Exaggerated Effort

[DrFaroohk]

This is a rant about people who exaggerate the effort something takes in order to make the requester look bad.

I see it a lot in World of Warcraft, but it's everywhere. You might be in an instance and someone says "Hey, what do we do against this boss?"

And someone then says "What? It's not my job to explain EVERY LITTLE THING TO YOU! I pay for my game and I'm not wasting my VALUABLE GAME TIME to hold your hand and carry you through the game."

And that's clearly not how it is. How long does it take to type in "target the chains of woe and then run away"? It takes longer to type out the angry rants than it does to just answer the damn question.

Sometimes you get it from professionals too. I wanted my hunting license renewed one year, and the town clerk says "I need your old license from last year and the guy in charge of that hasn't delivered them yet. But you can go get it from him!"

"Couldn't you just call him and ask if I had a license last year?"

"But...that's not my job!" Seriously. How long does it take to make a phone call. She's not THAT busy.

Come on, people. Lend a friggin hand and stop acting like you're a goddamn martyr for what amounts to 45 seconds out of your day.

[AdminAssistant]

I see that in WoW, too. But, honestly, if you're playing Warcraft, then you have a computer and an internet connection. Wowhead, Wowpedia, and Wowwiki will have the information you need so stop clogging General Chat because you don't know what kind of Hunter to level. But if you're in a dungeon and need to know how to best beat a boss, then yeah, the tank should let you know (the tank should do that anyway, but I digress).

[DrFaroohk]

Well, I see no difference going into general chat and saying "What's better for frost DK, 2h or DW?" or going onto google and typing "what's better for frost dk, 2h or dw?"

It's like this: The website you find with the information was provided by someone wants to give answers. Perhaps there's someone who wants to give answers in general chat. I enjoy helping people too, and always try to give answers when someone wants help, and it really doesn't inconvenience me all that much. There's no reason someone else can't too.

And if someone honestly doesn't want to answer the question, then go away. Shut up. It takes you longer to curse me out for not googling it than it does to just answer the question.

You can either type "DW is better." 10 letters.

Or you can type in "JFC Wtf you stupid asshole go look it up on wowwiki you dumb fuck it's not my job to wah wah wah wah wah wah wah wah wah wah wah wah wah wah wah wah wah...."

[Andara Bledin]

Well, for one thing, "what's better" can have multiple answers, despite there only being two choices. What do you consider better? What does the person answering consider better? Why do you each feel that way? Are there conditions where it would be different? What's your play style.

That particular question, as an example, is better answered on a forum than in chat, unless you're just hanging around and feel like trying to pick out the threads of your own conversation from chat.

And sometimes, if you don't answer a question the right way, you get flamed. Someone once asked a really stupid question in open chat asking where some prominent location was. So I responded, "M is for Map." I got flamed by like a dozen people for telling them how to answer their own question instead of just handing them the answer that they could have found on their own with minimal effort. Funny thing was that nobody else even responded to the question.

^-.-^

[HYHYBT]

You know how sometimes you look right where something is supposed to be, and often even is, and don't see it? The same can happen in cases like that too; either not understanding the map right or flat-out forgetting its existence. (And I apologize if neither of those is, in fact, possible in WOW. I don't play, but have never yet found anything so obvious that it cannot be overlooked in that manner.)

If the same person does it all the time, that's different: telling them off may take longer at the moment than answering, but not overall if it stops their asking endless more questions afterwards. But other than that, there's no good reason to be rude about it.

Of course, there's no reason for the person asking to be rude either. Boring, probably-irrelevant story follows: in the days of usenet I was reading somewhere or other and came across a question nobody had responded to. The question was something like "what are those railroad tracks by I-75 for?" (This was not a local forum of any sort.) Trying to be helpful, I pointed out that I-75 is hundreds of miles long, and therefore specifying the city and state might get an answer faster. Something along those lines, anyway, and said politely. The answer I got, however, I remember exactly: "Shut up! Shut up! If you don't know, don't post!"