Thursday, July 9, 2009

Helping Friends

Helping friends is something that most of us do in real life as well as in WoW. We all want to see our friends exceed in what they do. There is also a sense of accomplishment when we help our friends become all that they can be. This can be through helping them gear or teaching them a new rotation.

Some people would say not to help these people. They would say that you are a "friendly helpful person" or "M&S". This is simply not true. When you are helping a friend, you are making an investment in that person. By helping these people, you are making them better players (usually). They will appreciate it and it will make you feel good.

WoW is not a game of black and white. It is all blurry and mixed. Just like there are two factions who are neither good or bad, there is a blurry line between good and bad for players.

You may have a person in the top raiding guild on the server in full Ulduar 25 gear who is terrible at PvP. You can have someone who makes ridiuclous amounts of money who just can't get out of the fire. There are several ways that people can be good or bad.

Good and Bad are both very vague terms as well. What is good to one person is bad to another person. A 2100 rated pvper probably thinks someone at 1700 is bad. Someone taking on Algalon probably thinks anyone who has not cleared Ulduar 10 to be bad. Of course this is not true. These are just generalizations by people at different points in the game. The scale of "good" and "bad" has a wonky slider that changes enormously from person to person.

When you help your "bad friend", they will become your "good friends" and likely help you down the line. This could be in the form of instance run throughs or even gearing up your freshly dinged 80 toon. People who think that spending time on people is a waste of time are a waste of life. Investing in people is one of the smartest things that you can do. There is no end to the profits of friendship.

2 comments:

Pangoria Fallstar said...

That's a wonky investment. Especially when dealing with people you just met (most of wow).

So let's say you only help your friends. I'm not saying not to help your aquaintances if they're running VH reg, and can't find a tank, that's still reasonable, and they'll still need to dps, and most likely you'll still need heals on some bosses.

You have to find out what your definition of a friend is. Everyone's is different. Mine is a bit long, since I can't put it into just one sentence.

A friend: Someone you love, who you wish happiness and good fortunes to. You share in their lives, and help them when they are low, as they do you. A true friend helps without asking for a return, and never expecting one.

By my definition, you helping your friends, by how you describe the good reasons to do so, make YOU not a friend.

Instead of running them through an instance, get on an alt and form a group. The investment in helping them learn real group dynamics earlier is a benefit that will help them later.

Fish said...

I agree with you completely. We have a group in our guild who had level capped alliance characters and deleted them to join our guild (we play on a PvP server). Now, I had never talked to them before, but how much more commitment to a guild can you show than that? So I ran them through SM a few times and I'll probably run them through Ulda and the other vanilla content. I helped them because I wanted them to feel welcomed and that we appreciated the gesture. Appreciation and friendship aren't in the goblin's vocabulary.