luxlunae

The subject of behavior and interaction in video games, especially strangers has long been of interest to me. I've often wondered: "What can I say in this moment to foster teamwork and facilitate getting the job done?" in a variety of gaming contexts. I marvel watching my significant other play co-op games where everyone is silent until the recriminations and bile start halfway through the match. A little communication can go a long way towards ensuring success, I don't consider it optional. When new heroics come out, one of the first things I do is look for one of those "boss guides in a sentence" websites so that I can copy-paste it into dungeon chat. The more people understand about what damages them the less bitching at the healer (usually me) occurs. Win-win.

In some situations (usually multiboxing) I find that a nice macro goes a long way. It allows me to build communication and rapport without taking the time to type things out each time. The first team I ever took into dungeons using LFD was a ProtPally/RestoDruid combination, and I was careful not to be seen obviously multiboxing because I was very nervous about impacting other peoples play time with my hobby. What I did to smooth the way (from Deadmines up) was start every dungeon with a macro that said something like this:

/p Hi, this is my first tanking character so please help me out by dpsing the skull first!

And then I made sure my single target dps macro marked the target with skull. This was surprisingly effective. The team was a great success, I never had anyone notice I was multiboxing, although I occasionally would mention it to someone at the end of the run if they asked if "I can requeue with 'you guys' ". Not especially relevant but my cloak and dagger pretending to be two solo players extended to the point of sometimes switching to the healer on a boss fight just for the sake of running around a bit (like a real druid healer, get some jumping in) and having the toons in different guilds.

Last summer I decided to work on levelling my guild with only 4 active boxes and that means I wanted a dungeon team that could knock out the weekly dungeons for good xp with a minimum of fuss. I wasn't especially interested in paying an additional $15 a month for the privilege of filling the final slot, so I decided to go with 3 ret paladins and a prot paladin. This time my macro wasn't designed to confuse anyone, just preferably get them to actually participate in the process. I'm sure many of you have observed that solo players that end up in an instance with four boxed toons either react "Lol" or become dickish. I went with:

/i Good Morning/Evening
/i (Yes I am playing more than one character. No this is not botting. Also you will get extra loot because I don't roll on much.)
/i Make sure you need on anything (gear, crafting mats, etc) that you want for any reason.

With this macro I hoped to address the "this is weird" element right off the bat and get people moving towards the goal of defeating the dungeon together.

So now in rift I face the same sort of challenge when I enter Instant Adventures and I'd like to design a communication macro that 1) defuses annoyance 2) encourages anyone curious about multiboxing to ask about it. Until now I've mostly just been doing my usual "Hi all" or "Good evening" when I join the group and participating in conversations about objectives if they come up. The challenge here is that rift players start out a lot more hostile to boxers than wow players, to the extent that I stopped playing last summer after too much harassment.

Version 1:

/ra Good afternoon! Yes, I'm currently playing five characters. Please address all questions/insults/allegations about my mother to Xanshiny.

Rift only allows one /ra in a macro so we'll try this one out. I'm hoping for some lols and some casual interest, we'll see how it works out for me.