I will tell you a secret: I have a very low tolerance for voice chat abuses.

Anyone who ever PuGs heavily can tell you that how a raid uses voice chat can vary enormously between groups. Some groups use it exclusively for mid-fight calls, and the next group may do all their social chatting this way, while another falls somewhere in between. The worst part, however, is when you get that one player in the raid who has a radically different approach to vent than the other nine members and is oblivious to it.

With that in mind, I thought it might be a good idea to lay out some general guidelines for using voice chat when raiding with new players, whether in a PuG or as a sub or with a new start-up raid.

• Pay attention to what everyone else is doing. Before you say anything on voice chat, listen to how the other people are using it first. If they are being social there, then it’s okay to join in. If they are only using vent to talk about the fight itself, then don’t start yacking it up about what you did last weekend. It should seem obvious but experience has taught me that it isn’t.

• Don’t chat about irrelevant stuff while in combat. It can be very distracting for some players, and it prevents critical raid calls or strategy adjustments. It also encourages more people to do the same by responding to you. While some raids do continue to be social even during boss fights, this is usually with an established raid that has a fight on farm, and is rarely appropriate in a PuG environment.

• Don’t do mid-fight call outs unless assigned. One person calling out an event on vent can be helpful. Three people calling it out on vent can make what would have been valuable information into an incomprehensible mess. Let the raid leader pick a single person to make calls so half the raid isn’t shouting over each other. Furthermore…

• Not everything needs a call out. Every raider can groan about that one guy who shouted on vent every time he needed heals, or every time he died (despite performing a non-pertinent role), or whenever he was targeted by an ability everyone could already see in their raid warnings. If this doesn’t sound familiar, you may be that guy. Don’t be that guy, because that guy is on mute.

• Don’t fight on voice chat. Yes, sometimes groups can be frustrating and you just want to yell at people, but don’t do it through your mic. On top of making everyone uncomfortable, there are usually other people in channel who aren’t at fault and don’t deserve to be yelled at. Pick your battles. If you really need to say something, say it privately or at least in /chat. No one wants their speakers blown out by Mister Angry.

• Censor yourself. Don’t talk make inflammatory or controversial comments, even if you aren’t being serious. You don’t know if someone will take a remark personally, and they don’t know you enough to tell if you’re joking or not. Additionally, don’t vocalise every single thought that comes to your mind; some things are not relevant or interesting. You don’t need to add a witty quip after everything that is said. It becomes tiresome.

• Don’t dominate voice chat. Even if a raid has a very active vent channel and everyone is participating, remember the channel is not your personal soapbox. Don’t hog the mic and don’t talk over other people. You’re not really being social if 99% of the chatting being done is by you and everyone else is stuck listening.

• Don’t use vent if you’re only communicating with one person. If you want to have an extended conversation with one particular person, whisper them. No one else wants to be a captive audience to a personal discussion.

• Respect your raidmates. If someone asks you to quiet down or stop talking about a particular topic, do it.

Voice chat can be an amazing tool or a painful aggravation depending on how it’s used. Use your common sense to make sure that you are conducive to the former and not contributing to the latter.

Today I want to write about newer players and the learning curve for a game like World of Warcraft. Compared to many other MMOs, World of Warcraft has a low learning curve. It is friendly to newer players and fairly easy to pick up even for people who haven’t gamed before. WoW proves this by appealing to a very wide demographic that you probably wouldn’t find in, say, an FPS player base. You can also see this in Blizzard’s famous 11-million-subscribers figure. But while the basics of playing WoW are simple, the massive size and complexity of the game and its vast world can make truly learning all the ins and outs a daunting task. Much of the game requires outside research and preparation in order to perform adequately enough for any group work.

Learning to play the game “right” is something established players rarely need to think about and, if they joined to play with mentoring friends, potentially something they have never had to consider. Yet much of the latest game development has brought this issue to the forefront. Recently many of us have started encountering “less knowledgeable” players frequently via the new Looking For Group dungeon tool. There has also been a great many changes in recent patches (and planned in future ones) to make the game more accessible or, as dissenters might frame it, “too easy.” With these types of players impacting everyone’s gameplay, the issue is now relevant to all WoW players.

Whether it’s the Death Knight wearing spell power, a mage that is incorrectly gemming for crit, or a rogue still playing combat daggers, many of us have found ourselves frustrated at these players. Doesn’t he know anything? How hard is it to look up the correct talent spec? Everyone knows ability X does more than Y! But it’s not that simple, and such judgments are, at least partially, unfair.

I didn’t fully realise how much about WoW I’ve really learned outside of the actual game or from friends who also played until I bought my father an account as a gift. I gave him the very exhaustive run-down of all the basics, which are more than five minutes of explanation. I showed him the various hotkeys and shortcuts, the way to control his character and access the game menus, maps, social pane, spell book, etc. I explained his abilities, the questing system, how to find things in the world and in cities, how to tell if something is worth saving, class roles, professions he could learn. I informed him about the bank and auction house, and told him about needing to repair and train weapons. I had to go over how to communicate, and how to specify if it went into a private whisper, or was out loud, or in party or guild, and when it was appropriate to talk where. Then, thinking he was set, I left him to his own devices thinking he would figure out the rest by exploration and experience.

However, when I checked in on him when his character was around level 30 (which is a only a handful of hours of gameplay, even for a brand new players) and found he’d spent no talent points — if fact, didn’t even know what they were because nothing in-game explains them to you. He was also wearing [white] vendor gear because it had “more armor” than some of the greens he was getting from quests. I told him magic items were better and that armor didn’t matter very much, only to catch him wearing cloth with useless stats for him at a later date. So then I had to explain that only some stats on magic armor were good for him, and that was followed later by me having to explain why that spell power item was bad for his hunter even though it had hit and crit on it which I had put on the list of useful stats for him. And so continued the endless cycle of me being frustrated with him not understanding and his being frustrated because I was seemingly contradicting myself and not making any sense. Even explaining something as simple as buying an epic mount reflected what a vast divide there is between his perspective and that which I am used to (“Why do I need to go faster? If I’m going a long distance I use the flight master anyway”).

Whew.

Think about the following questions: How do you know what specs are “best” for leveling, that someone probably doesn’t want to level as a holy priest or a protection warrior, especially if they’re still learning the game or aren’t playing with a friend? Why isn’t “mana per five” something they want on their mage, even though they use mana? How do you clarify armor classes to someone without misleading to them to think that armor is more important for non-tanks than it is? And how would you explain why a piece of cloth armor piece with stamina, intell, and crit is bad for their leveling warrior after you just told them that crit is useful for them, stamina is decent, and armor doesn’t really matter? Furthermore, how do you explain the differentiation on why stamina is something that you don’t gear for but that it’s nice if your armor has it, but intell is something you don’t gear for and isn’t really okay if your armor has it? How do you clarify the ambiguities of all those kinds things that don’t really matter, except when they do? How do you enlighten someone as to the delicacies of why it’s better they let the hunter take that gun, even though it has stats on it that are useful to their rogue? Where in-game do you learn about the existence of enchants, belt buckles, and armor kits, if you don’t have one of those professions? How do you know that you can put a green gem in a red socket, or whether you should?  How do you learn the value of professions in the first place, especially what they will mean in “end game?”  For that matter, how does one know definitively that a particular piece of armor, or enchant or gem or glyph or talent or ability is “worth” more than another?

I always took these types of things as blatantly obvious before but now I was beginning to see that they are pretty complicated to a player who is new to the game, and especially confusing to a person who unfamiliar with the RPG/MMO genre entirely. Today my father has six 80s (he levels them quickly and then immediately retires them after reaching the cap) but still asks me questions that kinda horrify me. He’s an intelligent man, but not only is he not a part of this “world” of outside reading and research, I don’t even think he realizes this world exists. It just doesn’t occur to him that not only do people see it as a “big deal” if you’re not doing things perfectly correct, but that people go as far as to run simulators and use spreadsheets and argue on message boards as part of the process of determining what is correct.  And even if they knew, it would probably sound like absolute madness that we do these things for a game.

It may sound bizarre to the people here. As evidence by the fact you’re reading a WoW related blog, you are the kind of person who already uses resources outside of the game to improve your characters. However, players like you and me make up a minority of the player base. For the average WoW player, it probably has never even occurred to them to do outside “research” on a game. There are tons of people whose relationship around WoW is limited to the times between opening and closing the client. Those people may not even realise things exist beyond that. So something is not made apparent through regular gameplay, they’d be oblivious of it through no fault of their own.

On top of struggling with all of this, newer players also have to face negative judgment from older players who take for granted all the knowledge they’ve acquired over the years, who assume that everyone should know the correct way to spec or gem intuitively and who resent players that don’t do so as “lazy,” even though it is fully possible that many of these players don’t even realise there is such thing as a “correct way.”

It is perhaps time, with this in mind, that we learn to adjust our tolerances and, when really exasperated, aim for educating not berating.