The Multiplayer Jungle

When playing online multiplayer games one, inherently, by the nature of the game, exposes oneself to other people playing the same game. In some cases this can be a good thing, particularly for people the opposite of myself who are extroverted and good at making friends, but in some particular scenarios it opens everyone up to coming across the sort of people we’d all rather avoid, in the unpleasant context of being forced to work together with them.

I first encountered this when I began healing in the multiplayer dungeons in World of Warcraft, across various characters and in yes, both factions, because I’m not a fan of either the Alliance or the Horde, before anybody claims that Horde/Alliance players are better than what I’m about to describe. However many dozens of dungeon runs I made without incident, it’s always the ones that go badly that stick in my memory, even now more than a year after I have ceased to play WoW.

I still remember with clarity that one Scarlet Monastery run I did where a Dwarf Retribution-specialisation Paladin rolled for every piece of INT Leather gear that I (as a Restoration Shaman) needed, just to be a dick, and frustratingly won all of them. I still remember the Scholomance run I did as a Balance Druid where I ended up healing because our actual healer refused to, and then was left there on my own while everyone else exited the instance. I still remember the unbelievable Stockades dungeon instance I did on my Feral Druid character where I realised to my disbelief that all four of the other characters in the dungeon were controlled by one person, all with the same name ending in various numbers and set to auto-follow each other.

But sometimes, through some stroke of what is either incredibly bad or incredibly good luck, you come across players that are so goddamn awful that it becomes a bonding experience for everybody else forced to put up with them.

In honour of experiencing one of these yesterday while playing Heroes of the Storm (which I will probably talk about soon as well), I hereby present the story of my most remarkable dungeon in WoW ever, which occurred in Blackfathom Deeps as I tried to level my Dwarf Restoration Shaman.

The rest of the party was comprised of mainly Human characters, a Hunter who had a boar as a pet, a Destruction Warlock who started off with an imp summoned, and a Rogue. Our fifth, who was ostensibly supposed to be the tank, was a giant arse of a Night Elf Feral Druid who had queued as a tank presumably to cheat their way into the dungeon quicker (tanks and healers are always in higher demanded than DPS because there are 3 of the latter and only one each of the first two required).

Things started off all right, although we were all already somewhat bitter about our “tank” maintaining cat form, and it wasn’t until the first boss that our Rogue and Warlock started putting out messages saying “can you take bear form and tank please” because between the two pet classes there were enough extra bodies that we hadn’t suffered particularly much from the lack of tanking, and, to be frank, I was quite a good healer in those days. In response to their pleas, our Druid began switching to Bear form (which is designed to draw enemy fire from squishier characters like the Warlock and the Rogue) while running between enemies, and then switching straight back into Cat form to attack them – which could only have been a deliberate move to annoy them because it enhanced nothing.

Needless to say, this dickery did not sit well with the rest of us. We did our best as we continued through the dungeon, gritting our teeth and determining just to finish the thing, but our Rogue died a few times despite our efforts and my attempts to heal and the messages directed at the Druid began to become angrier as the dead Rogue started swearing at them, pointing out that if they had been in Bear form he wouldn’t have died. After the second boss, our Warlock summoned her Voidwalker (which has very mild tanking abilities) because we were desperate for anything to draw aggro, and our Druid indignantly demanded to know what the hell she thought she was doing switching to something that did less DPS.

All three of the DPS players were quick to point out that we needed a tank because the Druid refused to do their job, and it was at this point that the dungeon descended full-on into batshit insanity.

I was private-messaged by the Druid, who said “don’t listen to the Warlock, she’s trying to turn you against me, you should just heal me and ignore the others,” which I obviously ignored, because that’s not how dungeons work. Shortly afterwards it became clear they had been messaging the Hunter as well, because he stated in party chat that the Druid had told him that we should all run away from the fight and let the Warlock die, though quite why they felt that she was more at fault for anything than the other two DPS characters was beyond me. The Hunter furthermore insisted that the Druid should shut the hell up and do their job.

The Druid countered by saying that we had all been brainwashed by the Warlock’s lies about them (she not having said a single thing about him other than “can you actually tank please”).

By this point we were blitzing through enemies as fast as we could because we were desperate to get away from this person (unlike with the other three, I never knew their gender) and at a point where you can optionally choose to go underwater and fight a relatively secret boss called Old Serra’kis, we naturally were making no effort to prolong anything and breezed past the diversion, much to the annoyance of the Druid.

They began spamming the chat with [Old Serra’kis] [Old Serra’kis] [Old Serra’kis] over and over, probably at least a hundred times, standing by the entrance as we determinedly ignored them, mostly too busy fighting to actually type any messages in response since we were now fully down a man. I began receiving more private messages from the Druid, cycling through attitudes along the lines of “you’re going to leave me after we finish this dungeon aren’t you? You’re so heartless, how can you be so mean” to “you suck, I’m a better healer than you, you should just drop dead” to “what has the Warlock been saying about me? Don’t listen to her, she’s evil you know,” none of which I responded to and all of which were equally maddening. The first of these was especially confusing because I can’t believe that this player might ever have encountered a party who chose to stay together after a dungeon with them, and yes we were all obviously going to go our separate ways afterwards.

Our very irritated Rogue died once more and demanded in chat that the Druid stop messaging him with their “creepy-ass shit” (sic.) and the Druid, in between spamming [Old Serra’kis] a few more times, insisted that they would only stop if we would help them kill Old Serra’kis instead of going onwards. They then said, in what was a blatant and unbelievable lie, that they had been trying this dungeon for weeks and could find nobody kind enough to help them with Old Serra’kis, and couldn’t we please find it in our hearts to be good people for just a second and not ruin their whole day. This, despite being at level 15 still, the bare minimum for entering the dungeon, which they would have levelled past if they had done the dungeon even once before.

We took a short break, waiting for my healing to fully restore our Hunter, and I managed to type “maybe we would help with Old Serra’kis if you would actually TANK” and my comment received the universal online message of approval in the form of three sets of “^” and our Warlock saying “Preach!”

It was at that point that the Druid finally gave up on trying to convince us to kill Old Serra’kis and instead returned to outright insults, telling us all that we sucked in various imaginative ways and saying that we were evil and we were deliberately trying to ruin the game for them. None of us could be bothered responding to them anymore, and we quite miraculously managed to four-man the penultimate boss, with the Hunter’s boar doing a decent job of drawing the aggro for us this time. The Druid had caught up with us by now, but refused to fight, so the Rogue pointed out that the boar was more useful than the Druid had ever been, and we all in a fit of somewhat impish delight began crying “all hail the pig-tank!” and someone put a star symbol over the boar’s head, and there was much bowing, mostly because it was cathartic.

The Druid then flipped out, saying that we would see just how much they had been helping us if they went off and got themselves killed, and we would then be doomed without them, and beg them to help us with the final boss, and ran off to presumably throw themselves at some enemies and watch in triumph as we failed without them.

However, unfortunately for the Druid, our Hunter had just pulled the last boss, and what with the Druid pulling absolutely no aggro, the boss ignored them, thwarting their efforts to martyr themselves and show us the error of our ways. They then cried “you’ll never win without me!” and threw themselves at a bunch of minion enemies, not realising that the pile of tiny crabs they were standing in the middle of were all neutral enemies that wouldn’t attack unless provoked (unlike most of the other enemies in dungeons).

Undeterred by this latest failure, they finally took Bear form and attacked the last boss, drawing enough aggro to pull it away from us, and we let them take it, because by this point we were all quite happy for them to get themselves killed. And yet, even now, I had put out a healing totem that kept gradually keeping the Druid alive, and their constant cries of “what will you do now, huh?” were followed by them continually living and having to make a theatrical gesture again.

At length, the Hunter told me to let the Druid die, and I informed him that I wasn’t trying to help them at all, but that the spell I had used before (in order to help us) was inadvertently thwarting their schemes. The Warlock summed up all of our thoughts on the entire dungeon by saying “figures he can’t even kill himself properly.”

And then, at last, the Druid died, and over the top of their cries of how doomed we were, we defeated the final boss, congratulated each other, the Warlock and the Hunter sent me friend requests, and we went on our separate ways.

And I will probably never forget it while my memories hold, because it was so absolutely, ludicrously terrible that it reached a stage where it was actually kind of wonderful.