Pugging in WoW: How I Fixed The Issue…Sort Of

Pugging is hell. While I personally don’t care about being told mean things, they surely get in the way of doing in-game content and when everyone’s whispering you, the group wants something and you’ve gotta check everyone, it’s easy to get overrun. Just automate the invite process and block all communication — you don’t need it.

The why:

Skip this if you don’t care about why pugging is hell.

Now, you’ve got the option to pay $100 to get someone’s data legally and get back to them (since a good few people are really keen on telling you to commit suicide over declining them) in a way that they’ll never forget…or you could just not enter that situation at all, but, generally speaking, the average WoW player that would go to great lengths to say useless stuff is simply just a human leftover that’s gonna be on welfare by age 30. You need not worry about them, because these are people who, at a later point in life, will be all caught up in trying to pay the bills, but for now, they’re whispering you and rage-applying to your groups and Blizzard is more focused on punishing you for saying mean things to the ones who started it than actually solving the issue, so, you gotta do something.

People are vile creatures and if you decline them, you will get a report. If you pug a lot and decline fast, that’s a lot of reports in a very short amount of time. I’ve gotten silenced (but reverted) like this multiple times.

So, what do we do if we enjoy WoW, don’t wanna be in a guild and have to listen to a 20-something welfare champion, but most importantly we don’t want to get silenced? Automate everything! (Or get a second account running in a VM through a consistent-location proxy to hold the group, but it’s too much to manage, however, it sure feels nice being able to write whatever you want while keeping your account safe).

I’ve been using my own addon to block people’s whispers/hide notes, etc. but I couldn’t have been arsed to keep it updated. Lord is my witness, LUA is a pile of trash language. Luckily, there’s BadBoy and its cousin BadBoy Levels which allows for blocking all whispers unless they’re from people in your group.

The functionality that my addons offer, but is missing from BadBoy:

• Auto-deletion on in-game mail unless the person is white-listed.
• Hiding the LFG note. (?)
• Hiding reactions (people bypassing chat)

Right. Onto the actual addon itself. In simple terms, you can define the group you want:

• Composition by class & spec (it’s being checked when people enter the raid. No holy priests allowed!)
• Progress: what is the minimum progress, for a given activity, that a person should have? Perhaps you only want people that are 8/10HC or so, or above a certain score.

Benefits:

• Social points. People don’t like to be told no directly. It’s better, from an inter-personal relationship point-of-view to just simply let people guess. Obviously, this is an atrocious thing to do, because you’re wasting their time, but, hey — you’re winning social points, so, why not? In short, people don’t care if you mistreat them, as long as you’re doing it in a subtle way. As such, you no longer have to decline anyone — because the addon auto-invites whoever needs to be invited and the others are left to rot. Win-win for everyone!
• Silence. No more weird whisper pings that almost always end up being useless. Remember — if you have to whisper, you’re probably not getting in.
• Time. You earn so much time by not having to automatically check everything all the time.
• Extendable. The addon offers an event to hook into, should you need to play a sound when someone fitting applies or whatever. This should help with issues posed in the next section “where the addon fails”.

Where it fails:

• Higher-end groups. If you’re trying to build a pug for mythic, then, chances are you want to also look at people’s logs (and execute queries, as I do, since numbers on their own aren’t enough, but usually you just resume yourself to them). Warcraftlogs doesn’t have an in-game addon and, once again, it’d be pretty bad if it did. Score on its own is already a complete disaster of an indicator for any semi-competitive keys, imagine if people looked at logs and they didn’t see straight 99s. As such, any refined recruitment is not exactly great for this kind of tool, but it can serve as a nice starting point — ignore the LFG until someone promising shows up. Usually, when recruiting someone, there are certain basics you want them to have, so, assuming you’re making a mythic pug, it would be reasonable to only ask for 10/10HC multi-clear people — the addon can play a sound when it sees such person so that you can manually check them.

Features for the future:

• Filtering by list/guild. It’s known that cultural differences make up for a huge amount of issues, especially throughout the EU. I simply choose not to play with people whose culture is that of aggressiveness, lack of respect and hate, as consistently shown by every statistic out there. As of now, am removing them every so often.
• Better handling for when the person leaves the group (don’t re-invite checkbox).
• An outside-the-game UI for making your group composition. As of now, it’s kinda hard to create fancy drag-n-drop and toggles functionality in-game (or at least I just couldn’t care less about working with LUA, nor pay someone to do it, because it’s just wasted money).

Great? Great! Enjoy your silence-free gameplay and, when all else fails and someone was a real prick to you — there are always data brokers who will sell you their info like candy, all legal. Do your part and let your local piece of shit know that he’s not actually anonymous.

So, where’s the download? No download. I like to write. People ask me a lot about how I can make groups so fast.