You May Not Initiate a Vote to Kick Yet

I behaved poorly recently. I behaved like a child, and I enjoyed it. I was immature, mean spirited, and vindictive. I'm not proud of myself.

But it felt so good. (NOTE: Feel free to skip to the end, since most of this is the tale of what occurred - if you're not into people behaving badly, go ahead and scroll down)

I do my daily random on a somewhat random basis. Usually, I try to group with one or two people I know - a mage friend, and my honey bun tank. That day, the three of us were all available at the same time, so we put in for our random Heroic and poof! We were in!


The PUGs were a Warrior and a Hunter. All five of us were ridiculously geared. The PUG Randomizer had placed us in --- Nexus. Woo! Easy run! So we run up and take down the first monster, and then my tank boy needs to fiddle with something. The Warrior and Hunter race ahead. The Warrior pulls. My response, as the healer, is to save this Warrior from itself. *runs up, heals Warrior, and the Hunter pet as well*


"Dude hurry up" says the Warrior.


Pally Tank is not amused. Warrior proceeds to pull the rest of the ice room ahead of the Tank who's now a bit irritated that the DPS Warrior can't take a deep breath before trying to whack body parts off of enemies. So the Pally Tank has ceased to pull.


This continues until we reach the first "real" boss, where we obliterate the Blood Elf wench with some speed, and then ...


Well where did the Warrior go? Where's the Hunter? Because they're not in range of their healer (me), and their healths are getting dangerously low. Ohp - the Warrior's up there. And dead. And here comes the Hunter running for the tank with a mob. And the Tank looks at me across our desks and says, "Let him die."


I feel rather bad, but at the same time - the Tank is the Tank, and the Tank gets to pull unless the Hunter is Misdirecting to the Tank. The Warrior's being a jerk, and the Hunter is, for some unknown reason, following along like a lost puppy rather than being useful.


Well, the Hunter dies. And then Tank, Mage and Priest take care of the add. Warrior and Hunter just lay there. They spout some obscenities and make demands but I'm not interested in rezzing people who aren't team players, can't type in complete words OR sentences, and are making a point of speaking and behaving rudely.


Someone initiates a Vote to Kick, and the Warrior gets booted (well, he was the one running ahead and pulling), but now we're stuck with the Hunter. Who,  by the way, is now the Party Leader. Who, also by the way, refuses the option to look for a 5th party member. And who, as well, is repeatedly calling us all Scrubs (but mostly the tank) for going soooo slowly, nevermind that he just plain stopped bothering so long as people were running ahead.



So we've got Tank, Mage and Priest in the group, and now that no one's pulling ahead of everyone else, we're moving forward and killing stuff. It's a little slow, but we're okay with it because, well, it's progressing the way groups normally progress - Tank pisses things off and holds their attention while DPS whittles them down and Healing makes magical golden sparkles that make Tank and DPS feel so fabulous that they absolutely must continue to perform.


The Hunter remains dead. I've put him on ignore at this point, as has the Mage. The Tank responds to the Hunter on occasion, so anything I hear is second hand, but every so often the guy apparently comes back to make jabs at us.


We continue clearing to the next boss, and at the big elemental white freaky guy we pause. Well. Three raid geared people (the RPG trinity, at least) against a Heroic Boss. Very doable, though possibly taking significant time. However, this is Nexus, there are no enrage timers, and Tank and Priest have duo'd Skadi from about, or more than, half health down to death before, so it's not like this is anywhere near impossible. Just slightly irritating and requiring patience.


I'm a silly head so I start DPSing, and getting slightly distracted - long story short there is, we wipe. I assume the Hunter heckles us. We get back in there - I'm feeling very guilty, because really, I'm a healer so that's what I should be doing but those Rifts were eating us alive so I felt like I ought to be doing SOMEthing to help. Mage comments - and I get the impression that we were both being dorks, so it really wasn't as much my fault as it could have been.


We take down Anomalous (?) and move on. The Hunter ghosts, runs back in, and just sort of hangs out at the zone line while we continue to clear trash and kill the rock boss - woo! No distractions that time, no problems, though it does take a while what with a Mage DPS and the darn guy's spell reflect stuff. At least the flowers that pop up give her something to do while she waits for it to wear off, though. We finish and run up to the tunnel that drops down near Keri and pause - I need to AFK, Mage needs to AFK, Tank... well, he'll be around. So we do our thing.


Then we all get back and we have to ponder: The Hunter, who's been a flat out jerk almost the entire time, is still in the group, and we have no way of getting rid of him. "You may not initiate a vote to kick yet," it keeps saying. Nevermind that I've yet to initiate one today. We've cleared the rest of the instance of bosses, and we DO want our Frost emblems. But the Hunter is alive and inside the instance, and we don't like him. We don't like him at all. He's been insulting from the beginning, unhelpful for the main portion of the run, and now he's just expecting to sit back, do nothing, and either get some laughs or get some free Emblems out of the whole thing.


I don't want this. It just seems completely contrary to what grouping should be about.


I ask the rest of my group how they feel, and they both seem to agree. I'm being a bitch and I'm aware of it - we've cleared the instance for this Hunter, but I'm not willing to just leave the group and hand it over to him to finish with a fresh group of strangers. Kill 1 boss and voila, Frost emblems. No fuss, no muss, and NOT TODAY, buster.


So we occupy ourselves and just... wait. It turns into a waiting game. The Tank heads back to the zone entrance - aggroing a number of trash mobs we didn't touch on his way, and drags them to the Hunter. The Hunter freaks out and zones out. I'm not actually certain why, or whether the trash would even aggro on the Hunter to begin with.. but he zones out, and then back in after a minute. The Hunter and the Tank play chicken with one another, aggroing mobs on one another. The Hunter MDs to the Tank who tanks for a bit before zoning out, and the Tank brings a cleaving mob to smack the Hunter. It goes back and forth for a while. Eventually the Hunter gets "smart" and actually tells the Tank that he'll send trash at the ladies (Mage and myself) and proceeds to run through the instance toward us gathering trash. Tank says we can take care of ourselves.



The Mage and I are basically fully present - and decide this would be a fine time to sell, repair, stock up on reagents in town. So we port out and do as we said, do a bit of AH browsing and the like, and eventually, eventually, we port back into the instance. The Hunter's ported out as well so it's just the three of us for a minute but the Hunter eventually notices and joins us. And then runs out, looks for a mob, and Misdirects to to me, the Priest. Grid tells me I've got aggro on something, so while rude, it doesn't come as a surprise when something appears from around a corner and lifts it's arms to decapitate me.


However, I'm right at the zone line. So escape isn't a problem. 


We wind up clearing more trash because I'm just not interested in being MD'd to again and it gives us something to do.


In the end, the Hunter had nothing to MD to any of us, and got impatient. So he ran into Keri's room, activated the spheres and started Keri up. He MD'd to the Tank, who simply zoned out and then right back in.


Something I learned: Keri sees right through your piddly Feign Death (that, or her aura ticks it into uselessness, I'm not sure which). The Hunter died.


And promptly disbanded.


We got a friend on their alt (another Hunter, but not one that spouts obscenities) and took Keri out, and got our emblems. Then we ran another, so the Hunter Alt could get random Frost emblems as well.

Not my proudest moment in WoW History. I could have been a grown up and just finished it off, ignoring the Hunter. I'll admit that I was also leery that the Hunter might do something to sabotage us during the Keri encounter even if we'd just left them alone. It feels very odd that this entire event occurred. Clearly, a group may need to lose some jerk in their group, but as of this event in my experience, there's nothing a group can do once there happens to be more than 1 jerk present (or, as in this case, what if we're ALL jerks?!). We were helpless to simply clear the atmosphere other than ditching and re-grouping - which, yes, I acknowledge as probably being the most effective use of our time.

But it strikes me as utterly bizarre that we would HAVE to do so, after all the effort put into creating the rules of the new LFG tool. I mean, it wasn't like we were going out of our way to sabotage the group we'd been given - we simply found ourselves in a weird situation wherein we had two extraordinarily impatient DPSers who managed to scrape our Tank the wrong way, and things got abruptly out of hand. They remained that way due to personal choice, on the parts of everyone involved. I think the Warrior actually got the best out of the whole deal, and likely wasted significantly less time than any of the rest of us. At the same time, I need to figure out just how the Vote to Kick function really works, because while I don't use it often (and certainly don't plan to), it would be awfully nice to understand what limitations it comes with.