It’s official, the Holidays are OVER. Part of me is sad, the other part is celebrating at a return to some form of normality. However, as every student knows, my life is broken down into a series of semesters or quarters. This semester it appears I will be trying to finish up my thesis (egads), which means I will be home a lot more. Unless I find a rocking job.

Why am I telling you all this? Because while I was working I took great pains to try and post something around 10 am every day. Now, however, though I may post nearly as frequently, it may be at various times of the day. So, stay tuned to see how posting patterns change.

Now, enough of all that jibber jabber. It’s Monday, and that means it’s time to regale you with Sunday’s Pug n’ Pray. Except I was in Cleveland all weekend visiting family… But no matter! I will pull one of my many pug stories from the past out and share it with you, though it is a bit shorter than the usual. They aren’t all LFG tool stories, after all!

This particular story happened the same week as the Perfectest Pug. It actually occurred a few days before, in one of my failed PuG attempts to complete the weekly raid, which was Jaraxxus Must Die.

While we did have a group, we seemed to be short-handed tank wise. The feral druid who had intended to DPS offered to tank in order to help out in case we could not find anyone else. The raid leader took this to mean that the druid felt perfectly competent as the tank, and stopped looking for another tank. We set ourselves to go.

During Northrend Beasts, the druid tank did not turn one of the worms quickly enough, and everyone was splattered, resulting in a slow death, despite the efforts on behalf of the healers to save them. Immediately five separate members of the pug began their shrieks of epeened outrage at the mistake the druid made. The thing is, they didn’t just separately point out the mistake. For a full five minutes each of these DPSers went on and on about what a terrible tank the druid was, what a miserable failure, why did he even wake up that morning?, only a complete moron would make that mistake, and so on and so forth. Finally, the druid noted that he had offered to tank to help out, but was not accustomed to tanking, so he was learning it. Again, several people chided him, saying that everyone knows to turn the boss away from the DPS, and again, they went on about what an absolute moron this guy must be.

Finally, he simply left the group. Cheers went up from the DPS, and immediately they began searching for a new tank. Then I spoke up: “Be sure to find a new healer while you’re at it.” And dropped group. They didn’t like that one too much, as I noticed they were still looking for a tank and a healer for the next hour.

I then sent a tell to the druid, and added him to my friends list. I let him know I thought everyone had been out of line – when someone makes a mistake, even if it does seem to be an obvious and stupid one… usually all you need to do is point it out, ask the player to correct it in the future, and move on. The raid leader could have just booted the guy from the group. Instead, I wasted ten minutes of my very important and exciting life waiting for everyone to finish attacking this druid until he dropped group before they would even consider trying again. Maybe I stuck around so long because I was horribly fascinated by what was going on. In truth, it was also because I wanted to see what this druid would do. In the beginning I even piped up and said that the gratuitous insults were highly unnecessary – I’m sure the druid got the point. I was, of course, completely ignored.

The druid thanked me for my courtesy, and added me to his friends list as well. This all happened several weeks ago, but I ran into that same druid in Ironforge two nights ago. We chatted a bit, and he linked me his current ToC achievement, and told me that he had tanked every one of those fights now, and never had a problem. We laughed about it together, and then went our separate ways.

As far as I am concerned, it doesn’t matter if the tank screwed up, or was a completely awful tank in the first place (which he was not). He made one stupid error (one that, for the record, many tanks have made in that fight), and was ripped apart. Somehow, during the entire time (I have no idea why he stayed in the group as long as he did – some people get really desperate for that weekly quest!), he managed to stay completely calm and polite. If he had responded in a violently defensive manner, I would have paid it very little attention, rolled my eyes, and forgotten about it.

Instead, he took the higher ground, and responded to such inane rudeness with uncharacteristic grace and courtesy. I cannot say I would have reacted as well.