Thursday, March 31, 2011

How to Nerd Rage While Winning Friends and Influencing PvPers


Last night, I did something that I don't usually do in WoW.  I went on a major nerd rage during our rated PvP group.  I was leading the offense and was calling targets and telling people to CC stuff and things were not going down.  I saw targets that were not the kill target going down first.  I even had somebody say they were CCing the kill target literally 2 seconds after I said that person was the kill target.  In addition, someone who was not a BG leader was trying to change our strat in a Warsong Gulch, which I won't give away what our strat is.

Sometimes nerd raging is helpful.  Sometimes, it is not.  I'm sure we have all heard the audio with a raid leader just berating everybody in a level 60 Onyxia raid which has the famous phrase "More DoTs".  Just berating the whole raid usually does not get the results you are looking for.  That usually brings down the morale of the group.  A better technique would be to rage against one or two people who are not doing their jobs correctly.  That way, you may change the behavior of those one to two people instead of bringing down the entire group.

Also, the language of how you say it is important.  I'm not saying don't curse.  I said "fuck" at least once last night during my nerd rage.  However, endless cursing without content is useless.  If you are just cursing endlessly and not providing any help to people, you are just endlessly cursing for no reason and people don't know why, which tends to piss people off more than help them. 

Also, nerd raging is for during matches only.  After matches are for constructive criticism.  Don't continue raging after matches.  People accept nerd raging during a match because of the time constaint of the match.  People don't want to berated after the match.  After the matchs where I did nerd rage, I brought up issues that occurred during the match in a critical way, but not in a rageful way.  In high pressure situations, nerd raging is usually accepted.  However, nerd raging should not occur after a match.  After a match is a time to calm down and look at the situation as a whole.  Sometimes, you may even find that your nerd rage was over the line after calming down a little.

Final thing that is needed to properly nerd rage is balance.  It is okay to point out faults during nerd rages.  In real life, I work with a boss who routinely picks out faults, sometimes even faults that are not there at all.  However, something my boss doesn't do is make compliments when good stuff occurs.  If your team is doing a good job, tell them they are doing a great job.  Nobody likes constant nerd raging at them without any compliments on what they are doing right.  If you return a flag that is very difficult, compliment your part of the team.  If you have balance, your team will accept your nerd rages knowing that they will get complimented when they do stuff properly. 

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