The Perils of PUGs Addendum
…Finding them.
Once resigned to the fact that PUGs are necessary and need to be suffered, finding them becomes the challenge.
Sadly in World of Warcraft the Looking for Group function is horrible. It is incredibly limited and hardly anyone seems to use it.
On my server the big alternative is the trade channel. This channel is only available while inside a major city. Since it is literally the only channel that gets used with any frequency everyone joins it, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Imagine every PUG experience rolled into one very overused channel. It’s awful and I avoid it as much as possible.
Overall finding PUGs is not that easy, especially if you are a damage (DPS) class, as they tend to be a dime a dozen. Either you sit in town reading through agonizing trade chat, or you join the severely limited in game Looking for Group feature.
By limited I mean that you can only specify three different raids/dungeons that you are interested in joining. There is no general Looking For Group section, though this would also pose problems for WoW players since many of the dungeons and raids once completed force a lockout on the characters that completed them. This means that they must wait the allotted time to be able to return to the dungeon/raid.
At least when using this you aren’t limited to sitting around town. That’s right, you can enjoy the sporadically punctuated silence of the looking for group channel while traversing the entire lush World of Warcraft. =P
Of course there is always the option to start your own group, but then you are back at step one, reading trade chat in search of people to join your group.
Lets not forget to mention the intelligibility of the looking for group chat. DPS LFG H HOL (Damage class looking for a group in Heroic Halls of Lightning) or LF tank OS25 then GTG (Looking for a tank for the Obsidian Sanctum 25 man raid, good to go after that.) It all comes clear after a while, but its rather confusing right off the bat. I always end up advertising in full sentences. Not sure if this is a boon or a hindrance in finding groups. =)
While advertising yourself in the channels does help, my style tends to be more in the ‘wait until someone advertises something interesting and then jump on it’ vein.
Even so I do find myself just waiting around quite often, which rankles. I don’t like wasting my time just waiting to see if I may get into a group.
Sadly there doesn’t seem to be much of a solution. The best is of course a stable guild that has lots of readily available playmates. =) A good friends list can also cure the LFG blues. But in the end the waiting game is sometime the only choice.
<3 TFG
Tags: chat, drama, friends, guide, mmog, rants, world of warcraft
