No, I’m not talking about what that cute little runt did to your carpet. I’m speaking of the mental detritus from running a particularly bad pug. That sour stain on your otherwise good day. Now we already know thanks to our mothers that blood stains are best removed by using… Wait… your mother didn’t teach you that?? I thought all mothers taught their sons about such things.  Hmmm.  Well no matter. This post is about gaming, not avoiding jail time. We’ll save that gem of a topic for another day.

In the introduction, I covered the purpose of this series.  For today’s article, I’ll be showing you one of my favorite addons, Elitist Group.  This addon has the dual benefit of both allowing you to note offending players and potentially helping you avoid them in the first place.

The screenshot above shows you the basic player info window.  You can access this report by targeting the character you wish to examine and typing:  /eg or by typing /eg cayleb where cayleb can be replaced by the name of whatever character you want to inspect. Once this player info report window is open, you’re able to access a wealth of information about the player in question. For the purposes of puggers misbehaving, the part of the window that you’ll want to focus on is the tab that says “Notes” right up there next to the “Experience” tab.

Now you’ll notice that I haven’t entered any note on myself, which makes sense.  But if another player wanted to, they would click the greyed-out “Add Note” button in the “Player Info” box.  This becomes very useful if you’d like to remember who ninja’ed your Frozen Orb or that rare mount drop.  (Not that you’re likely to ever forget the jerk who didn’t even let you roll on the Grand Black War Mammoth.)

Where it becomes even more useful, though, is in the potential to learn from the experiences of others.  See, by default your notes are shared with any other player in your guild or party using this addon.  You can change and add to these sharing settings by pressing ESC to bring up the Main Menu and then selecting “Interface.”  The sharing channel preferences are quite simple, but if you enable them all you should be much more likely to gain and share useful information about ninjas via this addon.

Of course, bad pugging experiences aren’t just from those pesky ninjas and their questionable means of acquiring phat lewts.  You can also get the gift of FAIL from players who don’t really understand how to select appropriate gear, don’t have much experience in the dungeon or raid you’re about to run, and/or haven’t enchanted or gemmed their gear.  Well Elitist Group has you covered there as well.

Not only can you easily obtain a quick summary of their Dungeon/Raid experience from the Experience tab, you can also check out their gear, average ilvl (that icon in the lower right of the “Equipped Gear” section), and whether or not they’ve selected inappropriate enchants.  Gear/Enchant/Gem selections that are red flags are, appropriately, shown in red.  As you can see from the screen above, the addon has decided that my gear and enchanting choices are not heinous.  In fact, the addon author has given it the flexibility to recognize certain BiS PVP enchants as appropriate, as you can see from the screenshot below.  (If you don’t understand why I chose a PVP enchant for this slot, please ask in the comments section.  I’m happy to explain.)

And remember, if you’re concerned about the ability or gear or experience of the player(s) with which you’re about to pug, the best way to bring it up is politely.  “L2P newb!!1!” while gratifying, is neither likely to actually teach the player anything nor is it likely to gain you a favorable response.  In fact, most people, when confronted with hostility will return it, thus ensuring that you’ll have a negative experience.

If, however, you’ve mentioned it and gotten a negative response…  or the player has continued to make the same mistake over-and-over…  Well, that’s what the “Notes” and ratings of this addon are really for.

As with any other addon, I strongly encourage you to experiment with the settings.  There are a couple options there that really shine, including one that automatically brings up a quick summary of your four fellow puggers once the Dungeon Finder has teleported you to the dungeon.  Another brings up a quick-entry rating window at the end of the dungeon run so you can input notes or ratings (on a scale of 1 to 5) for your fellow puggers.  Remember that these ratings and notes will be shared unless you turn sharing off completely, and remember that they can be traced back to you, so please keep them civil and mature.

One final tip: If—like me—you forget to put in a note on someone upon occasion or would like to edit it, fear not.  That search box in the far right of the addon window means that once you’ve grouped with someone you can easily add or edit notes on them afterwards, recall their cached data, and review what their experience was before they healed or dps’ed you to death.

Elitist Group can be downloaded from either curse or wowinterface.  Good luck, happy pugging, and see you next week for the next installment in the series!

Tags: addon, Elitist Group, How to Get Rid of Pug Stains, pugging