SirRibosome wrote:
Quote:
In theory yes, but does it outweigh commitments you've made to four real people?
Extreme example:
You offer to help a new neighbour move his sofa, you get it off the truck and halfway across the road then drop it and walk off to eat.
You're comparing two different types of "friends". If you help anyone move furniture, I'm assuming you're pretty decent friends. Four random people in a PUG that I will never see again, and considering I'm not causing THAT bad of an inconvenience, doesn't really affect me. However, this is due to the fact that when I leave a group, it is because I legitimately have to go. There have been times when I thought I had the rest of the night to play, but get parent aggro for whatever reason.
A couple of years ago, I was in the process of moving in with my then-gf and someone had offered to give us a sofa (mine was an ugly piece of crap). Since my gf was a waif like thing, I found myself with the sofa sitting upside down on my head as I walked it down the hall out of the apartment building where the person who gave it to us lived (was very grateful for very high ceilings). Problem came when I reached the door. Fortunately, two perfect strangers were standing just outside the door and helped me move it out the door and into the back of the truck. I appreciated it. You don't have to be "pretty decent friends" with someone to help them move a piece of furniture.
More to the point, the game stops being about
just you the second you click the "Accept" button to confirm your party invite. Just because the images on your screen are just part of a "game" doesn't mean the people controlling the toons you're grouping with aren't entitled to a measure of courtesy. You don't become their slave, you don't have to set aside truly important RL things that come up suddenly and unexpectedly, but stopping to consider your course of action based solely on how it will affect
just you is a pretty crappy attitude to have. Chances are you
will come across those people again, even if you don't remember them. If you're routinely presenting yourself as a flaky ******* joining parties and then bouncing with little to no notice, it's a safe bet that they're going to remember
you. There are a number of people on my druid's realm right now that probably would barely recognize my name (if at all), but I won't group with them specifically because of that kind of crap. People who invite me to a group because they see me in LFG and then run off questing for 20 minutes without doing anything to add more members. "Oooo! A tank! Better grab them before someone else does!" People who join a group and then go afk without saying anything long enough that they get booted back to the character selection screen.. People who start putting a group together and after several lengthy and unexplained delays in communication they complain about having had 1.2k latency for the last three hours. Once in a while...no problem. Every other group? Thanks for letting me know to avoid you in the future. Unfortunately, for the minority who do experience legitimate delays from time to time, you get tarred with the same brush as the idiots...sorry, I don't have time to sort you all out.
