Pugnacious Priest's Warcraft Blog

A while ago  I was in a GDKP once where we made a decision to kick two players for low dps.  They were not performing as to their gear, and logs seemed to show an activity level of about 50 % each. They were a Pally healer, and a Rogue and from the same guild – of which they were the only two on.

We weren’t sure who the Pally was healing, or when because their affective healing was just above a ret Pally -and they weren’t using beacon.  The Rogue’s attacks were discussed by people who knew Rogues, and it was determined that when they were doing damage most of their damage was auto attacking.  Neither of them were on vent after repeated requests the whole run to get on.  (The loot rules were clear –  no vent, no loot – but I’ve never seen this enforced.)  So they weren’t involved in the discussion about their failures.

The theory was they were being duel boxed. 

It’s an interesting way to make easy gold.  Duel box them through a GDKP.  Not likely to be noticed,  one is a dps melee, and the other a healer –    If they hadn’t had been from the same guild, separately they would have been dismissed as poor players, and probably continued to be carried. Their extremely poor performance was noticed by several ” What is that Rogue doing… ”  Healers complained” Why isn’t the pally using beacon..”  So they were looked at closer. It was also noted that they had bidded a few times, but were not buying up loot either, and someone picked up their activity on the basis that comments were made about ” the pally just standing there most of the time” 

There was enough evidence – and this was put forward to the raid,  that they were trying to put in less effort and get rewarded twice  for it.  A Vote was called

“Click  No to kick on a ready check”

They weren’t on vent listening, and most people auto click yes on ready checks.

The vote passed, it was explained briefly in raid chat why they were kicked, and they were removed from the group.

It’s an implied rule in a GDKP that you perform reasonably to your class and gear expectations. Your not paying for a carry where it doesn’t matter what you do,  your still expected to reasonably participate, you don’t want a GDKP where everyone is so well geared they don’t need loot,  nor do you want a raid of poorly geared people because then you don’t get far enough to kill anything.

I’m not so sure if it were their performance which made the vote pass, or that fact that we thought we had been cheated. Bringing two underperforming toons to a GDKP raid, and expecting to profit x 2 was not considered fair.  Did we have proof? – a case was put forward,  supported by unrelated people, a key factor being their active time which was determined irrefutable by a live log.  If they had just sucked then we would have kept them,  but  the majority felt strongly enough about this deception to kick them.

I voted to kick. 

The RL tried to be as fair about this as possible – gave them an opportunity to explain and we had enough material for the ‘case’ but still we have no proof that they were a duel boxer,  only a probability.   They were peer judged  based on the measuring tools we had our disposal.

I did another raid recently as a holy priest, and we had a disc priest healing as well – the raid tried to peer judge the Disc priest – but she had enough people who knew enough about disc priests who were willing to speak up, this was reinforced when the disc priest linked her recount with the disc priest estimated absorbtion add-on bit  – and she was kicking all the healers butts.  But this really makes me think,  how careful you need to be when questioning performance, based on what we know about a class / role / assignment and the strength of our measuring tools, and that perhaps we should have given them the benefit of the doubt.