Cold Comfort

Guild Management and Leadership in WoW

Archive for category Cataclysm

Reforged Loot Distribution

Mar 8

Posted by Karatheya in Cataclysm, Guild Management | 5 Comments

reforge Reforged Loot Distribution

The recent developer chat on Twitter didn’t give us much information specifically related to guilds, but it did raise further questions about the changes originally announced at Blizzcon related to reforging.

My concern when the changes were first announced was related to the cost and/or priority of reforged items.

For all but completely random or open-bid loot systems, reforging may require you to re-think how you distribute loot.  Before we look at how, let’s go into some background on items levels.

The Math Behind Item Levels

The item level is something that Blizzard assigns to an item based upon the stats present.  Various attempts have been made to reverse engineer the formula.  If you’re so inclined, you can read about the gory details at Elitist Jerks.

Though the formula is stats to item level, it tends to be used in reverse by item designers.  A given dungeon at a given difficulty drops items of a given item level.  Blizzard throws stats on an item, runs it through the formula, then tweaks the stats until the item level matches the target.

Item level is a fixed attribute on that item, not calculated on the fly.  For items with only the standard stats, the formula is pretty simple.  Adding sockets or proc effects is where things get a bit more difficult to calculate.  Just how much of an item budget is used up by an on-proc effect is based upon some estimation of the value of the proc.  Obviously the opinion of Blizzard vs the opinion of the community may differ in this respect.

When people claim on the forums that “item x is under budget”, it’s because the reverse engineered formula says the item level should be lower than the item level in game, suggesting that some of the stats are lower than they should be.  When the math behind this is sound, Blizzard often adjusts an item.

(more) Stat Changes and Reforging...

Guild Mergers

Jan 11

Posted by Karatheya in Best Practices, Cataclysm, Guild Management | 1 Comment

merger Guild Mergers

Hopefully you’ve given some thought to your WoW Identity (both personal and guild), and considered how important it is to you.

Now, let’s talk about Guild Mergers.

My Experience

I’ve only been directly involved in one guild merger.  It was my first guild, one in which I inherited the guild master title from the founder, who logged in one day, transferred leadership to me without saying a word, then gquit.  I wasn’t even level 60 at the time if I recall correctly.  I did my best, and fairly well under the circumstances, but I also made a large number of mistakes.  One of those was trying to push us into Molten Core faster than we were able.  We had 25 or so regular members and wanted to get into raiding.

We’d tried running a guild alliance with a guild who was working on BWL, trying to do “half-and-half” MC runs, but they screwed us over on the first run by promising us 20 spaces then only providing 12.  Incensed and unwilling to cut almost half of my signups, we left their run and cobbled together a 28 person raid which took down Lucifron before getting eaten alive by Magmadar.

We kept trying to recruit, but could never get to a critical mass of people.  One of our members put us in touch with another guild in a similar situation.  We talked over the idea of a merger, then did a few 20 man raids to get a feel for each other.  Those raids were filled with mostly leadership types and the other top players, and overall went pretty well.  We got along, killed the bosses, and ended the run thinking that this group would go far together.

We agreed that they would merge into us.  I remained the GM, with their GM and his officers all becoming officers in the new guild.  I’d already made the mistake of having too many officers in my guild (seven or eight), so this put us at thirteen officers in a guild of about 50 people.

Within a week or so, problems started to arise.  Our guild wasn’t stellar by any means, but they were pretty mature (in line with what you’d expect given the positions I’ve written about).  The merged guild had a lot of younger age people in it, and were right on the other side of the maturity scale.

One of my members quit because she had had to deal with sexual harassment in chat from one of merged members in the past.  Guild chat became so garbage-filled that I had to create a separate chat channel and kick people over to it when they started babbling.

In retrospect, I was overly heavy-handed, and some of the new people picked up on this and chose to press my buttons.  It drove me up the wall, to the point where I took a week-long vacation and told my officers to get things in some semblance of order by the time I returned or I’d start kicking people.

As you might expect, things didn’t get back into order, and most of the new people (and some of my members) left the guild.  We re-built over time, though a job change forced me to step down as GM and subsequently leave the guild and the server.  They stayed together through TBC, but from the looks of the armory, the guild fell apart completely before the 3.0.2 patch.

What went wrong?  Many things.  I wasn’t an experienced GM.  I exposed my weakness with regards to immaturity to some children who chose to take advantage of it.  Mostly, we didn’t do enough investigation before choosing to merge.  The best of ours and the best of theirs got together, and we were both surprised when that wasn’t representative of either guild as a whole.

Guild Identity

I didn’t pay enough attention to what my guild’s identity was, and I didn’t consider how the integration of the other guild would change it.  In this case, it brought the maturity aspect of our identity down below what I considered to be minimum acceptable levels, which led to me acting the way I did.

I haven’t heard very many guild merger success stories.  You don’t really even see many stories about mergers at all these days (unless it’s one that you didn’t even realize was happening).  The 10 person raids in Wrath combined with the easy of acquiring loot means that you rarely are in a position where a guild merger is the best option available.

Will that change in Cataclysm?  Perhaps.  If recruting woes aren’t letting you move from 10 to 25 person raids, merging in a small guild that doesn’t have much of a guild built up may be quite attractive: you get the people you need and the incoming members get access to the talents and heirloom patterns that they don’t have.

Conversely, as a guild’s age (post-4.0) increases, the idea of a merger becomes less attractive, because you can’t bring anything but the warm bodies over.  Both guilds might be at level 20, but they will likely have different patterns and different talents.  You might be able to reconcile talents, but patterns will not carry over.

(more) Practical Issues...

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Rent A Tux

Dec 10

Posted by Karatheya in Cataclysm, Guild Management, Off-Topic | No Comments

tuxedo Rent A Tux

Are the servers up yet?

How about now?

I stupidly patched my EU client to 3.3.0 on Tuesday night, because I’m leveling a character on the US realms with a friend.  Now I’m locked out of the EU realms and am getting kicked out of the US realms after logging in (as I’m sure most of you are as I write this, though hopefully not as you read it).

Rather than talk about what’s going on right now (because much of it is about to change, or at least get re-focused), I’d like to speculate on an idea that came to me when writing about the Cataclysm announcements from Blizzcon 2009.

Rent-a-Tux: The Guild

Even with all the improvements to levelling due to come in Cataclysm, there’s still the issue of gear.  You’re constantly changing pieces of gear, sometimes sacrificing stats that benefit your class for core stats like stamina.  If you’ve ever leveled a character using Recruit-A-Friend, you’ll be familiar with the experience of equipping your first piece of Outland gear and realizing that it replaced a quest reward you picked up in your 20s – you just skip so much quest content.

The heirloom items introduced in WotLK help, but they only cover at most five of your seventeen gear slots.  We’ve heard that Cataclysm will bring heirlooms that cover all gear slots, but this won’t benefit people who are in small or leveling guilds.

What if you could pay someone to rent a complete set of heirloom gear, right from level 1, then use it as you level all the way up to 85.  The terms of renting the gear are that when you hit 85 (or after some suitable period of time), you have to leave the guild.  This kicks the gear back to the guild bank, ready to be rented out to the next person.

How much gold would that be worth?  How much gold would you get back by selling the highest-value quest reward on every quest you complete for 85 levels?  3000 gold?  5000?  If you knew you’d get that much back, would you pay a 25% premium over that to simply have the gear handed to you the moment you rolled a character?

Simple + Profitable

The beauty of the system is that once you have the requisite number of heirloom sets crafted, you never have to make any more.  If you have 20 sets, you can have 20 concurrent clients.  You know that in no more than 6 months (for example) you’ll get the heirlooms back in the guild bank, and you can rent them out again.  Without any management required, it would provide a steady flow of income.  Renting twenty sets of gear at 4000g per six-month rental will bring in 160,000 gold per year.

Other than providing the rental service, I don’t see the guild providing any other services.  It wouldn’t be a traditional leveling guild, just a shortcut to make leveling easier and more profitable.  It would sort of be like being in high school - you get a uniform when you enter school, wear it for the time you’re there, and then get rid of it when you move on.  You spend the time among other people doing similar things, some of whom you’ll continue to talk to after you leave and some of whom you’ll never see again.

Can You Afford It?  Can the Market Support It?

Creating a leveling guild solely for the purposes of renting out heirloom sets would by definition have a somewhat limited market.  A first-time player isn’t going to be able to afford the service, so you’re looking at someone with a well-funded main, either someone in a guild that doesn’t have all the heirlooms or on another server who is willing to create and transfer an alt over with a quantity of gold.

Obviously if you were a member of a guild that had all the recipes and offered heirlooms to member alts, you’d have no need for the service.  But I suspect there are quite a few small guild who will either not grind out all the heirloom recipes or will be so slow in doing so that it will be months before they have enough to outfit a member’s alt – assuming there isn’t a long queue of everyone who rolls a worgen or goblin.

You’d also have to get the guild supplied with heirloom items – which from the most recent news we’ve heard will require getting the guild to level 20 first so you can get guild currency to purchase the patterns and reagents.  If you don’t have alts of your own who can craft the items, you may have to pay others to play their alts in your guild to build up currency to spend.  If you expand your clientèle, you may need to pay a crafter to temporarily come back into the guild to learn and make the items.

Even if paying people to get the heirlooms created cost you 30,000 gold, you’d still turn a huge profit without much maintenance required.  You’d only lose out if you had suits of gear not rented.  As I sit here with dollar signs in my eyes, I envision having a queue of people ready to rent the next suit as soon as it came back to the guild bank.  Of course, if too many people decided to do this on a given realm, it wouldn’t quite work.  Unlike someone muscling their way into the Jewelcrafting market, this is a significantly larger enterprise, and the prep would probably keep the number of competitors low.

What do you think?  Crazy idea?  Or just so crazy it might work?

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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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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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Policy Transparency

Sep 17

Posted by Karatheya in Best Practices, Cataclysm, Cold Comfort, Guild Management | No Comments

Policy Transparency

I’ve always been a proponent of policy transparency.  I figure that if you’re open and honest with people then they are more likely to trust you, and trust from the membership is required for a strong guild.

For the sake of this article, let’s set aside a few things that I’ve written in the past that might suggest that full transparency is not a good idea.  You’ve decided that it is, and now you need to know what that decision entails for you.

What is Transparency?

I’ll crib from the Wikipedia page, which states that transparency (in a social context) implies openness, communication and accountability.  Looking at the related pages on open government and radical transparency, public scrutiny and oversight are also mentioned.

Transparency in the context of a MMO guild is conducting the guild’s business such that:

  • the way decisions will be made is published for the members to see
  • details of specific decisions made are published for members to see
  • members have the right to ask for more detail on a specific decisions
  • the guild leadership is responsible to follow the rules they have laid down for themselves

Let’s explore each in turn.

(more) Open Policies