Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Vicious Cycle



While looking up "vicious cycle" to help flesh out this post I found wikipedia's "Vicious Circle" entry and along with it "Virtuous Circle". I don't recall knowing of Virtuous circles, perhaps they were mention in some economics class I've long forgotten about. Vicious cycle is cliche, virtuous not so much.

I was thinking about vicious cycles in dungeon running.

Because on the forums tanks complain about dps and to a lesser extent healers and dps complains about tanks and to a lesser extent healers, and healers complain about tanks and dps seemingly equally.

DPS have long queues, so by the time they get a tank they want to tank to hurry. Not all tanks are equipped or comfortable with massive chain pulls so they feel pressured to rush. Tanks get inured to this and start biting off more than they can chew. Healers end up stressed because they aren't given the chance to get their mana up to a comfortable level and have to learn to keep up. Tanks and healers don't necessarily enjoy this so they stop queuing. DPS queues grow longer. The cycle continues.

DPS have long queues, but no one wants to give lesser-geared (with cheap crafted defense items you shouldn't be under-geared) tanks a chance. Tanks queue up as DPS to get tank gear adding to the DPS queue. The cycle continues.

What would be a virtuous cycle?

For me, I queue up with a group of random people and they laugh and joke and appear to have a good time. They act like they actually want to be there. They are better geared than me, way better in some cases, but they try to watch their aggro. The healer lets me know I can try bigger pulls and when someone inadvertently dies no one is blamed. The corpse laughs that he has made his "sacrifice". I want to keep running with these guys. And I do.

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