The PuG update: Al'Akir is down, reclaiming our #17K position. No screenshot, as there is nothing to screenshot, he just disappears and leaves a big nothing where his platform was. I hated this fight so I skipped the tries, first Hartog, then Sacristy led the raids. As they lacked healer for the last day, I "had to" join, so I was present in the kill and the previous 5 tries. Not on the 127 tries before. Every week someone made a try raid and finally Al'Akir died. Due to its complex movement, having a non-stable team was a problem here the first time. Still at the end, he was looted.
Hipponize joined our guild on Friday. His gear was completely ungemmed, unenchanted, he had no glyphs, several agility and intellect items (DK). If you check his gear now, he improved a lot. It wasn't a small feat, many people helped him with handholding advices and tips. Yet he got himself kicked:
People often comment that "social" does not exist, everyone has more or less sociality. So here I present you the completely social person: the immature, spoiled brat. We can clearly see the defining criteria of social here: believing that your rewards depend on interpersonal actions instead of work, therefore neglecting-devaluing objects and unpersonal tasks. He was aware of his uselessness in raid, but it did not bothered him. He truly believed to deserve a spot based on 3 social acts:
The social is beyond help because he is focusing on interpersonal acts. My advices about his gear and rotation are weird to him as these things are irrelevant in his eyes. He sees me as a "no-lifer", someone who focuses on irrelevant technical stuff instead of the meaningful things in life like love and friendship. Such mature social (unlike the immature) can be manipulated, but not helped abusing his delusions. For example by saying "everyone are running 5-mans for 346 drops, justice and valor points, why don't you?" I can make him run 5-mans, not by making him understand that this gear is easily available and significant upgrade to greens, but by abusing his vulnerablity to peer pressure.
The truth, that the boss dies from DPS and not from love and friendship is unthinkable for him. He has a wrong coordination system, wrong axioms. He is beyond help.
Hipponize joined our guild on Friday. His gear was completely ungemmed, unenchanted, he had no glyphs, several agility and intellect items (DK). If you check his gear now, he improved a lot. It wasn't a small feat, many people helped him with handholding advices and tips. Yet he got himself kicked:
People often comment that "social" does not exist, everyone has more or less sociality. So here I present you the completely social person: the immature, spoiled brat. We can clearly see the defining criteria of social here: believing that your rewards depend on interpersonal actions instead of work, therefore neglecting-devaluing objects and unpersonal tasks. He was aware of his uselessness in raid, but it did not bothered him. He truly believed to deserve a spot based on 3 social acts:
- reciprocity: as he did follow our earlier advices about enchanting his gear and replacing +int, +agi items to +str, he felt that he done enough for us, now it's time for receiving. Not kidding, a social really believes that by following our advices he did favor to us. That's why Blizzard is giving rewards for acts that you should do anyway to get raid-ready (achievement points, gear rewards for doing quests that give us XP).
- kindness/helping: he is new and weak and such people deserve help
- "nobody is perfect": with that funny comment at the start where he points out that my belt is unenchanted (belts have buckles, not enchants) refers to me being imperfect too, lacking the moral ground to criticize him. He is unable to recognize that the enchants are needed by the impersonal boss mechanics and even if I were an equally green-geared noob, he would have no reason to be invited to the raid (he would have every reason to run from a guild where the RL is so useless)
The social is beyond help because he is focusing on interpersonal acts. My advices about his gear and rotation are weird to him as these things are irrelevant in his eyes. He sees me as a "no-lifer", someone who focuses on irrelevant technical stuff instead of the meaningful things in life like love and friendship. Such mature social (unlike the immature) can be manipulated, but not helped abusing his delusions. For example by saying "everyone are running 5-mans for 346 drops, justice and valor points, why don't you?" I can make him run 5-mans, not by making him understand that this gear is easily available and significant upgrade to greens, but by abusing his vulnerablity to peer pressure.
The truth, that the boss dies from DPS and not from love and friendship is unthinkable for him. He has a wrong coordination system, wrong axioms. He is beyond help.
41 comments:
Would you perhaps have use for another tank in your guild? I'm debating transferring, but if there's an overpopulation of tanks, I won't. I know that you let others lead raids and no one is irreplaceable, but still.
About the post itself, well, it's nothing new. The person was probably a new player to MMOs in general. It takes a small while to realise that no person is a special snowflake and therefore irreplaceable in a MMO. (Even for social people, push friendship demands too hard and they will start to avoid you).
Experienced people don't get better with only experience, but by shedding mental constructs that hold them back. (Such as "I enchant gear for the guild to accept me as a friend.")
So you wasted so much of your time trying to explain things to man who doesn't even
want things to be explained.
I think I would stop after his third or fourth reply if I were in your shoes.
What the purpose of such wasting of your time Gevlon? Gathering material for your post? But I've seen many times in your blog how you are trying to help people who doesn't worth any help.
So are you now saying Social = Slacker? Because this is your definition of Slacker:
The slacker also don't make the effort, but it doesn't stop him from wanting the rewards. He believes he is entitled for everything, simply on the basis of him being a human (him paying $15). He believes that others should make his rewards happen. "Others" can be Blizzard nerfing everything to his low-effort level, or other players boosting him. The slacker resent those who have more than him and believes that they are just lucky or evil who immorally keep him away from goals. He believes that the raid leader who kicks him for below-tank DPS is merely an elitist jerk who has no life and kicked him only because he has life.
The slacker is not defined by the amount of effort he makes. He is defined by the low effort/goal ratio. [...] Slacker is not a relative term, someone is or is not a slacker based on the question: does he do enough effort to reach the goals he set?
Unless you have decided to move the M&S goalposts to win an Social argument, Hipponize is a slacker, not a social. By your own definitions.
I think we got similiar attitude in yesterday BWD run with Fomfur who beside having items not enchanted or gemmed, not reforged spirit after our questions why didn't he enchant before raid just kept telling "I can't get epics without raiding, everyone is moaning at me".
Sadly he joined raid later, and still didn't reforged spirit, empty slot gem but clearly he don't have time to fix it because he have to do old heroics and raid/dungeons for some purpose.
@Andru: the answer for your question is in the rules. "shedding mental constructs that hold them back" is slowly becoming less social.
@Azuriel: my fundamental point is that a social can't be anything else than M&S.
@Giovan: if you took an unprepared person to a raid, who is the stupid?
@Gevlon
The BWD raid I started out leading were missing a lot of people as such when there is anyone who is ready to step in after looking for a replacement it might come down to keeping the raid going and (maybe) get a boss or two, or just ending the raid.
I personally were leading a raid I wasn't ready for so I replaced my self, gave leader to another raid-member and gave the pot over as well. Not trying to glorify my actions.
But I know I came from a place were I would blame everything else but my own actions for it.
And I still have done it when I feel I hit a roof on my dps on my alt.
Leaving such ideas are hard, but it can be done.
I'm actually fairly patient, but I don't think I could've tolerated that much. I was in a heroic last night and for some trash mobs the tank did the same amount of dmg as the 3 dps COMBINED. Lol...
It was a miracle that we downed the first boss, but I bailed after that. One of the very few times I've done so.
I was probably not clear in what I wanted to say, Gevlon.
You cannot help complete socials, but that doesn't mean they are beyond help.
Others can not help them, but they can still find out what's going wrong on their own. With time.
As for becoming 'less social' or whatever. That's not exactly true. Or it is, but in a different way. A person can still enjoy Megan Fox tits discussions outside a raid/guild chat, over whispers.
That's arguably more social. Because, before the MMOs, people went online to chat with other people, which is as pure social as you get.
It was only later, when people started trying to mix gameplay with talking to 'friends'.
From my perspective, keeping discussions and gameplay separate is becoming more social, because then you will socialize for the sake of socializing, not with a gameplay agenda in mind.
@ Arthor.
Stonewalling people is not a good policy for imprinting doubt. Hypnotize will learn later that mixing business (raid) with pleasure (socializing) is useless.
As to why Gevlon did it. Well, he tried the abuse way in TB, and that did not work either. Something MUST work, no?
@gevlon again
Please tank situation. I'd hate transferring over and trying to organise raids and find out DPS lack. (No kidding, last guild I was in was like that.)
Its interesting the continuing debate. I personally have been struggling within the guild as it turns out I am not actually that good at PVP and being in a PVP server has become a living nightmare. Between the continual corpse camping, the 3hrs+ to complete my TB daileys and having to wait until level 85 before I could quest in Deepholm and Hyjal I have noticed I am starting to improve. I had been paying a shaman 1k gold for 5 arena wins/week, but now as my gear as improved, I actually have reasonable resilliance, I no longer need that boost. This week I paired up with a hunter who was spamming trade, he had nice gear without a single gem and enchant. His version of tactics was to charge the enemy, even when it was a warrior and a DK, I did 3 times his damage in each match and we won seven in a row. Then I got bored. Now am I suddenly an amazing pvper? no absoultely not. I have a long way to go, but I think what makes me a social as opposed to the slacker you listed is that I care enough about others perception of me to take on board /w of "ffs you got no *@&king skills" "l2p" "retard" and actually do something about them as opposed to ignoring them or asking people to boost (for free).
Wow Gevlon, that's quite a lot of patience you showed there with that guy.
What bugs me the most is when people say "but I play this game for fun" when challenged on their horrible gear, horrible spec and horrible skills.
HOW IS IT FUN to suck in a game? I just don't understand it. Isn't it a lot more fun to see your character grow and become better all the time? Isn't it great to see you do 2k more dps than you did last week because you worked on improving? To me that's a million times more fun than dying all the time and have people ridiculing you for still wearing green gear after 10 days played on lvl 85.
I think people use this excuse to hide their own laziness. "I play for fun" = "I cba to do anything by myself".
@Azuriel: my fundamental point is that a social can't be anything else than M&S.
So you are making a tautological argument that Social = M&S, ergo Social = M&S? You explicitly said:
So here I present you the completely social person: the immature, spoiled brat.
Except that is the same sort of definition you use for Slacker. Your argument here is pure fallacy. Do you further assert that no HC raiders could be social? Is Paragon a fully asocial, The PuG-esque guild? Or are they boosting M&S in Paragon? Or perhaps they aren't "true" socials?
Your argument here is asinine. Those pictures are from interacting with a SLACKER, not a social. Your first clue should have been the willingness of Hipponize to appear weak in a peer setting, which is not what any social ever does willingly. Leeches? Yes. M&S? Yes. Socials? God no.
Gevlon: "my fundamental point is that a social can't be anything else than M&S."
That's not proven by this post. Here, you've demonstrated that a social who is also a slacker is an M&S. From this, you cannot draw any conclusion as to whether it was the 'social' bit or the 'slacker' bit, or even a combination of both.
In reality, the 'slacker' portion has much more of an effect than the 'social' bit. Larisa, whom you've highlighted previously on this blog, is a social. I don't believe that you would classify her in Hipponize's category.
"my fundamental point is that a social can't be anything else than M&S"
I thought You had gotten over this ridiculous assumption many months ago.
If you phrase it like this its not even about a correlation or anything - the claim can be disproved by anyone finding a single social, who is not a moron nor slacker. And I know a bunch of those, myself included.
@Gevlon
I didn't took him, after whispering to raid leader that would be good idea to check Fomfur armory i just got reply "we'll kick him if he fail" to later kick him after inspecting inside raid, and later invite him again when raid leader changed(not me).
last thing I heard of the PuG is that it has more Tanks and Healers than normal guilds, simply because they like being free of the M&S
other than that, you can simply check out the armory, I am sure there are tools that can summarize the situation. or you can do it manually. or you can create a twink and check it out yourself
so many options.
Are you always raiding from 20 (server time)?
Due to rl changes I can't (and don't want to) commit a lot of time into raiding, your guild suits me for a lot of reasons, but the raiding schedule is the biggest issue.
Am I going to have any spot if for example I log on at 21- 21.30?
From your posts you seem to swap a lot so I might have my chances?
PS does anyone organize some raid during week end evenings?
PPS is there any interest in arena? Any rated bg? My current guild basically ignores pvp..
interesting read, althought it'd have been more efficient to reply "find a guild better suited to you". The interesting part is the endless begging, but it could also well have been a young teenager? you always assume you're talking to an adult, but wow is 12+ (and playable from 8 and up)
Nevermind the socials. You hated Al'akir? You? How can that be? I love that fight (disengage rules everything there), though my guild isn't doing him, since he drops useless loot, and we have bigger heroic fish to fry, and shinies to get. But I'm very curious what's your excuse?
I want to point out that practice dummies are good for testing rotations, but very bad for testing damage output, because you lack raid buffs and debuffs. However, 7k dps can't be improved much by any buffs available.
There are indeed two kind of socials:
1) The 9-13 year old kids that really just recently started to use internet and are still overwhelmed by all the discoveries. They sincerely perceive 'lolling' and all kind of internet slang as cool and fun.
Also, because they most likely did start gaming somewhen in 2007-2009, they don't have much clue, what serious/hardcore gaming is (e.g. Angband or first two Dooms no-save Nightmare runs). It is very common that their first gaming experience is some crap Facebook games, which are totally designed around sociality and ultra-intense 'looky, I have new shiney and I am better than you' and 'help each other and give out of thin air conjured freebies to your mates' stuff. Also, these games are designed so that no matter what you do, you just can't lose.
There isn't much wonder, if such person comes to WoW, they have very smilar expectations from their peers. And also there is no wonder, why Blizzard is making the game more accessible for such kind of people.
2) The 'hardcore socials'. These can be even 70 years old. These do use all kind of emotional manipulation intentionally (mainly trying to make other party feel guilty) to gain, what they want. Those indeed are beyond any fixing. These are the source of guild dramas of most epic scale. They are the types of emotional vampires that will drain the life out of the unprepared drop after drop.
@ anonymous asking about arena, I have been trying to get a guild team together. I wont promise greatness, but If your up for it you would have a partner.
@ next to last Anonymous.
Personal research is all fine and well, until the margin for error from personal research is intolerable, and/or the costs for doing so are also prohibitive.
Not every physicist who needs the speed of light to 5 decimals can devise and build an interferometer precise enough to measure that. Sometimes, a question posed to the right authority is the best way to go.
Case in point, I am unsubbed, thus subbing and making a character is cost-ineffective, and armory crawling is ineffective because all I get is how many people have a tank spec, not how many people *play* their tank spec.
Waw, Gevlon
you really tried with this one ...
Never have never thought you would have this amount patience with the guy.
and you didn't even kick him for his lack of english, not capitalizing , etc etc ...
This guy was so perfectly anti-Gevlon and showed every characteristic of M&S as defined by Gevlon on the front page that I am totally convinced his performance was very much intended and meant to be a mockery of this project and the ideas behind. A true troll, as Gevlon would have called it.
You are being way too optimist thinking Hipp is not an adult person ("adult" = in the twentys), in my guild we have found people like this in the thirty's, with degrees, etc. Sometimes, virtual and fake worlds like warcraft's are where people conducts themselves as they truly are.
Also your dialog with this slacker wasn't so lengthy, you wanted to prove that he/she was beyond salvation and tried to starve all your arguments, proving that this person couldn't see the tree even if the entire forest was kicking its ass.
PD: sorry for my english, I'm from the Moon
Come on, this was obviously a very young kid. Just look at the way he talks, this is the way children talk.
Gevlon, this is like shooting fish in a barrell. Children are selfish. This is not news.
Actually Grue, it is considered normal in Britain to type this way, due to the abundance of texting everyone now finds it acceptable to talk/type like an idiot.
7K on a dummy mean nothing, in my experience you cannot extrapolate anything from a dummy to a real boss, even tank&spank ones.
He asked to be taken to raid and be evaluated there, stating he was able to do the dps of other damage dealers which were not replaced. You proved recently that gear is overrated, so I don't understand why you simply didn't bring him to raid and see, whatever his gear was.
You can make him (or others willing to do the same) pay in advance an "insurance" to be kept and shared to the others were the DPS actually not acceptable, and given back were acceptable.
Like other said, I cant believe how patient you are... I'm in a "normal" - what I mean is not a goblin-ish - raiding guild, and I'm sure every of our officers would kick his ass right after the look at such a gear.
I'm REALLY suprised you took so much time to explain the same thing over and over to him.
He clearly doesn't listen or understand the guild he joined.
I think this social example represents the point at which I disagree with Gevlon about "socials". I have no doubt that accepting "boosting" and things like that are behaviors that exist, and it might be accurate to call them social behaviors. But in this example, it's not that 7K DPS "raider" is social, it's that he thinks GEVLON is social and he's trying to manipulate him.
Look at the core of social belief...helping people and "being nice". Except Hipponize, and pretty much all of Gevlon's social examples, just expect that behavior from others while at the same time folks like Hipponize are actively hurting their friends in the guild. If they were actually social, they'd acknowledge that bringing nothing to the table and actively dragging everyone else down is behaving incredible selfishly and anti-socially. The only social folks are the ones who put up with such behavior.
What's always interesting to me is that the ones who most loudly profess a belief in "helping people out" and "being nice" rarely return the favor. In truth I think it's because they CAN'T return the favor, but I'm not sure if it would matter if they could. Clearly their aim is not to spread peace and love and cooperation, it's to get what they want by manipulating others.
@Squishalot
Larisa by her own admission procastinated on stopping her blog, quitting her guild, and quitting the game. She admitted this procastination was on account of her social attachments to the people she raids with and her love of the game. Had she been a bit more asocial she would have quit sooner rather than later. It's this type of behavior that only proves Gevlon's theories. Being a M&S is wasteful and self destructive and breaking free of the social subroutines will only increase your intelligence, rewards, and increase your "state of flow".
Although I wouldn't consider Larisa a slacker the technical definition of a slacker is someone who shirks work or an obligation. Knowing you should quit but you don't can be considered the shirking of an obligation to oneself. Perhaps the aforementioned is a bit of a stretch but you can't argue that Larisa spent too much time agonizing over quitting when she knew it was time to go; she got trapped by her social subroutine. But what makes Larisa different is that she broke out of her subroutine and left it all behind (not sure if she is still playing wow).
I don't blindly believe Gevlon's theory. I think life is about balance and a certain dose of social behavior/subroutines can be healthy for society and personal enrichment. Where I disagree with them is when these social subroutines leads to destructive behavior: tribalism, racism, enabling behavior, etc.
@Gevlon - sorry if this is a redudant submission but your website often errors out when I hit submit.
@ Campitor
She stayed in the game due to her social attachments - she gained utility from those social attachments. If she was asocial, of course she would have left earlier, because she wouldn't have gained that utility. That doesn't say anything about whether staying longer was 'wasteful' however; as long as she derived utility from the social attachment, it can't be said to have been wasted.
The problem with your argument is that you assume that social attachment provides zero value. This may be true from an asocial's point of view. But, just as it is stupid to assume that everybody thinks as you do, it is equally stupid to assume that the zero value that Gevlon proscribes to social attachment is mirrored by socials who obviously gain some value from it.
It's for this reason that I criticise Gevlon's arguments so vocally. Because he is not presenting a logically correct argument, his conclusion is flawed and ends up coming across as mere rhetoric, rather than a logical, well-thought argument.
For example: Gevlon's argument in this blog is:
a) Hipponize is a social.
b) Hipponize is stupid and beyond helping.
c) Therefore, all socials are stupid and beyond helping.
I could spin that around the other way and conclude:
a) Gevlon is asocial.
b) Gevlon presents irrational arguments and aren't worth listening to.
c) Therefore, all asocials present irrational arguments and aren't worth listening to.
The reason I don't conclude that, of course, is because it's an irrational argument. I know plenty of other asocials (and socials!) who don't have to rely on rhetoric to make their points, and can argue logically, coherently, and in a manner that doesn't use blanket flawed generalisations.
I would go through and break down each statement of Gevlon's into 'logical' and 'rhetoric', but I feel it'd be a waste of time, since 90% of it would end up in the 'rhetoric' pile, and Gevlon would simply refuse to post it. It's ironic that someone who considers M&S beyond helping is, himself, beyond helping.
I vote that this was a troll
Notice the title is not "The social is beyond help", it is "The TRUE social is beyond help". Maybe the only way to tell the difference is to help them. You guild-invited and you gave good advice how to improve. The next one maybe will decide to spend the day making changes to do 9k dps to the dummy instead of 7k. People can change; some do, and some don't. Sometimes a person does not change until he is rejected.
Why the need to take it into the guild chat? For approval? Show of power?
@ chewy: One of Gevlon's rules is that all /gkick'ing would be done in public so that there is no question about motive.
You'll note that the guild chat was very clear - "did you ask to be carried?" "yes" /gkick in accordance with the rules.
You should add a farm run rule where players that want to get carry has to pay every other player 1000 Gold.
Gevlon wrote:
"...present you the completely social person: the immature, spoiled brat."
and later:
"You can't see so naked sociality in adult people, as with "maturation" people..."
Therefore Gevlon, despite typing English as a second language, recognized and was fully aware that Hipponize was a child.
Two time-worn axioms are appropriate here:
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.
Change comes from within.
We don't blame children for acting socially. It is the natural state in which any human is born, due to all those years of evolution.
The "helping" that we as asocials provide, consists of creating an environment in which they can learn a better way. They will help themselves, when they become mature enough to recognize the difference between instinct and rational thought. (That may never happen.)
Once in the past we heard the "Love will kill the bosses" sentence.
After that a real life friend of mine (Who plays a hunter) renamed his pet to Love. He uses that pet up until today because "LOVE KILL BOSSES"!!
Gelvons argument is flawed.
Hipp was a moron. He might have been a social person as well.. but that wasn't the issue. the Issue is that he was stupid as well as ignorant.
Stupidity does not equal social and social doesn't equal stupid in spite of what Gevlon claims.
I myself am a socail person. I know people on WoW that I consider friends. I talk to them about RL things as well as in game things. That is 100% social.
I am also a raid leader. And when I raid I expect everyone to be geared, gemmed, enchanted, specced, and flasked properly. If they are not I will not take then on the raid because it is detrimental to everyone else. If people perform sub par I will boot them from the raid. If they repeatedly fail at fight mechanics (moving outta fire, etc) I will boot them.
I would also have gkicked that Hipp guy far faster then Gevlon did.
and I also run a few crafting businesses on the AH and make all my gold there because I hate wasting time farming crap.
yet I am by my own admission social.
So... it's pretty obvious that a person can be social as well as productive and goal oriented.
Social =/= Moron.
Moron = Moron.
This is something the Gevlon does not seem to understand.
Post a Comment