Guild Wars 2

William Bradley Knight.2609:

But people who join groups that explicitly advertize e.g. full zerk, minimum achievement points, ping gear, experienced only, no rangers, no necros, or similar stuff will obviously kick people who join but don’t meet those criteria. As they should, right?

Advertising criteria like that for a PUG is passively aggresive. It’s no different from excluding that one kid in the school yard from the lunchtime football game because they happened to drop a pass or fumble the ball the previous game. Is ArenaNet obligated to stop this? No. Will it continue to happen in every MMO? Absolutely. I have no illusions that this behavior will magically cease. However, I still think it’s a stupid way to play games. The main reason I left WoW was that you were pretty much forced to adopt that attitude in PUGs as well as organized groups if you wanted to enjoy the game. My experience in GW2 so far is that there is no such need. That may change when I get into higher level fractals, but so far I haven’t encountered anything that couldn’t be overcome through the slightest bit of persistence.

William Bradley Knight.2609:

If it was a reverse situation where someone formed a play-how-you-want, all builds accepted group and somebody joined in full zerk gear and then started constantly complaining about poor group dps, complaining about the ranger/necro in the party, and calling everyone noobs and complaining about inexperienced play, he would also likely be kicked, right? As he should. He simply joined the group with improper expectations.

It’s a game. I don’t want to play with a bunch of cry babies and drama queens. I’ve spent years training my kids to quit behaving like that, and I don’t want to educate someone else’s kids in game. Kicking such a player would have nothing to do with how they play and everything to do with dragging down everyone else’s mood by acting like jerks.

William Bradley Knight.2609:

The OP’s assumption that kicking players who don’t meet advertised group criteria is a form of aggression is incorrect. People joining such a group when they don’t meet the criteria are obviously the ones who are being “aggressive” since they are simply annoying or interfering with others who are trying to play how they want.

The act of kicking may not be aggressive, but the advertisement in and of itself was already aggressive. That having been said, I personally don’t see why anyone who didn’t want to meet those criteria would even join such a group. I would chalk it up to ignorance. Someone who doesn’t even know what “zerk gear” or “APs” are may not even realize that they are failing to live up to certain criteria.

I have no desire to run dungeons with PUGs right now, but if I did, I would probably use those advertisements to filter out the groups that I don’t want to join. I prefer unexpected adventures to repeatedly running an instance at top speed exclusively for the sake of farming materials and gold. To each their own, I guess.

Obtena.7952:

Wethospu.6437:

Respect other players and their wishes and they will probably respect yours.

Unfortunately, there are opposing values in some cases, so as much as that’s a good ideal, it can’t happen if two people team, one values time, the other values how they look and RPing while killing trash. There simply isn’t a way for someone who values time to respect the wishes of someone wanting to perform Shakespeare prose and vice versa.

In any other endeavor, people who have such diverging expectations would not expect to work together. They’d each go their own way. Why do people not choose to go their separate ways in GW2 group play? Because they don’t want to be inconvenienced to have to find players who want what they want. In other words, they want the LFG tool to provide the experience they want with little to no effort on their part.

This conflict happens 66% more in GW2 than in other MMO’s. In those other games, the primary cause of conflict is in whether one is using the best DPS spec for one’s class. Since a 5 player party needs a tank and a healer, the conflict is only about 3/5 of the party.

Sunshine.4680:

Honestly even on wow it wasn’t this bad. in dungeons it did suck when DPS would sign up as tank etc but raid wise, pvp and standard pve it wasn’t an issue, some builds were better than others but some stuff worked well. GW 2 just attracts a whole heap of jerks, the community is more toxic than D3 or any moba game and that tells you something right there.

I would like to add that GW2 DUNGEONS might seem to attract “a whole heap of jerks”, but the community as a whole (outside of DUNGEONS) has always been quite helpful in my opinion. Of course, this forum seems to have a rather large majority of players that think when the term PvE is used you of course, mean DUNGEONS….why would anyone discuss (much less PLAY) open world zones?

I get this thread is about TEAM play (and thus Dungeons / Fractals), but the community outside those 2 areas is much less toxic (and actually quite accepting, in my experience).

J Eberle.9312:

OP came here because it didn’t work out so well in the dungeon forums :P

And he got the exact same response, the one that makes sense.
What saddens me – yeah it saddens me really, is that he isn’t going to think about it… won’t use the occasion to question himself and his personal view of the game and the people playing it; he’ll just proceed to shrug it off as a response by biased players, trolls or just people being mean for the sake of it and will look for validation elsewhere.
I hope I’m wrong.

GW2 makes it too easy for terrible builds to complete anything. No matter how bad you are you cannot fail and if your teammates aren’t too terrible, they can carry you through anything.

I’ve seen far worse communities. However, the general player level in GW2, as show by the Marionette event, is terribly low.

The forums had me terrified to get my deadly blooms for the legendary work. Everyone is making our dungeon system out to be full of self-entitled people who will kick at the first wipe. I finally decided to give the LFG a try and found out that it really isn’t that bad. Sure, the self-entitled people do exist but you can easily avoid those groups by not joining. They are very clear with what they are looking for and so long as you have wiki-ed/ googled the dungeon and have an idea of what goes on…you can get them done.

At least here we can’t right click on someone and see their gear. We have an AP system that some like to judge worthiness on but for the most part, you are allowed to prove you know what you are doing. And if you don’t, you can ask the group if they can show you what to do. The forum community is far more toxic than the in game one.

These threads always make me laugh, because the players claiming to be open-minded and who say they want everyone to play how they want, don’t want Zerker only people to play how they want.

maha.7902:

I can understand people preferring a specific build like zerker, but people not being open-minded that other builds can be just as effective in a party are simply annoying.

They’re not “just as effective” though. You don’t do the same amount of DPS as glass cannon, and a lot of support isn’t amplified by gear stats so you don’t even need to be using non-berserker stats. So – your build does less damage but does exactly the same support – how are they then equally as effective?

I’m not just talking about the gear. Traits and skills do their part too.
Zerker is a pretty frail setting. One part of the group misses a dodge, is down to barely any hp and is downed in one second. Another one tries to rez and is down next to him. You can’t fully avoid those situations with random groups.
That’s pretty much what I made my tanky build for. With evasive arcana and some other neat traits across the line I can heal the full party from 5% to almost a hundred percent and clear all their conditions in 2, seconds. Not to mention that the healing I can dish out with the water-attunement makes zerkers less likely to drop.
However, I’ve got to sacrifice the crit-stats from the air-traitline for it.

The build itself may not be good to deal high dps, but it can keep the party alive and supply healing, crowd control or buffs if needed, that a full zerker build may not be able to dish out in that frequency. If you got a group that is well organized and communicates flawless, a full zerker-party may be the thing to go, but you will hardly ever find such a constellation of perfect organisation in a random group.

Luckily for you you probably won’t, cause you’ll be kicked on sight in any game where you can inspect gear/builds.

Hi, I’m a guy who will kick a pug for doing anything that is

1. annoying me/I don’t like you
2. complaining/asking to do something that the rest of the group planned to skip/do differently (they usually leave before being kicked) (for instance if I want to pull the troll to kholer and bet money on who is gonna win that day)
3. not knowing how to run the path when it says xp people only…

Needless to say kick me from the group and enjoy re-running the dungeon that we finished 90% of because I usually open. This is why you open dungeons yourself.