Owning up.

One of Gevlons sentiments in a post about one of my posts  Brick Wall  – (  I think I’ve explained my thought processes in the orginal post Gamers or Raiders   and I’ve talked about wiping as learning experiences before)  

But Gevlon, in discussion about giving feedback  talked about a players reluctance to take ownership of an error, and that they will lie, rather then admit to making a mistake.

This is going to sound quite odd, but I am happy to admit I screwed up, firstly because that means I beat the person who tries to tell me I screwed up; thus depriving them  of superior satisfaction.  It takes the wind out of their sails**, and  secondly when I screw up now – I deserve to be ‘punished’ ( to a point) Yes, I  know I screwed up, and that the people who matter will probably know I screwed up, but I would rather take ownership of the issue because I think the embarrassment of you admitting an error is a lot less then   being called on it.

To stop being called out on things like missing interrupts we have macros shooting off all the time ” I kicked you”  “Misdirect on ”  I set a Shackle macro  up in the days of Kara so they would know I was casting what I was supposed to.  They are pretty much people trying to cover their butts.   “See my macro went off… I did cast it…”

Ideally you don’t want people to make mistakes.  It’s going to happen to the best of people,  If more people were honest  – and then fixed the issues  then there would be less pointless wipes, so the campaign of ” Own up – and Suck it up” Shall commence ( <– kidding) I do think that if you skip hiding behind your avatar hoping you don’t get busted will make you a better player, and put you in better light with your guildys.

I do have a funny story about the lack of ownership though.  last night while attempting TOC  we got to the faction champions and my game started lagging.  My fear didn’t work,  I couldn’t get my dots up on the skull.

At the time I was thinking  –  Awe crap – whats my PC doing?  Is my Virus Checker running? Is Windows doing an update?  Is  it a graphics problem and my Pc is going to die on me.  Is it my ISP  ect.

The funny thing is that 24 other people were thinking the same thing,  interrupts weren’t happening,  people weren’t being healed,  CC was breaking, and they were all too afraid to talk about their problem.

Until someone said eventually almost 40 odd  sec’s into this terrible lag.  “Uh is anyone else lagging really badly”  you should have heard the sighs of relief, and the ” I thought it was just me”  as people who were so worried that it was their own individual performance that no one was game enough to admit to having a problem.

I don’t expect people to keep the guild updated on the health of their PC,  but if the 1st person who noticed that their stun or heal or spell didn’t work said “I’m lagging” and it was just them, and said so,   it alerts the raid that eg the tank healer might not getting enough heals right now, that a CC target was going to be loose ect.

Should have I owned up  ?  Nothing I was doing was particularly important on that fight,  and to be honest I thought it was my Pc being sick again, not an instance problem so I was being slightly hypercritical hiding behind my avatar hopeing it would fix itself. If I died in a fire due to lag, I still would have said  I lagged, and it would have been true,  ( though it’s never happened due to lag)   When I died to the rocket on Mim, and  got hit by a Shadow Crash on General,  I DID IT – IT WAS MY FAULT. I did  find it  amusing how long it took for people to admit a problem, when it was raid wide because they didn’t want to admit it.

** not everyone has that tone.  My belief  is delivery of feedback is just as important as what you say.