PuGs: Unfairly Judged

Michelle had an interesting comment to yesterday’s post that got me thinking.

That said, my perspective may be skewed because BDF is a fairly progressed server and our trade channel PuGs are usually able to down Anub. I only run ToC25 on my main; I PuG it on my alts and have become rather sensitive to the way people look down on PuG’s. /shrug

Why do we look down on PuGs?

I don’t pug. It’s one thing to invite pugs for our guild runs. We’re in control generally in control. This is important to me not because I’m a power hungry dictator seeking dominion over my fellow beings (although I’m working on that as well),

but because I have more control over my experience. The people I run with are fun people. I’m comfortable around them. This makes things easier for me, especially if they go south* and all the more enjoyable when they go well. And besides, at this point the main reason I play the game is because of the in-game friends I’ve made so if I’m not playing with them, why play?

But that’s not a good enough reason for why PuGs have gotten a bad name. It isn’t like I haven’t run with good PuGs before. So why the bad name?

Story Time

I’m not one for giving out a lot of personal information on this blog. I’m sure you’re not interested, but for the sake of this story I need to set it up for you a little.

I graduated from Brigham Young University (BYU). I am a Mormon. Which is why I especially found BBB’s post the other day extremely entertaining. 🙂 (BTW a good majority of BYU’s football team over the years have been non-Mormons.  They recruit just like any other school.) But please understand that I’m a horrible example of what a Mormon should be. I haven’t attended church in over 5 years (basically since graduating). I cuss on this blog and in real life (mostly while playing CoD which aggravates my wife to no end). And have a slew of other problems to boot. So please don’t judge Mormons as a whole based on me. They’re just like anybody else. There are good ones and bad ones.

There’s several somewhat controversial…topics, let’s say, amongst church members. For those of you that know Mormons, caffeine is one of them. Another one is R-rated movies.

Now any religious person that really wants to lead a clean and wholesome life probably will not find any redeeming value in an R-rated movie. But the funny thing is that a lot of Mormons base what they will and will not watch on the rating system. You’re basing your religious moral values on a system set up by what you consider a morally corrupt system? Hmmm. Yeah, I’ll never understand that one.

So there I am on a Saturday morning sitting in my living room with two of my roommates. We’re watching a movie and I believe it was one of the greatest movies ever made performed by one of my favorite actors of all time.

Die Hard! Rated R for violence and language and maybe a few other things, I don’t know.

While the three of us are sitting there attempting to wake up, eat breakfast, and watch the movie, the door opens suddenly and another one of our roommates with arms raised, fists clenched, and bowed head triumphantly exclaims “I macked on three girls last night!” Laughing he walks in followed by a friend of his that he met last night.

While my roommate heads into his room to change clothes, his friend stands at the doorway and quietly observes us watching Die Hard. Unfortunately he breaks the silence.

“What movie is this?”, he asks quizzically.

“Die Hard,” one roommate responds and proceeds to spoon a mouthful of Lucky Charms into his gaping maw.

“Isn’t that rated R?”, the guy asks.

“Yup,” I said wondering who the hell is this guy and does he really have the gall to come into my home and lecture me on what I can watch?

“You can’t watch that,” he said apparently possessing the gall.

“That’s funny,” I said “because I think I am.” My roommate proceeded to spew Lucky Charms all over the floor barely missing the couch.

As we sit in tense silence, the triumphant roommate returns from his room having successfully changed his clothes and heads for the door. His friend asks, “Did you grab the movie?”

“Oh crap!”, he exclaims and runs back to his room. Curious another roommate asks what movie they’re going to go watch.

Without missing a beat the guys says, “Austin Powers”.

I nearly exploded.

It’s All In The Delivery

It’s one thing to believe or know something. It’s another to then try and pass that belief or knowledge on. It’s entirely another thing if you do it poorly**.

This guy, who I didn’t know from a hole in the wall, entered my home and attempted to lecture me on what I could do. As a Mormon I agree with him that I probably had no reason to be watching that movie. It contains absolutely no redeeming qualities from a religious standpoint and some negative qualities in that regard. Disregarding his hypocrisy, which is the fun part of the story, I think we can agree his delivery was horrible.

Because of this and similar stories, I had a rough time at BYU. But even as I knew I was being unfair and judging the entire school based on these few people, I couldn’t stop myself from doing it. And so it is with PuGs.

I’m sure you’ve had a chance to PuG a 25. And I’m sure you’ve had the chance to PuG a bad 25. Was it bad because of 24 other people or was it bad because of 1 or 2?

I’ll bet you just about anything that all of your bad PuG examples are because of 1 or 2 people in the entire group. It’s because those guys are vocal and stick out whereas the good ones stay quiet. It’s the vocal ones that give the entire group a bad name. It’s those guys that cause the drama. It’s those guys that make me not want to PuG. All because I don’t want to take the chance that I’ll end up with one of them. And I’m probably missing out on a great part of the game.

*Why do we say that? Is the South that bad? 🙂 Well here’s a random song for you and one of my favorites!
**A certain hunter needs to learn that before the entire guild turns on him. Although it might be too late for that…

Weekend Update

Well by now you all know that Amber’s our new GM. Mach did a wonderful job in my opinion, but I for one can more than sympathize with stepping down. Hell it had gotten so bad for me that I not only stepped down, but made the tough decision to leave friends behind and go to another server. But damn it! She’s already got me helping her clean out the bank…Mach never made me do crap!

So what did I do this weekend? Well, I leveled alts mostly. I was supposed to raid on Saturday, but personal things got in the way. My wife and I made the conscious decision to get rid of one of our cars a few months back. I only live 3 miles from work so it works out pretty well and saves some money. But at times it gets a little annoying.

On Saturday I had to take my oldest son to get his H1N1 vaccination. We waited outside in the cold for 1.5 hours. It wasn’t exactly fun, but I have to thank my kids for being so good about it.  To do that, I had to drop my wife off at work and pick her back up which conflicted with raid start. I thought I’d just be a little late, but it turned into more than that. We started Christmas shopping a little early this year.

My wife works at a department store, if they even use that term anymore. And we decided this year to buy a Wii. The store was having a buy 2 get 1 free on Wii games. So she got the Wii, games, and a couple of accessories for the family with her 10% discount. 🙂 My son has been begging for a DS, but he’s 6 and still hasn’t done a great job of taking care of his toys and mine for that matter. At the end of the week there’s always a stack of games and DVDs in the living room and it often takes 30 minutes to find the cases and put them all away. Yeah, I’m not buying a $200 handheld toy for him to destroy…

Anyway that made for a late evening and we picked up G.I. Joe to boot and watched that when we got home. So Saturday became family night and I have to admit it was a lot of fun.

So mostly that left time for leveling alts which was a lot of fun. I know I’ve been rather negative about the end-game lately. We had an Ulduar10 hardmode run this week which was the most fun I’ve had in raiding for a long time. We didn’t complete any hardmodes, but we sure had a hell of a time trying! I think we would have had XT with a slightly different makeup and a couple of slightly more geared dps alts.

But in the meantime, leveling has been a huge blessing! I’m having a ton of fun with the rogue, hunter, and warrior. The warlock is a little boring still, but I seriously dislike dotting and wanding. If I do much more, I aggro and in the few cases where I don’t I end up running seriously low on mana and have to sit and eat/drink afterwards. Trying to keep the downtime to a minimum, so wanding it is. There has definitely got to be a better way, but I’m a noob and haven’t found it or found the motivation to really go and find it.

I will admit that the mage has gotten a little better since I’ve learned pyroblast! 🙂 I can almost kill mobs my level before they reach me and anything 2 levels below is dead. I need to figure out a better cast sequence though. I’m basing it solely on cast times which has got to be the dumbest way of doing it.

Unfortunately I was ganked several times yesterday and I finally raged enough to park my DK in the zone. In fact, I ran around the zone for 15 minutes trying to find the four or five guys that had ganked me. I had even attempted to move into Stranglethorn Vale, but there were a couple of guys literally parked at Nesingwary’s camp waiting for Alliance lowbies. They stared at me for two minutes across the river before I finally gave up on them leaving.

Is it wrong that I want to level my rogue to 80 just so I can camp lowbies like Scrappie does in Redridge Mountains? You got a kid that apparently has been doing this since BC every weekend and most weekdays according to several people in the zone and through my own personal experiences. It’s a nice dream I suppose, but one I’m likely to never do. Man sometimes I wish I was more of an ass*! 🙂

*In all honesty, it’s probably less of being an actual ass than just a different method of playing. But it’s less fun to bitch about! 😛