Archive for category Raiding

Reasonable Expectations

expectations Reasonable Expectations

Against my better judgement, I’ve started working on gearing up another of my characters that I abandoned after hitting 80 in the month after the WotLK launch.  I’d finished with all of my EoT gear on my Paladin and Shaman, and told myself that I was just going to get exalted with two factions for a couple of tailoring patterns.  In the course of doing that, I ended up getting enough EoT to pick up a couple of pieces of Tier 9, and before long I found myself chain-queueing for heroics on a character that I was going to let rot until Cataclysm.

That’s a long way of saying that I’ve been running even more dungeon finder groups than is my custom recently.  It’s taking a bit of a toll on me – I find myself having less patience with people than I’d like to, and at times acting like a jerk in response to jerkish behaviour.  I wiped a group on heroic Halls of Reflection because I refused to exploit the escape encounter with them.  Technically, they wiped themselves, as I was just standing in a safe spot and didn’t move to heal when when the first wave of adds came, but it’s the same thing in the end.

Around the point where my frustration was getting the better of me, I read an interesting article by Matthew Rossi on wow.com.  In short, he says that putting raid-level expectations onto the people you meet in dungeon finder groups is not only a recipe for driving yourself batty but is unfair to everyone involved.

Between the point of his article and the ongoing commentary from my post on selfishness, I started to think about why these groups were getting to me.  Was it the groups, or me?  Were the groups completing the dungeon?  Yes, for the most part – maybe 5% of the groups I’ve been in have failed to complete the instance, and that was usually on the path to Tyrannus in the Pit of Saron.

Reflection

So if the groups were completing the dungeon, and I was getting my emblems and rolls on loot, why was I getting annoyed?  It was because the groups weren’t living up to my expectations.

A much wiser man than me gave me this sage advice: “expectations are just premeditated resentments”.

The groups that I meet in the dungeon finder don’t tick a check box that says “I promise to live up to the standards of an experienced four-year raider”.  So why was I treating them like they had?

In my defense, I’m pretty lenient about performance compared to some people.  The numbers I quoted in the selfishness articles are the ones I live by – I don’t complain about DPS unless they’re consistently below 1500, and I’ll happily heal a tank with 25k buffed HP through the original heroics.  But when it comes to situational awareness and having respect for other people, I take a hard line.  Neither of these are required for random heroics.  The fomer makes things run a bit more smoothly and the lack of the latter is more a comment on society as a whole than WoW in specific.

Yet I find myself pushing the things that are important to me on people who may have a completely different set of values.  I like clean execution.  The myriad melee DPS who have killed themselves on Krystallus obviously don’t.  But they seem to have fun and don’t blame anyone but themselves.  Obviously I’m taking things a bit too seriously if someone else gets themselves killed and I let that bother me.

Does this mean that I’m going to instantly become an easy-going dungeon runner that lets nothing bother him?  Not likely.  But I will try to put myself in the shoes of people who don’t take this game as seriously, and not judge them so harshly.

(more) Type A Personality...

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Bridging the 10 to 25 Gap

bridge 450 Bridging the 10 to 25 Gap

In the post on guild mergers, I talked a little about what to do when you’re trying to expand from a 10 person to 25 person guild.  Today, I’d like to expand on that a bit outside of the context of mergers or alliances (the latter of which will be covered in a future post).  Hopefully this one won’t turn into an opus (I honestly didn’t expect the last few to run so long, that was just how they looked when I finished writing).

So, you’ve got a 10 person guild.  Perhaps you started it with a few friends, perhaps it was a group of former guild members who left your old guild at the same time, or perhaps you just stuck it out in the trade channel until you had enough people to run a regular 10 person raid.  You may be happy with the situation, but a few of your guild members are making noise about the better loot that they want out of the 25 person raids.  You’re not certain, but you suspect that the sentiment is a common one – people want to run what they perceive to be the “best” content, and for many people that means 25 man raids.

Some practical ideas on how to proceed then:

Is This a Good Idea?

First, make sure the sentiment is commonly held.  It may just be one person rabble-rousing, and you may be better encouraging them to seek a guild that is running 25 person content rather than try to push the guild into what can be a tumultuous period in its life.

There are two points to remember here: Blizzard has decided, at least in WotLK, that 25 person content gives one tier better loot than 10 person content.  They have not, however committed to continuing to do so in Cataclysm.  Remember than the 10/25 versions of every raid were a bit of an experiment for Blizzard.  I think everyone will agree that the experiment has been been successful on the whole, but the item level spread could do with some improvement.  We might see changes to the way the 10/25 split is handled in Cataclysm.

The second point is to remind people that a boss with more HP and damage numbers doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a harder encounter.  Does it feel more epic?  Sure.  But in terms of raw difficulty, many 10 person encounters are harder.  You can’t recover from the loss of a healer (especially if you’re only using two).  You may not have the full complement of buffs and debuffs to boost your DPS.  For a good while after WotLK released, Sartharion-3D was considered to be significantly harder on 10 than on 25.  I know a former guildie who is more proud of his “of the Nightfall” title than “Twilight Vanquisher”.

What’s driving your members to raid?  Are they in it for the loot, or for the challenge of the fights and the feeling that comes from defeating an encounter after several weeks of refining strategy and execution?  I am more proud of what my guild accomplished in Blackwing Lair (Razorgore to Nefarian in six weeks) back in patch 1.9 than I am of my experience clearing WotLK Naxxramas in three weeks.  The raid size isn’t the point here – it was learning to master things like taunt rotations on the drakes, healing teams on Chromaggus and the periodic loss of a role on Nefarian.  These were new concepts to people used to steamrolling through Molten Core, and to get together with a group of people and overcome them was very rewarding.

I haven’t really felt that same level of accomplishment since (though I am proud of what my guilds have done in WotLK).  Then again, I’ve never been in a guild that pushed hard mode content.

You may find that what people are really craving is that feeling of accomplishment rather than the high item level loot.  When I inspect someone and see item level 239 items (which can only be found in Ulduar-25 hard mode), I’m impressed moreso than people wearing item level 245 (easily obtained from Trial of the Crusader on normal).  If so, perhaps now is the time to revisit the hard modes you didn’t complete.  The extreme hard modes from older content tiers are still something to be proud of beating (though obviously less so the further you get into ICC).

(more) Ways To Get There...

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Tools for Mentoring

mentoring Tools for Mentoring

A few months ago, I wrote an article on ways to turn bad players into good players.  Today I’m going to expand on the mentoring advice that I laid out in the hopes of showing some practical ways you can help even a completely new player improve their game very quickly.

Advice vs Mentoring

First, let’s be clear on what mentoring is.  It’s not just throwing someone a few URLs to your favorite class specific blogs or sites and expecting the person to perform better next week.  In order to perform the job of  a mentor well, you need to analyze their current performance, identify the problems, help them find workarounds, then measure the improvement.  It’s a coaching role.  A football coach doesn’t just show up at the start of practice and tell the team “just kick the ball better this time” before walking away.

This means that mentoring is a non-trivial thing for a member of your guild to do.  If this is not something that someone has already agreed to do (say by becoming a class leader), then make sure they understand what they’re getting into.  This may be a good place to offer loot system bonuses, commensurate with the amount of time invested.  If someone’s going to spend even two hours per week talking with and measuring the performance of another member – time that they can’t be doing dailies or random heroics – then shouldn’t they be rewarded in the same manner as you reward people for time spent raiding?

What you want to avoid is having someone say “sure, I’ll help _blank_ get his DPS up”, only to have them get frustrated and quit (or be short with the person they’re helping) once they realize the scope of the task.  I’ve been playing for nearly four and a half years, most of that as a healer.  I’m now pretty close to the top of my game, but to transfer what I know today to someone who is new to WoW and/or new to healing is going to take several weeks of coaching, as well as some heavy hands-on with user interfaces and explaining the nuances of experience.

To Match Class or Not

Let’s say that you’re a small guild, or one which is light on a few classes.  You’ve recruited a resto shaman but their performance isn’t where it needs to be for the content you’re on.  The only other shaman in your guild is enhancement and is very good at DPS, but only heals in a pinch for 5-man runs, never in raids.  Pairing the two shaman may seem to be the obvious choice, but I would argue that any raid-capable healing class would be a better mentor.

In 5-mans, there’s no other healer to compare yourself against, and you rarely have to heal continuously for more than a few minutes.   Overhealing doesn’t matter, there are no healing targets to stick to, and the mix of spells you use isn’t that important.  Any sufficiently geared shaman with a resto spec can chain heal spam their way to victory.  When you get into a raid environment, everything changes.  You have to pay attention to more people, you can’t afford to overheal too much, and you have to know when to not heal a raid member because another healer is assigned to take care of them.  If you don’t heal raids, you won’t have this type of discipline.

For everything related to healing, I’d rather pair up the resto shaman with a priest, druid or even a paladin (who, for all their history vs shaman are probably the least like them in healing style).  When it comes to things that are shaman specific (such as totem synergy), you can either rely on web site resources, or pitch those questions over to the enhancement shaman.

Know the strengths of your potential mentors and match them up based upon the value they can provide, not just the color of their raid frame.  This is itself an argument against class leads and more towards role leads – a technique I’ve found to be more effective in the guilds I’ve been a member of (more) Website Resources...

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Primordial Trophies and Orbs, Oh My!

trophy Primordial Trophies and Orbs, Oh My!

When a new content patch is on the horizon, I like to go through my policies and see what needs to be updated – typically with regards to loot.  I continue to do this for Cold Comfort even though the guild is in stasis at the moment.  It’s a good exercise, and it helps build up a history with which to demonstrate my ideas on policy transparency.

For patch 3.3, I wanted to update the policies to remove old instances and set a policy for dealing with new items that would drop in Icecrown Citadel.  In doing so, I realized that I had never drawn up a policy for distribution of the non-gear items that drop in Trial of the Crusader.

I’ve heard many people complain about how their guild deals with things like Trophy of the Crusade.  Certainly the way that Blizzard set up the various grades of tier 9 armor didn’t help much, but most policies I heard about seemed to split one of two ways:

  • make them purchasable in the exact same way as gear, with anyone who is interested bidding on them
  • distribute them via some loot council system (even if the main loot system is DKP-like) when a member reaches some threshold (such as having the other materials required for turnin)

The way that you obtained tier 9.25 and 9.5 armor made either approach painful.  In the first case, people would try to grab the trophy early to ensure that they controlled when they were able to upgrade their gear.  In some cases, this let them skip the 9.10 tier entierly.  The second technique led to the opposite behaviour – if you didn’t know exactly when you were going to get your trophy, you might hold off buying your 9.10 set so that you weren’t emblem-starved when you did receive the token.

Crusader Orbs were also tricky, as they were used in 36 recipes to make gear on par with Normal 25 / Heroic 10 drops, but the items crafted were bind on equip.  Imagine that a Blacksmith tank has just purchased four orbs to craft Saronite Swordbreakers for themselves.  While waiting to do the last Titansteel transmute they need, Armguards of the Shieldmaiden drop.  The items are roughly equivalent (depending on the mix of stats you have on the rest of your gear).

Should the member be able to give the orbs back and get their DKP back?  If the items were given via loot council rather than purchased, does the member now owe the orbs to the bank because they would not have received the orbs if they’d already been wearing the dropped item?  What if they’d already crafted the item – are they now at the back of the line for orbs, even though they just wasted them?

Primordial Saronite, the new “orb” of Icecrown Citadel adds yet another variable.  While it’s used for half as many recipes, it is also used in large quantities to progress through the quest to form the legendary weapon Shadowmourne.  While you can purchase the Saronite for 23 Emblems of Frost, doing so would take weeks of pouring all your emblems into the task, and prevent you from purchasing any other EoF rewards in the process.

Even Blizzard doesn’t really have guidance for how Primordial Saronite “should” be distributed, acknowledging that it’s a problem of social dynamics (more) My Plan...

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Performance-Based Loot Systems

STRONGMAN Performance Based Loot Systems

While browsing the US guild relations forum, I was struck by this post: PerLoot – a new Loot System

Not struck by the brilliance of the system, mind, but the process by which a reasonable goal (rewarding people who perform better) fell apart in the implementation.  What’s worse is that the original poster didn’t seem to realize how much things had fallen apart.

In summary, the poster proposed a loot system whose rewards were based upon performance in raids.  The better you perform, the more loot you get.  They proposed to measure performance by the meters – your DPS divided by your GearScore times the cubic root of the number of dispels or interrupts you perform.  The post made no allowance for how tanks would be handled, but did say that they would gauge Discipline priests differently “because they heal by prevention”.

The premise that gave birth to this loot system is attractive: ultimately, loot distribution should reward those who perform well.   I’m sure most people who generally perform above the average of their raid feel they should be rewarded for doing so.  But the loot system as proposed fails on so many levels.

(more) How Do You Fail Me?

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Principles vs Pragmatism

principles pragmatism Principles vs Pragmatism

Another article inspired by a comment on the last article, this time from Veliaf of der Hexenmeister.

Veliaf asked how to deal with the situation where your policies require you to treat everyone fairly, yet some people are more important to the success of the raid.  I think it was implied was that the people who are more important to the raid try to take advantage of that situation.  Let’s invent a hypothetical situation that you might face as guild leader to give the discussion some focus:

Foo and Bar are your progression tanks.  They’ve both very well geared and know their classes well.  They’ve been tanking since vanilla WoW, and when you throw them at content, you know things are going to go smoothly.  But as a new patch approaches, they’ve slipped into maintenance mode, where they just show up right before invites, do the raid, then log off.  There is nothing left for them to reasonably work towards until the next tier of content is released.

Quux is your third tank.  He used to be DPS, but changed his main spec to tanking a few months ago.  His gear is a little worse than Foo and Bar, but he’s very active in the guild – helping others, farming materials, researching class mechanics, and generally doing everything he can to improve himself.

Foo begins to miss raids from time, which doesn’t hurt your regular raids too much.  Bar steps up and Quux fills in the second tank role.  Sometimes things don’t go quite as smoothly, but you manage.  After a few weeks, Foo disappears entirely.  Quux keeps tanking, and gets his gear up to a level which while not on par with Foo and Bar is easily enough to tank the next tier of content.

The patch drops, and magically Foo appears online for the first scheduled raid of the new content, with no explanation for the absence.  He expects to be the designated MT for the first night of the new raid.  Now you’re faced with a dilemma.  Foo still has slightly better gear than Quux, and has a better innate feel for fights.  But Foo abandoned the guild when it no longer offered him upgrades.  While you don’t have a specific policy that covers this situation, you have established an expectation in your members that dedication to the guild and performance are rewarded.

Who’s The Tank?

Who do you put in the MT spot?  The person who will make things go more smoothly for the first night of a new raid, or the person who stepped to the plate when the guild needed him, and is ready to continue doing so?  Would your decision be influenced if you knew that Foo was likely to throw a temper tantrum and possibly gquit if you didn’t put them in the MT role?

The principled decision is easy: you reward the person who has helped the guild and shows promise to continue doing so.  If you lose Foo as a member, so be it.  Bar and Quux stay as your main tanks and you recruit a new third tank.  But this leaves you without a geared third tank, and since some fights in the new content require three tanks, you may stonewall progression.  You also have no wiggle room should Foo or Quux be unable to attend a raid.

The pragmatic approach is to give the MT spot back to Foo and demote Quux to third tank again.  While they’ll get to tank on the fights that require three, they’ll be relegated to DPS for most of the other content.  Their only hope for advancement in the guild tanking corps is for Foo to take another unannounced vacation.  Will the new raid go more smoothly?  Probably.  But you’ll have broken the implicit contract between you and your members: performance and dedication no longer guarantee reward, and selfish behaviour is tolerated if you’re a critical member of the raid.

To extend our hypothetical situation:

A month down the road, a similar situation arises with a DPS player.  You easily fill the empty spot with a new recruit who is equally geared and who puts out equal DPS.  When the original member returns, they cite the example of Foo as reason that they should get their spot back.  Do you give it to them, compounding the problem you created earlier?  Or do you return to principles, denying the returning playing a first-line spot on the raid team and cementing the double standard?

As Veliaf suggested, the situation could be even more extreme: Quux might not exist – you might have had to PUG an under-geared replacement tank during Foo’s absence, and not giving Foo the MT role back might mean that you can’t raid at all.

I’ve been purposefully hyperbolic in this example.  Rarely are the positions so clear cut, nor your decisions so polar.  The underlying problem is quite real however – your policies represent what you’d like things to be like in an ideal world, but the real world rarely plays by these rules.  Every day you may find yourself having to bend or break your own policies for the greater good of the guild.  But if you’re doing that regularly, why have policies at all?

To Punish, Penalize or Let Slide

So how do you deal with situations like this?  First, figure out what you’re trying to do.  Do you feel a need to punish Foo?  If so, what will that achieve?  Instead of punishment, are you instead looking to make them realize that they aren’t a linch pin of the guild?  Perhaps a more aggressive tanking rotation, where Quux would be placed in the MT position regularly might achieve this without being a formal punishment.

If challenged, you can justify such an action by saying that you need to ensure the guild always has two first-line capable tanks.  This might create some friction between you and Foo, but probably not enough to force a quit – they can’t exactly deny that they left the guild hanging, can they?  If they do get childish and threaten to quit, then they’ve tipped their hand – they are more interested in their own importance within the guild than with the guild’s ability to take on content.

A more aggressive rotation benefits you in two ways: Foo’s importance is reduced while Quux’s is increased.  You’re sending a message to the tanks (and your members) that the contract still stands, and so long as you’re fulfilling your side of the bargain, you’ll have a place as a tank on a regular basis.  This will help if the biggest issue for you was to not insult Quux by relegating them back to a DPS role.

Penalties and Bonuses in your loot system can also help here, though it helps if you’ve put them in place ahead of time.  Perhaps you have a penalty for leaving the guild hanging – a forced pass on the next mainspec drop they are present for.  Or you might have a reward for people who step up into a critical role when the guild needs them.

If punishment is your goal, consider whether you have the support of the guild.  This has greater weight if you’re contemplating punishment that isn’t explicitly laid out in your policies.  Any time you invoke your “I’m the guild leader and I say so” power, you need to know that the majority of the guild is behind you.  If not, you may have to bite your tongue this time and consider a policy change that would allow you to apply the punishment as a matter of course next time.

Plan Ahead

If you haven’t yet run into a situation like this, now might be the time to alter your policies to reflect the chance.  If you don’t already have an attendance requirement, consider adding one.  If someone misses three-quarters of the raids in a month, they need to have perfect attendance for the month following their return before they get first pick for raids.  If you don’t want to apply an attendance requirement across the board, you could put one in that only deals with extremes: if your actions prevent the guild from raiding, you’ll have to warm the bench for two weeks when you return.

These types of policies are tricky, because they tend to affect tanks and healers more than DPS.  Though the policy applies to everyone equally, the chances of running afoul of it are higher the more important you are to the raid.  If your reward system already favors tanks and healers, such as a loot council system where they get gear first, then you have an easier time implementing this policy.  The guild rewards you more, so the expectations of you are higher too.

Another idea is to have a hybrid penalty system that benches people where appropriate, but applies loot penalties where it is not.  I think of this like getting a parking or speeding ticket: you can choose to go to court and fight (taking up your time) or pay a fine to settle the matter immediately.  For the purposes of discussion, ignore that in many jurisdictions you can request a trial and never get one due to court backlog.

Applying a policy like that to our hypothetical situation might result in Foo being given the choice upon his return: either let Bar and Quux tank, with you on standby or in the 3rd tank position for fights that need it, or pay a loot penalty (a loss of a percentage of your points, a forced pass, etc.).  This forces the member to assume responsibility for whatever led to the punishment.

Would You Sacrifice Progression for Stability?

Ideally, you prevent people from becoming linch pins in the first place by aggressively rotating members through roles so that no one person is head and shoulders above the rest.  This will slow your progression, but provide a buffer against someone being absent.  If you’re an average raiding guild and you have the extra people to support it, this may be the safest route to take.  For anyone in a competitive progression guild gunning for server firsts, it’s just not an option.  Getting to the top first and staying there requires more dedication from your members, end of discussion.

Managing such a guild also requires that you look beyond gear and even beyond skill and catch a glimpse of how loyal someone will be to the guild under pressure?  Will they be there when the guild needs them and take responsibility for their actions if they’re not?  If the answer is no, you may need to address that gap or replace them before you wind up in a situation where you need to punish them for leaving the guild hanging.

I’d really like to hear from people who have gone through situations like this.  Are my suggestions too principled?  Can you just let absences like this slide, and nobody in the guild cares because they get to continue raiding?  Have you not punished someone and been criticised by members who feel that punishment was called for?

Until Next Time

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My Dog Ate My Frost Resist Set

dog ate my homework shirt My Dog Ate My Frost Resist Set

A comment by Malevica on a recent article inspired me to write about excuses.  Excuses for leaving groups, for missing raids, for poor performance, for lack of knowledge, for not heading to the dungeon when your group fills up and generally just not giving your all when playing with others.

WoW is a game, first and foremost.  Let’s get that out of the way.  Games (not just those played on the computer) have different levels of interaction with others, and different levels of commitment required.

You can stop a game of Solitaire to go make yourself a cup of tea without issue, but the pitcher can’t just walk off the mound halfway through game of baseball because his mother tells him dinner is ready.

I like to think of WoW as being around the same level as a friendly bowling team.  You don’t tend to bring substitutes to the alley, so if one person doesn’t show, the game is off.  If you’re in a tournament or league, an unannounced no-show may prevent your teammates from playing themselves.

I don’t think anyone believes that WoW should trump all else, or that nobody should ever be pulled away from the game for something important.  If a family emergency comes up, you have to go.  The issue is the subjective value of “important”, and the ability of people to be honest, both with themselves:

How much time do I *really* have available to me before I jump in this heroic or raid?

and with others:

I’m sorry, I can’t join the Thursday raid because I have a paper due on Friday, but I’ll be sure to unsign well in advance so you’re not left hanging because of me

We’ve all heard the various excuses for why someone fails to meet a commitment they’ve made to other players:

My guild needs me for a run

I have to go to eat

I wasn’t feeling well

Or the best excuse of all:

What I’d like to discuss (and what I think Malevica was getting at) wasn’t so much the veracity of the excuses themselves, but the need to make them.  Regardless of the reason you give, having to make excuses comes down to two things: not managing your time and assigning a different importance to WoW than the people you play with.

(more How Important is WoW to You?...

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