Guild Wars 2

I am fairly new to this game and have found it one of the best games I have played in a long time. I leveled several professions right away to get a feel for which I liked and have been doing a few dungeons after a friend told me about gw2lfg. As a newish player I avoid posts that read “be experienced or you will be kicked” even if I have done the dungeon a few times. I am still learning, and those people have a right if they make the post that specifically to ask that newish players sit those out.

However, I found a group with no such tag where from the first boss til the point I got kicked, one player in particular accused me of being a “bad guardian” because I wasn’t using a certain build. He was killed on the first boss because I wasn’t cleansing with shouts as he said I should have been. Later, after much taunting to which I try to ignore, he berated me further for not using GS5 at just the right time to pull the mobs on some trash pull to him. And I was subsequently kicked from the with the nice tag line, “good bye sh#$%ty guardian.”

I wonder if such behavior is just to be expected as it would be in LoL, and I should not complain? And how will this seeming elitism work with the new LFG tool that is incoming in game? These are serious questions I have because while I can understand not wanting to fail content because of a constant flow of “bad” players, should we expect PUGs to all be masters of the universe and know everything, be running THE right build?

This may not be the place for this, but I do think it is helpful to remind the community that there are new players still, and these are the experiences that hurt the game in the long run.

It’s unfortunate, but you’ll definitely get some groups that will just assume you know what you’re doing, and expect you to be playing the way they want you to.

I’d suggest either creating your own parties and leave a note saying it’s not a speed-run, or new players welcome, etc. Or if you join a party for a dungeon and they don’t have a note left on it, politely let them know you’re still learning and getting used to dungeon mechanics. More often than not, people are usually willing to teach newer players how to run dungeons and how the boss mechanics work. If they’re not, just leave and look/form a new party.

Leave now before your soul turns as black as mine.

I expect a certain evolution to take place:

Immediate launch: dungeon performance across the board falls. Believe it or not, GW2LFG has a certain player base, and the LFG tool will open up everyone to dungeon runs.

Within 1 day: community split. With larger playerbase, the “experienced” only groups will become frequent, and more intolerant of other players. The inexperienced or generally “not as good” players will group together themselves.

Within 1 week: player performance will have split so far that the “experienced” groups become hyper specialized, expecting random pugs to be equal to premade and predetermined roles in efficiency, and failing when this doesn’t happen. The less skilled will grow much more slowly in skill, but nonetheless they will grow in skill.

Within 2 months: the inexperienced players will have grown in skill enough that the average PUG group will be quite satisfactory in performance by the average player’s standards. There will still be groups that are hyperspecialized to ineptitude with regular players, or groups so “casual” that they refuse to improve their own performance even the slightest, but for the most part there won’t be a problem.

Unless I’ve missed something, the overall outlook will be good. The immediate outlook, however, will be filled with failure.

You can never 100% rid yourself of kittens, that’s the gamble with Pugging. Obnoxious players make it very easy to identify them almost as soon as you enter the dungeon (players who spam party chart with “guys wtf?” are my favourite.) However don’t confuse this attitude with someone who just wants to take the lead so everyone knows what’s what, and having that leader role is so very helpful for inexperienced players. I suppose if you see two or three people that are in the same guild, or seem to be friends, be wary of any condescending talk, because as you just experienced it takes just 3 clicks to send you out on your way.

And really it takes a special kind of elitist to expect anything from PuG’s, all I expect from a PuG is to stack where we stack, and not ruin any pulls with unnecessary knock backs. Oh and errr…. 3k+ AP and a non-trash profession
…..Might even ask em to ping that Berserker gear.
Oh god who am I kidding, we went through like 10 PuGs in TA once till we found two that were adequate, but in my defence, that was the smoothest PuG TA ever.

Dolan.3071:

all I expect from a PuG is to stack where we stack, and not ruin any pulls with unnecessary knock backs.

you leave my fear necro alone

Dolan.3071:

Oh god who am I kidding, we went through like 10 PuGs in TA once till we found two that were adequate, but in my defence, that was the smoothest PuG TA ever.

Sword/sword warrior? Cleric shout heal warrior? Staff camping guard? In TA F/U thank god we kicked them asap ._. would not have been fun smooth sailing >.<

It was pretty funny xD
Necro? Kick.
800 AP Thief? Kick
Ranger? Lets see how he goes. Camping ranged as expected, kick.
That went on for a while, think we found the best PuG Warrior ever though, dat banner micro managing is just something the regular PuG can’t handle.
OH THAT’S RIGHT and we grouped with No.1! Like The Number One, he had what 13/14k AP? And he was a fear Necro, but it’s okay, we don’t depend on mob positioning anyway…

seriously I thought the sword/sword warrior was just using savage leap to get through the husks in the beginning.

Name is War Prime .. if u from EU SERVER pm me at anytime for dungeons

Hi there, I remember having your exact same issue when I started playing, unfortunately I never, not once, found a gw2lfg group willing to guide me, even avoiding the “experienced only” posts. Lucklily I made some good friends playing, we mastered every dungeon we though impossible at first (we had nightmares with Coe’s alpha, now we cant understand what made it so difficult in the first place), the thing is, playing with people of your same skill level is so much fun, you dont feel obliged to do things right, you screw up together and learn from those mistakes. Right now we still run dungeons daily, and when any of us wants to do something else, we post on gw2lfg to fill the group, since we’re chilled and we’re at least 3 we love bringing inexperienced players on our runs as long as they keep a cool attitude and listen instructions it doesnt matter if someone screws up… I’d really like you to join us on these runs, we can teach you what we know and have a good time doing so, I’d have loved this same kind of offer when I was a newb =) so i hope you consider it =D Add me in-game, or search my char name “Nagelfear”

Cheers =D

There are certain dungeons where a bad/inexperienced player will not only be dead weight, but can actively screw everyone else over.

If you are running, say, AC P3 and you die to the spider or whatever, okay. No DPS out of you. No one really expects much from pugs anyway. On the other hand, if you are running Arah and don’t know how to fight Lupi, and you start trying to kite him around during P2/3 when the rest of the party is trying to melee, and Lupi starts teleporting and bubbling, etc. and that causes the party to wipe, not so good.

In general, dungeons where you can’t really expect to be “carried” (because there’s more ways to screw the party than just pulling aggro):

- CM Seraph
- TA F/U
- SE 2
- The COE path with the tree thing, I forget which it was
- Any path of Arah
- Dredge, Aquatic, Ascalon fractals

Any other dungeon, so long as you don’t randomly aggro things, you can’t do worse than die and not contribute to the fight. Which is 99% of PUGS anyway even if they’re alive, so it doesn’t matter that much.

I don’t get all the hate public groups get. I run a lot of dungeons and very rarely do I encounter issues. Even having 1 or 2 inexperienced players doesn’t have a huge impact on the group as long as you guide them.

Bri.8354:

I don’t get all the hate public groups get. I run a lot of dungeons and very rarely do I encounter issues. Even having 1 or 2 inexperienced players doesn’t have a huge impact on the group as long as you guide them.

The better you think you are, the higher standard you set for others in your group. Person A may think the group was good, while Person B could call it trash.

Trying to melee lupi with someone who cant dodge grubs is the most irritating and difficult thing ever. “Oh look double grubs at phase switch”…. “Thanks for 3 bubbles in a row”….

Bri.8354:

I don’t get all the hate public groups get. I run a lot of dungeons and very rarely do I encounter issues. Even having 1 or 2 inexperienced players doesn’t have a huge impact on the group as long as you guide them.

If you do public PuG runs that often I am sure you have your own collection of horror stories.

Inexperienced players are no problem at all. Not even non-optimal builds (but I have to admit I cringe a little when I saw a 5sig war in Arah explo the other day). We are talking about PuGs here. I do dread players who refuse to listen.

I don’t even mind people running kitten builds/gear if they’ll LISTEN and understand that I really am trying to help when I explain why what they’re doing is wrong. But lately all I get is “zerk armor sucks” and “whatever condi is fine” and kitten like that and it makes me want to do the Jay and Silent Bob thing to people on the internet

spoj.9672:

Trying to melee lupi with someone who cant dodge grubs is the most irritating and difficult thing ever. “Oh look double grubs at phase switch”…. “Thanks for 3 bubbles in a row”….

Haha, just the other night I ended up with an 8 Empowered stack Lupi. The pugs stack for range and I go into melee. Lupi won’t target me and grubs just keep coming so I go to the stack to kill them from there. Unbeknownst to me, one guy had ran away from the stack and kept getting grubbed and no one was targeting them. I was like eh, this could be fun, I usually don’t give directions unless it’s a new group. This was an “experienced only!” from gw2lfg. We ended up killing him after about 10 minutes, the pugs literally ressing each other the entirety of phase2. It was actually quite fun.

As far as pug expectations, I find it best to have none. I think pugs are much better than they used to be and getting better. Sometimes you’ll still end up with that absolutely horrible group, but that’s the nature of pugging. I’m sure many here have been in a pug that went decent and at the end a pug said “OMG that was so fast!!”, even though the run was sub par. Even the best pug runs don’t come close to organized guild runs, but doesn’t mean they can’t be fun.

TheMaskedParadigm.3629:

Leave now before your soul turns as black as mine.

Ironically I had to do that to some powergamer friends I made when the game was still new-ish. They kept telling me how good I was but when I introduced them to a friend who plays casually they kitten all over him in PM’s. I had to stop playing with them, they were great players but horrible people. Now I either solo or join randoms.