Anti-"Freeloader" Extremists?

It's better than logging off, shutting GW down then having to start all over again.... Please people, just be a lil' more considerate.... I have like, no RAM, so after a few (5-6) zone changes, I need to log off and restart me comp to free up the (inconsiderate) RAM anyways, so I make the most of all my time while in a current zone.... If someone goes AFK, oh well... I have soloed before and will do it again....lol....

*chuckles* Rubber necker!

Apparently, those of you who say 'plan restroom breaks in advance' are unfamiliar with the existence of a wonderful drug called 'caffeine'.

You really should familiarize yourself with this miracle drug; it'll allow you to stay awake so you don't go making ill-formed rude posts about silly behavior - about a game, I might add - because you're half-asleep. But one of its side effects is (you guessed it) increased production of urine, and also reduced tolerance for a full bladder.

Honestly. Get just a little bit of patience, you'll thank me for it later, when your real life puts you on hold and you can't get what you want right this instant. A five-minute break is nothing; try doing something productive. Balance your checkbook. Read up on particle physics, I don't care.

That said, freeloaders do irritate me. The person who takes the time to get himself invited into a mission party, and then sits at spawn waiting for you to carry him through is indeed a freeloader. Hellfire Warrior, for example. The person who, during some downtime, says 'brb, bio break' however, is not.

There are only three things that irritate me more than freeloaders - hypocrites, whiners, and people that have no patience. So please, take some time to attempt to view problems like this from the other person's perspective - more often than not, you'll find that you can see something you missed before.

Goodbye,

-sam

I'm sorry, but an eight minute break is just way too long unless it's some kind of emergency. You can't expect the group to sit around and wait that long cause otherwise you're just wasting everyone's time.

Yeah, it's just a game, but I'd like to get somewhere too. My RL schedule is busy enough that I only get about an hour to play a day. If you AFK on us for 8 minutes, that's more than 10% of my time gone waiting for you to come back.

Preach on, brother!

Most people have about 5 minutes patience and if you can give them some idea that it will take less (ex: "brb bathroom 1.5 min") at a safe point in the game most people will wait for you or the rest of the party will continue on and let you run and catch back up to them.

"BRB, food" is not a good excuse. 'What? Are you saying I can't eat?!?!' No. Going to get "food" can range anywhere from 1 minute (candy, munchables that you can eat in front of the computer) to an hour (a full dinner). If it's only going to be 1 minute, say so. Ideally, say something like "sorry, need a snack, back in 60 seconds" because it makes you sound more serious. And if you are going to leave for more than 5 minutes, expect your team to have moved on without you or for them to warp/kick you out. Do not be pissed at them for doing so, you are taking a long time and they do not know whether you are coming back or not.

"AFK tornado." If your house is on fire or someone is going to die, just do what you have to do. Don't be pissed that you got kicked from your team. Do not expect other people to wait for you because they probably won't believe your house is on fire.

Nice things you should do because it does not inconvience you too much:
After a mission go to the bathroom. If the team spent 5 minutes in town and you go to the bathroom right when the mission starts, it really seems like you are trying to leech. And ask yourself, "Can you blame them for thinking so?", considering you had ample opportunity to take care of business.

If you can hold in your hunger (or need to relieve, etc) for a few minutes just to complete a task without inconviencing yourself too much, do so. Are you serious playing this game until you are so hungry that you must run and grab something to eat? And then resume playing while eating or immediately after? Then that really sounds like there are more serious problems other than manners.

Most missions take less than an hour to complete, most even take less than 30 minutes. If you only have 30 minutes to play, don't play a mission with 7 other people you don't know. Go play a quick PvP, go farm, go do an old mission in Ascalon that you didn't complete. For longer stuff like fissure, plan accordingly, it's really not that hard.

Accept the fact that if you go afk, the team may become broken up and people may be pissed at you. If you have the right to leave for a while, so does the other guy. The rest may be pissed that your leaving caused this chain of events, but you left for a reason and you couldn't help it. Just say sorry and then leave and find another group, afterall nothing can fix the situation now.

I've had agroup wait 15 minutes for me because I was eating. They were cool. After 10 they ran off and left me a message saying where they'd gone. Then I came back into the game and caught them up. And they were like "Hey there, how you doing, welcome back". A really nice bunch of people. So people will wait. Just depends who you are playing with and whether they are ridiculously impatient or not. Flame away!!

I agree entirely and especially with the latter points.

Gee, Thanas, I guess we're all just a bunch of meanies, huh? LOL!

Given the right -attitude- is a lot of it as well. If you make the assumption that the group WILL wait for you, you will probably find yourself back in town all alone. If you tell the group what's going on, assess -their- needs/wants...*gasps* ahead of your own, you probably will run into more groups like the one you so describe.

I know that, for myself anyhow, if someone is polite and reasonable, I'm more willing to consider what they're saying. If they're rude or just assume that, because we happened to have grouped together, I'll wait on them ad nauseum, they'll find themselves dead or back in town.

MEANIES UNITE!

When I play with a group its not my intention to leave. Most of the time if the team is good natured and everyone talks to each other people are willing to forgive things such as "I'm sorry, I gotta go eat" and I do warn people if I think this will happen. I've never had anyone have a go at me about this in game if it happens.

Anyone who can eat an entire meal in 8 minutes is either the rudest diner at the table, or a starving labrador retriever.

Am I the only one who makes the distinction between a 2-minute potty break during the group's energy recharge time, and forcing the entire team to endure long-term dinner/chore/pick-up-the-kids-at-football downtime?

This is why I love my henchies. Sure, they are suicidal and stupid. But they don't announce AFK at the spawn point, they die with dignity, and they don't spam-beg "REZ ME, REZ ME, REZ ME" as I fight a mountain of grunting mobs, desperate to maintain my last 40 hps.

Sometimes muteness is its own reward, y'know?

Well, I'd hate to call myself "ridiculously" impatient but personally, I don't consider food breaks acceptable UNLESS it's a snack. Anything else takes too long (15 minutes is 25% of my free hour).

That said, I never advocate booting a freeloader / AFKer (though I do get annoyed). I've never said "let's go back to town and boot this guy". However, if someone DOES suggest it, I probably wouldn't object unless we were already halfway through the mission, cause then it'd seem counter-productive to do so.

I do consider bathroom breaks (~5 minutes) acceptable, however. I have a small bladder myself. Fortunately the bathroom is like 10 feet away so I'm gone and back in about 1.5 minutes. Blazing speed!

isn't the entire argument for most people here that we need to be more understanding of other poeples needs and desires....all I see in that argument is "me" "my hour" "my time" MY this MY that...how is that any different than the person that doesn't care about your hour of time...ALL YOU CARE ABOUT IS YOUR HOUR OF TIME.

Usually groups I'm in that are doing the longer areas(like Fissure) will usually have a quick 5-10 minute break for food, bathroom, etc. It makes it much easier then having someone AFK in the middle of something.

LOL! Good argument for henchies! I especially like the "die with dignity" part.

Agreed! I think people should eat etc, if they want to. I don't mind people doing it and won't kick them. I'll say "OK". I honestly don't care that much. I usually enjoy a short break when I've been playing for an hour. I go and do something else. Then come back.

Ah the evil henchies! Grrrr Alesia.... Alesia heal me, heal me, no dont run off and aggro that mob. No run away. Stop healing yourself. Heal us!! Thats it run away. Now start rezzing. Noooo come back. What are you doing rez. Well done everyones dead!

I once got caught up in traffic getting to a group meeting for a final project, and ended up getting there maybe ~20 minutes late. The whole time I was omw, I felt really bad about holding things up (even though I couldn't have anticipated the traffic). When I got there, there was a post-it saying they'd waited about 10 minutes and then gone off to a conference room to work in. When I finally caught up, they said pretty much the same thing "sup, how you doing, welcome to the group".

It didn't change the fact that I felt like an ass for making 3 people waste 10 minutes waiting around for me. The fact that they were very nice and understanding about my delay made me feel worse about what I'd done, not better. Making 7 people waste 10 minutes waiting around before finally giving up and going on without me would make me feel even worse than that, especially if it was something I could have anticipated.

I really don't understand how you can shrug stuff like that off so easily, and then imply if those people hadn't been totally good-natured about it they would be "ridiculously impatient".

The difference is that we're not trying to waste their hour of time. If we get our way, they continue to play guild wars, just like they originally planned to do. If that's not what they want to do, they should not have joined the PUG, that's the crux of our argument. What they are doing is wasting our time, because we're not continuing to play guild wars like we originally planned to do. So making a counterargument that says "well you should worry about my time instead of making me worry about yours" is completely invalid.

Same goes for drinking a lot of water or beer (both of which you can drink a lot faster than coffee due to the fact that they're cold). But if you go to the toilet before a mission (even when there's no 'urge' yet), you will definitely last until the end of it. Fissure of Woe/Underworld are an exception: they're so long that I think most groups take a few breaks during the course of it, so you could just wait until one of those breaks arrives. I drink unhealthy amounts of coffee myself, and I've yet to be forced to pause a mission because of the sideeffects, so I really don't think this is such a different issue.

Indeed, we do need to be understanding of other people's time. You are right, that is the point.

If everything is agreed-upon ahead of time - ie, we will/will not be stopping for breaks - then there are no misunderstandings later on. As has been said, simple COMMUNICATION everybody - it's not that hard. Whether you want to do the mission or mission + bonus, these things are agreed upon ahead of time to reduce the wasting of everyone's time, not just mine or yours.

If X goes afk because their child is bleeding and there is no time to type an explanation, X will HOPEFULLY be more relieved when the emergency is over for their child's sake, than to care about being kicked from a group. Right? "Child stabilized at hospital - hope they waited for me back at the desert!"

Group that X was in, will have every right to boot someone, whatever the assumption or information may be for X's absence/lack of movement. Even if everyone in the PUG knew about the bleeding child, would they say, "We'll wait for you - be back soon - hope the kid lives! Cya!"

No, I think that expecting 7 other people to wait 5-10 minutes for you to eat is selfish. You are being inconsiderate with their time. If they only have an hour to play at a given time, and you waste 10 minutes of that, you have cost them 1/6 of their time to play. If you have to leave, why should the whole group pay for it? And if everyone did that, pretty soon the first guy can't even finish the mission in the hour he or she has to play.

And who can't hold a normal bathroom break in? My parents drove us around on trips when we were kids, and if every one of us had the attitude that you did about bathroom breaks, we would have never made it anywhere. I had a friend once who was playing touch football. After a play he was laying on the ground in the corner of the endzone whining, "Oooohhh, my kidney." We all had a good chuckle, and he resumed play realizing his simple side ache from running the length of the field.

Matt

Thats your perogotive mate. Your the one worrying. They are not. You are creating problems that don't exist and over complicating the situation.

I can shrug it off quite easily because the team do. I didnt say that not being good-natured equates to riduclouly impatient. However it is quite likely that somebody of poor temperament will be impatient and complain.

I have completed missions with far less than a full team. So who cares if somones eating. Let them. I've had it happen to me and I'm like "so what?". For me it makes completing the mission all the more fun, cause I know it took skill to complete it. Always turn a potentially bad situation into a good one.

As a 20th lvl Mo/Necro I have no problems getting into games. As soon as I do, I make it very clear. If one person AFK then all AFK and we wait. If not I say c'ya... Im not going to waste my time with these idiots. Eat your damn McDonalds on your time, not mine.

Ok, lemme try tackling this from a different direction: let's try to find a common ground and work from there. On the one end of the spectrum, we have this real situation: Player A is in a group with some random strangers. Halfway through a mission, he stops for 15 minutes to eat, the other players wait about 10 minutes for him before deciding to continue without him. My opinion is that it's rude of Player A to do this, yours is that it's not, so we are in disagreement.

Let's put on the other end of the spectrum this hypothetical situation: Player A is playing GW. He stops for 15 minutes to eat, but GW has a rule that every time you do this, seven random other players who don't even know you get their games frozen for 10 minutes. This I'm sure is a situation where we can both agree it would be rude of Player A to play GW when he knows he's going to eat later and that it's gonna freeze lots of other people.

Now I'm going to try to flesh out some situations in between these two points, and you tell me in which ones you believe Player A is not considered rude. Obviously IMO he is rude in all of them, I just want to know how far along the spectrum you agree with me before our opinions diverge, and we can work from there.

1) Player A logs on to GW. Before he can leave town, he must find seven other players who agree to be linked to him. They don't have to play with each other, but for the remainder of the gaming session if one of them takes a food break, the others are frozen for 10 minutes.

2) Player A logs on to GW. If he takes a food break, seven other random players receive reduced exp and drops for 10 minutes, and all their battles become slightly harder.

3) Player A logs on to GW. Before he can leave town, he must find seven other players who agree to be linked to him. They don't have to play with each other, but for the remainder of the gaming session if one of them takes a food break, the others receive reduced exp and drops, and all battles become slightly harder.

So you get to do what you want (eating) and they also can do what they want (leaving)

Nobdy will win this discussion. Get over it.....

As well as the time of the six other people who are in the game. If one person goes, they're putting their time ahead of everyone else's. Your point is completely off track.

Yeah, I personally think it's a bit extreme to say no bathroom breaks whatsoever, but what if someone wants to take 30 minutes for dinner? Yeah, the rest of the team can try to move on, but when we die, the camera is just gonna center on the AFK guy and we're all forced to sit there while waiting for that person to come back.