if you want to invite me to party, ASK ME first.

Mate, anyone who does it to me, ends up ignored, it's as simple as that. Because you ARE assuming, and you DON'T have the courtesy of asking. It's simple manners.

Also, shoving an invite window into someone's face is a lot more disruptive than sending a tell, since it requires player action to remove AND blocks part of your vision. Which, incidentally, has in fact gotten me killed in games, because when fighting an elite or another player it's just about the last thing you can use.

Manners =/= Doing it my way or else!

Let me guess. OP is one of those people who flags himself as LFG for a specific dungeon or quest and then declines when he gets an invite lol

i agree with the OP. i've had random invites sent to me, and so of course i decline! then i turn around and realize that the person was behind me sharing the same area. i mean get real. just whisper, "YO WANNA SHARE THIS MOB LOL?"

it isn't hard.

Seems like auto-decline is the fix, no? Again, the only assumption here is that someone is trying to be rude by inviting. I venture to say that most people doing it here are doing because they are exactly trying NOT to be rude. It's also "manners" to embrace people's varying comfort levels. I feel much more comfy talking to someone after they've accepted a group invite, rather than spamming them with small talk when there may or may not be interest.

One thing I can agree on is that anyone who does EITHER in the middle of someone's fight is a douche.

I think the opposite. if I am starting to kill something in the area... I am glad that someone blind invites me, if they are nearby and wants to join in the fun.

If someone doesn't like it, and it bothers them that much... maybe they are just a tad anti-social to begin with.

no granted, if they are just inviting to ask for money, trying to sell junk, or whatever... you leave group and ignore... 2 seconds and it is forgotten.

This for me too.

I don't mind blind invites in situations where it makes pefect sense to create a temporary group for a single objective.

Like uteboy said, if there are 2+ people standing around a boss, there isn't really a whole lot of discussion needed to establish who needs what. To me, a blind invite in a situation like that means, "let's team up for this and then we can part ways again".

If I've already engaged the final boss for a given quest and I see someone running up who is clearly in need of the same kill, I'll actually go out of my way to toss them a blind invite. It's my way of asking them if they want in on the kill, as typing it out and waiting for an answer would simply take too long when you're already in the fight.

In most other situations though I always ask people first and usually people do the same to me. I've had the occasional random blind invite, but it's not happened enough to really annoy and usually after a decline they don't try again. I've only had 1 case where a player was really persistent and required a trip to /ignore to block repeated blind invites. Given how atrocious today's MMO communities are usually made out to be, I think at least on the servers I play on it's not that bad.


On a slight off-topic note:

There have been cases where grouping up ad-hoc just isn't feasible, usually when me and my fiancee are duo-ing open-world heroics. Occasionally on the final boss we'll run into another group of 3-4 players and there just isn't enough room for us all to merge into a single group.

If that happens we always let the other group go first and help them bring down the boss. So far every time we've done that the other group has stayed around to help us dps down our boss in turn, even if it took a while for the boss to respawn. Who says common courtesy is completely dead in MMO's?


PS: just wanted to add I do understand where the OP is coming from. Blind invites can be perceived as very rude and especially if you don't even see the person in question it can leave you scratching your head wondering what they're thinking. However on a personal level I just take it in stride as long as it doesn't happen too often. I just remind myself that not everyone knows the unwritten etiquette of MMO's and that a lot of them probably don't realize they're being (what might be perceived as) rude.

The exception is those people who spam invites, whether it's trade, guild or group invites... if you can't take the hint after the first decline you're either being rude on purpose or you're really immature.

It's like the people jumping in to 'help' you kill a mob, when you haven't the slightest need of help. In many cases you may ruin the original fighters combat experience, by messing up their power rotation or even their abilities (i've played classes where I NEEDED to get hit in order to do more damage) of by ruining the challenge (e.g. when fighting an elite or champion). And many of us have played games where, unlike in SW:TOR, the person who does most damage gets the kill credit, the loot and the experience... So jumping in to 'help' is something you just don't do, unless you want to be branded as a killstealer. Healing, buffing, all fine, but don't jump in unless they're really going to die without help.

MMO aren't that unlike a regular, real life community. Especially in the longer lived ones, you get to know people, you develop relations that can last for years. And like all communities, virtual communities too develop unspoken rules of conduct so you don't rip each others' throats out. Which can be quite literal in games with PVP.

This. Everything in this post.

It's almost like you don't like other players in your MMO.