Cold Comfort

Guild Management and Leadership in WoW

Archive for November, 2009

Investing in Other Players

Nov 30

Posted by Karatheya in Guild Management | 1 Comment

person question Investing in Other Players

How much time and effort are you willing to invest in another player?  If that person is in your guild, the answer is probably a fair bit more than you’re willing to invest in someone you meet in a PUG.

For obvious reasons, we’re willing to invest in the long-term performance of people we expect to be playing with in the future.  We’ll accept lower gear levels, the need to explain strategies, and perhaps some out-of-raid consultation on rotations, gear, spec and enchants – all in the name of producing a better player some weeks or months down the road.  We may not consider it to be an investment in the same way you think of mutual funds, but it is – you’re investing time that you would otherwise spend running heroics or gathering materials.  What you hope to get back is a smoother experience in the future.

This willingness to invest is almost exclusively contained within our guilds.  Advice to people we run PUGs with is more perfunctory:

You should use Seal of Vengeance instead of Seal of Light to tank

or

Move when you see the “Ticking Time Bomb” debuff

These snippets are designed to make our immediate experience better.  Even loot advice (“that mace is better for a shaman than what you’re using because Shaman get no in-combat regen from spirit”) isn’t really an investment in future performance.  It comes from that “how can you not understand the core stats that are important for your class” place, at least for me.

There are exceptions, to be sure.  Sometimes when I’ve left a run I’ll get into a chat with someone about class mechanics or things that have a long-term benefit, but there’s never any follow up.  It’s just friendly advice, and whether it results in improvement I never know.

The introduction of cross-server dungeons in patch 3.3 is only going to reinforce this lack of investment in PUGs, as the chance of running into the same person twice will go up by a factor of 20 or so, depending on the size of your battlegroup.

(more) The Standards We Keep...

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Guild UI Changes I’d Like to See

Nov 26

Posted by Karatheya in Cataclysm, Guild Management | 6 Comments

leader Guild UI Changes Id Like to See

Cataclysm will bring a number of changes to guilds.  Some of these are completely new functionality (guild experience) while others are improvements to what we have today and could arguably be introduced independent from the new expansion.

Today, I’d like to draw up a wishlist of guild tools that I’d like to see added to WoW in the future.  As we haven’t heard much beyond the snippets from Blizzcon, some of these may even already be in the works.

First, let’s quickly recap the changes we know are going to be part of Cataclysm.  I’m only talking about changes to the guild user interface and things that provide utility, so I won’t be going into depth on things like talent trees and guild currency.

  • you will be able to inspect the professions of guild members without them being logged in
  • you will be able to invite other guilds to your events (rather than the individual members of that guild)
  • you will be able to set recruiting options for your guild, including the type and level of members you are looking for.  People can search for guilds in-game much as they search for groups in the pre-3.3 LFG tool

Now, on to what I’d like to see added:

Communication

Getting information to your members has always been a challenge for guild leaders.  The in-game tools are so lacking that an outside forum is the only place to post anything of substance.  Getting your members to visit the forum regularly is like drawing water from a stone.  Either you make the website integral to their in-game experience (by only inviting members to raids if they’ve signed up via the forum) or you spend a good deal of time saying if you’d just read the forum, you’d know _blank_ in guild chat.  There is more than enough room for improvement.

Guild Warnings

I’d like to see an /gw command that works the same way as /rw does in groups today (though with green text by default, naturally).  The ability to spam a guild warning would be controlled by a new permission bit, or at the very least be restricted to the same people who can edit the message of the day.

Depending on how many channels your members are in, and the amount of social chatter going on, it is all too easy to miss something in guildchat that your GM or officers say.  Whether you’re trying to get people’s attention a few minutes before raid invites go out or enforce some level of control on guild chat gone crazy, the large text and accompanying sound will help.

Notification of MOTD / Guild Info Changes

If you’ve used a Ventrilo server before, you may be familiar with the MOTD window that pops up when you first connect to a server.  And every time thereafter, unless you tick the checkbox that reads “only show me the MOTD when it changes”.

The MOTD and Guild Information Pane are useful places to put information for your members, but neither are very effective at getting information to members the next time they log in.  The MOTD can easily scroll right off the page if you have a few addons that spam startup messages, and the guild information pane is so infrequently accessed by most that you can only put reference material there – links to your forums, your voice server’s host / port / password, etc.  Some addons (epgp) even use the guild information pane to store configuration data on the assumption that when people do infrequently open it up they can visually filter out the addon data.

I’d like to see an option where changes to the MOTD or Guild Information panel prompt members as to whether they want to see the changes.  Much like a software update, offer choices like Yes, No and Remind Me Later.  If you’re online when the change is made, it would be best to wait until you’re no longer in a group to display the prompt; otherwise you see it as soon as you log in.  Once you’ve acknowledged the changes, you don’t get prompted again until the information changes again.  That way guild leaders could put some basic announcements and communication that members would be all but forced to read.

Ability for Members to Change Their Public Note

I’ve never understood why the guild permissions are set up this way, but the permission bit to “change public note” allows you to change anyone’s public note.  As such, it’s only appropriate for officers to have.  I know many guilds who use the public note for nicknames, or tracking of alts, or just forms of self-expression like a very small Twitter update.

Either all of these changes have to be mediated through an officer, or anyone can screw with anyone else’s message.  I’d like that permission bit to be split in two – one that allows you to change your own public note and one that allows you to change anyone’s.

(more) Addon Data...

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Managing Your Loot Standings

Nov 23

Posted by Karatheya in Best Practices, Guild Management, Raiding | 3 Comments

inflation Managing Your Loot Standings

When comparing loot systems, pay special attention to how easy it is for established players who raid often to gain a massive point lead over new members or those who can’t raid as often.  While attendance needs to factor into buying power, certain systems are more susceptible than others.

There are two different problems, depending on whether your loot system has fixed prices or not: inflation and list camping.

Inflation affects systems where the cost of an item is driven by player bidding.  For whatever reason, one or several players have very large point balances.  The going rate for drops rises because the person with a high balance can easily beat anyone who is new.  People with low balances don’t even have the chance to compete – they could bid their entire balance of points and still have that only equal 1/10th or 1/5th of the balance of an established raider.

List Camping tends to affect systems where item prices are fixed.  For the same reasons, someone ends up with a large point balance, so that they have first pick of anything that drops.  When they want an item, they get it at the fixed price, but it doesn’t make much of an impact on their balance.  They essentially stay at the top of the list forever, and when new tiers of content are released, they get geared up first because they keep getting first pick.

That your members will take advantage of these situations isn’t a given.  I’ve been in some guilds where people with high balances sometimes feel guilty for always getting first pick, and deferred to lower-geared players to benefit the raid.  But this relies on magnanimous behaviour, which also isn’t a given.  If the person decides to, they can grab a ton of gear, and it’s not unheard of for people in this situation to do just that in the days and weeks leading up to a /gquit.

Before I talk about ways to address this, let’s look at a few of the common loot systems and the extent to which they are susceptible to these problems.

DKP with Fixed Costs

DKP with fixed costs is susceptible to list camping once you have all the gear you need from the current content.  If the loot system continues without a reset through multiple content patches, the lead someone has can become insurmountable.

DKP with Open Bidding

DKP with open bidding is susceptible to inflation, as a well-geared member can gain points while never bidding on gear.  If members collude to keep prices low (say an under the table deal to allow one person to pick up an item at the minimum bid price), then it can be susceptible to list camping as well.  While this system allows for the greatest level of flexibility for members, it is also the easiest to corrupt.

Zero-Sum DKP

Zero-sum DKP is not susceptible to inflation (as the number of total points in the system remains constant), but it can be susceptible to list camping.  Just how susceptible depends on whether you combine zero-sum with open bids or fixed costs.  While this may make zero-sum DKP sound attractive, the major failing of this system is the inability to provide rewards for anything other than loot dropping.  Without a way to incentivize progression content, zero-sum can be very demoralizing after a night of wipes.  It is better suited to farm content, but I’ve seen many guilds choose to go directly from their primary loot system to open /roll rather than maintain a parallel zero-sum system for lower-level content.

EP/GP

EP/GP is protected against both list camping and inflation, as the points you receive for raiding (EP) are not directly used for purchasing gear (only to rank people in priority order).  In addition, weekly decay of both EP and GP means that the larger the gap between high and low ranked members, the more that is lost during decay.   This discourages list camping – with a 10% decay, it takes just seven weeks to remove half of your EP and GP.  As any regular reader will know, I’m a big fan of this system because it doesn’t share the downsides of the other loot systems (though it does have it’s own cons, including the inability to spend what you feel an item is worth to you regardless of your priority).

Ni Karma

Ni Karma is a “boosted roll” system, in which your points can be used to supplement your roll if you so choose.  There are no item prices, so inflation is not a problem, but you can end up with people at the top of the list after a long period of taking no loot.  Due to the way in which the points are used (a winning boosted roll halves your balance), you can only effectively camp the list for one item.  Unfortunately, this can lead to people not taking minor upgrades because they are focused on winning the one item they really want and want to save their points.

Suicide Kings

Suicide Kings is not subject to inflation, as nobody has a balance, just a relative position on a list.  When you take loot, you drop to the bottom of the list of people who are in the raid (not the absolute bottom of the list).  Like Ni Karma, this can result in list camping for one particularly desired item, as once loot is taken you aren’t likely to get another piece right away.  I don’t see this system being used very much, as it has the same “lack of progression incentives” as zero-sum DKP (and can in fact be called a “zero-sum spend-all” system).

Suicide Kings doesn’t tend to be as popular as it was when first introduced, as the “cost” of an item (such as it is in this system) varies based upon who attends a given raid.  While this is also true of open-bid DKP, Suicide Kings doesn’t give members the level of power they have in open-bid DKP, which makes this downside more glaring.

(more) Reining things in...

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Sweating the Small Stuff

Nov 19

Posted by Karatheya in Off-Topic, Raiding, Ranting | 5 Comments

bang head here Sweating the Small Stuff

Let’s talk some more about pickup groups.  Every time I run them, I’m on the lookout for people who might be a good fit for the guild.  At the very least, I like to keep track of people who know what they’re doing so I can group with them again.  There’s no 5-man heroic content that should really pose a challenge these days – you can start doing heroic with far better gear than was possible when WotLK launched thanks to Trial of the Crusader normal, and very shortly thereafter you should be pulling in tier 8.5 / 9 emblem rewards.

Skill is the only thing that can really screw up a heroic these days, and even then you have to be very lacking in it to cause a wipe.

There is however a middle ground in performance between able to get through a heroic without causing your group members undue stress and this person is someone I’d group with again without question that I see regularly.  This is the my gear level means that I don’t have to care about the small stuff zone, and people who live there drive me nuts.

Failure 101

How many times have you been in a heroic where someone:

  • stands in the Ticking Time Bomb in Utgardge Keep
  • gets hit by Impale on Anub’arak in Azjol-Nerub
  • stands in the Mojo Puddle fighting the Drakkari Colossus
  • doesn’t bother to interrupt the Spell Flinger’s Shadow Blast in Ahn’Kehat
  • gets hit by Shadow Crash cast by the faceless ones guarding Herald Voljaz in Ahn’Kehat
  • as melee dps, stands on top of the tank during the Anub’arak fight in Azjol-Nerub and get one-shotted when he chooses them as the target of Pound
  • doesn’t cleanse debuffs that they are exclusively capable of removing (e.g. a Paladin tank failing to cleanse magic from themselves when paired with a Shaman healer)

These are all little things, and most of them won’t wipe a group.  Some of them directly translate into things you need to know in raids (see my article “FFS, You’ve Been Trained for This!“), but most just piss off your healer.

Still, I like to run heroics like I did when WotLK first launched.

A year ago when tanks had 22k HP and DPS were barely scratching 13 or 14k, you couldn’t afford to be hit by a shadow crash for 12.5k damage.  Today, gear levels allow you to make a few mistakes and still survive, though the danger of others hasn’t changed.  Did you know that Shadow Blast hits for 80% of your maximum HP?  If you have a new 80 healing a well-geared tank, it’s actually harder to heal Shadow Blast today than it was a year ago.

(more) The Reason for the Behaviour...

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Sullying Our Good Name

Nov 16

Posted by Karatheya in Best Practices, Guild Management | 3 Comments

reputation Sullying Our Good Name

On my main’s server, I’ve been running PUGs pretty much daily for the last few weeks.  The time just isn’t right to form Cold Comfort the guild it seems, so I’ve resolved to try again closer to the release of Cataclysm, when there is bound to be a fair amount of shakeup and re-rolling.

Standards

As any regular reader will be aware, I have reasonable but strict standards for the people I play with.  I’m not going to tell a tank that they need 35k buffed HP to do Naxxramas, or that you have to have surpass 4k dps to join an Onyxia-10 PUG, but if I invite you to my group for Trial of the Champion and you fail more than once to avoid Radiance when fighting Eadric, then I’m not going to group with you again.  The record of failures I’ve observed in one fight was 11 spread among 3 people.

I use the excellent addon Do I Know You? to keep track of such people because it instantly tells me when someone whispers me if I’ve marked them as negative in the past.  I track more than just people who don’t meet my standards: trade spammers, griefers, people who have caused loot problems, people who ditch on groups and especially that bloody Death Knight who won’t shut up about how the Dragonball-Z game is available on PS3 but not on XBox-360 all get on the list.

Over time, patterns start to emerge with regard to the guild tags of people on my list.  On my main server, two guilds in particular are responsible for a disproportionate number of negative entries, and as such I won’t accept invites from members of those two guilds.  It’s not a foregone conclusion that any group I join started by someone from the two is going to go poorly, but I’ve wasted enough time in the past and play roles that are in enough demand that I’m not robbing myself of opportunities by doing so.

If a guild on a realm gets a reputation for actively antagonising the other members of the realm, the decision not to group with them is pretty obvious.  Has the guild been proven to harbor ninja looters?  Don’t group with them.   Did they transfer in to steal a server first from a home grown guild?  Don’t group with them.  Simple.

The position I take on the smaller stuff – just not being a good player -  is one that I seem to take a bit more seriously than others.  I want to play with skilled people.  If your guild is made up of people that tend to end up on my “do not group with” list, the impression I get is that you recruit for numbers, not for skill.

Is this fair?  Should guilds be responsible for their members’ actions, and what, if any actions by a guild member outside of a guild event reflect on the guild?

It’s my $15 a Month

We all pay our $15 / £9 / €13 per month to play WoW, so shouldn’t we be able to do whatever we want?  Why should I have to conform to a playstyle or set of rules that I don’t like just to stay in my guild?  There’s a nearly year old post on Fel Fire that is still a good read on this subject.  In essence, your guild can’t force you to do anything, but they can say “these are the requirements for continuing to be a member – break them and you’re out”.

So, when leading or joining a guild, it’s a good idea to be clear on what is and is not tolerated.  I touched on this more specifically a few weeks ago; in the same way as guilds tend to gloss over the bigotry issue with terms like “respect your guildmates” they gloss over other unwanted behaviour with terms like “respect the members of the realm”.  Use words and like “respect” that have different meanings for different people and you’re just setting yourself up for an argument when someone crosses the line you’ve drawn in your mind but is still far from it in theirs.

(more) What should be written down?...

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GDKP – Where Does It Fit For Guilds?

Nov 12

Posted by Karatheya in Cataclysm, Guild Management, Raiding | 1 Comment

gdkp run GDKP Where Does It Fit For Guilds?

A few weeks ago, an article was posted on Elitist Jerks detailing the GDKP loot system.  Since then a few other blogs (Pwnwear, Deathknight.info) have picked up on the idea and spread it around.

I was hoping to provide a bit of an overview and practical suggestions for organizing GDKP runs, but as that’s been done to death I’m going to look at where GDKP can fit into a guild’s loot strategy.

What is GDKP?

A quick refresher: GDKP is a loot system where every item is bid for openly using gold.  Highest bid wins, and at the end of the run everyone splits the pot.

The name is a bit a misnomer, as there are no “dragon kill points” involved.  DKP, EP/GP, Ni Karma – all of these loot systems are closed.  You earn points within the system that you then use in some fashion to receive loot.  No matter what you’ve done before, when you enter into a new DKP system, you’re starting from scratch.

GDKP runs on the other hand implicitly favour people who have a lot of gold, at least from the perspective of getting drops.  But interestingly, GDKP doesn’t solely attract people who are interested in loot.  You can be dressed to the nines with no need of any drop in a dungeon and come out the other side with a tidy sum of gold in your pocket.

Who Is It For?

GDKP attracts three distinct types of players: low-geared members who are willing to spend a reasonable amount on multiple pieces of gear during a run, high rollers who want just one item and are willing to spend large amounts to get it, and people who are just there for the gold.

For the right balance of performance and payout, you probably want no more than 40% low-geared members, 40% people looking for a payout and the rest high rollers.  Depending on just how under-geared the lowbies are, you may need to set more strict gear and experience limits on the rest of the players in order to avoid hitting enrage timers.  Similarly, you can’t go overboard on the people who are just there for the payout or the total gear purchased will be low (as will the payout).

Unlike forming a PUG run where warm bodies are your first concern, building a GDKP run is a balancing act.  Don’t try starting one up on a whim – you need to announce it, review people who are interested, and build a group that serves the needs of everyone attending.

Lowbies Buying Loot For Gold Is Wrong!

Perhaps.  But it’s been going on for a very long time.  Even before Zul’Aman bear runs (costing 15 to 25 thousand gold if I recall correctly) were popular on most servers, there were always guilds who were willing to carry people through higher-level content for a hefty amount of gold.  The difference was that they typically brought one or two people at a time as part of a regularly scheduled guild farm run.  The gold usually went back into the guild bank, and members saw the benefit in that the guild could afford to pay for more repairs or for gems / enchants / etc.

GDKP is just one variant of this.  It’s a framework for doing PUG loot runs that will hopefully become common knowledge.  All you need to do is announce that you’re doing a GDKP run and specify the tuneables: minimum bid amounts, rules for getting kicked, etc.

(more) GDKP as a primary loot system...

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Minor Updates on Guilds in Cataclysm

Nov 9

Posted by Karatheya in Cataclysm | 1 Comment

cata Minor Updates on Guilds in Cataclysm

There isn’t quite enough detail to warrant a full post, but a few details were recently announced about the guild levelling system scheduled for introduction with Cataclysm.  The details come from IgoMir, the “Russian E3″.

Visit the original article for the specifics; the only thing that I find interesting is that the guild experience feature was originally described as being very much like player experience – activities by guild members would accrue XP for the guild as it leveled from one to twenty, gaining talents points along the way.  Once at max level, the experience would be converted into guild currency.

This new description is a bit different – it sounds like your experience is converted to currency at the end of every week.  You can then choose to spend that currency to buy talent points or the items that were mentioned previously: reagents, profession recipes, etc.

This may suggest that the time to level a guild to 20 might be a months-long process for a reasonable guild, and Blizzard wants to allow smaller or less active guilds the choice to progress via recipes or via talents.  Personally I’d prefer the original system with a shorter levelling curve, but I can see how that might encourage a large number of small vanity guilds, which doesn’t really serve the needs of a server’s population.

Other updates include:

  • confirmation that guild heirlooms will cover every gear slot, not just the chest/shoulder/weapon combos we’re used to from emblem vendors
  • the reagent requirements for heirlooms will decrease as your guild levels up.  This sounds to be the reward for guilds who choose both paths of guild advancements (profession recipes plus talent points).

Everything else in the article seems to be a recap of what was announced at Blizzcon ‘09.  The Blizzard speaker seems to have been J. Allen Brack, but it’s not clear if the news that wow.com is reporting is going through a double translation or not.  Some of the finer points may not be entirely accurate.

Hopefully we’ll get some clarification or confirmation in the next few days, but it sounds like the guild changes are still in flux and subject to change.

Until Next Time

UPDATE 20 Nov 2009: According to the official coverage, experience providing currency at levels 1-19 was not accurate:

http://eu.blizzard.com/events/en/igromir2009/coverage.html#Cataclysm

It appears that the original Blizzcon 2009 description was correct: XP levels up a guild until 20, at which point it becomes currency.  Specifically excluded is the idea of the conversion being XP to currency to talent points.

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