Yepper

Guest Post

I was chatting with Shiny and was regaling her with tales of “The Yepper”, and she said I needed to submit it as a guest post. So what the hell, I wrote a story.

Enjoy.

There is a horror lurking within your chat box. A timeless, inevitable terror. Even guilds with small numbers of people are subject to eventual victimization. There is no refuge where it cannot find you, except perhaps that of complete isolation. If you never come across it, consider yourself lucky… but odds are – whether you recognized it or not – you have already encountered it at least once in your MMO career. For those who have escaped contact thus far, it may only be a matter of time before they run into…

The Yepper.

The Yepper is a curious creature. It may seem harmless at first, skulking in the shadows of your guild chat. You may notice it and even interact with it without realizing exactly what it is. Some Yeppers actually arrive in an advanced state of growth – ready to begin their assault the minute they touch your chat channels – but in most cases there seems to be a period where it may be undetectable. Inevitably The Yepper will anchor its roots and begin to blossom. Once The Yepper is comfortable and prepared, it will begin.

From this point forth, no matter what question is asked in chat, no matter how simple or complicated that question may be, no matter who it is addressed to, and no matter how eloquently it is answered by the person it is addressed to… The Yepper will contribute.

“Yep.”

As an example of this phenomenon, let us imagine a scenario where someone has become disoriented in the city of Dalaran:

[Player1]: “Hey, where is the bank in Dalaran??”
[Player 2]: “There’s two of them, one north and one south.”
[Yepper]: “Yep.”

It is almost as if The Yepper has evolved such a sense of self importance that it feels every question must be either addressed to it directly, or in need of personally delivered verification to assure everyone that the answers provided are indeed accurate. Sometimes mere confirmation is not adequate, and The Yepper will expound on the answer. Sometimes the extra information is actually useful to the inquisitive party, but in extreme cases of Yepper infestation it is as if The Yepper is compelled to seek out and add loosely related tidbits of information which have absolutely no bearing on the original question, just so it can become involved in the conversation.

In its most advanced stages of growth, The Yepper will expand its assault to mere comments that some hapless victim drops in chat. Even the most innocent and whimsical remarks can trigger it.

“Yep.”

In its final flourishing growth form, chat is all but completely rendered useless. Any single comment can result in everyone being subjected to hours of most likely pointless trivia and observations, all cheerfully provided by The Yepper. Rhetorical questions will always be answered, and no joke will be left with its punchline unexamined. This is where The Yepper life cycle begins to wither, for at this stage, it is only a matter of time before everyone either stops using the channel, or leaves. Starved of nourishment, it is presumed that The Yepper retreats to an earlier stage in its life cycle until it has rooted itself in a new chat channel, where no one has it on ignore. With a fresh supply of questions and comments to validate, The Yepper cycle can continue.

It is very rare to find a chat channel which is free of Yepper infestation. The Yepper has been found in guilds with as few as people, and the odds of finding them improve exponentially as the population of a chat channel increases. Given how common this phenomenon is, it seems prudent that those who feel they have never encountered The Yepper should ask themselves one simple question:

Are you The Yepper?

Tagra’s Tactics pt.5 – Respect and Negativity

Guest Post

Respect your Fellow Raiders.

This is a much bigger category than you might think at first glance. I don’t just mean like “Don’t make racist jokes because one of them might be that race!”, or “Don’t insult someone because they had a brain fart and died to something dumb this time.”

I mean recognize the fact that there are 24 other live (with or without lives…) people in the raid with you. You are not better than them. Your time is not worth more than theirs. It also means that it is not ok to tab out or go afk after every fucking pull, or god forbid after a wipe while you lie there waiting for everyone to run back and rez your lazy ass, because you are wasting the time of 24 other people. And it also means that it is not okay for you to watch TV while putting in minimal effort while everyone else is doing their best on an encounter.

I hope anyone leading a raid is aware enough to recognize disrespectful assholes and kick them out on their ass.

And a very important one for me…

Don’t be Negative.

I zoned into the battlegrounds the other day, and before the gates had even opened, a very familiar scene played out for me:

Newbie: Hey guys I’ve never been here before, what do we do?
Asshat: Lose.

Asshat has a lot to do with what is wrong with shitty raids. Let me explain!

The above is a battleground example, and the anonymous and random environment of BGs is basically a perfect storm with disastrous results, so it’s a great place to observe it, but if you think about it, you can see it applies to PvE raids as well.

Being negative lowers your morale and self-efficacy.  Being openly (raid chat…) negative lowers the morale of the entire raid.   If a persons self-efficacy is low, they are less likely to put effort into their actions, because they feel (consciously or unconsciously) that their efforts aren’t going to make a difference anyway.   If they stop putting in effort, then we are more likely to fail, which just confirms their beliefs… but had everyone in the raid put out 100%, maybe we would have succeeded.

The reason it bothers me so much is I had a lot of trouble with this back in the BWL days, back when consumables were a pain in the ass to collect and carry around and gold was hard to get and you needed to drink 20 different fucking potions every single wipe because there were no flasks that persisted through death.  Yeah it was a bitch and I can understand why people would try to sneak under the radar when we tried to enforce them.   What pissed me off was how when they were called out on it, they’d go “We weren’t going to win anyway, I didn’t want to waste them.”

Do you know how many times we called raids early because it seemed like we weren’t really getting close to killing the boss, but half the raid wasn’t using consumables (or putting in effort…) so we didn’t really have an accurate benchmark on how we could have done?   Do you know how many 1% wipes we had when there were negative cheapskates not using consumables?  1% worth of boss-killing consumables?   No, we didn’t win.   But we could have, you asshole.

And then the best part, my absolute favorite part… was when we did kill the boss and they were all “oh wow I didn’t think we could do it.”   What the fuck is that?  Not only are you negative before we start but you’re negative after we win?  No wonder we were plagued by shitty attitudes.

Positive results from shitty negative comments like those: … well if the raid really truly sucks, then it might end early!
Negative results: Everyone in the raid is more likely to put in less effort as they come to believe we are never going to win. Thanks for your contribution!

It’s tricky because a lot of times people make jokes (I know I’ve made several jokes about our impending horrible demise…) that they might not even realize are negative, but it can set a negative tone for everyone and take a lot of steam out of our momentum as everyone comes to think “well, we’re not going to win on this attempt either, so…”

Tagra’s Tactics pt. 4 – Don’t Be A Whore

Today’s guest post is brought to you by Tagra and her tenacious attitude towards one goal.  Owning your fucking face.

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Don’t Be A Whore

Meter Whore:
You know them, the ones that “forget” to switch targets on target switching fights because if they stick to the boss, they do 500 more dps than everyone who did switch.  Or, worse, the ones who switch to shit they’re not supposed to because it gives better numbers.

Congratulations, you did 10k dps!  …we wiped because the stuff you were assigned to kill didn’t die fast enough, but you’re on top of the meter!  And that’s what it’s about, right?

Loot Whore:
The ones who don’t actually want to raid, they want to watch TV until the boss is dead (without dying at all in the process, of course.  That might cost gold!), then scoop epics, then bugger off until the fights are easy again.  I’m not entirely certain why they want the epics if they don’t want to get them dirty.  It probably has something to do with standing around in front of the bank trying to get people to notice them.

Attention Whore:
The ones who don’t ever shut the fuck up.  There are many varieties. Some of the more common ones are the “Guys I’ve done this instance before.  I’ve killed this boss before.  Do you want me to tell you about the time I killed this boss before even though you have also killed this boss before?  Because I’ve totally been here before and I know this fight.  Oh that’s cool you do this the same way we did it when I was here before.  Yeah that happened when I was here before too.” and there is the “I am pointlessly commenting on everything everyone says no matter how trivial because you all must be talking to me when you say anything even if I’m brand new to this raid group and even if you specifically mention someone else by name!”

No one cares. The most impressive thing you can do is your best at your fucking role in the raid.  Stop being a whore.

Tagra’s Tactics pt.3 – Fucking Pay Attention

Tagra’s Tactics is brought to you by the rant-a-licious Tagra and her mental daggers of kill-you-right-fucking-now.

Fucking Pay Attention:

The add you’re supposed to switch to just popped, and you didn’t kill it. Something you are supposed to be tanking just punched a healer in the face because you didn’t notice it switch targets. The tank you’re supposed to be healing just dropped like a rock because something funny happened on TV. You’re standing in shit that is fucking killing you.

Pay attention.

I don’t understand why this is so hard for some people.

Most things are understandable. Not realizing exactly how a class ability works because the tooltip sucks and you didn’t dig through all the catass bickering over the best ways to min/max it… understandable. Fucking up on a boss fight you’ve never been to before, understandable.

Dying to the same gimmick you died to last time, and the time before, and the time before… you’re telling me you didn’t notice it (again) and that’s why you didn’t react to it (again)? Are you even trying, or are you just hoping to die so you can watch TV without being bothered by this game thing that keeps distracting you?

There is also the ever popular excuse: “lag.”  Lag happens. Latency happens. Sometimes there is nothing you can do about it.

One thing you most likely can do something about, though, is framerate. I once raided with someone who ended up killing everyone with a bomb-type gimmick every single raid, and the standby excuse was that their framerate was so low that the screen froze and they couldn’t move away. At the time I was running WoW on a computer that was already 5 years old, and theirs was roughly three times better. I did not have framerate issues. What was the issue? They had like, every fucking addon in existence installed and running during raids.

Some tips to hopefully improve framerates during raids:
- Turn off addons. You don’t need Gatherer and Auctioneer to raid. Get Addon Control Panel (yes I realize it is ironic to install additional addons…) and you can disable every addon except the bare essentials without having to log out of the game. You can even set up a “raid” set to enable only your raid addons with a click.

An additional note, since apparently a lot of people never noticed this… on the character select addon screen, there is a dropdown in the top left corner where you can set addons to load for specific characters only. So you can tell your auction addons to only load for your auction alt, or pvp addons to only load for your pvp characters, or whatever. It can be handy sometimes too.

- Turn down game settings. This is kind of a “durr” suggestion too, most everyone does this first, but it’s worth mentioning. Particle Effects being one of the biggest frame rate hogs and most fights don’t require it to be high.

- Turn down settings on your graphics card itself. Check the control panel for it and make sure it’s not trying to enforce antialiasing or anything.

- Turn down the resolution of the game. A lot of people don’t think of this, but if you run WoW at a smaller resolution your computer is working much much less to render the game. Yes, it is ugly, but if having a hideous screen for 4 hours is what it takes for you to not stand in fire, is it worth it?

To Be Continued…

Tagra’s Tactics pt.2 – Know The Fights

Today’s guest post is again by the mouthy and intelligent Tagra.  I’m glad to bring you part two of Tagra’s Tactics.

Know the Fights!

Know the Fights:
There are so many resources now that there is really no excuse for not at least having a vague idea of what is about to happen. I’m very much a learn-by-doing…-er, so I understand that the wall of text on Wowwiki doesn’t translate very well into “oh fuck there’s fire everywhere” until you’ve died to it once.

wowwiki.com
bosskillers.com

Raiders:
There’s really no excuse for not realizing that standing in fire is a bad thing, even if you have never seen this particular shade of fire before.

Leaders:
If there’s a new person don’t fucking talk about the fight for 30 fucking minutes, arrrghhh. Seriously, by the time you shut the fuck up and pull everyone will have lost focus and the new person won’t understand a goddamn thing you said until they see it in action anyway. If you have to talk, do it in a point form summary of things that will kill us, or on the SECOND PULL when they have a frame of reference for what you’re babbling on about. Thanks.

There are several common themes in WoW bosses, and learning them helps you pick up on what a new fight is going to expect, even if you haven’t seen it before. If it is killing you, don’t stand in it. If it is killing someone else and is attackable, we usually have to kill it so you might want to think about making a target macro.

/target XXX

It’s important to understand why we do certain things on fights, too. I remember on my first raid ever back in Molten Core, I asked the raid lead “why do we do (thing)?”, and their answer was “I dunno why, that’s just what we’re supposed to do.” This was before the days of guides on the internet, so the next attempt I went and did the opposite of it, whatever it was, and it did something god awful horrible to me and then I understood why it was vital to avoid it.

Before I understood that, it didn’t really seem all that important to me to avoid it. I was avoiding some faceless monster that didn’t seem worrisome because it was just another series of steps in the sequence, not something vital to remember to do. Remember to switch to the tree on Freya! But it’s not even doing damage! Surely I should keep killing these adds before worrying about th… a tree that will heal everything and wipe us if we don’t kill it in the next couple seconds? Oh shit, ok kill trees…

Which reminds me…

(to be continued in Tagra’s Tactics pt.3)