Wednesday, June 4, 2014

The worst dungeon experience I ever had in WoW

Wasn't this dungeon, but these characters. This screenshot makes me so glad for transmog.
 Warning of sorts:    This will be a long possibly somewhat rambling post. I debated about making it at all, but well, it still bugs me and maybe it will feel good to write it out. After all, nobody is obligated to read it. This isn't a story about wipes or people ninja-ing loot. If it was I'd most likely have forgotten about it by now.

     Back in Cataclysm I was a new tank on my 85 protection paladin, Rim. I'd picked up the patterns for Firelands weapons on Rim and was forced to learn to tank heroics so I could get chaos orbs to make them for my guildies. My friend, Os' player back on her original account, was an experienced tank and healer and she'd often come along to heal them for me and coach my tanking in vent, so that helped my confidence and did wonders for my tanking too. We were a great team and we had a lot of fun.
    This particular run was Stonecore heroic, I'd done it several times before, I knew the fights, still hated some of them, but knew them very well. We'd queued together as tank and healer, and lacking any available guildies for dps had picked up three randoms. It was a fairly decent typical run until most of the way through. We'd cleared the area in front of Ozruk of trash and Os' priest, Roy had taken a seat for mana. So I stood there waiting and running through the fight in my head, because I was still a rather nervous tank.
     One of the dps got impatient and started nagging at me to go, repeatedly, but I said very simply in party chat. "I never pull while the healer is sitting." Partly because we were in vent and I was waiting for her to let me know she was ready. But at that point that dps and one of the other's started calling me noob and a few other names I didn't even recognize at the time, but later looked up and found out were racial slurs. Nice. I was annoyed but well there are jerks.
     She gave me the go ahead, so I pulled. We executed Ozruk pretty much flawlessly, nobody died, nobody wiped. End of story, right? Except that at that point Os' player, who had been tabbed out while getting mana scrolled up and saw the commentary from before. 'If that was meant for the tank, she was being smart.' she typed in. 'We're in vent and she knows I sometimes tab out while I get mana.' And that's when the crap really started. I didn't screencap this. I don't remember the exact words but the immediate response was very close to this: 'Oh... SHE... that explains everything right there.'
     The entire rest of the dungeon those same two dps subjected us to every variation of 'you losers should go back to the kitchen and stop playing this game' that I have ever heard, with some obscenities thrown in here and there. It still makes me angry thinking about it. I hadn't done anything wrong in my tanking, I had the aggro, I did the mechanics, nobody died. Heck nobody had even complained about anything until I refused to pull while my healer was getting mana. But the second Os' player used a female pronoun and they found out it wasn't a guy behind Rim's avatar we both got treated to some of the most blatant and obnoxious sexism I've ever been subject to.
     I don't recall the third dps saying anything. I don't recall us saying a whole lot in party chat after that either. I just remember reading the stupid, uncalled for stuff that scrolled across my screen and being so mad by the time we had downed the last boss that I logged off for the day. Probably I should have dropped group, more than likely I should have ignored them, but we were done with all but the last boss by then and I wanted my one in five chance at a chaos orb. I didn't even remember there was an ignore function then... if I actually knew. I was still fairly new to the game.
     It didn't make me stop tanking. It didn't make me stop playing WoW or enjoying playing Rim. It did make me fairly cautious about revealing my gender to anybody while tanking. And no matter how many dungeons I run where people do silly things and we wipe and someone steals loot I want... I doubt anything will ever make me quite as mad for quite as long as that did.

2 comments:

  1. Since I need little help getting depressed it's why I stay away from the general population. When things like this occur in game I think OMG these people are out in the real world, they might appear normal but that's really what they're thinking. Woe, woe, woe, and then I'm depressed and worrying about the future of humanity. Yeah, I'm that weird.

    Then it turns into wondering where are their parents, wherever they are they're doing a REALLY bad job.

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    Replies
    1. It's a good reason to stay away from the general population. There are some real jerks out there, though I think these two have the privilege of being the worst I've run into in WoW. There are some really nice people too and starting a blog has definitely made me happier because I've met a lot of you through it. :)

      I hope sometimes when I see people saying really horrible stuff... that it -isn't- actually what they're thinking but that they've gotten carried away by an audience that's paying attention to them and are just trying to shock people. I try to tell myself maybe it's that anyhow.

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