Kicked for Being Deaf

To be honest, I'm pretty amazed by the people that aren't really being sympathetic to this story. Take WoW out of the equation. If his story is true, the fact is, the situation could have been handled better by the guild leader. I mean, come on, see it from his position. Months of loosing people who you thought were true friends, and he can't even get a break from all the shit he has to put up with on the internet.

Some of you people need to get out of the whole "video game" mentality, and realise that the damn point of this story isn't about the fucking game. The post above mine is a prime example of this stupidity.
 
Can't edit, and didn't want to pick names, but I was referring to Rofl-Mic-Lofl's post.
 
you do NOT need Vent to play WoW, i'm living proof of it

anytime I was ever asked to be on vent, I declined, when asked, either I said I was deaf (which I am) or I said I simply did not want to listen to people yelling and shouting in my ear (which if I have my hearing aid on, I have no interest in).

Yea, you don't need vent to play/raid WoW. Many guilds do use it, but having run raids for years in EQ with 54 mans (a few 72), chat macros are actually more effective when handled properly.
 
I'm not sure this is something worth crying over.

Straw that broke the camel's back, man. I dont blame him. Lose your hearing, your real life friends, and even your fucking internet friends over becoming deaf. Pretty fucked up.
 
Meh, I can relate. I can't communicate over Ventrilo because I'm hard of hearing. All my guilds have accepted that, as I compensate by being observant and prepared, but you still miss out on the social aspect and I tend to get ignored for not being on Vent.
 
Are you the one who booted him?

rofl

This story is sad and silly. Ok he is deaf now and he is crying over a video game for getting kick. erm shouldnt he be more sad that the accident has changed his life. I dont play wow but i would be pissed. And would retaliate if possible. ;)
 
He didn't get kicked because he was deaf, he got kicked because the leadership in his guild (possibly the other members too) are assholes.
QFT.


If it were my guild I'd have ya, then again I don't play WOW, But I don't say "yer Deaf, fuck off".

Welcome to the world I see everyday, sorry for those who don't, but it's coming hard each day. No matter what I do to See things in a better way, I think were screwed if we need to see past someones Disabilities. ;)
 
Yeah. I've kicked people from runs that didn't use vent in many games I've played. Certain activities in multiplayer team games require voice chat.

No sympathy, sorry.

Sure if this where BC2 but WoW? There is no real reason vent should be required. Its a crutch for people that dont want to pay attention on their own.
 
Sure if this where BC2 but WoW? There is no real reason vent should be required. Its a crutch for people that dont want to pay attention on their own.

Doesn't matter what game it is. That's their policy. If the raid leader feels it would effect the group's performance or doesn't want to type out instructions, then the guy needs to go to a guild that doesn't require vent.

I know it hurts to find out people you thought were your friends don't care about you, but... no need to make a fuss about them not letting him in the guild since he doesn't meet requirements.
 
I can't believe people are upset this guy got kicked.

You can't force someone to be friends with someone else. You can't force someone to spend their leasure time with specific people.

If the guild didn't want him, they didn't want him. Whats the big deal. I'm sure he could find 100 guilds who accept him.

This is the most non-story blow out of proportion in a long time.
 
Go outside, its just a game. people need to let go and come back to the real world. I know Sue them! lol
 
Our main tank and off tank all through Vanilla were both deaf. I hope this guy can find a home. We definitely had some slow down while things were typed out but for the most part there's not a lot of need for communication if everyone knows the encounters.
 
Friendship = exchange of interests.

Romantic relationship > friends.
 
Yet another reason to avoid WoW.

Why pay a monthly fee to put up with assholes when you already do it for free on most other games?
 
I can't believe people are upset this guy got kicked.

You can't force someone to be friends with someone else. You can't force someone to spend their leasure time with specific people.

If the guild didn't want him, they didn't want him. Whats the big deal. I'm sure he could find 100 guilds who accept him.

This is the most non-story blow out of proportion in a long time.

Wow. So you're friends with someone for 4 years, then he becomes deaf and your first thought is, "Can't force people to be friends with someone else?"

Quite a few commentors on here get it; it isn't really the WOW, it is the constant reminder of his new disability.

And quite a few others are callous assholes. Sympathy isn't a weakness; a kneejerk reaction to being a dickhead is.
 
Yea, you don't need vent to play/raid WoW. Many guilds do use it, but having run raids for years in EQ with 54 mans (a few 72), chat macros are actually more effective when handled properly.

This.. I was going to add the same thing when I didn't see it on the first page, I'm glad someone did though. People just tune vent out most of the time anyways. I always found text worked much, much better at getting people focused. I'd rather use text personally and did so in EQ for years in a high end raid guild. What they did to this guy just sucks and I'm really surprised by the responses from quite a few people.. wait no I'm not people everywhere are dicks.
 
also, there were LOTS of funny moments with our deaf tanks. we still talk about the time a vent nazi forced our preferred off tank into a vent channel. It was partly because we just wanted to hear the sound of his voice, even if it was lou farrigno. he logged in, switched to our channel, his mic opened, we all waited breathlessly, and then he proceeded to bang two pots together for 5 minutes straight until they had to ban him from the vent server. it was absolutely hilarious. you've never seen 39 other people rip the headset off their heads so fast! lol.
 
LOL... Well that sucks.

And for the record - I'm deaf and don't play WOW but same thing is happening in some games and stuff. It's silly. I just always mute all voice comms cause I do use headphones/earbuds - I can hear the environment and id them fairly well but I don't understand voices and stuff.

I've been bashed myself for being deaf and unable to use vent or whatever and then they don't appear to be as good in some games as I am so it goes to show - THERE ARE SOME THINGS YOU DON'T NEED SUCH AS A VENT TO BE "PRO" or whatever.

People are assholes - deal with it, find some another guild. I know few friends who are like hardcore WOW players - they're deaf too. Big effin deal.
 
LOL... Well that sucks.

And for the record - I'm deaf and don't play WOW but same thing is happening in some games and stuff. It's silly. I just always mute all voice comms cause I do use headphones/earbuds - I can hear the environment and id them fairly well but I don't understand voices and stuff.

I've been bashed myself for being deaf and unable to use vent or whatever and then they don't appear to be as good in some games as I am so it goes to show - THERE ARE SOME THINGS YOU DON'T NEED SUCH AS A VENT TO BE "PRO" or whatever.

People are assholes - deal with it, find some another guild. I know few friends who are like hardcore WOW players - they're deaf too. Big effin deal.


I'd join their guild, they are probably better than 99 percent of the players who play WoW.

The one thing about being deaf and having a goal or task laid before you is that since you can't hear, you're easily able to block out a lot of the distractions that hearing people have and just focus on what you're doing. That's one trait I find very common among other deaf people I know . . . .
 
One guy being off vent isn't going to make a big difference. Certainly not worth booting an otherwise competent member.

That said, it sounds like this guys guild wasn't a raiding guild to begin with, but just a bunch of failures, so no real loss there.
 
I remember when I started losing hearing in my right ear, that was around the time Vent use was becoming big in MMOGs, I'd have to tell people Vent was completely useless because I couldn't make out a damn thing they were saying, but people weren't being douchebags about it. Now I'm glad I quit playing those game. :D
 
If anyone in any of my guilds pulled a stunt like that guild leader I would have bounced them out of the guild so fast thier sword would fall off. I had an alliance leader that bad once, I and my guild left taking almost the entire alliance as well as most of his guild members with us.
 
Why is this news? Can't communicate = can't participate in the most efficient way to communicate = can't be an effective team player in uber elite snob guild. Solution? Join a guild that is not comprised of elitist snobs. Boo hoo
 
I know how the writer feels. I'm mostly deaf in my right ear already from a tumor that occurred when I was young. Over the summer of 2010, I had a case of strep which quickly spread to my one good ear. As a result, my eardrum ruptured, rendering my ear devoid of most of its hearing for about three weeks or so. During that time, I could barely hear. Communication was frustrating, and not being able to enjoy the everyday simple thinks like your favorite song, or the sweet sound of the girl's voice at work that you have a crush on, start to get to you.

It's quite obvious the guy is flailing out a bit after losing his hearing. Arguing? Lamenting? He's trying to adapt to a new way of life now. But the truth is, whether it's on WoW, or EQ, or any MMO you can think of, people over the internet aren't your friends. You may get along with them, and you may share some interests in life that you can relate to, but ultimately you're just a means to help others achieve personal enjoyment on a larger, cooperative sense. So really, the guild getting rid of him doesn't surprise me. As quite inhuman as it sounds, it's rather typical human behavior.

Ultimately, the guy is better off. It's rather unfortunate that he had to go through this, especially after such a life changing and traumatic event of losing his hearing, but in the long run, he's probably better off. Better to learn the true nature of human nature over the internet, where the aftermath never leaves more than a small scrape, rather than in real life where scars often never fully heal.
 
Aside from the dramatization going on here, I don't see why he would be surprised. If he was in the guild for years, he knows that they use Vent, and very likely knew those people were selfish. So either every single other person in the guild needed to change to accommodate him being deaf, or he needed to go somewhere else.

Uh-huh. Even if he knew they used Vent, if they never had a deaf member before him in the guild, the issue of "what to do if someone joins or becomes handicapped" may have never come up. That, and how DO you know if they have exhibited selfish behavior before?

Then again, to be blunt YOU seem to have the same selfish attitude his guild has to be honest.

As an aside, I play EQ2 and have almost total hearing loss as well. So I very much understand what the guy is going through, I was born being able to hear and I didn't lose my hearing until about 10 years ago. So the way I see it, if the people I used to raid with (I did quit, but on good terms) can work with me despite not being able to use vent (I was OT for almost a year before I quit raiding and went to more casual play), I suspect that his WoW guild could have worked with him instead of just kicking him due to no longer being able to use Vent. Now did I demand that accomidate me? No, but I am glad they were able to do so. And I was joining a guild (well a raid alliance that evolved into a guild) when I was deaf, not coming back to a game but now deaf, so they knew they had to figure out how to raid with me not using vent from the start. But even so, I can't be impressed with any guild in any MMO if they can't figure out how to accomidate someone who can't use vent for some reason.
 
His old guild has bigger problems than someone not on vent if they have only cleared Naxx 10 once...sucks it happened to him but maybe it will all work out in the end.
 
I use Vent/Skype/TS3/Mumble pretty extensively now, just because everybody else does.

But I really miss the older days where people just typed. First, these things didn't happen because that didn't matter. And we still did just fine coordinating more complicated plans and teamwork - it just required people to pay more attention, rather than having somebody yelling at you to do this or do that because you were spacing out while spamming something.

Other things I enjoyed was that it really added to the immersion of the games for me. Having a handful (or a large group) of people chattering in your ear really detaches me from the game world. Another nice thing was that women could play games and not be incessantly harassed/hit on. (This has opened the door for a whole new type of female player - although a very not-new type of female - the "attention whore".)


In short, I feel old, voice chat is overrated, often unnecessary, and detracts from games IMO.
 
Most of those small/family guilds are full of terrible players who need ventrillo because they have very poor situational awareness. So it's easy for someone in one of those guilds to conclude that you can't play without vent.

I don't know that they are necessarily bad people - it's just that when you fail to complete even the easiest raid because "person x wasn't in vent and couldn't hear me tell him what to do," you will inevitably form the belief that ventrillo is a basic requirement. Shadows on cave walls etc.
 
rofl

This story is sad and silly. Ok he is deaf now and he is crying over a video game for getting kick. erm shouldnt he be more sad that the accident has changed his life. I dont play wow but i would be pissed. And would retaliate if possible. ;)

I'm sure he's sad about the entire thing, you know, abandoned by friends left and right, and deaf being the reason >.>

Sucks, but at least you found out who your friends are. Most people don't have that, just a bunch of people who hangs around...
 
I'm on the hater side of the fence, if he was blind there'd be no question - he shouldn't participate because his disability hinders beyond reason. There surely are enough deaf people to make a guild where everyone is on the same page. But for someone who is spending their leisure time playing a game to be imposed on by someone with a disability, not cool.

I'm legally blind half of the day due to keratoconus, so I can relate to having a disability and feel so sympathy.

After reading the post the guy is just new to being disabled and expects the sympathy to bend the world, needs to understand whats reasonable and whats not.
 
MMOs are very attractive to the deaf community, because a good guild without voice chat can be like society with closed captioning. I'm severely deaf from birth, and put in a good 5 years in EQ in guilds that didn't do voice chat, like Sheep on the Luclin server. Understanding every word that everyone says in an event with 40-50 people is not something deaf people normally get to do. Whenever I asked around (which wasn't often but the subject came up sometimes) there was a surprising number of deaf players.

I can sympathize with both sides. I wouldn't expect an entire guild that relied on voice chat from the beginning to be able to stop using it. The guy in the article will have no problem finding a non-voice chat guild, and he'll find better friends (and likely better players) that way.
 
Ok so lets form an [H] Justice League and go beat the crap out of heartless assholes. Just throwing that out there.
 
As my Wife is deaf, this is something I'm tempted to let her read about but, knowing her it'll spark an outrage and set her off on a tirade that I'm not quite interested in hearing (no pun intended, she'd understand the joke - not sure you folks will). :p

As someone that's been involved with computers "online" since the 1970s, "chatting" with people online to me and always has meant text, typically black on a white background etc (sorry, can't tolerate BitchX style stuff, just ain't happening...) and I really don't have much use for voice chat which is becoming increasingly popular.

One thing that I did get into a few years ago to keep in touch with a small handful of friends was using either Yahoo Chat (not Instant Messenger) and even some other forms of online voice-capable chatting, but I got out of it fairly quick since the Wife couldn't be part of it. She could participate in the text-room chats that were happening at the same time, but a) it wasn't fair to her that she couldn't keep up with people that were on the mic blabbering on like the typical idiots they were (and still are), and b) it wouldn't be fair to ask all of them to stop using voice and rely primarily on text when she happened to be around.

Suffice to say: this world sucks with respect to deaf, hard-of-hearing, and other people that simply miss out on the vocal and speech aspects of communication. I'd have subscribed to Netflix a long time ago for streaming purposes if those boneheads would simply enable the streaming captions that their technology has supported for over 4 years now but they just keep putting it off. They have a minuscule amount of content that's captioned for streaming and it's not worth the cost.

Hulu also has very little even though the technology has been more than capable for many years now. If I can rip a DVD and keep the captions and subs inside an MKV or MP4 container, they can do it with QuickTime, Flash, or Silverlight as well - all of those technologies support captions/subtitles in the streams, they're just being lazy assholes over it.

</rant_off>

I feel for the guy that's having troubles. I can't say I understand it since I'm not deaf, but after being married to my Wife for years now - and she's the first person I've ever really had any experience with in terms of dealing with communicating with a deaf person - I definitely feel for him and many others like him.

It's sad that this world can't do better in this respect, but that's how it is I suppose.
 
Aside from the dramatization going on here, I don't see why he would be surprised. If he was in the guild for years, he knows that they use Vent, and very likely knew those people were selfish. So either every single other person in the guild needed to change to accommodate him being deaf, or he needed to go somewhere else.

Right , if you think Vent is required to raid in WoW you seriously are wrong. When I was deep into EQ (the first one) everyone raided with around 70+ people WITHOUT a voice client of any kind directly massive groups of classes in intricate events that required far more skill than the joke that WoW calls "raiding".

You can raid just fine if you have half a brain and use DBM. What that guild leader did was not only the tactics of a retarded 5 year old it was also petty and cheap. Losing one of your senses like that is just awful , it can cripple you for life if you let it. And considering it just happened... this guy really didn't need some lousy GM to tell him he is of no use to them without the ability to listen to his nerdy gay ass voice in vent scream out crappy commands to a sub par guild that spends the majority of its time wiping..

Vent is a luxury and a great way to shoot the shit .. but a requirement? Fucking please.
 
So. Summary so far:

1) We all feel for this guy. His friends turned out to be assclowns when he needed them most, both online and IRL.
2) There are great guilds not staffed by assclowns. Someone help him find one.
3) Voice chat is a crutch for gimpy newbs.

This is what happens when 90% of online gamers are bigoted anonymous teen retards.

Alright. I think we can move on to the next outrage.
 
When I was deep into EQ (the first one) everyone raided with around 70+ people WITHOUT a voice client of any kind directly massive groups of classes in intricate events that required far more skill than the joke that WoW calls "raiding".
Eh? I don't remember anything in Everquest that compared to the complexity or difficulty of raids in WOW like heroic Mimiron, yogg 0-light, or heroic lich king. EQ never really fundamentally got past the 'gear check for class x' paradigm until the release of Depths of Darkhallow relatively late in the game. EQ had much slower pacing - for example, you had 10 seconds to click the OMM mask. WOW typically gives you 2~4 seconds to react to events. And while WOW had DBM, EQ had emotes and audio triggers, which were really much more powerful because they worked for *everything*, while DBM doesn't help with many boss effects that only provide visual cues (for example, Prof Putricide's goo balls).

You can raid just fine if you have half a brain and use DBM
What you need is not intelligence per se, but rather situational awareness or "court vision" - that is, the ability to look at a chaotic situation with many things going on, quickly determine which things are important to you, and which order you need to address them in. Ventrillo acts as an awareness multiplier, allowing one person with very high situational awareness to process incomming information for 2~10 other people.

If you have six people in the raid who freak out and panic whenever they see fires, explosions, laser beams, and bomb-throwing robots on the screen at the same time, you probably aren't going to be able to do mimiron without Ventrillo.
 
One of the reason why I tried an MMO game years ago, left and never got into any MMO since.

The biggest turn off in an MMO is always the community which is full of retarded kids.
 
What you need is not intelligence per se, but rather situational awareness or "court vision" - that is, the ability to look at a chaotic situation with many things going on, quickly determine which things are important to you, and which order you need to address them in. Ventrillo acts as an awareness multiplier, allowing one person with very high situational awareness to process incomming information for 2~10 other people.

If you have six people in the raid who freak out and panic whenever they see fires, explosions, laser beams, and bomb-throwing robots on the screen at the same time, you probably aren't going to be able to do mimiron without Ventrillo.
This is why I like smaller, tightly-knit guilds :D

Back in TBC I raided up to T6 content with a small guild of college buddies. Not MY college buddies, mind you, most of them knew each other IRL but I was just a random guy looking for a guild one day and they took me in. In my experience, I find that these smaller guilds that place more of an emphasis on the community and atmosphere of the guild as a whole generally produce either absolutely amazing players or downright terrible ones when it comes to endgame content.

I was fortunate enough to be in a guild filled with the former :p Even in progression fights, everyone had taken the time pre-raid to research all they needed to know about the encounter, and very little information was given over vent regarding the fight itself. Most of the time we just used vent to talk about random crap.
 
Kicking him out because he lost his hearing... I can't see how you could get much lower. In the end I think he'll be better off for being out of the guild. They were never really his friends anyway. A hard life's lesson learned, but he'll value the people that are sticking by him that much more for it.
 
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