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WoW Rookie: PUGging without the bad apples
New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the basics of a good start in the World of Warcraft. Send us a note to suggest a WoW Rookie topic, and be sure to visit WoW.com's WoW Rookie Guide for links to all our tips, tricks and how-to's.PUGs (PickUp Groups), which are groups of players that come together on the fly to run instance groups or raids, are a fact of life for most WoW players. Especially in today's WoW, when instances fly by more quickly than ever before (a quick TotC before dinnertime, anyone?), PUGs help you accomplish your quest, gear and achievement goals when you can't run them with a regular group or guild. And now that most players are concentrated in endgame content, PUGs are likely to be the only way you'll get a shot at running earlier instances as intended, with a group of the appropriate level.Sounds like a winner ... So why do PUGs get such a bad rap? Mostly, it's the bad apple theory – but as Donny Osmond warbled so winningly above, "one bad apple don't spoil the whole bunch, girl." In a Massively Multiplayer Online RPG like WoW, you shouldn't be afraid to get involved with other players. Let's see how you can dig into PUGs without biting into (or being) the worm.
AGDC09: Easy voice chat for PUGs with Puggable
If all you play is World of Warcraft, then you might not have heard of Vivox -- but they're the people providing integrated voice chat solutions for EVE Online, EverQuest, EverQuest II, Star Wars Galaxies, Second Life, Fallen Earth, All Points Bulletin.. I'd go on, but you probably get the point. This week at AGDC, Vivox is spreading its wings with the announcement of two new web-based voice chat applications: Vivox Web Voice for Facebook and Puggable for World of Warcraft players. Though the two use the same technology, Puggable is definitely targeted at the WoW-playing audience. I had a chance to sit down and chat with Vivox about Puggable at AGDC, and, though I haven't had a chance to get hands-on time with it, I've got to say the idea has a lot of appeal.So what do you need to do to start chatting? Just fire up your web browser, point it to Puggable.com and create a chat room for your group. To invite others, all you need to do is share a link. The site will display character stats for your player from the armory (as seen in the above screenshot) for easy viewing by your entire group. And if you wish to select the instance you're running and the boss you're going to fight, Puggable will automagically pull up links for strategies, videos, and loot. No one needs to download or configure software (unless you're playing WoW with people who don't have web browsers... but that would just be silly) and there are no passwords to remember, share, or change. I'm hesitant to say it's fool-proof, but it certainly looks like group communication and organization simplified.Puggable is presently in closed beta (though if you're interested in testing it, you can sign up on their site) with plans for a more open beta in the next few weeks.
The Daily Grind: Which MMO has the best PUGs?
Whether you are lucky enough to play with a steady group of good friends or you're more of a soloist, you've still probably encountered the stray pick-up group or random team member here and there. Many gamers even spend all of their time with strangers. But if you've played several MMOs, you may have also noticed that there seems to be a difference in the playerbases. Some games are notorious for having more immature players while others can safely say their players are the best. But which ones? Which MMO do you feel has the best PUGs?I decided to take this question an extra step by adding a poll in which readers could vote. The top games are included in this poll, but certainly feel free to add your own to the comments below, along with examples.%Poll-33107%
WoW Insider Show live today at 3:30pm Eastern
Yes indeed, you might have thought that we'd call it quits after the 100th show spectacular. But no such luck -- we're back for another 100 (200? 300?) shows, starting with this one today. Alex Ziebart and Lesley Smith will be on board with Turpster and I, and the words on everyone's lips are "patch 3.2," as we're expecting the new patch any minute now. We'll look down the notes and remind you of all the important stuff to look for when the game gets updated, including the major class changes that we haven't covered yet. And we'll talk about the most popular posts of the past week, including who benefits from PuGs, whether or not there are bad talents, and just how incredibly easy it is to level up nowadays. It all starts up at August 1, 2009 3:30 PM EDTvar date_span = document.getElementById("date"); var date = new Date(date_span.innerHTML); var monthname=new Array("Jan","Feb","Mar","Apr","May","Jun","Jul","Aug", "Sep","Oct","Nov","Dec"); var weekday=new Array("Sunday","Monday","Tuesday","Wednesday","Thursday", "Friday","Saturday"); var year = date.getFullYear(); var day_of_month = date.getDate(); var month = monthname[date.getMonth()]; var day = weekday[date.getDay()]; var hour = date.getHours(); if (hour > 11) { if (hour > 12) {hour -= 12} am_pm = "PM"; } else { am_pm = "AM"; } var minute = date.getMinutes(); if (minute < 10) { minute = "0"+minute; } date_string = day + ", " + month + " " + day_of_month; date_string += " at " + hour + ":" + minute + " " + am_pm; offset = -date.getTimezoneOffset()/60; if (offset >= 0) { offset = "+"+offset; } date_string += " in your time zone GMT"+offset; date_span.innerHTML = (date_string); over on our Ustream page, or, as always, you can find the embedded stream below. We'll see you this afternoon.
We've got spirit, yes we do!
It's pretty routine to run across complaints in World of Warcraft communities about poor DPS showing up to PuGs. When I say poor DPS, I don't mean the unfortunate soul who just dinged 80 and is running around in greens far below their class' hit cap. You would reasonably expect someone's damage to be fairly lackluster under those circumstances even if the person concerned is a great player. By "poor DPS," I mean someone at 80 who shows up to your Naxx PuG in full epics rocking 25-man raid buffs who manages to stay alive on each boss fight with a Bloodlust/Heroism...and doesn't manage to break 4-figure DPS. I've seen it before, saw it again recently, and am fatalistic about its eventual reappearance.Questionable gemming and enchant choices tend to abound with these players, as you'd expect, and the cry of "He gemmed for Spirit!" tends to follow them around. Fair enough; it does happen, but as someone who's been leveling a platoon of alts through a sea of /headdesk pre-60 itemization, I've wondered whether the abundance of Spirit on pre-60 gear leaves newer or inexperienced players with a false impression regarding its eventual importance in the endgame. And it's easy to see how they could arrive at that conclusion; the stat is everywhere!
Do tanks get the most out of PuGs?
I've been leveling my Restoration Shaman through Northrend, and the closer he gets to the level cap, the more I find myself getting unnerved comparing his group experiences to those of my main, a Druid tank. This past week, for example, I've healed normal 5-mans on my Shaman, then relogged and tanked heroic 5-mans on my Druid (in some cases, the very same content my shammy just did on normal). With very few exceptions, my shammy's had a tough time of it, whereas my main has sailed through her pugs without a care in the world. Initially I chalked this up to having a lot less experience playing a Shaman, but I think it was around the time that my shammy's second Utgarde Keep PuG quit at Ingvar after wiping for 30 minutes* (no joke -- and yes, this was on normal) that I had a small epiphany; maybe the reason I've enjoyed pugs so much is that I've almost always played a character who's largely immune to their faults.
Drama Mamas: Of scrubs and terribads
Let the Drama Mamas guide you through the sticky business of dodging drama, toward becoming that player everyone wants in their group. Drama Mamas Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are real-life mamas and experienced WoW players. And just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your server. We're taking your questions at DramaMamas (at) WoW (dot) com.Sometimes, there simply are no words that do justice to our friends' lack of play skills. You know the people I'm talking about. We say, "He's a good guy, but ..." or "She's a real sweetie, for someone who ..." Argh! It's the last halves of those sentences that wipe the raid group every time.So what's a player to do when his friends turn out to be scrubs, terribads, n00bs or any other variety of out-of-tune toon? Sometimes there's hope – but we'll be honest, sometimes things are beyond repair. Either way, you're going to have to decide: can you fix it, or can you grin and bear it?
PUG Checker shows players' boss kills
Although most of us, I suspect, prefer guild runs, most of us also have to PuG it up every once in a while. LFG can be a bit of a crap shoot; you can get an Ulduar-geared player doing 3,000 DPS in your heroic, or a fresh 80 who has a thing or two to learn doing 1,000. Fortunately, we have the Armory to help us separate the good from the bad, or at least the geared from the ungeared. Sites like Be Imba and WoW Heroes have been around for a while to help us more easily check a character's gear level. Now a new site, PUG Checker, can show you at a glance what bosses a character has killed, and how many times - or rather, what bosses they've been present for a kill of. Above right you can see what it shows for raids on my priest (I don't like Malygos very much). If you click "show bosses," you can see specific raid bosses in raids; otherwise, it just counts kills of the end boss. It uses Armory data, of course, which is pretty accurate, but not always perfect. Like the site says, "don't shoot the messenger" if the numbers aren't quite right. Like Be Imba and WoW Heroes, this isn't an infallible guide to whether a player is good or not. It does probably correlate to some degree, though. In fact, if PUG Checker just added the average ilvl of the equipped gear of the person I'm checking, it would be my go-to site for checking puggies. It does load data much quicker than either of those equipment sites, which alone is enough that I will probably use it. I also really dig the clean design and the number-circles that look like subway indicators. [via My Life as a Cartoon]
Contemporary raiding and real-life obligations
An unidentified reader wrote to WoW Insider explaning that while he is in a raiding guild, his life schedule does not allow him to raid. He feels he's being left behind as groups ask for higher DPS.What practical advice is there for progressing in the game while being a player with RL obligations? First off, I'd like to tell you that you're not an outlier, there are many of players in similar situations. Nearly all WoW players have real life obligations including work, school, and families. The two most important things to work on are balance and realistic expectations.It's easy to get suckered into playing too much WoW. To balance WoW with life, you need to determine how much time you can spend in game, while leaving plenty to meet your other responsibilities. If you can, try to schedule WoW at regular times, that way you build relationships with folks you play with often.
Defining "PuGgable"
Alan over on WoW LJ has a great question: just what is PuGgable? Lots of people are talking about Naxx and Vault of Archavon and Obsidian Sanctum as PuGable, or able to be taken down by a pickup group, but just where does the line get drawn? Is 25-man Naxx able to be killed by a PuG? Sarth with three drakes? Ulduar?Most of the 10-man instances are generally easy enough to be dropped by a pickup group, in my experience, though probably not for the achievements. A well-geared PuG can roll right through Naxx or VoA without any problems at all. But when you start getting into the achievements (Sarth with drakes) or the higher content (Eye of Eternity is tough unless everyone in there is experienced), then things get a little shady. Which is why lots of PuG leaders will be checking gear and achievements -- they'd rather take along someone who's already done the content than worry about pulling newbies through. Services and reputations can help that a little bit too -- a good friends list can come in very handy for PuGging even hard content.And I'd say Ulduar is not PuGgable, yet, for a number of reasons. First of all, it's brand new, which means that most pickup folks won't know the fights, and that leads to wipes and only about one or two bosses down. Plus, since it is so new, every raid reset counts, and guilds don't want their raiders using up their resets when there's a guild run later in the week (of course that's not an issue for Naxx, which most guilds have on farm anyway). Though as more people gear up and more guilds make progress in Ulduar, you have to think there'll be PuGs in there as well
Officers' Quarters: Disposable raiders
Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.PUG players seem to be everywhere these days. For guilds that can't field a full 25, PUGs are running Naxxramas and Obsidian Sanctum and even the Eye of Eternity alongside you. They're practically half the raid in your Vault of Archavon runs. They help your 10-player raid take out Heroic Flame Leviathan for some quick, juicy iLevel 226 loot. If Blizzard keeps nerfing Ulduar, pretty soon they'll be looting Keepers' chests, too. Last week's e-mail was practically a blog unto itself, so this week I thought I'd pick a short one. One reader asks what we owe these PUG players. Can we just boot them as soon as some of our own guild members log on? Hi Scott I have a question about what is considered fair to pugs in a raid. I don't do pug raids myself so I am out of touch with what the etiquette is.We had needed to pug for a raid and were just about to start, when a couple of guildies logged on. They wanted us to kick some pugs so they could join the raid. The issue isn't that they logged on after raid start, but purely about whether it is considered fair to kick a pug out in favour of a guild member.
Tracking dead bosses in the instance you step into
As you will have noticed by now if you've entered an instance in progress since patch 3.1, Blizzard's new binding notification system is in effect. Whenever you join an instance in which bosses have already been killed, you get a warning that staying in there will bind you to that instance -- thus hopefully preventing you from accidentally sticking to an instance you don't like.However, as a few players have noted, there's still some functionality missing there. While the notification will tell you that bosses have been killed, it won't yet tell you which ones, so a malicious or confused guild could invite you a Naxx in which only one wing has been downed, when really all they've got left is Sapphiron and KT (or no bosses at all, if they really wanted to ruin your week). Fortunately, Zarhym agrees, and says that discussion about adding a little bit to the notification is incoming. It seems a little bit weird to just have a list of killed bosses on your screen when you first walk into the instance, but maybe they could add some sort of "boss tracker" to the instance maps, where you could see at a glance what was going on in any instance you join.As a few other people say in the thread, most of you may never have seen this notification pop up -- if you only join instances where nothing is killed yet, you'll never see it. But for those of us who take boss kills where we can get them (in PuGs and guild runs where an opening appears), it's a nice feature to have.Thanks, Medros!
Guildwatch: "This is not a f$#(ing joke"
How dare you find something amusing that raidleader Strakken of Shattered on Winterhoof says?!? What do you think this is, some kind of "game" where people "play" for "fun"? He has been forced, forced to increase the amount of time he plays just to deal with people in his guild. And whereas once he may have been proud of the guild and what they've done in terms of progression, times have changed. There's no way he's "going into 3.1 with a guild like this." Guildleading, my friends, is some serious business.Eesh. That drama and more can be found in this week's Guildwatch. We encourage you to click the link below and read on, if only so you too can realize that it is completely possible to take this game and its guilds way, way too seriously (and by the way, if you know of any guilds you'd like to see here, email us about 'em at wowguildwatch@gmail.com). Because here's the secret: this is a joke. It is a game. And if you're not having fun, it's not time to increase the amount of time you play. It's time to walk away.
Observations from running a Naxx-25 PuG
I'm very "up" on PuGs. I started my career as a PuG tank and met a lot of great players that way, many of whom I still raid with today. I've always been a stout supporter of throwing caution to the wind and joining LFG for an afternoon to see where it'll take you; it's been my experience that random players on your realm can and often will surprise you. Once you master the art of the 5-person PuG, the ultimate risk is a raid PuG. One-shot the instance, or spend the night wiping? You won't know until you try.I used to run Hyjal PuG's in late Burning Crusade and got to be the person in charge of arranging healers on Anetheron, explaining where to die on Azgalor, and uttering a hollow laugh at suggestions on whether or not Archimonde was in the cards (answer: hell no). I wasn't around for my guild's Naxx run one of these past weeks, and a few guildies were interested in gearing up their alts, so we thought -- PuG a 25-man Naxx? Why not?
Anti-Aliased: Yu rack disriprine
A few nights ago, I was in one of the worst pick-up groups I have ever seen. It was World of Warcraft, we were in Halls of Lightning, and we had opened up with a dramatic wipe on the first boss. (He wasn't even in his powered mode, which surprised me.)Valiantly, we tried the battle again, but found the same effect. Everyone looked like they had enough gear -- I had done that boss with "worse" people backing me up. Of course, while I was pondering that, the squabbling had already begun in the party. Priest blames hunter, hunter blames mage, mage blames paladin, then the paladin stops pondering why we were failing, realizes people were blaming her, and becomes flustered that someone would actually blame her for the wipe. Meanwhile, the rogue sat in stealth and went afk. Perfect party dynamics.Before long I found myself outside of Halls of Lightning again, sitting on the steps in my pristine holy plate armor. I held up a sign that said, "Will tank 4 food," while I kept up hopes that another party would take me in. (Note: Apparently Game Informer used "Will tank 4 food" in their latest magazine, which just read 5 minutes ago, well after this article was completed. Scary.)Party dynamics seem to be on the decline, but why? Pick-up groups were always a scary prospect, but lately they seem to have become something entirely more nightmarish. What the heck has changed?
Anti-Aliased: Yu rack disriprine pt. 2
CasualLolz player, meet OMGHARDCOREBBQ player The last part of odd group dynamics comes from how much our genre has grown since the days of EverQuest and Final Fantasy XI. Back in the days pre-Warcraft, the MMO community was a small group of gamers who, for the most part, had the same play styles. If you didn't like the genre, you probably didn't play the games. The games presented their basic dynamics to the player very quickly, and people who didn't like how the game was going had the chance to drop out at level 10 or earlier. That's not how the community is today. Thanks to the rampant success of Warcraft, friends are inviting non-MMO friends. People who haven't even touched a game before Warcraft are picking up MMOs. They jump in, do their soloing, fall in love with those dynamics instead of being immediately introduced to party dynamics, and then enter into parties with explosive consequences. It's then, at this late point in the game, when they realize that they don't want to be with other people. They don't want to re-learn everything because they feel that they have mastered what the game is all about. Then you have the player that has played the older games, who does know what to expect, and who runs his endgame content with an iron fist. Do one thing wrong and he screams at you, because in the "olden days" doing one thing wrong netted you extreme penalties and raid wipes. Putting these two people into the same group is not going to work. Yet, this occurs every day in Warcraft and other MMOs because of how huge the genre has become. Some people come because they want to have some easy fun, but then they falter when they get to the content that is obviously targeted towards people who have been in the genre for some time. The people who have been in the genre can't stand the people who are there for the casual soloing because they act too loosely in raids. Yet, it's not all that bad For how much we moan and complain about pick-up groups, you'd think the sky was falling. Sure, the rate of failure in grouping is much higher than it use to be, but that's the way it's going to become. The bright side to all of this is the very same sentence I used at the beginning of the article -- grouping is all about having experience grouping. As the newcomers and old players adjust to the new ways MMOs work, they will become more experienced. The fail wipes of today will become the successes of tomorrow, as long as players learn to stick with it and take the good with the bad. Failure will never disappear from online MMOs. It's a necessary game mechanic that can't be removed, no matter how much we try to minimize penalties. Just remember to learn from the mistakes you witness -- you'll be a better player because of it. Colin Brennan is the weekly writer of Anti-Aliased who thinks people might like to play with other people in MMOGs, but is probably totally wrong. When he's not writing here for Massively, he's rambling on his personal blog, The Experience Curve. If you want to message him, send him an e-mail at colin.brennan AT weblogsinc DOT com. You can also follow him on Twitter through Massively, or through his personal feed.
3D Armory offers a round of new improvements
We linked to 3D Armory a little while ago, and as Eliah says, it does what it says it'll do: provides a picture of your character as they are in the Armory in 3D. The site's founder recently emailed us about a few improvements, and as you can see over there, there's lots of new additions. All the different regions are now reachable, and while there was an issue with special characters in the realm name, it's been fixed, so you can get any character that's online into the 3D viewer. They've added character customization, so you can make sure that the model in the picture matches your model in game. Screenshots can now be taken, and even uploaded to Facebook through their Facebook app.And there are some inter-character features as well: you can now comment on character profiles, which might be a good or a bad thing -- you could mark a good player or maybe label a ninja (though we're not sure what kind of moderation there is for that. And finally they've created something called the PuGchecker, which lets you quickly and easily enter character names and see what raid achievements those characters have earned (so if someone says they've been to OS before, you can make sure it's true). And they've even got an ingame macro you can use to run the script from directly in the game.The rate of development over there is pretty impressive, and the site has definitely grown into much more than just your average Armory substitute. At some point you wonder just how many of the features are necessary (if you ever want to see your character in 3D, you can pretty much just log into the game), but they're definitely getting creative.
Shifting Perspectives: The dual-specced Druid
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting Druids and those who group with them. This week, in the interests of keeping our writer away from editors of the opposite faction on PvP servers, we examine dual specs. Between lollygagging here at WoW Insider Central and engaging in some extracurricular indolence, I've often wondered where I'd take the column after finishing the bear pre-raid post. I could write something on how to theorycraft the highest-HPM tree, I thought, or get around to testing whether weapon skill has an unintended effect on bear threat. Look at the potential return from Eclipse procs as a function of fight mobility? Argue whether it's worth it to take Feral Aggression in a hybrid feral build? Or compose an entire column as a mockument to T.S. Eliot's most famous poem:Q: Let us go then, you and I --A: No.All good ideas. But then we received the following missive from that enemy of all that is good and right in the publishing world, the editor:MEMO: To all WoW Insider class columnistsFROM: You know who.TEXT: Write something on how your class will deal with the upcoming dual-spec system in patch 3.1, or Dan "One-Eye" O'Halloran will "remember" where he left his whip."Well," I thought. "That sounds like a good idea too."
The Silent Bob approach to group management
The world of groups: pugs, raids, arenas, guilds, confederations, servers; all of it means one thing: you have to know how to get along with each other. A big part of getting along with one another in a successful group is knowing how and when to get information across. This communication is often times hard to do, even for the most seasoned communicator. How do you tell someone that their tanking is so awful you'd rather let the hunter's pet be the main tank? What do you say to a healer to get them to understand that healing means more than casting their biggest heal all the time? And what do you do with the DPS who always decides to pull for the group?Recently I've taken up a new way to deal with all these things. I call it the Silent Bob approach to group management.The approach is outlined by three simple steps.
Officers' Quarters: Waiting at 80
Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.Lately I've gotten a lot of e-mail from readers with a similar theme. People ask me, "Should I stick with my guild even though we aren't raiding yet?" They say, "We just lost five members because we haven't cleared Naxx." They tell me, "I hate PUGs, but I can't even run a Heroic with my guild because only two people are 80."They ask me to weigh their guild against their desire to run group content. And the fact of the matter is this: I can't answer that question for you. And I'll tell you why.
