Cold Comfort

Guild Management and Leadership in WoW

Archive for category Off-Topic

Portal Roulette, Corrupted Healing and Other Mischief

Mar 1

Posted by Karatheya in Off-Topic | 2 Comments

MrMischief Portal Roulette, Corrupted Healing and Other Mischief

I’m catching up on some of the Warcraft novels, specifically Beyond the Dark Portal at the moment.  I find the scenes with Nefarian taking me back to the time when I was running Blackwing Lair.

I still rate that experience as the best time I spent raiding in the time I’ve been playing WoW.  It wasn’t so much the content, but the amount of good-natured grief that we gave each other that made the experience enjoyable.

Corrupted Healing

For those who never experienced the Nefarian fight when it was current, he periodically “calls” each class, making them do something special for 30 seconds.   In the case of priests (which was my main at the time), your direct heals stack a DoT on your target.

One or two stacks doesn’t hurt much but if you really wanted to kill someone and had enough priests, you could spam rank 1 Lesser Heal on someone and quickly build up a 2k per second DoT (this in the days where a well geared clothie would have maybe 4000 health).

Every time a priest class call went out, our class leader died in 2 seconds.  It never got old.  The first time was requested by our guild master (prompting a couple of “are you serious?” responses), but after that it just became a guild tradition.  He spent phase 2 and 3 desperately trying to keep himself alive with shields and renews, but usually would up horizontal for the kill.

Everyone knew it was coming, we all had a good laugh afterwards, and we were confident enough in our abilities to compensate for the loss of a healer.

Portal Roulette

In my next guild, I played a mage.  I’m not sure how widespread the tactic is, but our key screw with your guildmates move is known as “portal roulette”.  When it comes time to portal everyone home, multiple mages stack up on each other and face the same direction.  On a count, you all start casting portals to different cities.  If you have time, you cast more than one.

The result is a massive glowing blob of portal energy, and if you mouse over it your tooltip will rapidly cycle between the various destinations.  Right click at your own peril – you never know if you’ll end up in Dalaran or Stonard.  For those of you in 10 person guilds, Spicytuna has a recommended rotation for a solo mage to get the same effect.

No matter how many times we pulled this, there was always a cry of “dammit, why am I in Thunder Bluff?” from someone who wasn’t paying attention.  Again, everyone in the guild has a good laugh with no serious damage done.

I’m sure there are other examples that others will share – clustering on someone during Gruul’s Shatter, or putting Amplify Magic on someone just as they’re about to blow up.

When you can repeatedly kill your class leader on the final boss of an instance (at the behest of the GM no less) and everyone laughs it off, you know you’re in a good guild, or at least one that knows when to take themselves a bit less seriously.

My personal experience in WotLK hasn’t replicated that.  We were never the most skilled group, so we couldn’t afford to lose anyone on purpose, especially not in the 10 person raids.  I would have loved to have been a member of the Brew of the Month club so I could pull this off while fighting Sapphiron, but I could never get the hang of ram riding.

What do you do to maintain a spirit of camaraderie in your raids?  Any interesting ways to keep spirits high, even on progression content when you can’t let a few people die and still make the kill?

Until Next Time
(image is Mr. Mischief from the Mr. Men series)

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Selfishness

Jan 14

Posted by Karatheya in Off-Topic, Ranting | 22 Comments

selfishness Selfishness

Warning: rant incoming.  It’s been a while since the last, and the commentary on the time-to-emblems post pushed me over the line.

I’m calling out everyone who’s become a selfish, self-centered “me first” jerk since patch 3.3 was introduced and the Dungeon Finder became the best and worst thing to happen to WoW in recent memory.

I’m specifically talking about anyone who:

  • drops group without saying a word (at the start of the run or otherwise)
  • complains when a group member’s gear is vastly beyond what is required for heroics just because it’s not equivalent to their own
  • complains about someone’s DPS without giving any constructive advice at all
  • queues as a group leader but doesn’t do anything that can be called “leadership”
  • doesn’t bother to check if the group is ready / in the right spec / buffed before they start pulling
  • pulls when they’re not the tank
  • pulls when the healer is out of line of sight
  • pushes the group to at an unreasonable pace (i.e. “gogogogogogo”)
  • skips bosses without checking what the majority of the group wants to do

If you’re one of the 80% of people I’ve run with who make my dungeon runs enjoyable, this post is not for you (though you may get a laugh out of it).

Here’s the problem I have with people who do one or all of the above: you don’t care if your actions inconvenience other people.

Now, there are always going to be some percentage of people that are jerks, but since patch 3.3, something has changed.  It’s not that I’m encountering more jerks – this was to be expected.  I’m running more dungeons, so given a stable percentage of jerks in the community, I’ll run into more of them.

Jerk Pride

What surprises me is that the “selfish jerk pride” I’m seeing in party chat, trade channels, official forums, and even in the comments to my posts.  Not only do they not care that they’re screwing other people over – they’re standing up and defending their selfish behaviour as if they think that there is a logical argument to be won here.

In real life, shame acts as a limiting factor to jerk behaviour.  If you have an explosion of asshattery among your friends, they’re going to call you on it.  Your desire to not face that and to maintain your friendships might prevent you from acting like a jerk in the first place.

Even among people that you don’t know, there are certain societal norms that discourage you from doing whatever you want.  When you know that you’ll be held to account, you may change the way you act.

The virtual world of WoW removes that shame factor, and these people seem to be missing the gene that self-regulates behaviour in such situations.

(more) Exploiting Anonymity...

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How Long Do Your Heroic Runs Take?

Jan 7

Posted by Karatheya in Off-Topic | 5 Comments

My post on Time-to-Emblem ratios seems to have become quite popular since wow.com linked to it, but there is some disagreement over how long each instance takes.  To improve the original post, I’ve set up a series of polls.  If you have the time, please fill the questions out to the best of your ability and once we have enough data, I’ll update the original article.

Read the rest of this entry »

Your WoW Identity

Jan 7

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

A bit of a thought experiment this week.

I was ready to write an article about Guild Mergers, but after running over my thoughts on the topic I realized that there’s some background I need to get people thinking about first.  Here’s a quick preview: the fear and trepidation that surrounds a guild merger is all about the fear of losing your identity.

But what is your identity?  What makes you “you” online?  How much of your personality and values make it into the persona you expose to your guild members?  Are you more or less the same person, or do you build up a completely different you when behind a keyboard?

Consistency or Facets?

Assuming that nobody knows of the common player behind your alts, do you choose to expose a different facet, or even an entirely different personality on one character vs another?  Or do you play all of your characters act in a way that is consistent with your personality and values?

Personally, I think of myself as a protector, and this comes through in all of my characters.  It’s what led me to always have a tanking or healing main character.  It’s why I only death grip on my DPS Death Knight to pull a mob off the healer.  I like the idea that I am responsible for the other people in my party – not for their behaviour, but for their safety from whatever the game throws at us.

MBTI

If you’ve never thought much about your personality traits, you might want to take a few minutes to take the Meyers-Briggs Typology test.  The full test has 72 questions.  There are shorter versions, like this one that uses the Simpsons characters, but you can’t expect to get much out of a personality test that asks four two-choice questions.

(when our vice president joined the company and wanted to do some team building, he gave us the Simpsons version of the test and I came out as Principal Skinner.  Read into that what you will.  Now that I think about it, it might be fun to work out the 16 WoW NPCs that match the various typologies.  Garrosh Hellscream for ESTP?  Wait, “able to handle criticism”.  Perhaps not)

If you’ve done one of these tests in the past, you may know the general category you fall into.  If so, pick one of your characters and do the test as them.  If you’re someone who does absolutely no role-play, there may be no difference in the results, but I suspect a great number of us switch things up even a little bit when playing.

(more) What Are Your Limits?...

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Best of 2009

Dec 31

Posted by Karatheya in Guild Management, Off-Topic | 2 Comments

Ah, the joy of 10 days away from work.  It just gets you in the mood for doing … nothing, or at least nothing that requires much effort.

The problem is that when you talk about transparency all the time, you can’t easily get away with half-assing an article during the holidays.  But if you just come out and admit that you’re half-assing it, then that’s OK.  Right?  Right?

In that spirit, I present the articles I’ve written this year that I am most proud of.  For those of you who have started reading the blog in the last few months, I hope you may find something here that of interest that you’ve not come across in the archives.  For the loyal readers, thank you for continuing to put up with me.  I hope you’re all enjoying some downtime as we head into 2010.

It’s a fair assumption that Cataclysm will be out in 2010.  I’m guessing that we’ll start seeing beta invites sometime in the second quarter.  Once that happens (and assuming I get an invite, or can work by proxy via someone who does), I’m sure to have some more meaty articles for you all.

  1. Alliance vs Horde Lore in Northrend: An off-topic post that I’m still proud of.  Blizzard are great story-tellers, and if you haven’t experienced some of the quest chains I mention in this post (on both factions), you’re doing yourself a disservice by not doing it at least once.
  2. Loot Collusion in Raids in Patch 3.2: I was sadly prescient on this one, as this was an issue during patch 3.2 (though somewhat less since 3.3, if only because you can get emblems faster from chain running heroics)
  3. Foresight: As a guild leader, what do you do to prepare for a new patch?
  4. Breaking Up a Guild Bank: It’s like a divorce, but without lawyers.  How do you split up the goods that you earned as a group after a guild is no longer viable?
  5. Motivation to Raid: Do you know why you raid?  Do you know why your guild members raid?  Are the reasons the same?
  6. Policy Transparency: How open is the business of your guild to your members?
  7. Nerdrage and How To Deal With It: I was writing about the Battle.Net merge nerdrage on the official forums, but knowing how to deal with rage from your members is a valuable tool.
  8. Turning Bads Into Goods: If you don’t have a steady flow of qualified applicants, you can undertake to improve people who aren’t up to spec.
  9. Guild Ranks and Controls: Advice on how to set up your ranks for security and flexibility.
  10. The Myths of Account Sharing: I have zero tolerance for people who share accounts.  If you allow it, perhaps I can debunk some of the common myths.
  11. All About EP/GP: An overview of the loot sytem and why I think it’s the best balance between fair loot distribution and time invested.
  12. Guild Changes in Cataclysm: A six-part series detailing the changes announced at Blizzcon 2009 with regards to guilds.

Until Next Time – Have a Safe and Enjoyable New Year!

Time-to-Emblem Ratios

Dec 28

Posted by Karatheya in Off-Topic, Ranting | 37 Comments

Inv misc pocketwatch 01 Time to Emblem RatiosSpell holy summonchampion Time to Emblem Ratios

Why do people leave groups in the new LFG system the moment a dungeon is assigned?

The instances I see this most often on are:

  • The Culling of Stratholme
  • Halls of Lightning
  • Halls of Stone
  • The Oculus

If you jump out of the group, you can’t re-queue for 15 minutes.  For a tank or healer, that means 15 minutes plus a few seconds until your next group.  For a DPS, you’re probably talking more like 30 minutes until your next group (on my battlegroup at least).

The thing I don’t get is that the ratio of time spent to emblems earned is better than it has ever been in the past.  Nobody’s doing these dungeons for the experience or the achievements – those are for groups you organize among your guildies or friends.  It’s a pure loot grab, sometimes with an eye for loot in the instance itself (for new 80s, or anyone if you get assigned one of the new dungeons), but most often by way of emblems.

Let’s look at the MPE (minutes per emblem) of various dungeons.  I’m assuming a competent heroic group chain pulling, including optional bosses and that this is not the first random heroic of the day.  If these numbers don’t agree with the time it takes you to run the dungeon, contribute to the poll to help make things more accurate.

Minutes Per Emblem

Instance Min Time Min Emblems Min MPE Full Time Full Emblems Full MPE
Ahn'kahet 20 5 4 30 7 4.3
Azjol-Nerub       15 5 3
Culling of Stratholme 23 6 3.8 25 7 3.5
Trial of the Champion       15 5 3
Drak'Tharon Keep       20 6 3.3
Gundrak 18 6 3 20 7 2.8
Halls of Reflection       25 5 5
Pit of Saron       25 5 5
Forge of Souls       20 4 5
Nexus       20 7 2.8
Oculus       25 8 3.1
Violet Hold       20 5 4
Halls of Lightning       20 6 3.3
Halls of Stone 15 4 3.75 25 6 4.1
Utgarde Keep       15 5 3
Utgarde Pinnacle       20 6 3.3

Assume that you get an instance you don’t like.  You ditch, and get into another one immediately after the cooldown expires.  I’ll use CoS followed by Utgarde Keep as an example.  The aggregate MPE is 6 (15 minute cooldown plus a 15 minute run for 5 emblems).  The only instance which gives that crappy a rate of return it the Pit of Saron.  If you’d just stuck with CoS, you’d end up with an aggregate MPE of 3.3.  You’ll only find three instances on the list above with a better return on your time investment.

So if you’re just there for loot, why are you shooting yourself in the foot, making the Dungeon Finder experience worse for others, and as some have suggested, exacerbating the problem by leaving a bunch of “just need a tank for Oculus” groups at the top of the DF queue?

Either you’re a mercenary or you’re not.  If you’re looking for specific loot, queue for specific dungeons you want.  If you’re in it for emblems, just suck it up and let the system work the way it was intended.  Your failure to perform simple division makes you look like even more of a fool than when you just ditched the group.

Ah, and note to self: Mondays still happen when you’re on vacation.  Post deadlines do too.  :)

Until Next Time (when I hope to have something a bit more substantial for you instead of minor rants)

Update 5 Jan 2009: with the announced changes to Oculus, the instance is one of the lowest minute-to-emblem ratios around.  It’s sad that this change was required, and even sadder that people are saying they’ll still drop group when assigned to it.  Some people’s children….

Update 7 Jan 2009: Smells like wow.com’s been here.  Updated a few mistakes in the original post and added min/max emblem calculations

Update 7 Jan 2009: I’ve added a http://blog.cold-comfort.org/long-heroic-runs/ to help get better data on the time it takes to run each dungeon.

Update 9 Jan 2009: With 30 some-odd repsondents to the poll, my original estimates seem to agree  with our readers, save for Ahn’kehat, which was bumped up by 5 minutes for both full and minimal clears and Nexus, which came down from 25 to 20 minutes.


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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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