I was explaining to The Kids my funny experience with the priest following my baby lock around Teldrassil. To my surprise, they both thought I could have been nicer, maybe even offered him money. (?!?!?!?) “But he was following me, without saying anything,” I reasoned. “It was weird!”

The Son shared with me his singular experience playing WoW (at a friends house as we don’t let them play at home). He created a Night Elf hunter and was running around doing what some of us veterans might call spamming group invites. My skin crawled. I always decline uninvited group requests, particularly when on a new character in Teldrassil. I asked him why he had done that - he just wanted someone to talk to while playing. He had no idea that when grouped, xp is lowered and it takes twice as long, if not longer, to get dropped quest items.

The poor guy. His own mama would have dismissed him in favor of quickly leveling out of the starter zone.

I’ve become a crotchety old veteran of WoW, and I’m not alone. I see new players asking the same types of questions veterans had when they were new get lambasted for not knowing. No, we didn’t have the thotbotts, wowheads, or allakhazams back then. But new players don’t necessarily know about these resources. For some reason a lot of us veterans assume other players know what we know and react accordingly. The anonymity virtual Azeroth affords us makes it permissible for people to be rude, and sometimes cruel, without experiencing any repercussions.

I don’t want to be a curmudgeon, yet I fear my policy of “don’t bother me and I won’t bother you” could be making me enter the mindset of one. If I had grouped with that priest, I might have lost half an hour of my play time helping him out… if that’s what he needed. But is it my duty, as a veteran, to help these types of players so as not to tarnish their gameplay experience? Do I really care if they thought I was rude? At the time, my answer was no. I most likely won’t run in to them again anyhow.

As veterans, our greatest fear with the act of helping is that we encourage someone to NOT learn how to do something on their own. Paying gold to be run through a dungeon certainly does not help one learn how to play their class in a group. Yet, the frustration of running the same dungeon over and over again due to bad luck with incompetent groups makes paying gold for a high level’s help the better option.

Then we get the 70s that don’t know how to play their class in a group.

*sigh*

Well, the only curmudgeonry crotchetiness I can do anything about is my own. To combat its onset, I’ve gone against my own policy and accepted two random guild invites (on separate characters, of course). They weren’t the kind that appear as an accept/decline popup out of the blue… these invites were received in a nice tell. Even such polite invites I would normally decline, very kindly of course. But my internal anti-curmudgeon got the best of me this time.

I’m not sure I’ll ever get to the point where I’m able to happily accept blind group invites - sorry son!