Responsibility and Respecting Other’s Time

In an effort to try and prepare myself for Vidalya’s run this weekend, I have been fervently running HoT heroics like they were going out of style. Having hit 85 only two weeks ago, I didn’t want to show up and be “that person”. By Friday night the key piece that I was missing was a helm. My beloved heirloom helm, while trustworthy, needed to go. I wanted a meta gem. I wanted to enchant it. I just wanted a new hat, dammit! That is how I ended up in End Time late Friday Night – most likely to be disappointed, yet again, when Murzanod forgot that he had a leather caster helm in his loot table.

After accepting my queue I found myself zoning into Sylvanas, with a dead group. This is never a good sign. But it seems it’s an all guild group, so how bad can it be? Famous last words, I know. I wait until everyone is there, and then buff, and advise the group that I am ready to go. The tank, a DK, pulls. And the very first time Sylvanas drops her purple pile of doom, the DK doesn’t move out of it, and dies. No big, I’m a druid, so I rez her. However, as soon as the zombies spawn the DK cuts herself in half on the purple lasers – and we wipe. So we run back in to get ready to go.

And we wait. And wait. And wait.

After roughly 5 minutes passes, the warrior in the group advises me that he’s going to tank and we pull. The DK is still blood, but whatever. We get to the zombie part, and the DK cuts herself in half on the purple lazers….again. We wipe. Once again, I release and run back. The group thanks me for being so patient – I suspect the healer that left was not. I get there, buff and we wait.

And wait, and wait, and wait.

The DK finally indicates that she’s ready, and I ask her if she has something other than a blood spec, and she says “Oh, opps, I just put unholy presence on”. No, not presences, do you have something other than a tank spec? Finally she swaps to a frost spec, and we pull. We get to the part with the zombies, surprisingly she lives! However, she dies immediately after when she doesn’t move out of the purple goo. Whatever, we ultimately won and can move on. I portal myself to the next shrine and, you guessed it!

I wait. And wait. And wait. Probably about 10 minutes this time.

Now, I generally have a lot of patience for players who seem a little green. Who clearly don’t have a lot of experience with a zone. I mean, people have got to start somewhere, right? And it’s not going to do them any good to have people raging at them about how terrible they are, or how stupid they are, because they don’t know what they are doing. In fact, it’s likely counter productive to their improvement as a player. So I try to be an understanding person, and try to be helpful and patient. But…these AFKs are starting to wear on me.

Finally someone in the group, probably the DK’s significant other, says “sorry, she’s back, little ones! Twins!”.

And so we pull the totem guy, and we wipe somewhere around 10%. ARGH! Alright, no big deal, we are REALLY close, we’ve got this. So we release and run back. And if you guessed that we waited around for another five or ten minutes, you’d be absolutely right! Finally, after another AFK we are ready to go. But we wipe again. People just couldn’t figure out how to get out of the damn lava. At this point, my patience is starting to fray. Because I know that a wipe means another five or ten minute AFK, and at this point we’ve had roughly forty minutes of AFKs…in an instance that can be cleared in fifteen.

As we get back and wait, yet again, I say to the group “I don’t really want to leave the group, and I understand the reason for the constant AFKs, but in the future you may want to find a guild healer or a healer from your realm who  understands the situation, and doesn’t mind all of the AFKs during the run”. I thought this was a fairly diplomatic way of letting the group know that the AFKs were really starting to wear me down. The response I got? “Stop your bitching”.

Really? REALLY?!

I told them that I didn’t mind learning the encounters with them, but that it was a little unfair to pick up a healer via the LFD tool and expect them to sit through so many AFKs throughout the course of a very short instance. To which I was told “Well, life isn’t fair, stop bitching”. Finally the DK gets back and says “Well, I have babies who need tending too, and they are a little more important than this”.

WELL NO FUCKING SHIT, LADY!

I completely, 100% agree with that statement. Your children are more important than this instance. But have a little fucking common courtesy for the others in your group, would you? Had our roles been reversed, about the second or third time that I had to step away from the computer to tend to my small children I probably would have come back to the group, said “sorry guys, this is a bad time” and asked them to find a replacement. But instead, the expectation was that my time wasn’t also  valuable and I was in the wrong for commenting on that.

I didn’t really want to drop the group. We’d already killed a boss, I was going to be locked into it, and I wanted a chance at the last guy in the zone. But here I was, being held hostage by the group. I couldn’t vote to kick the DK because it was an all guild group. So if I wanted to leave, I was not only going to be penalized with a 30 minute deserter debuff but had the possibility of being locked out of the zone. At this point, I was seeing red.

I asked the group to kick me.

And when I asked I got yet another “stop bitching, leave if you want”. I didn’t want to leave, I didn’t want a deserter debuff, that wasn’t fair to me. I shouldn’t be penalized for 30 minutes because I didn’t want to sit through an extensive AFK each time we wiped, which was multiple times each boss – through no fault of my own. I asked again to be kicked. Finally the group relented and I was removed.

As I raged to Brade, he said “heh, I probably would have left before they killed the first boss and taken the 30 minutes”. And in hind sight, I would have spent less time trying to clear the zone had I done just that. But I didn’t. I tried to stick it out and help an obviously inexperienced group of players through the zone – and then in no uncertain terms got told to piss off. I was livid.

Here’s the thing. I 100% agree that this woman should care for her small children and it should be more important than slaying internet dragons. However, if the children were requiring so much of her attention she should not have been participating in a group activity unless the entirety of the group was on board with her needed so much time. To expect a completely random person, with absolutely zero ties to you whatsoever, to just be OK with that is an unfair assumption on that person’s time. And it’s disrespectful. To basically be told, via the group’s actions, that my time wasn’t important was a slap in the face.

I understand that life happens. I absolutely encourage people to tend to life and to prioritize it over a video game. But in doing so, please have the courtesy to also be respectful of those around you. If you don’t have the time to commit to a group activity, don’t. If something occurs during a group activity that requires your attention, tend to it. But don’t hold the group, or members of the group, hostage while doing so. You understand that your time is valuable, but please also understand that other people’s time is equally as valuable to them and should also be treated with respect.