WoW in an Hour: Communication

The signs are there that I'm becoming a grumpy old man. I'll present the evidence:
1. "Game[ldar] is getting snarky"
 That is a quote from guild chat recently. It is not normal for me to get annoyed but I was getting frustrated in a FoS run with the holy paladin that was having trouble healing and for some reason had beacon of light on one of the DPS and wasn't keeping themselves alive either. There is only so much Ardent Defender and Lay on Hands can do.

The point however was that is was worth commenting in guild chat that I was getting snarky because it is a rare occurrence.

2. I initiated my first vote kick ever
I was running Azol-Nerub with a guild mate who was healing for me. In the run was a well geared warrior who
a) kept pulling aggro from me, partially because he was doing 6k DPS, but mainly because he was killing the wrong target (for example he was going full ball on the first boss while a watcher was still alive).

This lead to b) him dying a couple of times - there is only so many times I can taunt - and my guild mates Valyrn bubbles were quite making up for how tired he was.

Despite all this, it was a quick run but he complained and says to hurry up as we're heading to Anub. While I'm doing a quick check of the healers mana and making sure we're all there the warrior charges in and starts the event by tanking Anub. I was tempted to just let him tank it and let us four man it while he was just a corpse. However I then noticed that the hunter was locked out. I snapped and initiated the vote kick with a the reason "No frosties for you"... well it would have had that reason, except I didn't get the dialog asking me for it.

3. I snapped IRL
This is the real proof and my shame. On Sunday night I was looking forward to the ICC 10 man which I had been organising. I came into the bedroom all ready to log in and get everyone organised when I found my wife all excited about finishing up the DVD we had been trying to watch the previous night - which we watched on the laptop away from sleeping children's ears. I snapped and said that there was no way we were watching it. I was going on my raid and there was no way she could stop me. Needless to say this didn't go down well, but it was failing on relatively deaf ears.

Communication is key

I might be becoming a grumpy old man but my wife is doing her best to stop that, but that brings me to the point of this post. The whole of the third proof could have been avoided by some clear communication. One of the reasons for my reduced play time is to moderate what happened when my first child was under one. Through lack of sleep, that is normal to parents of babies, compounded by late nights playing WoW, I was rapidly becoming that grumpy old man! So my wife and I have an agreement on my play times and how often I play. As Gnomeaggedon said, in his WoW in My Hour interview, it is imperative that you keep to that agreement. But setting those bounds and adjusting them to changing factors requires good communication!

The above situation could have been avoided had I communicated effectively rather becoming overly defensive, particularly in the situation we've been in recently - being extra tired from having a unsettled baby under assault from new teeth, separation anxiety and being on the cusp of crawling. What I heard was "I'm reneging on our deal that you can raid on a Sunday night" which, in my mind, I had clearly established a few weeks prior. My wife heard "my computer mine mine mine roar I don't want to spend the evening with you".

There was actually three major points of failure in communication on my behalf.

1. The most obvious was my raging rather than saying clearly and apologetically that I had different plans for the evening. My snarky, oppose-me-if-you-dare response was certainly not the way to who friends and influence people.
2. I had not shared with her my excitement and the effort I had put into putting together the raid. I had been planning, organising, recruiting, cajoling people for a number of weeks and it finally looked like I would have the numbers.
3. When I had discussed raiding on a Sunday night previously, I hadn't communicated clearly enough that it would be every Sunday night and that I was organising it. Basically I had said I wanted to try and raid on a Sunday night and that it wouldn't be much different from a normal Sunday night except I needed to make sure I was on by 8pm. I should have twigged at the time when my wife didn't ask more questions about it, and just said OK. Obviously she had not realised that this was an every week thing, and I hadn't reiterated it at any later date either - particularly as it didn't start immediately and a few weeks had elapsed.

Subsequently, having discussed it further, and with more detail what it involves and what I want to achieve, we worked out there is actually a better night for it - when she is regularly out and there isn't going to be conflicts with our intentions for the evening. So that is the plan from here.

As an aside - the ICC 10 man was a fizzle for me anyway. We did get it going and it ended up being an all guild run. However I got bitten by the lag monster running to about 7k pings. Pings like that don't work for tanking, and I was having 40 second cast times for Flash of Light when trying to heal (I'm just sort of the haste soft cap so they are normally just over a second). And then my daughter woke up screaming and I had to go... so hopefully I'll see some ICC action soon!

So you hear it over and over and over again - good communication makes good relationships and when WoW is involved it isn't any different! So practice good communication!

Note the image above is from http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2009/09/twitter_fight_n.php