Kimberlite wrote on Mar 27
th, 2012 at 11:57am:
They mostly keep to themselves, although they'll leave their LFM up with just "OR" in the info block for much of the evening. That can be annoying since guild chat exists for a reason, but several of the end-game guilds on Orien do that kind of thing.
The actual reason is that it takes time for the game client to load the LFM list, but one of the first things to load is the LFM comments. So when we run raids back-to-back and people are switching to different characters, the group can be formed even though the guys switching over can't see who's putting up the LFMs yet (the name of the character putting up each LFM is slow to load). We've tried having the group leader directly invite people as they log in, but that didn't work because load-in times for everyone is different and that resulted in a lot of expiring invites.
Kimberlite wrote on Mar 27
th, 2012 at 11:57am:
Last night , six of the eleven people in their guild raid group were anonymous. That is a very high ratio compared with any other guild-only LFM I have seen, and it says one of two things to me (or a bit of both) - they are either harassed, or else they don't want any interaction with anyone else on the server.
Members get harassed. Generally by people of the Desolator variety, but there's also other types. Squelching doesn't help because it's toon-specific. GMs are basically useless. Getting stuff done and being active on the forums means it attracts the nutcases.
Kimberlite wrote on Mar 27
th, 2012 at 11:57am:
It seems that Keybreaker would love to see all of Orien work together as well and as efficiently as his guild does internally. It is good to have dreams, but internet forums are places where dreams tend to get brutally murdered.
Key has this Quixotic vision that people on Orien can learn how to do raids and be better prepared and better equipped players if only given a bit of direction, so occasionally he'll post some stuff on the forums to try to get people to understand what to do and be ready for the endgame. (He also used to lead
daily PUG Shroud completions on Orien, and training runs on Saturdays, even loaning out DR-breakers for whoever didn't have them, and Bril who would eventually lead Over Raided used to do that as well prior to Key, so it's kind of funny every time I see posts saying that OR people should get out and PUG more.) Unfortunately they always devolve into the same forum trolls disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing and trying to score political points. I've joked to Key that he should just start a thread someday about something completely random, like "hey I went to the barber shop today" just to watch the idiots pour in like "such an elitist expecting others to cut your hair" or "I bet you didn't tip him much" or whatever.
When Turbine recommended all new players go to Orien it basically resulted in everyone on the server thinking they're hotshots in the game because it's made up of newbies so everyone's "good" relative to each other, so it's difficult to get people on Orien to, you know, actually improve on their playing. Everyone thinks they got what it takes even though very few actually do. People who say they can PUG any group to completion have obviously never played on Orien. So you get a lot of people like Desolator who posts about "video proof of soloing epic ADQ1!" and you watch the video and it's just him running to the three easy chests and looting them, and thinking he's hardcore.
Then they get offended that you don't bow to their needs or wait for them to slowly make their way to the raid, as if their attendance is necessary for a raid completion and the whole party should wait around for them. Part of the reason why we're less inclined to take PUGs nowadays is because there's been too many incidents of people joining, we'll say "hey we're starting, get over here quick", then we watch them dawdle on their airship for another five minutes when we already have 11 people waiting inside. Then they throw a hissy fit that we didn't wait for them, and likely end up posting on the forums about how OR is just a bunch of elitists that aren't willing to wait around for them.
Generally people who troll OR can be divided into the "functionally retarded" types like Desolator who just wants some attention and the "have an axe to grind because they feel slighted" types as you can see in the thread. Sometimes both. Which is unfortunate because there's rarely any
good drama like what Khyber is reported to have, although I would guess that other extreme powergamer guilds like the Revenants probably have similar types of trolls. (This being Orien, there's also a subclass of the second type of people who think they're hotshots but get rejected by Over Raided for a variety of reasons like attitude or personality, and then go around actively making up stuff about Over Raided, thereby validating why they were rejected in the first place. There's also quite a large subclass of the second type that pretend they're all-inviting and man-of-the-people on the forums, actively going around screaming "elitist!" or whatever every time an OR member posts anything as their guild recruiting method, but their leaders and members in-game are very critical and harsh on PUGs and make fun of them, enough to make them cry -- true story. It's a bigger portion of the OR-bashers on the forums than you may think.) It's more the type of facepalm drama which makes you wonder how these people made it through middle school (or maybe they didn't?) or weren't beat up every day at school (or maybe they were? the internet connection provides easy protection for whatever they say). It's probably the human equivalent of
musth for elephants, where having enough elder elephants around will prevent younger elephants from this type of idiotic behavior.
The thread gives another example of self-important PUGs, where the LFM said "VoD" and is a quick run (we're not the only guild on Orien to say "quick run" in the LFM by the way -- it's not a speedrun but means "we're not going to wait, we'll start soon as we have enough people"), and yet some people run to HoX instead and then get miffed that we don't wait for them to re-clear the Subterrane when the rest of the party is already waiting by the VoD door. And that ends up on the forums as meanies "leaving a third of a party out of VOD" without pointing out those PUGs' own incompetence or that they kept the rest of the group waiting in what's supposed to be a quick run because of their stupidity or lack of literacy, however you want to take it.
It doesn't mean that all PUGs on Orien are bad. But in pretty much
all the cases where people try to badmouth OR members on the forums through such incidents, I ask the guild members involved and they'll give the
actual details of the run that somehow never seem to make it into those "badmouth OR" posts. And they'll give some critical piece of information, such as the above, that show that all those incidents are really just the result of the PUGs' stupidity and sense of self-importance, as if
we're expected to raid at
their convenience. Every. Single. One. There are plenty of examples of this, as well as of the "axe to grind" variety, such as when someone went on the forums claiming that an OR member purposely sabotaged their ToD speedrun. The basis for this claim was that they had told everyone in the group to DPS Nythirios in part 2 but the OR member didn't. It turns out (the part that they "forgot" to post) that the OR member was actually the one
in charge of the shadows, and was busy dealing with getting the shadows' aggro and keeping himself alive. Even now, with shadow tanking more prevalent, even in guild runs we don't expect the shadow tank to be DPSing Nythirios, much less a PUG (and the member was not a well-known Over Raided skilled caster like Flamicia or Selina, and the character was definitely not his primary toon nor geared out). But of course all people saw on the forums was some guy claiming that an OR member was going around sabotaging other people's ToD runs before the thread got removed.
Unfortunately the Turbine forum mods never bother to do anything about it, at most perhaps removing a post here or there or locking down a thread once the trolls have taken it over, but apparently never handing out infractions (because the same people continually make the same type of posts and get threads locked over and over and yet continue to post; I think it's
horrible policy to lock threads without handing out infractions because locking a thread means it violates the forum rules in some way, and without infractions or bans the perpetrators are completely free to do it over and over). Partly why I tend to be more involved with the forums as a whole rather than the Orien forums.