guts. If you're not running dungeons now, you may want to keep it in mind for Warlords of Draenor.
Have you ever been vote kicked?
Applied with discretion and thoughtfulness it's a useful tool, but in the hands of an overly snarky or bad-tempered group it can certainly be abused--we are talking, of course, about the group vote kick option. Most of the time when I run group content I don't even remember it's there, but occasionally there's that one person who won't stop butt-pulling adds before the tank is ready, or who just can't seem to resist spewing a never-ending stream of gross and offensive epithets, or someone logs off and just doesn't ever come back online. When that happens I'm very, very grateful for vote kicks. Sometimes, unfortunately, it gets applied less sensibly; I've heard of players being kicked for every reason from their choice of toon being disliked to not having "enough" heirloom gear equipped, and situations like that can be infuriating. When I stopped to think about it, I realized that I have never myself been kicked from a group. I'm sure this is mostly due to the fact that I'm not a huge dungeon runner, so I'm not in random groups very often, but also at least partially because when I do run group content I tend to play a healer. Kicking a healer, while sometimes necessary, can also occasionally result in a very bored group sitting around for a while waiting for a new one, which is no fun. Sometimes people don't believe me that I've never been kicked, but I've met plenty of players who also say they haven't, either, so I've never thought myself particularly unusual, but I still I count myself as being lucky in this respect. How about you, though? Have you ever been kicked? And, perhaps more importantly, was it deserved or were you the victim of a trigger-happy kicker? %Poll-83117%
Beta Testing 101: Good group etiquette
The most crucial piece of information for you to remember while beta testing is that the process can be grueling and frustrating. Servers will go up and down, instances will crash, and above all, the people playing the expansion's beta will be just as inexperienced as you are with the content. Here are some etiquette tips on how to stay calm during a productive group session during beta. Be patient. Patience is essential to the beta process. Flaws in the software or gameplay are not discovered without time for those problems to manifest. Be a good tester and log on to WoW with the mindset that you might not be in for the smoothest run. As a beta tester, your patience will be tried. You'll wipe, fail, screw up, die, whatever. It's a game that you're helping to make just that much better. Put aside the gung-ho group attitude and talk to your team about testing -- that helps me focus on the task at hand.
The Daily Grind: How do you say 'shut up'?
Yesterday, Matt Low of the our sister site WoW Insider and the very awesome World of Matticus blog pointed out a fairly interesting conversation going on over at PlusHeal. Apparently, the original poster had been using the phrase 'shut up' during a raid to try to quiet down people cross-chattering over voice comms, but after dealing with the upset it caused, they're looking for something new and more effective instead of 'shut up'. Having been a group/raid leader myself, I can say in all honesty that this is absolutely one of my pet peeves; talking during instructions/pulls or loot distribution. It distracts from the important things and can cause quite a bit of confusion. On the flip side, clamping down on cross-chatter too much will make a group or raid feel less like fun with friends and more like a second job. As such, this morning we thought we'd ask you - how do you tell your group to quiet down without sounding like the guy from the Onyxia Wipe animation? (Link language NSFW) Are there any phrases or methods you've found effective to quiet a noisy group down without ruffling feathers? Or sometimes are you justified in telling people to shut it?
