ArcaneTinkerTank (otherwise known as Gnoble, Husband, and He Who Sleeps On Couch) is dead wrong. Now what?
It all started when Gnoble announced that he was going to start tracking death rates on raids. With like, numbers.
I have no effin clue why I blacked out the names since you all KNOW who is in our guild. Duh.
Now we can get into the pros and cons of the policy – but that’s not the issue. The issue is that he’s my husband and I thought he was being dumb.
I obviously (privately) told him he was dumb. In fact, I have his ear quite a lot, so I can explain the dumbness – over IM, in the car, during dinner (Mama Murloc is refusing to take sides). But now what?
You see, if I say nothing on the forums, it looks like I agree with him – not because silence is usually construed as agreement, but because I’m his wife.
On the other hand, posting on the forum is incredibly artificial because… well he already knows what I think. My arguments have obviously done nothing to sway him from his opinion. Why the hell bother?
Ultimately I did post on the forums, just a short list of why I think it’s dumb, for the benefit of the other guildies. And he posted back, a short list of reasons why my arguments are dumb. It was a pretty dry exchange, since we had already scripted this out long before in our discussions over the dinner table.
However, I did get to threaten him with sleeping in the cat pan (not the couch, the CAT PAN) if this turns into healer blame for deaths. I am also annoyed because this new “death ranking” doodad has foiled my nefarious plans to let Alas die for her lolwell haiku.
Cat pan sounds like a good plan – men LIKE sleeping on the couch – it’s like camping and they have total control over the TV remote. One way to make the couch a nasty place is to take the remote(s) to bed with you.
Don’t ask me how my husband bear tank found this out from his priestess wife
I’m guessing he didn’t wait for you to drink before pulling the next group?
This post was easily the highlight of morning. Thank you for the laughs and the mental pictures, Zel!
Once upon a time in a guild far, far away, my wife and I were both logged in doing our things – her, fishing for fun and frolic, and me, storming the halls of Karazhan. One guildy, who may or may not be single-handedly responsible for all instances of my vowing never to raid there again, made an asinine statement in guild chat for everyone to see. Mrs Grimmtooth, being not so much the wilting lily that some would prefer in their wimmins, noted, in guild chat (same place), that he was an asshole.
After waiting to see if the GM /gkicked her for such temerity (she didn’t), he responded in private with a barrage of profanity.
To me.
Apparently, I should keep MAH WOMAN in control!
Now, this guy, despite being an asshole (he totally is), is also a bit progressively minded, so the notion that this fellow somehow has it in his head the outdated notion that husbands are somehow spokesmen for their wives is proof that we have a long, long way to go when dealing with pairs in-game.
So, to make a long story short (too late!), I see why you feel that silence in your case implies assent, and I strongly dislike that that’s just so automatically assumed.
Glad you guys can work through that sort of thing in a non-dramatic fashion. Well, what passes for non-dramatic in THAT thread, at any rate.
(In my case, one assumes, silence in that thread implies intense, mind-numbing shame. And I’m OK with that.)
In our guild, where we don’t have sexist monsters, I think my silence might mean assent not because I’m the wife but because I’m a spouse. If Alas says something, do we assume that At is ok with it? Probably. It’s more an assumption that the other partner agrees, regardless of the genders of the speaker and partner.
Oh, that’s a very good point. In my case our relationship is more asymmetrical than that of Alas/At Zel/Gnoble etc because I’m a raider and she’s hugely casual, so while I’m awash in theorycrafting and builds and strats, she’s combing WoWHead for the best fishing ensemble or what have you.
But if I were to start having a presence in Second Life, the situation would be reversed. Oh, they don’t raid, don’t theorycraft, or stuff like that, but there are norms, and politics, and things to know. I dunno … dance party etiquette, things like that.
And in that situation, I’m sure her friends would likely assume I was OK with anything she said or did in-game as well.
I’ve never really considered before how others might interpret my lengthy and often ranty posts and At’s frequent silences. Most times, he only partially agrees with me but can’t be arsed to get worked up enough to say something one way or the other.
I totally learned my lesson for that haiku regardless.
Because we’re such a loud bunch, I’m thinking that ANYONE who says nothing either agrees or isn’t reading. If it’s a spouse, he’d BETTER be reading!
Since we raid lead as a team, Reversion and I use the same strategy we use on our daughter (well she’s two so we don’t really use it much on her yet…). Disagree in private, united front in front of people. I think it helps keep things stable. Of course he has yet to be as exquisitely wrong as Gnoble just was.
The other way we avoid conflict is having areas of responsibility; he gets the final say on how we do pulls, what pulls we do, etc. I get control over invites and my healy minions.
We don’t really have officers or an officer forum – so what he says in public isn’t “the decision”. Whereas when we present a decision to Twig, it is “the decision.”
Reversion and I aren’t “officers”, we’re just the two who happen to lead our raid. I figure someone has to decide where we’re going every night, and it’s too much of a hassle to vote on everything, so we do take a leadership stance.
Maybe it’s just our crew but I feel like they appreciate that while we can all stand around and discuss everything, at some point Reversion says “all right, let’s go, we’re doing X strat”.
I love our debatting to be honest. This one caused a lot of it but I feel that overall we come out stronger each time.
On a more serious note I appreciate this post a lot. I’m always careful around couple in WoW, especially when one is a raid leader/guild leader due to past experiences. I’ve lived a bad case of a SO sucking so bad it would sink the raid but you couldn’t say anything at all… It’s nice to know that bad is still considered bad.
PS: See Gnoble! I did nothing wrong and still below 95%! I blame healers! (I have a free couch if Zel makes you sleep in the cat litter. Gotta support !!! /brofist!)
Is this death tracking going any more in-depth than “such and such seems to die early?” Because that’s not really a helpful thing to know in the absence of any context.
The closest I get to this is, when we have a death in raid, I go and take a look at the death log of the person in question. Then you get to see the last 10-15 seconds of their life and see everything that happened – did they get a lot of hot ticks but no direct heals? Did they eat a melee swing from the boss even though they’re not a tank? Did they take more than 150k damage in less than a second and a half? Then we try to figure out why those things happened. If it’s cho’gall, did we have a tank death because both healers got converted and the interrupts used to break the conversion incapacitated the healers for nine straight seconds? Or were they out of range?
Just knowing that Bill dies a lot and dies early is really not any help. Does the fault lie with Bill, or positioning of the raid, or is the raid ignoring a mechanic, or what? IMO, any time the raid leader resorts to effectively saying to people “play better,” that’s a failure on the part of the RL. As a hunter I have excellent tools to avoid the shitstorms that get kicked up on Al’akir’s platform in phase 1, so if someone else is having trouble I need to have some idea of something their class can do to deal with that – even if it’s just changing their boot enchant to lavawalker.
I think there’s a good analogy with military service. If you’re a squad leader and one of your Soldiers (or Marines) isn’t able to qualify with his or her weapon, you don’t just say “shoot straighter”. You watch them at the range. Are they holding their rifle correctly? Are they supporting it correctly? Breathing correctly?
This sort of coaching is more difficult with WoW, of course. I can’t teleport to someone’s house and watch them raid and see how their UI alerts or doesn’t alert them to upcoming events, I can’t see how far their fingers have to reach to hit emergency keybinds, etc. But I try to do what I can.
@Pradzha – I think in this case, The RL is using the numbers as a first indicator, and basically saying “You over there, need to do something about this” on the assumption that the more thorough analysis (reviewing previous 15 secs, etc) will be taken on by the person in question.
One nice thing about this group is that we have a lot of log geeks and helpful advice is always close at hand – solicited or otherwise
I blame the healers
You and Morehnai are gambling with your own survivability numbers, you realize… >>
Go on, play with fire!
(Much love, from Team Heal)
I’ve been fighting team heal since the very beginning, calling for revolution! I can take your abuse!
I’m really just lobbying for a Gnoble cat pan nap.
I did make him clean up cat vomit this morning while Twig announced “DADDY CLEAN UP THE BIG THROW UP.”
HA HA HA! Oh, the mental picture!