More weekend pug adventures

I had a string of friendly pugs yesterday and today - though it's kind of sad that nice pugs have become something noteworthy to begin with.

First I healed a heroic Utgarde Pinnacle run where the tank suddenly said "brb" as we were getting ready for the second boss encounter. And nobody shouted "gogogo" or decided to start the event anyway! People just waited and chatted. The rogue apologised for his low dps, explaining that he had only just dinged that day. And he was doing nearly two thousand dps anyway, nothing to be ashamed of! When the tank came back he apologised too, explaining that he had had to get the doorbell.

On Skadi our hunter picked up all the harpoons without prompting and shot the boss down in one flyby. So nice, considering the amount of bickering I've had to observe in regards to that simple task over time.

Then, just as we were going down the stairs after the boss, the tank suddenly went afk again. The hunter pulled anyway and we wiped, but he said that it had been an accident and once again apologised profusely. Everyone ran back on their own (!), except for the tank, who was still afk. However, he didn't complain about his death either once he came back, just told us instead that he had been gone because he had to attend to the workers in his house that were there to fix a leak in the roof. I told him that that was definitely one of the better reasons to go afk and that it was all good. It was nice to see people act laid-back about things like brief interruptions and mistakes without immediately flying into some sort of nerd rage.

Today I was healing a heroic Halls of Stone run, where the tank asked us after the Brann event whether we'd be willing to do the Abuse the Ooze achievement, since that was the only thing he really wanted from this instance. "In that case... hell no! Just kidding," responded one of the dps, which made me smile. We discussed briefly how it worked and then completed it without any problems. It's amazing how much of a difference to the general tone and people's willingness to help it can make if someone just bothers to phrase their requests politely.

Ironically I was the one who broke the lucky streak - sort of, at least. When I queued up my mage for a random right after the run mentioned above, I got Halls of Stone again. After a few pulls I noticed that our dps paladin was putting out really good damage and went to inspect him because I wanted to see what kind of gear he had. Except... I accidentally clicked on "vote to kick", which is right above inspect on the drop-down menu. I immediately said in chat that it was a mistake and apologised... just to see the vote-kick go through two seconds later. What? WHAT?!

I was shocked and flabbergasted. Why did people approve of kicking someone who had done nothing wrong?! We got a replacement immediately and nobody commented on what had just happened in any way. I quietly completed the run but felt terribly guilty the entire time. So guilty in fact, that I went to create a level one alt on the kicked guy's server afterwards to apologise to him. He said that it was fine and that I shouldn't worry, which made me feel a lot better.

Still, the whole incident was stupid. I kind of want to say that Blizzard should implement some kind of confirmation screen for vote-kick initiation, but then the rest of the party is sort of supposed to work as a safety catch to prevent you from kicking people wrongfully anyway, isn't it? Too bad that this doesn't work if they just mindlessly click "yes" to whatever questions you put in front of them.