The Letting Off Steam Thread - Page 174

#passion

I've run out of Hob Nob biscuits! For fucks sake

#FirstWorldProblems

SC2 less stressful than LoL?

WHY THE FUCK DO YOU LEAVE THE GAME?!?!?!? ARE YOU AFRAID YOU ARE GOING TO LOSE FUCKING 20pp? DOES IT REALLY BOTHER YOU THAT MUCH? ... THEN PEOPLE WONT GIVE A FUCKING RUNBACK OFF OF A CLOSE GAME EITHER FUCK YOU YOU DUMB PIECE OF SHIT THE GAME WAS GOOD TOO WHY ARE YOU SCARED OF LOSING POINTS?

I want the people who designed this ffucking game to be raped by rusty tire irons every day of their lives

I have a headache.

No good deed goes unpunished.

I talked to a relative on the phone last night and they asked if they could call me on occasion for computer help. Usually I refuse but I decided to be nice in this instance and say sure. They have now called me 3 times today for help and it is not even 1PM. I'm going to stop answering my phone now.

Give and inch and they take a mile.

this will be long, i'm sorry.
i ended up running a raid for a while. it was a convenient solution to get people i like to play with each other in a group that i also resided in. i never thought about it in a critical way until now--that i was attempting to build a team for the purpose of clearing game content together. i just wanted a time and date to meetup with 7 other people so we could have fun min/maxing together.
so when it came time (one year) where i couldn't lie to myself anymore about hating mostly everyone's play in our group, i learned that it's completely justifiable to take the burden or responsibility of having been the source of said bad play.

being the 'leader' (wanting it to be incognito or not) means you have a large influence on how the group interacts or the way people play on an individual level when it comes to playing for content that is designed to be difficult.

i never wanted to be the leader, and i very much prefer not calling out a single mechanic because my ability to multitask is limited to me being able to perform my role in the first place. i found myself making mistakes and getting snap-back remarks about my play as i begin to voice my own frustrations about our progression woes.
and so i found myself not even being able to offer criticism because i felt so stressed and depressed about organizing everything, and making sure roles are being delegated so i didn't end up the only person calling out boss mechanics and timings.

my role is a dps and i don't know anybody with the same role on any server who does the stuff i was doing within my group, in and out of raid. i just found myself starting with those responsibilities because the content was easier and i knew i could help out in the group if i tried hard enough to balance focus between everything happening.
it became habit and there were even times where i thought that i needed to stop letting people handle certain mechanics.
so then i was a dps doing all of the non-dps mechanics and trying to make sure there was enough focus in the group to practice and handle the mechanics that couldn't concern me or the players i needed to work with.
as much as that sounded like a huge ego-tease in my head before typing, it was 100% truth, and i felt there was no way out besides leaving.

once again,
as a 'leader', you're able to be nice to everyone and keep a good atmosphere. you're able to make sure an unwritten agenda is being kept to and that everyone is being fair despite conflicting interests or efforts. this does -not- mean that the effort you place into things is going to be reciprocated or noticed.

nobody is going to notice that i gave away a trip to japan with my parents (decades older compared to other parents of people my age), or turned down too many people to count for us to have a chance to raid. nobody is going to simply notice that it hurt every single time i had to explain to a pug that i needed to have expectations of them, or that our group was probably not going to thank them for all their efforts afterwards--because guess what, you can't just tell people to act the way you want them to around others.
yet you are running on several other people's time, and time is very valuable currency.
it didn't even occur to some people to thank somebody for bending themselves backwards to be able to fill in on short-notice... because you (hypothetically speaking) refused to believe you needed sleep to function the next day. and decided it'd be fine to set alarms for naps and be tired for raid days that everyone is looking forward to.

so although i love playing with these guys and talking with everyone as friends, we came to schedule problems where either we couldn't raid this patch, or we needed to have extremely difficult times. we chose the difficult times and suffered at the start. everyone suffered. i spent three hours a day practicing and parsing on more than one class so the possibility of carrying someone on one of their bad days (or good) could be a thing.
the most basic of damn things, i needed to have a solution for, otherwise it was silent awkwardness, or a lengthening of wasted time in our already bad time-situation.
i'm told they want to be competitive, and that they're tired of being behind.
the one time i explicitly ask for help in a dire way, 'can someone with a better internal clock please help me count 15 seconds for ____ mechanic while i get more comfortable in this fight?.. anybody? . . . nobody at all?' nope. just deal with it.
a handful people want to be more competitive yet a couple of them are the very same people who never practice or consult information that's easily available and is made available to them--and i tell them that, and also since the very beginning, confide in them that it's overly stressful and impossible for me to continue doing what i was doing--that i wanted to play more for myself and step backwards. please for the love of everything good--never consider i did a good job as someone who happens to be reading this, but i tried my very hardest when doing all of this, and while i was completely outside of my comfort zone.

after all this damn consideration--and believe it or not--lost sleep over the subject of organizing and keeping things going, when i voice concerns or try a direct approach to hushing non-raid chatter during our already-tight okay time, i am suddenly the undisputed villian. people are talking about me behind my back all the time and aren't voicing grievances or concerns to me when i have been pleading for the chance to talk from the very beginning.
sure, talk doesn't help all that much, and sure, i have the image of leadership tagged onto me, but they knew i loved to help, or why would i be there in the first place?

the method of asking someone to focus harder or better is considered calling someone out and is normally frowned upon in raiding etiquette. in the top groups out there in any raid, you're expected to be able to dish and receive harsh words all the time--so long as they relate directly to the cause and don't step over boundaries in the process.
i don't do callouts on a person by person basis. i'm mr. rogers to the best way i can manage. i care about individual mechanics and the way mistakes are made as well as how they're fixed as a group. yet due to our inexperience with studying fights and with self-study, i am noticing groups of our squad making the same mistakes over and over.
this is common in most groups, but what is uncommon is when nobody owns up to making the mistake.
however much you feel otherwise, you are not a damn prodigy who doesn't benefit from watching videos or reading strategy; however much you feel you have a grasp and other people are holding you back, you have ample opportunity turning your frustration into helpful advice and patience to help these people succeed like you. i've said it time and time again. everybody is at fault in some little or unknown way.
i am probably the slowest learner out of everyone present, and i have the knowledge necessary to advance our progression in the fight. mistake after mistake, chatter over more chatter while mistakes are happening, or over friends who are very evidently trying to concentrate on what they need to mid-fight. i'm thinking: what in the flying fuck are you thinking?
listen to what i am trying to call out to you, and stop blaming your mistakes on other people when it would be very evident what your problem was if you were paying attention in the first place; if we can get this one fight down on farm mode, we can just have fun and chat then!

what a waste of my time---what a waste of -me-.
is what i felt when the laziest member of our raid--the person who claimed my strategy as his own as he brought it to other groups to show off and advertise--left for PR reasons like needing to take a break for school and to prevent burn-out.
buddy, we raid one day a week. twice at most. you don't even work on your paper until the day before it's due.
you barely study for your remedial math exam, and you came out with a 50.
you fall asleep mid-raid when you ask for a 10 minute break to go to the washroom... and we end up waiting 45-to-an-hour for when you wake up on the toiler seat or something.
i understand that school is tiring, but there is something wrong with the way you're forming your schedule.
there's something wrong with you drinking alcohol in the middle of raid, or during school, and you know all this.
i have to organize this raid for your ass, because you care for the game and everybody finds you're generally cool to be around. i like having you for our social anecdotes, and you're a lazy POS who still camera pans with WASD keys and loses aggro as a tank to the stupidest shit.

and this is the experience more or less (much less) that i have with every person in our raid, minus three.
ignorance is bliss. this idiom never played out to my advantage, because nothing would have taken off if i didn't try to form this raid group and subsequent community around it.

i would be in some raid group with some guy or girl screaming down my neck about mistakes i did or didn't make if i hadn't originally met some of these people i was with until just recently.

the way i chose to shape things towards the group disbanding was frankly awful and uncalled for.
actually, i believe they're things any raid leader would have done.
but it wasn't me, and it was sudden.
i wanted things to lighten up and look like what i was always hoping it would be---partially the things i've been trying to team-build into, else i would leave alone.

my motto while playing that game with one of my good friends (in another raid) is,
'less talk, more do.' much like nike's branding, or something an experienced veteran would utter to someone fresh for comfort.
except i'm not experienced, not in the way i won't regret.
the night we sat here and disbanded, i was indirectly told to stop talking nicely and stop beating around the bush about the real issue of negativity in our group. apparently everyone was mostly talking about each other in private--about displeasure, grievances, me.
there was this girlfriend with whom i never officially broke up with. we just stopped contacting each other, and i constantly think about her. i will never be able to apologize to her and offer support, or wish her luck as a friend anymore.
and it's because i wrapped myself and spent way too much time outside of work trying to foster something that wasn't there, or had a slim chance of forming:
team chemistry for a raid group within a dumb mmorpg.

why the hell didn't i give up sooner? the answer is quite simple; because you guys never said you were giving up.
the belief in the idea of existentialism and wanting to treat strangers like they were friends--believing what they want you to believe--meant that i met and had wonderful friends like you. everything we had to say each other outside of a serious environment was funny and thoughtful.
working together, we were selfish and truly absurd sects of people.
i've once heard someone very important to me say that they're angry before they're sad,
but for anything relatable that i feel for those emotions, i am now just sad and melancholic.

i'm sorry for the long-ass post. thank you.

Fucking TL

chuck palahniuk's novels are always better as movies.

Not necessarily a complaint, but whatever.

Also, Choke is a neat little film, but lacks any kind of satisfying conclusion.