In World of Warcraft, enjoying the game sometimes also involves performance. But what do you do when your friends are simply “too bad”?
In MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, everyone knows this: You are in a group in a dungeon that is quite challenging. There’s a time limit or a specific challenge and the group keeps failing due to the mistakes of a single player. While in random groups, after a few attempts you are inclined to just kick the person if there’s no improvement, there is a group of people with whom this is more difficult: friends and acquaintances.
But what should you do when the problematic player in the group is one of your friends?
Games like World of Warcraft are most fun when played in a dedicated group with friends. As long as fun is the priority, it’s not a problem if not all players are on the same level. It’s only at endgame that problems arise when certain hurdles can no longer be overcome because individual players are too weak or make too many mistakes.
5 Mistakes people make in WoW
There are a lot of things that can go wrong in WoW:
- The tank misjudges his sturdiness and just stands still instead of kiting the most powerful enemies for a few seconds to relieve the healer.
- The mage can’t quite get his rotation right and ends up dealing less damage than the tank.
- A priest is inattentive and repeatedly approaches dangerous groups of mobs too closely from behind, pulling them as well.
- The healer just can’t seem to avoid the dangerous void zones that announce themselves seconds in advance.
- A monk throws in the towel after the first wipe, thinking “You can’t achieve this anymore anyway, so we might as well give up”.
Mechanics in WoW are diverse and a lot can go wrong, from pure “output” performance to correctly playing the mechanics of many enemies or just having the right mindset to tackle challenging content in a focused and effective manner.
For me personally: As long as the goal is achieved, I don’t care about performance for the moment. If the goal is just a keystone at Mythic+7 and can be achieved even with rather poor gameplay – no problem. I like to play performance-oriented, but as long as the goal is reached, a player can lag behind a bit compared to others.
It only becomes problematic when the intended goals are repeatedly not achieved and it’s quite obvious where the issues in the group lie.
Fun is clearly important, and as long as everyone is having fun, things can go wrong sometimes. However, if the group consistently misses their intended goals, the fun inevitably declines over time.
In my group, there’s a collective awareness of this. If a player constantly falls out of line, there’s a collective desire to fix this “mistake” – in the friendliest way possible. This can be an additional announcement in Discord, specifying exactly when a particular player needs to move, a few ideas and suggestions for the rotation of abilities, or just finding reasonable guides to follow.
But even here, there are sometimes problems. After all, not all players can handle criticism or ideas for improvement equally well. Some want to stick to their playstyle because it simply makes more fun for them. Others struggle with the idea of being taught by their friends in a game, indirectly being told: “You are the problem, please change that.”
Right here, I would like to know from you how you deal with such a “problematic case” in your friend circle.
Feel free to write in the comments how you deal with friends in your group when there are persistent issues with gaming performance.
- Do you ignore the problem and just keep going, hoping that it will resolve itself?
- Do you address the problem and try to solve it, even if it puts someone in an uncomfortable position?
- Do you also kick friends from the group after a while if their performance simply isn’t enough?
- Do you have a completely different way of dealing with it?
What if you are the Noob?
But I would also be interested in the other side. How do you deal with it when you are the problem? Have you ever experienced and felt that it’s clearly you that the group is currently failing because of you? How do you react to that?
I have the advantage here that I am quite an ambitious person demon when it comes to performance in the game. I like it when my tank can stay alive for a while even without a healer, or when my shadow priest occupies one of the best DPS spots in a raid.
If that is not the case – which often happens – it weighs on me.
Then I almost always look for ways and opportunities to improve. Whether that means adjusting talents or making small changes in gameplay, everything that makes me more effective in my role is considered. I see it as my duty to fulfill my role as well as possible – because if I don’t try, why should the rest of the players do so?
Of course, there are limits to this. For instance, I currently would not change my covenant to gain one or two more percent performance. But everything else is at least up for debate.
The more it weighs on me when I can’t find a solution. When I encounter another player of the same class and specialization, who with similar gear is simply leagues ahead of me, I quickly get frustrated.
Because it’s not always clear to me where the mistake lies. If Warcraftlogs tells me that in a fight I only achieved about 50% – 60% of my theoretically possible performance, my right eyelid twitches nervously. It doesn’t help me personally if the boss still goes down and I was near the top of the DPS ranking. If more could have been done, I want to achieve that, too.
In WoW specifically, for me, fun has long been linked to a performance mentality. I have fun when I know that I’m doing my job well and not being a dead weight to the others, but rather a group member whom at the end you think: “Good shadow priest, I’d gladly take him again” or “Great tank, 5/5 stars, swipe right”.
If you still have the inclination, then please answer the second question in the comments: What does the performance mentality look like for you when you notice that you yourself are currently the problem?
Some people are currently complaining about Torghast – how could Blizzard fix it?
