player-accountability
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Where does the pressure lie in healing?
I used to be a healer, once upon a time. It was in the days of vanilla, when being a healer consisted largely of staring at 40 bars, pressing Flash Heal, and occasionally mixing it up with a bubble or Heal Rank 4 while swigging potions like they were going out of style. It was a very different time, and healing was by and large much less complex than it is today. My guild didn't use Vent, so I did all the healing rotation calls via macros on my keyboard -- that's how easy healing was. I had time to press macro buttons and pay attention to calling things. But at some point that guild fell apart, as guilds are wont to do on occasion. And since server transfers weren't even a possibility at that point in time, I simply rolled another character on another server, vowing to take a break from any and all raiding. It lasted until paid server transfers were added as a feature, at which point my priest was promptly moved to my new server and I began healing again -- this time, in battlegrounds. I helped a lot of friends by healing them while they tried their hardest to get High Warlord in the original honor grind. So what happened? Well ... healing happened.
Should players be in charge of accountability?
Once upon a time in vanilla World of Warcraft, player behavior was something that was kept in check by server community. How did this happen? Well at that point in time, there wasn't really anything in game that was cross-server. If you wanted to do something in game, you had to do it with people from your realm -- and if you misbehaved, players were quick to call you on your behavior in a very public manner. Because of this, players that were legitimately called out by the community soon found themselves with nothing to do, because nobody would group with them. Their only choice was to re-roll on another server and start over -- at this point, you couldn't even transfer your characters to other servers if you wanted to. And oddly enough, the system that wasn't really a system completely worked. Players that were jerks eventually had their jerk-ish ways come back to bite them on the butt, and the rest of the server community happily resumed playing. While cross-realm play is incredibly useful for opening up the player base, it's had the unfortunate side effect of getting rid of that accountability aspect of the game from vanilla. What's to be done about a jerk if that jerk is on another server?
Click the Lightwell -- no, really ...
I like to think I'm a decent rogue. My DPS is pretty good, I know my rotation like the back of my hand, and I've got orange weapons with which to stab things. More important than that (to me, anyway) is the fact that I use self-heals almost religiously, without thinking about it. I think a good portion of that comes from having been a healer originally and having an understanding about healing and just how difficult it is. I don't want to make it more difficult; I just want to happily stab things. In order to do that effectively, I need to not die. That said, I love Lightwell. It's a nice little spell that priests toss on the ground, and you click it to use it. Earlier versions of Lightwell were a little clunky and difficult to use, but today's version is pretty streamlined. I don't lose my target if I click the Lightwell, and I don't have to be on top of the thing to click it. It's a handy little heal to have, much like a Healthstone or even Recuperate. Since I'd rather be using DPS-boosting potions than healing potions, I'll take any little heals I can get. Oddly enough, not everyone does. And I can't quite figure out why.
Should WoW players be responsible for player accountability?
Blizzard's policy as far as reporting players has been about the same since day one. If you have a problem with a player, you report them. While Blizzard can contact you and thank you for reporting the issue, it will not give any details regarding what it has done about the problem being reported. This has always been understandable to me; in the many years on and off that I worked customer service and call center jobs, rule #1 was that you did not speak to anyone but an account holder regarding the status of their account. To me, the Blizzard policy is just more of the same kind of treatment -- Blizzard cannot tell you about actions taken against another player's account, because hey, their account isn't yours, you know? It's private information. That said, I have reported my share of players over the years, and I never really knew if action was taken against these players or not. In simple cases of name violations, like using an inappropriate word for guild or character name, I could usually tell if something had been done, because the guild or player in question would have their name changed. But in cases of player harassment ... well, you never know if they've been told anything or not. You just sort of hope this means the person harassing you will go away and that will be the end of it, but there are absolutely no guarantees.
