This is a series of articles on the changes coming in WoW: Cataclysm as they relate to guild management and leadership. See the other articles in the series: overview, part 1, part 2, part 3 and reforging links. Articles in the series will be published every Mon and Thursday from Aug 27th through September 14th.

Having now gone through the changes in detail and speculated about the reason for these changes, I wanted to give my overall impressions of everything related to Cataclysm that we learned from Blizzcon.  I’ll take the liberty of talking about a few changes not directly related to guild management.

I am extremely excited about this next expansion.  As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m currently unguilded, wrapping up leveling my US characters to 80.  Prior to Blizzcon, I was toying with taking a break from WoW until the next expansion came out rather than going back to the EU realms.   Since the news broke, my drive to start and build a solid guild in preparation for patch 3.3 and then Cataclysm has been renewed.

Removing Old Azeroth

I am not at all bothered by the permanent removal of “old Azeroth”.  I took the opportunity shortly after WotLK launched to get the full Loremaster achievement on a Death Knight, so there’s no need for me to go back and level an alt from level 1 before the expansion comes out.

Gear Stat Simplification

Simplification of stat on gear also doesn’t bother me.  I’ve never been hardcore enough to break out a spreadsheet for gear upgrades.  I know the stats that improve the performance of each class and spec, and with an addon like RatingBuster, I’m comfortable giving a quick thumbs up or down on pretty much any item.  I like being able to eyeball and item and have a gut feel if it’s going to be an upgrade, and allowing me to do this while juggling less numbers in my head is a good thing.  It’s not like you don’t have to think about spellpower or attack power, just that you don’t have to balance the gain of a core stat (like STR or AGI) against the loss of a secondary stat like AP.  The spreadsheets will still be there for the hardcore theorycrafters – the formulas will just be a bit simpler.

New Races

I must admit that I’m kind of “meh” on this.  None of the new class combinations particularly appeal to me, probably as an effect of already having so many max-level alts.  If I were re-rolling from scratch I’m sure I’d choose one for the novelty of it, but there’s nothing that makes me say “I must have one of those!”.  When they bring in straight race changes (some time after faction changes as I hear it) I might be convinced to switch my female belfadin to a male tauren paladin just because it fits the tank archetype better, but otherwise I’m happy with what I have.

Lore

This is the part I’m most excited about, both what was announced for patch 3.3 and the Cataclysm itself.   I really hope that the point of the three 5-man dungeon wings in Icecrown Citadel (which must be completed in order and are “steeped in lore”) will expand the story of Saurfang the Younger and Bolvar Fordragon.

As for the Cataclysm and Deathwing himself?  Wow.  I’ve read all the books covering Deathwing, and while Knaack tries to give you an idea of just how massive Neltharion is and how his body is tearing apart, this image just took my breath away.  While those who haven’t read the novels may not realize just how large a part Deathwing played in setting up the events of the original warcraft RTS, he is easily an equal nemesis to Arthas in my mind, far more so than Illidan or Kil’Jaeden ever were.  Kisirani has hinted that there will be lore quests leading up the Cataclysm, and I hope these get people fired up to take on Deathwing the way everyone was ready to kill Arthas after the scourge invasion.

Just don’t give us another scourge invasion, k?  People on my server were jerks.

Professions

I have to admit I was a bit disappointed that we aren’t getting a new primary profession.  I had leveled a Death Knight on the US realms specifically to have a level 80 with a free profession slot in anticipation of this, but now I’m just left with a half-dead mutant space goat.  On the upside, I was planning on leveling a pair of alliance alts on the EU realms for the same purpose – I’ll now skip that step and do it once Cataclysm is out (though which faction I choose I’m not certain of yet).

Overall

Blizzard has described themselves as story tellers first, game designers second, and they show no sign of letting up any time soon.  As a huge PvE lorehound and a guild leader, this expansion just gives me more of what I crave, and I can’t imagine being swayed from my game of choice by any of the other MMOs on the horizon.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series of articles.  By the time you read this one, I’ll be back from holidays, hopefully with some new ideas and ready to get my EU guild started up.  If you’re on a PvE EU server with an active population on the horde side, please leave me a comment – I was fairly set that I would move off my existing server when I came back, but now I may wait until faction changes are available to see what that does to population and activity levels.  If you like some of my ideas and would like to talk about helping to get Cold Comfort the guild going, feel free to send mail to karatheya@cold-comfort.org.

Until Next Time

This is a series of articles on the changes coming in WoW: Cataclysm as they relate to guild management and leadership. See the other articles in the series: overview, part 1, part 2, part 3 and reforging links. Articles in the series will be published every Mon and Thursday from Aug 27th through September 14th.

This is a series of articles on the changes coming in WoW: Cataclysm as they relate to guild management and leadership. See the other articles in the series: overview, part 1, part 2, part 3 and final thoughts. Articles in the series will be published every Mon and Thursday from Aug 27th through September 14th.

Now that we’ve gone through all of the changes that will affect your guild in Cataclysm, I’d like to talk about the motivation for these changes.

Blizzard wants your link to your guild to be stronger.  They want membership to have distinct perks associated with it, and more importantly they want you to think twice about leaving a guild.

At the upper and lower ends of the guild spectrum, there isn’t a huge amount of member movement.  Top raiding guilds tend to keep their members because they are among the few guilds who can offer exposure to the content that those members crave.  Likewise, social guilds have bonds that attract people who aren’t as interested in progression or loot.

In the middle you find the multitude of raid guilds, with varying levels of commitment and activity.  At face value, there isn’t very much to distinguish these guilds – they all have a tabard and a guild bank, they’re all doing some level of raid content and they all have some system of loot distribution.  Your choice to join one or the other may be driven by friends who are also in the guild, or it may be a simple facet of their policies (say loot council over EP/GP).  You follow their rules, show up for raids, and you get loot I suspect that it doesn’t go any deeper than that for many players.

If things change in the guild (your friends leave, or a policy change that you don’t agree with is enacted), there are usually plenty of other guilds to choose from.  You might jump backward or forward a bit in progression, your raid nights might change, but after a settling period, the experience is much the same.

Cataclysm’s guild changes mean to strengthen the ties you have to your guild.  By letting your actions improve the guild, the hope is that you will feel more invested in your membership.  You may think twice about jumping ship if if means that the other guilds you can get into don’t have a full complement of guild recipes, or whose guild tax is higher, or who don’t have the Cash Flow talent.  You may have several alts at lower levels decked out in guild heirlooms, and you don’t want to leave them naked in the Barren when those revert to the guild bank.

Some of the changes coming in Cataclysm can be emulated via process and policy if you have sufficient drive to do so.  Implementing a guild tax, having open repairs and maintaining a searchable list of profession recipes for your members just takes a great deal of time.  The changes in Cataclysm allow every guild to offer perks that where possible today have a huge time cost for a few dedicated members.  While the smallest guilds may not get all of the benefit, the majority of guilds will get the same basic benefits.  But each guild will be able to differentiate themselves.  I can see the recruiting messages now:

Join <The Avengers>!  7% extra cash and no guild tax

<Brutal Army> is recruiting: 5% tax and all raid repairs paid for

<Everlasting Flame> can outfit your level 1 alt in full heirlooms for just 1000g!

Daily quest rewards far outstrip the cost of raid repairs in WotLK, so it’s not like paying for repairs will make a huge impact on raiders, but the psychological effects far outweigh the material ones.  Perhaps you can get away with only two daily quests instead of five with repairs paid for – does your schedule allow you to run five quests daily if you move gears?

As I’ve said in the past, it would be great if members flocked to guilds purely for the sense of belonging and shared achievement, but at the end of the day many players will be attracted by the biggest carrot.  Once you get past that basic fact, it behooves you to use as many of the tools at your disposal to help build strong links between your members and the guild.

If you’re a new guild starting out, Cataclysm will make recruiting easier, and provide incentives for your new members.  If you are an existing guild, Cataclysm will let you push some processes that you may be doing out of the game back into the game.

No matter what type of guild you are, these changes will help you achieve what the goal of every guild should be: to build a community inside of the game that members will want to come back to and be a part of.  And that is a very good thing.

In the last article of this series, I’ll wrap up my thoughts on Cataclysm including a bit of commentary on the non-guild related changes.

This is a series of articles on the changes coming in WoW: Cataclysm as they relate to guild management and leadership. See the other articles in the series: overview, part 1, part 2, part 3 and final thoughts. Articles in the series will be published every Mon and Thursday from Aug 27th through September 14th.

This is a series of articles on the changes coming in WoW: Cataclysm as they relate to guild management and leadership. See the other articles in the series: overview, part 1, part 2, reforging links and final thoughts. Articles in the series will be published every Mon and Thursday from Aug 27th through September 14th.

Reforging and Its Impact on Loot Distribution

Ghostcrawler likened reforging to an enchant whose description reads “Converts Spirit into 50% equivalent hit rating on [cloth] gloves”.  While the specifics of how you will choose the from and to stats aren’t known yet, the net effect is clear: an item that is today a strict upgrade but would drop one of your stats below a desirable cap will become usable in Cataclysm.

This would have been great when the Gauntlets of the Iron Furnace dropped and I was still wearing my Tier 7.10 gloves.  I couldn’t afford to lose the hit rating, even though the gloves were a clear upgrade in almost every other way.  Since armor penetration isn’t that useful for Paladin tanks, the obvious reforge would have been to swap half the ArPen out for +Hit.  I still would have lost a bit of +Hit, but not enough to drop me below the cap.

So how will this affect guild management?  You need to decide if your loot system will take reforging into account.  In a player-driven system like DKP bidding or EP/GP this won’t be much of an issue – let people declare interest in an item and leave it up to them to re-forge the item if it makes it more useful to them.  Loot council will be a bit harder.  In the case of the gloves off of Ignis, they are much better suited to a Warrior or Blood DK tank – if one had been present on that raid and we were using Loot Council, would you consider the benefit to the player with or without reforging?  You may need to ask players to state their intent to re-forge along with the specific stat they plan to swap when declaring so that your council can make an informed decision.

Transfer Percentage of Gold to your Guild Bank

I’m not 100% sure if this is a global feature available to all guilds, or enabled via a guild talent.  I hope for the former.  The mechanics are pretty simple: a certain percentage of gold earned by the player goes into the guild bank directly.  There are addons that do this today, but they are very much honour based.

We don’t know at this point whether this affects all gold gains, or just mobs, or quests (including daily quests?).  It might be just gold looted from mobs, and only in events the game considers to be a “guild event” – i.e. 75% of the members are from the guild.  This seems the fairest solution, as if it affected all gold it might encourage members to not guild their alts to increase personal income levels.

As I mentioned in part 1, this is a great thing to match with the Cash Flow talent, as it should (I hope) make the gains balance out.  Members of guilds who have both features enabled earned the same as if neither was enabled, but the guild coffers slowly grow “for free” as it were.

Important things to take away from this: if you’re going to enable this, make sure your members know.  Get the discussion going ahead of time, especially if you’re going to enable the guild tax without the Cash Flow talent.  Given that the talent is in tier 2 and has 3 ranks, you won’t be increasing earned gold by 10% until your guild hits level 6 at the earliest, so consider increasing the tax gradually to match the extra income as you put more points into Cash Flow.

If you aren’t going to use Cash Flow (making it a true tax on membership), make sure that it’s disclosed in your recruiting materials.   Nobody wants to get that sticker shock after being in a guild for a few weeks.

Lastly, decide what to do with the guild.  In real life, we expect to get certain services for our tax dollars (even if they’re the ones we may not see direct benefit from, like Emergency Services).  If you tax your members, what do they get in return?  Free repairs for all guild events?  Free repairs always?  Free consumables for raids?  Remember that the tax affects everyone, so don’t offer incentives that only cater to a subset of your guild.

Possibility of Guild Server Transfers

Moving a guild to another server is a costly experience.  Even if you’re taking advantage of a free character migration, re-purchasing all of your guild bank tabs will run you nearly 10,000 gold.  I assume that this feature would really be a “guild leader transfer with bank intact”, and that each member of the guild would have to move their character manually, then join the guild on the new server.  I suppose they could have a fully gated system where the guild leader starts the process, then members have a time window in which to “attach” their characters to the transfer before it takes effect, but this seems overly complicated.

In the end, this is just a convenience feature.  I doubt any guild who seriously wanted to move realms today would have been discouraged by the cost of re-establishing themselves.  All of the same issues that surround guild moves today (getting everyone to agree, issues with people who have strong ties to people outside the guild will still exist and still need to be dealt with.

When I first read about this I thought that it would make it easier for nefarious guild leaders to abscond with the contents of a guild bank, but in fact it makes it harder.  In order to prevent the guild name from coming across,  you would need to get 10 distinct accounts to create a placeholder guild on the target first to force a guild name change when the transfer was complete.

Blizzard could also make it easier to track guild masters who try to use this system to transfer a guild bank intact and force a name change: make the armory assign an opaque identifier (just a long number) to each guild, and use that in the URL used to access the guild.  Rather than viewing

http://www.wowarmory.com/guild-info.xml?r=SomeRealm&gn=SomeGuild

you’d instead go to:

http://www.wowarmory.com/guild-info.xml?id=1234567890

Then make that number sticky when a guild moves servers.   Not only would this help keep the RSS news feed links working, it would make tracking someone down a cinch, as the old number would point to the new guild on it’s new realm.

Cross-Server LFG

Just like your battleground matches contain other people from your battlegroup, you will now be able to form groups for 5 man dungeons (and possibly raids in the future) with players from other realms in your battlegroup.  Apparently once the group is formed, there will be a way to put everyone from the group into the instance (since players from other realms cannot exist in your realm’s outer world as they would be if you used the summoning stone).

From a guild management perspective, the only impact is on guilds who use 5-man groups to recruit, a practice a wholeheartedly recommend.  You may find yourself playing with a great player who needs a guild, but they’re on another realm.  With the 3 day cooldown on paid character transfers it’s feasible to bring them over for a trial, but that’s not a cheap move if it doesn’t work out.  It’s also not clear how easy it will be to schedule such runs (if you wanted to do a heroic marathon with the person before they paid for a transfer), as presumably you need to use the LFG tool instead of the normal /invite mechanism – how do you ensure that they are in the LFG tool at the right time.

I think a fair amount of out-of-game coordination will be requried to adapt recruiting techniques to cross-server LFG (Ventrilo and guild forums for example).  The benefit for just getting groups together (especially for lower-level content) will be immediate and quite welcome.  Unlike other features, this is coming in patch 3.3, so you’ll experience it when you choose to level an alt through the “classic” Azeroth one last time.

This is a series of articles on the changes coming in WoW: Cataclysm as they relate to guild management and leadership. See the other articles in the series: overview, part 1, part 2, reforging links and final thoughts. Articles in the series will be published every Mon and Thursday from Aug 27th through September 14th.