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.

Type A

Now, some of this self-realization is contrived.  It’s not like patch 3.3 shone the light on my tendency to try to control things.  It just took the constant frustration that came with patch 3.3 for me to reflect on how that aspect of my personality was making my in-game time miserable.

I hope that a bit of introspection will help, but what is more interesting is thinking about how this trait affects matters in a guild.  I rarely see dungeon runners twice, but I have to work with my guildmates for so long as we share the same tag under our name.

I’m sure many of you have heard of the Type A Personality, perhaps even when someone is describing your guild leader.  (Hint: if you’ve never heard anyone in the guild described as such, it’s probably you).  Though the theory has more backing in pop culture than in science today, the sentiment people express when they say it holds some truth: leadership roles tend to be filled by people with a strong desire to express control over things.

In some ways, this is a good thing.  A guild leadership made up of all laid-back people probably isn’t going to work very well.  In the guilds I’ve been a part of, I’ve been one of the people who wanted to take control.  In the guilds I’ve left, I was not the only person who wanted to take control.  While you need one person to provide some structure and drive, too many people trying to do so leads to chaos.  We don’t tend to compromise very easily.

The problem a leader can easily run into is asking (or more commonly not asking but expecting) guild members to live up to their set of standards.  This is not a slight on having standards or asking people to meet them – far from it.  It’s a reminder that standards and expectations need to be reasonable and communicated if the guild is going to have a hope of meeting them.

The Department of Guildie Resources

I just finished my bi-annual performance review at work, and though I usually look upon most of the administrivia surrounding workplace HR with disdain, the method we use to set goals for the next six months does have some applicability to guilds.

The technique (which I’m sure some of you will be familiar with) is called SMART, where each of the letters stands for an aspect of the goal.  The typical terms attached to each are:

• Specific: your objectives should be clear and well-defined
• Measurable: you need to be able to measure progress towards your objective
• Achievable: set goals that are within reach
• Relevant: set goals that (in this case) support the guild’s purpose
• Timely: set a time limit on how long it should take to get there

Using these criteria, a goal like “be ranked in the top 20 guilds server wide according to GuildOx by the end of January 2010″ is good.  A goal like “be one the best RP-PVE guild on the server” is not, because it only barely hits the R criteria, and none of the others.  Statements like the latter are more a statement of purpose, and are the things that goals should be relevant to.  If your purpose is to excel at PvE content, setting goals for PvP activity doesn’t make much sense.  If there is a strong desire to measure progress in PvP, then you should consider whether the overall purpose of the guild needs to be re-stated.

I am not suggesting that guild leaders draw up goals for their guild like a project manager at a large company.  That would, in a word, suck.

I would however encourage you to take a moment and write down the expectations you have for your guild: both the guild as a whole (progression) and for individual members (performance).  Do you cringe when looking at damage meters or combat log parses because a few people are consistently below what you think they should be able to put out, even when you’re beating enrage timers?

What about your goals for the guild?  Did you expect to have the first wing of ICC on farm by the time the Blood Halls opened up?

Just the exercise of writing down your expectations for the guild may reveal a few expectations you weren’t really aware of.  Once you’ve written down your expectations, consider how they stack up against the SMART criteria.

Do the people falling below the performance bar know that you expect more of them?  Is the bar you’re setting realistic given the mechanics of the fight in question?

If your progression isn’t where you think it should be, how close are you to achieving that goal?  How far past the original time expectation are you, and what is a realistic new time goal to set?

Share Your Goals

I’m a proponent of transparency, both inside and outside of the guild.  No matter what comes from your review, I recommend posting your expectations on your guild forums.  Go over them again from time to time.  I’d suggest no less than every three months, but you may want to review them more often, or perhaps each time a new chunk of content opens up to you (such as the barriers in ICC coming down).

One of the advantages of making sure that everyone understands the short-term goals of the guild is that you can focus people’s effort and provide rewards or incentives for meeting the goals.  Do you only have one week left to meet your goal to one-shot every encounter in the first wing of ICC?  Since everyone has known about the goal since you set it, you can ask people to give a little extra, encourage them to raid a bit longer, or to sign up for an additional raid night that week.  If you loot system allows, you can offer bonus points for meeting the goal.

If you want to completely co-opt the the work performance review, you can offer some level of reward (either gold or loot points) if the guild meets each goal in time.  Part of me shudders at the idea of taking the processes from the workplace and applying them to guild leadership.  It certainly doesn’t help counter the “raiding is a job” meme.  But I have to admit that many people are driven by rewards, and making the criteria for those rewards open and accessible may be a better choice than distributing them at the whim of the guild or raid leader.

Do you set goals for your guild?  If so, are they shared only among the leadership, or could any of your members tell me what you were working towards?  Have you ever set a long-term goal and rewarded the guild for meeting or exceeding it?  Did it help spur performance, both towards the goal and towards the next one you set?

Until Next Time

Related posts:

• Turning Bads into Goods
• Trying to Solve the World’s Problems
• Bigotry In The Ranks

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).

Ways To Get There

For now though, let’s assume that you’ve settled on moving from 10 to 25 content and you want to make the transition as smooth as possible.  I’ll assume you’re starting out with about 12 regular raiders, and that you haven’t cleared many 10 person hard modes.   Your options are:

• Start running 25 person content immediately, filling any empty spots with PUGs
• Keep running 10 person content while recruiting, sitting extra people using a rota
• Start running 10 person hard modes while recruiting, min-maxing for each fight so that everyone on standby gets in for a fight
• Keep running 10 person content while recruiting, tailoring the content to the specific drops your members need
• Add an extra raid night and balancing the schedule so that everyone gets a chance to raid each week

Outsider Loot

With all but the first of these options, at some point you are going to reach a magic number (probably 18 or 20) where you feel comfortable doing a 25 person guild run, filling in a small number of spaces with PUGs.  Before you do that (or if you choose the first option), you should review how fairly your loot system treats outsiders.

If you revert to a non-stateful loot system (i.e. /roll) while building your roster, then your runs aren’t really serving the needs of the guild – to build a team that learns to play together and to gear those people up.  You need to continue to meet this goal while making the run attractive to outsiders.

To make my runs attractive to PUGs, I’ve found that using a system where priority is given to guild mainspec followed by outsider mainspec followed by any offspec works fairly well, but only on farm content.  Your members use the guild loot system, and the outsiders use /roll (if more than one declare interest).  The outsiders are likely to get an upgrade or two, assuming that your members will be passing on much of the loot.

Make sure you explain the loot rules up front, and be prepared for people who don’t like the rules to leave.  Better that they do before you get started than get into an argument when loot does drop.

While your members are in the raid as part of a larger plan (learning the ins and outs of 25 person raiding), PUGs will be there just for the loot, so you can’t expect them to join the run without any expectation of reward.  If you’re lucky, you may find a few friends of your members whose guilds are no longer running the content and are happy to help out, but this will be the exception rather than the rule.

The gear your 10 person raids have reasonable access to will determine the best raid to do on 25 person mode.  If you raiders have access to item level 251 gear (ICC-10), then you can run ToC-25 normal, which rewards item level 245.  This should result in a fair number of passes on gear by your members, making them available to outsiders.  If you hadn’t yet started ICC-10, but had done ToC-10, then the PUGs might never see a drop because anything that dropped on 25 person would be better than what your raiders have access to.

Keeping People Happy Along the Way

While you’re building up to the magic number, your primary concern is going to be to keep your members happy, which gets harder and harder as the number of people you have to sit grows.  You may be tempted to create a second 10 person team once you have 16 people, filling two spots on each with PUGs.  This variant shares all the problems I’ve outlined above, but adds the complexity of balancing the composition of multiple teams.  In order to get the balance right, you may need to have people swap to alts, which may limit the content you can do.  Rather than do this at 16 members, I’d suggest just continuing to push to the 18 or 20 mark where you can start doing guild runs supplemented by PUGs.

So what do you do with the people who you can’t offer a raid spot to?  You can build a schedule where everyone is asked to sit out one raid a week.  This gives people a night when they don’t have to log on if they don’t want to, but makes you more dependant on the scheduled people showing up consistently.  If you only have a few extra people, you may not sit everyone once a week.  Make sure that you organize your sitting schedule over a longer period, so that the same person isn’t being left out two weeks in a row.

Depending on your raid composition, some players may never be asked to sit out (typically tanks and healers).  Even though it would be impossible for anyone to raid without a tank, this still may create some hard feelings from people who are asked to sit.  Address this early.  It should be clear that this is a restriction driven by the nature of the game rather than preferential treatment of one member, but some people need to be reminded.

A variant of the sitting schedule is to try to craft runs that maximize people’s chances at getting the loot they want.  Have everyone list three to five items that they still need from 10 person content.  Then try to build raid groups that maximize the chances that a person will be present for a boss who drops something on their list.  This is a huge amount of work for a raid leader, but can make members happy as it keeps them out of content that they have no interest in running.

Standby Rewards

If you go with a schedule that swaps people in on a fight-by-fight basis (either for hard modes or the loot wish list), you should look at your standby loot rules.  Many loot systems give less reward for people on standby because they are free to do other things while waiting to get into the raid, and it would be unfair for them to get both personal rewards and full raid standby rewards at the same time.

This makes sense when your standby members are there just in case someone has to leave early, or doesn’t show up, or has network problems.  But if you are asking people to be ready to jump into a raid at a moment’s notice, you need to restrict what they can do on standby.  Daily quests are fine, but running heroics probably isn’t.  Even the fastest heroic takes 15 minutes to complete, and if you have someone drop group at the start of the run, the entire thing can take upwards of 30 minutes.

While you can try to give advance notice (“we just downed Jaraxxus, we’ll be at the Twins in 15 minutes so be ready to come in”), eventually you’re going to need someone who is busy in a heroic.  Now you have to decide whether to wait for them to finish their run, or have them drop group, affecting four other people and possibly impacting your reputation.

One solution is to ask people to only do full guild run heroics, where someone dropping out for the good of the guild is acceptable to the other group members.  But this supposes that you have five people on standby (and that those form a viable heroic group), which won’t always be the case.

I prefer to boost standby rewards and ask people not to do anything that they can’t stop doing with 5 minutes notice.  Decide who is on “designated standby” for the night and give the same DKP / EP / Karma points to them as to the rest of the raid. Yes, they’re getting a double reward in some respects, but if you do your schedule correctly then most everyone will be in the same position in the future, so it all balances out.

Guild Leaders, have you had to bridge this gap?  What methods did you use, and how effective were they?  How quickly did you get from 10 to 25 person content, and did you lose anyone who was impatient along the way?  Or did you find some other way to keep everyone interested?

Until Next Time

Related posts:

• The B Team

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

Web Site Resources

It may seem easy to just throw someone towards TankSpot or PlusHeal or Elitist Jerks and be done with it.  This may work for some people, but not everyone.  If you have a background in WoW (in the case that you’re switching classes or roles) or a history with other MMORPGs, you will probably be able to absorb the amount of detail these sites offer.  Jumping in without knowing the lingo can be quite disconcerting.  Certain sites also have a more friendly community when it comes to newbie questions.

If you do send people to sites, I would suggest going there yourself first and finding specific threads to point people to.  For example, if you go to EJ and look at the topics in the Shaman forum, you won’t find a “here’s everything you want to know as a resto shaman” post.  You will find that post over here – in the Theorycrafting Think Tank.   This isn’t consistent – the omnibus post for Death Knight Frost DPS is found in the Death Knight forum where you’d expect it to be.

If you send someone to the front page of such a site, they may miss the posts they need to read or even worse find outdated information in the obvious place to look.  This is part of the time investment of mentoring – you need to help the person get the concise information they need.  When I meet a paladin tank with a wonky spec using Seal of Wisdom, I send them to this post on Maintankadin, because everything they’re doing wrong is corrected in that one post.  This is a case where the post for 3.2 is the best place to start – there isn’t a 3.3 version of the post up yet, and the two major changes are covered in their own posts that go beyond “here’s what you’re doing wrong right now”.

If time allows, have the trainee read a particular post, then come back to you with questions right away.  Not everything in these omnibus posts makes sense off the bat, and sometimes a simple statement from someone experienced can set things straight quickly (e.g. “Paladin tanks still use spellpower, but we don’t gear for it”).

Taking a Look under the UI

One thing I like to do is get a screenshot of a trainee’s UI.  Take a few shots – one while idle, one while grouped in a 5 man, one while fighting trash, one while engaged with a boss, and one while raiding.  Look at the information their UI is presenting.  Is it too much?  Not enough?  Spread out too far?  The WoW user interface is very customizable, but you can easily end up with information overload.  If someone has downloaded a UI pack (especially one that wasn’t sized to their display resolution), addon frames may be covering up important aspects of the game world.

If their UI has gotten out of control, consider starting over from scratch.  I prefer to start with the following skeleton:

• a viewport (to get your action bars off the game world)
• an action bar replacement (so that you have have you action bars in one place aligned with each other, not halfway across the screen)
• a boss warnings addon (with the warnings and bars moved out of their default location of “right on top of your avatar”)
• Grid + Clique (yes, even if you’re DPS – being able to quickly remove a curse as a mage or proc a 5-point maelstrom weapon healing wave as an enhancement shaman is worth it)
• a libdatabroker (LDB) display.  My favorite right now is ChocolateBar.  Get the plugins to provide the important information on the display and keep it of the game world.  Many addons that would take up a large chunk of screen real estate can output just the important information (like personal DPS or threat) to the LDB display.

Most importantly, try to enable “hide in combat” for any graphical addons that you don’t need to look at during the fight.  It’s the raid leader’s job to monitor performance during a fight, not every individual member’s.  There’s no point having an updating DPS meter on screen during the fight if it pushes you to make stupid choices to boost your DPS.  Analyze your performance after each fight or after the raid, not during.

I like the damage meter Skada for this purpose – it can be configured to switch to threat display during the fight, then revert to your normal display (healing / dps / damage) when out of combat.  Without a bunch of clicking, you can’t see per-member DPS during the fight, and this is a good thing.

I’ll include the obligatory link to my UI (which goes far beyond the skeleton I’ve laid out, but adheres to its principles).

Watching Their Performance

Next, you want to look at their performance.  This varies greatly by role.  For healers, you’re looking for spell breakdowns, overhealing, healing per second, and depending on the content dispels.  If you’re going through heroics to gather this data, your damage meter may give you everything you need.  I suggest doing your first run without any hints to establish a baseline – do this even before you send them to read web sites.  Get a feel for what their instincts tell them to do.

You want to measure improvement in performance in a like-for-like manner.  The healing and DPS required in Azjol-Nerub is not the same as the Halls of Reflection.  Try to go for a four or five boss heroic, but not one that requires excessive amounts of movement (like the Culling of Stratholme).  There will be a time and a place for improving “on the go” performance, but your first goal should be to improve typical performance where you move from static pull to static pull.

For raids, you will probably want to use a combat log analysis tool like World of Logs.  When analyzing healing performance, remember that while much of the analysis is the same (spell mix, etc.), there is another dimension in that you will always have multiple healers.  Healing assignments don’t come across with the log, so make sure that you know what they were when checking who someone healed.  Be sure to discount “splash” heals that the healer can’t direct like Circle of Healing, Wild Growth and Chain Heal (which is difficult, as the jumps heals don’t stand out from the initial heal).

For DPS, this is much easier – you’re looking for idle time and damage output mainly.  Don’t forget to look at “damage received” though – a 5k DPS who stands in fire is not as good as a 4K DPS who avoids them entirely.

Tanking is probably the hardest to evaluate, as threat doesn’t show up in the combat log.  But you’re not really concerned about the quantifiable threat when evaluating a tank.  You want a tank that:

• maintains agro
• doesn’t threat-cap the DPS
• doesn’t take too much mana to heal

This is easiest to evaluate in a 5-man group when you’re the healer (or a DPS who could exceed the tank’s threat if they wanted to).  In a raid, you may have to do some comparisons of your DPS players from a previous raid with a better tank.  Is DPS lower for the same encounter with the trainee?  Can it be explained by other RNG-factors?  If not, talk to the DPS.  They should be able to tell you whether they felt they were threat capped.

How far ahead of the DPS a tank is is irrelevant if no DPS is even approaching the 75% mark.  Only when the DPS has to stop casting or attacking to avoid pulling agro does the threat output become something to focus on.  The gap is what’s important, and the best way to check this is to watch the threat meter in real time.

Watching Them Perform

Depending on the performance of the network connection, you may be able to use screen sharing tools to observe someone as they play.  The latest versions of Skype for Windows and Mac allow screen sharing, and the performance is surprisingly good.  It intelligently drops frames to maintain a usable rate, and unless the network is very slow, you should be able to spot things like not reacting to environmental damage, not noticing UI alerts, or clicking on spells instead of using keybindings.

You can also use this in the reverse direction, sharing your screen and doing a running commentary as you run a heroic or raid.  When I was learning to drive my instructor had me do a running stream of this: “check side mirror, check dash, check forward, check rear mirror”, etc.  You can easily imagine a similar stream for a healer: “moving out of the void zone, cleansing Foo, swiftmend healing the tank, refreshing water shield” and so on.  Sometimes people don’t realize that there really is something you can be doing on every single global cooldown, even if it’s just to scan the board and confirm that everything’s fine.

Another option is logmein, a service much like GoToMyPC, but available in a free version for personal use.  It doesn’t have the performance to keep up with a raid or heroic, but for basic training like “Grid’s telling you that this person is cursed, right click on their frame to dispel” it can be helpful.  It allows you to take control of the other PC as well, so it may be helpful if you’re helping someone who is not well-versed in addons get their UI set up.

Setting Goals

Every time you analyze performance, try to identify the biggest issue.  Is a shaman using healing wave instead of riptide + lesser healing wave and going OOM too quickly?  Is a DPS waiting too long to get into a fight, or not attacking from behind, or not building their initial rotation properly?  Make that the area for the trainee to focus on.  When you first start working with someone, you may find that there are a lot of things that need to be addressed.  Sometimes you’ll get lucky and be able to sort someone out with relatively little effort in the course of a week.   Other times you’re looking at a multi-week or even multi-month effort to bring them up to spec.

If there’s a lot to fix, list each of the problem areas and rank them in order of what will benefit the raid most.  Is overhealing way too high?  Make the goal to tighten up healing assignments.  Is initial threat too low?  Make the goal to establish a 50% threat lead in the first 15 seconds of an encounter.  Set reasonable goals, and come back to them each time you work with the trainee.  Either they’ll have met the goal, or you should be able to analyze why they have not.

If a problem area is big, don’t be afraid to set milestones.  It might not be realistic to get overhealing down from 40% to 10% in a week.  Set an intermediate goal of 25%.

If you find that your trainee is getting discouraged because they’re not hitting your targets, consider setting smaller targets that they should easily exceed.  There’s a huge personal morale boost to be found in knocking one out of the park.  Even if the goal was unrealistic and nowhere near the final target you need them to hit, it may get them out of a downward spiral and energize them to tackle the next problem area.

Mentoring as a Cure for Atrophy

As the various wings of Icecrown Citadel open up, recruiting is going to be easy – the further progressed you are, the longer the line will be outside.  Once the Lich King goes down in heroic mode and the Cataclysm beta starts, guilds will be facing atrophy again.  Some people will take a break until the expansion, and not all of them will come back.  People will move around to be on the same realm as new friends, and most guilds will have to re-build some of their raid roster.

While you can wait until your members hit 85 to open up the doors of recruiting, this will leave you with a mix of gear and skill for the early Cataclysm raid instances.  It’s much better to try to pick up people in the weeks and months prior to Cataclysm’s launch.  Identify those who need help and spend some time getting them up to spec when there is no leveling or gearing-up pressure to contend with.  Everyone’s going to deal with a gear reset, whether that’s in the first leveling zone or once they start doing heroics.  When gear is normalized, it’s skill (and attendance, but that’s another topic entirely) that largely determines how far and how fast you’ll progress.

Until Next Time

Related posts:

• When Do You Throw in the Towel with Guildies?
• Turning Bads into Goods
• Cataclysm: Reforging Your Link to your Guild

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

My Plan

The technique that I came up with was this:

• half of the Primordial Saronite that dropped from bosses would be given to the current designated member building Shadowmourne (more on how we’d select that person later)
• the other half of the Primordial Saronite would be available using the standard EP/GP rules, with a GP cost of 70 per.

The GP cost (which could just as easily be applied to an EP or Ni Karma cost) came from this:

• determine the typical GP value of an armor piece of that iLevel
• discount this value by 25% (for items that use world-farmable items) or 50% (for items that require emblems for turn-in)
• divide the remaining GP value by the average number of items required for crafting or turn-in
• round up or down to the nearest multiple of 5

So for Primordial Saronite, an average of six Primordial Saronite are required for each crafted iLevel 264 item.  The average GP value of an iLevel 264 item is 550.  550 * .75 / 6 = 68.75, which is rounded up to 70.

For Trophy of the Crusade, a single Trophy of the Crusade is required to turn in for an iLevel 245 item.  The average GP value of an iLevel 255 item is 330.  330 * .50 = 165.

Bear in mind that I knew this was an academic exercise from the start.  I was more interested in coming up with a distribution policy that was fair and justifiable, not necessarily one that would provide the fastest level of progression in ICC.  For some contract, take a look at Matticus’ policy for a guild that is focused on progression.

What Is Important to Your Guild?

A policy that favors using Primordial Saronite for crafting gear tends to work better when gear is distributed by loot council in the first place (which is what Matticus’ guild does).  What you’re doing is pushing gear into the hands of your most important raiders (generally tanks followed by healers) before you could reasonably expect equivalent gear to drop from bosses.

I’m not certain how much Ashen Verdict rep you can get prior to the next wing opening up, but I have seen people advertising the new hunter projectiles (which require honored reputation).  Presumably guilds will have access to some the Revered patterns just before or shortly after the next wing is open, by which time you might have enough Primordial Saronite from drops to make one or two items.

If you were willing to blow massive amounts of gold on the Saronite that you find on the auction house, you might be able to go into the second wing with five or six people each wearing one piece of iLevel 264 gear.  Interestingly, the gear crafted using Primordial Saronite isn’t the only way to get that item level into a given slot.  Even if you only consider the first four bosses, there are some tanking and healing slots which could be filled by drops as easily as with crafted gear.

True, most of the pieces have different stat balances (+hit on the drop vs +expertise on the crafted, or +crit on the drop vs +haste on the crafted), but the same can said of various drops.  For the same slot at a given item level, you’re always going to have to balance stats around the other gear you’re wearing.

I can see the point of using the crafted gear later on to quickly gear out new members, or to fill slots for which an item just won’t drop.  I can also see a top-tier guild valuing a tank going into the second wing wearing two iLevel 264 items instead of one, or in the case where the drop has not been obtained, one instead of none.  Outside of that, it doesn’t seem to me that the crafted gear is going to make or break a raid.

Legendary Problems

So now onto Shadowmourne.  Legendary weapons have always been difficult to handle.  They are far more objects of desire than a long-lasting improvement to a member’s performance.  They don’t last very far into the next expansion, if that far at all – take a look at Val’anyr against Trauma, an item which can drop off of a boss being unlocked in a little less than two weeks.  Will everyone who has the Ulduar legendary switch to an ICC drop?  No, but you have to consider the relative effort involved in getting both items.

The difference between the Ulduar legendary and the ICC one is that Val’anyr didn’t take up any resources that could be used elsewhere.  Once you’d chosen the fragment recipient, it was just a matter of doing the encounters over and over until you could create the item.

It’s clear that randomly distributing fragments of the mace (or soulshard fragments in the case of Shadowmourne) isn’t an efficient way to get anyone the weapon.  I suspect many guilds will take a similar approach to Shadowmourne that they did for Val’anyr: choose one recipient, then funnel further drops to them unless they are not present, in which case you choose an alternate via the same mechanism.

And the Winner Is….

So how do you choose that person?  My decision was to use the person with the highest EP value.  Unlike DKP systems, in EP/GP your two values never go down when you get loot (only via decay).  EP just keeps going up, so it’s an accurate measure of the total effort put forth by any one person.  As long as you perform some kind of adjustment when a new content patch comes out, it should continue to reflect performance – if a long-standing member remains at the top, it’s because they’ve continued to raid regularly.  If you decay by 50% when a new patch comes out, then new members can catch up, but only if the long-standing member slacks.

If you accept that legendary items are a status symbol, ego-stroke or “attaboy” towards the member chosen, you may want to detach the decision from loot or attendance.  Who among your members really embodies what the guild stands for?  Talk to your members about this.  You could even do it by member vote, or some kind of content in the weeks preceding a patch.

What you want to avoid is establishing some expectation that the most senior member of a class gets the item by default.  I’ve been in a guild where the most senior priest was a poor leader, didn’t help people, and kept mostly to themselves outside of raids.  While he was a competent and valuable member of the raid, I wouldn’t want to reward that kind of attitude with a legendary weapon.  Take a lesson from Jedoga Shadowseeker and ask “Who Among You is Devoted?”

Having said all that, would I change my policy for Shadowmourne and Primordial Saronite if Cold Comfort the guild was running and focused on progression?  Probably.  Like Matticus, I’d divert Primordial Saronite into crafted gear until we had the Lich King down on normal mode – not because it’s a clearly better use than the legendary, but to give me data to use in making the decision as to who gets the legendary.  If everyone knows that their performance on the bosses during the initial push will factor into my decision, I think you’d see a bit more dedication from the affected classes.  Once we were doing hard modes, I’d probably revert to my 50/50 split idea, by which point the need for crafted gear will have died down considerably.

Finally, a few unrelated notes that don’t really deserve a post of their own:

Strange Updates on MMO-Champion

I did want to comment briefly on an update that went up on MMO Champion entitled “Guild improvements in Cataclysm“.  I’ve read over it twice now, and there doesn’t seem to be anything new – just a rehash of what we were given at Blizzcon.  Am I missing something obvious?  Do any of you notice something new in there?

New Post Category

I’ve created a new post category called Practicum, into which I’ve filed all posts that provide practical advice to guild leaders.  Hopefully it will be of use to people who are looking for tutorial-type posts rather than analysis and opinion.

Lastly, let me wish everyone a safe and happy holiday season.  Enjoy the time off you hopefully have, whether you spend it with family and friends in the game or out.

Until Next Time

Related posts:

• Breaking Up a Guild Bank

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.

How Do You Fail Me?  Let Me Count the Ways

Those who have better gear will do more dps / hps / tanky-stuff, while those with lesser gear will do less.  Thus the rich will get richer while the poor stay poor.  When this is brought up, the original poster suggests to compute a ratio of DPS/HPS to the player’s GearScore.  This is based on the assumption that a higher GearScore means that you will perform better while a lower GearScore means you will perform worse.

The same player with the same level of skill should perform better in gear with a GearScore of 5000 than in gear with a GearScore of 4000.  But good players swap out gear based on the stats that the fight calls for.  For my block set, I wear several pieces of gear with a lower item level because they make me unhittable with Holy Shield up.  How do you adjust what my expected performance should be on a fight that is made easier by wearing lower level gear?

Even if you could normalize expected performance based on gear, then compare that to actual performance, are you qualified to judge what every class and spec should be doing on every fight?  All casters benefit on fights where melee has to avoid whirlwind, while DoT casters will out-do nuke casters on high-mobility fights.  How would you adjust healing measurement for Anub’arak phase 3 where less is more?

What about hybrids who intentionally sacrifice some of their personal dps to buff everyone else?  Do you attribute part of the damage done by every caster and healing doen by every healer to the Shaman who drops Totem of Wrath?  Do you only count absorption from Power Word: Shield, or also the 3% reduced damage from Renewed Hope?  But what if you had an extra prot paladin to put Sanctuary, which no longer stacks with the priest buff?  Who gets the extra 3% credit?  The Paladin because it’s passive for 30 minutes, or the Priest who has to bubble someone once every 20 seconds to keep the buff up?

PerLoot also makes no allowance for damage taken by non-tanks.  You can boost your numbers by not moving out of the fire or staying in for whirlwind, so long as your healers can keep you up.  If you aren’t penalized for doing so but are rewarded for doing more DPS, then PerLoot incentives DPS to make stupid decisions.

The system is also full of opportunities for collusion and corruption:

Priest to Rogue: I’ll heal you throgh the fire to boost  my HPS

Rogue to Priest: Sweet, not moving out will boost my DPS

Very hard to detect and very easy to deny in small numbers per fight, but it can add up to a significant extra healing done over several hours of raiding.

And how exactly do you measure tank performance?  TPS?  What about offtanks?  What about events in which you have to hold multiple small adds – you’ll have enough threat on each to hold them, but measuring your aggregate threat is near-impossible to do in real time.  Even if you do, can you really compare the performance of an add tank to a main tank?  Surely the performance threshold for a tank is “they didn’t lose a mob and none of the DPS can say they were holding back”.  Yet all your plate tanks are going to want the same gear, so how do you decide who performed better on a one-shot boss kill?

Someone who has extensive experience playing all specs of all classes would have a tough time normalizing expectations for every encounter.  Anyone with less than extensive experience would be lost.  You’d be sitting with a World of Logs parse for twelve hours per boss fight trying to figure out who gets loot.  The poster’s suggestion that this could somehow be wrapped up in an addon to do the calculations for you reflects a shallow understanding of the problem.

Really, This Wasn’t Supposed To Be a Rant!

My goal when I started writing this post wasn’t really to rip the post apart – I just got into “debunk mode” as is my wont to do.  But I do find myself asking why the questions I pose weren’t asked by the poster of themselves before thrusting the idea upon the guild relations community.

The reasonable initial premise of “better players get better loot” is implemented in a way that almost guarantees huge amounts of work and uneven loot distribution.  The poster just doesn’t appreciate the complexity of the subject, yet they feel that they are ready to create a policy.  I have to agree with one of the responses:

It is virtually impossible to account for all variables with a “magical” formula.

Your own words. Your system is also ‘virtually impossible’ to implement.

It’s OK to be inexperienced.  It’s not OK to not know that you’re inexperienced.  That goes the same for guild leaders creating policy, DPS with their rotation, or tanks with situational awareness in a fight.

As everyone should know by now, Recount and GearScore are tools.  They give you a snapshot of an aspect of a player’s performance on one fight.  Because they cannot give you a comprehensive view of player, they are unsuitable as data points to drive a loot system.

Leading vs Using Leadership Tools

If the real issue is that people don’t like seeing gear go to someone who stands in the fire and sucks up healer’s mana, then that needs to be determined and dealt with on a personal level.  There are addons to alert you to failures, but some are unavoidable – if you lose a tank on a dragon but another tank picks them up, many of the raid will “fail” by getting hit by breath or tail swipe when the dragon spins.  How do you know which failures were truly avoidable?

As readers know, I’m a fan of EP/GP because it quantifies effort and allows for bonuses and/or penalties to be given without corrupting the system.  But these aren’t automatic – you have to detect and choose to reward or punish someone.  If you don’t, then someone who stands in the fire and does low DPS will receive the same number of effort points as someone who performs at the top of their game.

Performance should be parsed using the Mark 1 Eyeball because it requires experience and an analytical mind.  Effort and attendance is an accounting task and should be given over to addons and web-based packages. Depending on your loot system, both may factor into who gets loot.  But you can’t run a comprehensive loot system with just one or the other.

Ideally, the way that you prevent under-performers from getting loot is by not inviting them to the raid after you realize that they’re under-performing.

I have considered the option of Loot Council.  Loot Council is unique in that the decision as to who gets loot can change from fight to fight without prior notice to members.  It’s entirely a human decision, though often influenced by performance metrics and failure counts.  My issue (which I’m sure many people share) with loot council is that the system only works when there is a high level of trust between the council and the members.  It’s all too easy for council members to collude to help friends in the ranks, and this can be hard to detect until a pattern emerges (by which time the recipient of the goodwill may have received a number of upgrades).

If relationships between members of the council sour or as members of the council come and go, the nature of decisions can change.  I believe that members deserve a stable and mostly deterministic loot system, so I’ve never been comfortable signing up to a guild that used the council method.  I also believe that many of the problems we try to solve with technology in WoW are at their heart people problems.  Sometimes we have to remember that we’re dealing with people, not data points on a chart.

Wait, I’m Supposed To End My Rants With a Lesson, Right?

Ok, so we get it: loot based on meters is bad.  But what is a guild leader to take away from this?  Well, I have to assume that the original poster had a reason for coming up with this system and asking for feedback.  As some of the responses point out, those reasons may have been selfish, but nonetheless the issue of “how do I distribute loot better” is one any of us might face.

The lesson is to be critical of yourself.  Find a sounding board, and have them play the Devil’s Advocate.  Remember the maxim “if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is”.  Imagine yourself presenting the idea to your peers and think of the questions they might answer.  Do you have solid responses, or can you only dismiss their concerns as not being relevant to “your” system?  Ask yourself if you are too closely invested in the implementation as opposed to the goal.

Above all, ask yourself this question: if my idea is so good, why has nobody thought of it before?  I love asking this one at work when someone thinks that they’re being brilliant.  I’m not saying that nobody I work with comes up with brilliant ideas, or that no guild leader will come up with a brilliant new loot system.  I’m just saying that truly revolutionary ideas don’t happen every day.  If they did,there would be hundreds of viable loot systems instead of the generally accepted five or six ones that people use variants of.  Be a bit circumspect – is the reason people aren’t already doing this this way because the idea has never occured to them, or because there are subtle pitfalls that you haven’t thought of?

Until Next Time

Related posts:

• On Loot Systems
• Managing Your Loot Standings
• Loot Collusion in Raids after 3.2

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

Related posts:

• Turning Bads into Goods
• Wall of Text Crits you for Over 9000
• Reforged Loot Distribution

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.

How Important is WoW to You?

When you PUG a heroic, you’re going to get a mix of people.  Some may be hardcore players farming emblems, while others may be once-a-week casuals.  Each person will probably consider WoW to be of various levels of importance.  Some will consider it less important than a phone call from a friend; others will let everything save a giant squid attaching itself to the side of their house.  You’re not going to be able to predict it, so when a member of your group goes AFK unannounced, there’s not much you can do other than press on (if the group can sustain the loss) and maybe mark them as someone not to group with again.

The bigger issue is time management: your ability to plan your leisure time such that when you make a commitment, you’re able to keep it.  If you have a lot of friends who like to go out at short notice, and you consider WoW to be less important than those friends, you’re probably not the best candidate for a raiding guild.

If you don’t control your own time (i.e. anyone who has to answer to a parent, spouse or S.O.), then you need to either come to an agreement on what time you can spend playing without interruption.  Respect those blocks of time – don’t try to squeeze in a heroic run when you only have 15 minutes left – only a flawless run goes that quickly, and some instances can’t even be done flawlessly that fast.

WoW Is Not a Job?  Or Is It?

When explaining my position on this to other people, I try to steer clear of equating WoW with a job.  There seems to be some taboo surrounding this.  I don’t really know why: paying jobs and serious raiding in WoW share many similarities.

• you agree to show up at a given time
• you perform a directed task
• when you’ve done that a number of times in a row, you are compensated in some way

Unlike a paying job however, your guild doesn’t have any direct authority over you.  You willingly play by the rules they set because you want the reward at the end.  If you don’t want to play by the rules, you leave the guild.  I can’t just walk away from my job because the compensation is so tightly interwoven with everything else in my life.  If I don’t like something my boss tells me to do, I have few options other than to do it.

For people who are more social, some of the problem may be in trying to explain to someone who doesn’t play an MMO why you choose to spend time playing and more specifically why you have to play at a specific time.  Do you remember trying to explain to someone for the first time that there is no such thing as a pause button in WoW?

There also seems to be a taboo against giving the same level of respect to your on-line friends as your real life friends.  If you do so, you’re a no-lifer who only has friends on the Internet.  Yet the same real-life friends who level such charges would think it rude of you to stand them up for an arranged meeting.  Having respect for your guildmates doesn’t mean that they are equal to your real-life friends.  While on-line friendships can be quite strong and long-lasting, they can’t really compare to seeing someone in person with the same regularity.

It almost seems that “respecting your commitments to others” is seen by some as the apex of friendship, whereas I would say it’s a basic tenet of any friendship, on-line or off.

No matter how well you plan your time, eventually life will come knocking.  When it does, be honest with the people you’re letting down.  Don’t make up silly excuses that your guildmates are going to see right through.  Most people are pretty bad liers, and people will think less of you if you get caught making up excuses than if you’re honest.

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Polonius, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3

You may not even realize that you need to re-evaluate how you spend your leisure time until you get honest with the people you’re letting down.  If you find yourself having to skip out on raids regularly because of other social commitments, then perhaps serious raiding just isn’t for you.  Be glad that in today’s WoW, hardcore raiding is not the only path to gear.

Dealing With Excuses as a Guild Leader

What can guild leaders do to make things easier?  Make your expectations of members clear.  As I mentioned earlier, people raiding together who have different ideas of how important WoW is causes some of these problems.  The entire guild doesn’t have to rate WoW in the same place on their scale of important, but everyone should be pretty close to each other.  More than how often guilds raid or for how long, I would argue that it’s the level of importance the members place on raiding that classifies a guild as hardcore or casual.  Longer, more focused raids are just a natural side effect of getting a group people together who feel very strongly about WoW and progression therein.

Recognize that life happens, and try to be accommodating – to a point.  I don’t think anyone should have drastic measures taken against them for their first no show (except perhaps during a trial period).  But every no-show should be justified upon the person’s return.  If your loot system allows for it, consider a penalty for a no-show, with steeper penalties for successive no-shows.  If your members are aware of this, they should accept the penalty as part of being a member.

Lastly, I’d like to touch on burnout, which is apropos given where we are in the patch cycle (though interest is sure to increase with the speculation of 3.3 coming out next week).  People burn out, and certain classes burn out faster than others.  If you don’t spot this happening early, you may be able to do nothing when the person finally explodes and /gquits or takes an extended WoW holiday.  An increase in excused no-shows may be the precursor to someone burning out.  Do you have a process in place to make things easier on someone approaching the burnout point?  Once you have content on farm, do you rotate your less experienced tanks into the MT role, allowing the progression tanks to do some DPS?  What about your healers?  Are you OK with having a “critical” member of your raid team take a several-week break and come back without penalty rather than lose them?

Hopefully this has given both raiders and guild leaders something to think about.  We all approach our gaming slightly differently, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find a common ground from which to play together with respect.

Until Next Time

Related posts:

• The Trouble With the World…
• Fixing the Community
• Principles vs Pragmatism

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.

Reining Things In

Now that we’ve seen how loot systems can get out of whack, what options do you have for bringing them back under control?

Multiple Pools

This is most often seen with traditional DKP systems.  You might have a pool for Naxxramas, a pool for Ulduar, a pool for Trial of the Crusader and then a pool for Icecrown.  This a lot of work to manage, though web packages exist that offer multiple pools as a base feature (I still remember hacking eqDKP a few years ago to manage this for my guild – it wasn’t pretty).

The problem with fixed pools is that when people end up with a large balance and know the next content tier is coming up, they want to spend the points.  Unless you’re dealing with a situation like Trial of the Crusader vs Ulduar where you know you’ll still keep visiting the previous tier of content, those points will do you relatively little good once the new patch arrives.  You are effectively resetting everyone’s contribution to zero at the time the new patch drops, which can be a bit demoralizing.

The thought from some members may be “the guild might not even be in a position to enter Icecrown without all the hard work I put into TotC, so why shouldn’t I grab every minor upgrade before the points become useless?”  This can lead to undergeared people who join you late in a content patch not getting the upgrades they need to compete in the next tier because the people with high balances are picking up sidegrades or minor upgrades.

You may also find problems with hard modes – should points earned in normal difficulty be usable for gear that drops in heroic?  What about 10 person vs 25 person?  You could go crazy and have four new pools created when patch 3.2 drops, or you could try to organize pools by perceived difficulty instead of which tier of gear they belong to.

This also gets problematic with the new hard mode toggle being introduced in Icecrown – if you give say 10 DKP for every hour spend raiding, but you know you’re going to attempt one boss on hard mode, when do you switch pools?  Do you use the normal pool for all trash and normal bosses, then use the heroic pool just for hard mode boss loot?  You may find that your raiders have very little DKP to spend in that case, as only time spent attempting a hard mode boss give points that can then be spent on that bosses’ loot.

Multiple Pools with Cross-Pool Transfers

Multiple pools have the reset problem, in that you can’t carry your effort from one tier into the next.  You can’t just move points freely from one pool to another (otherwise you effectively just have one pool), but you can allow people to convert from one pool to the next pool up at a given ratio.  Say you have 500 points from Trial of the Crusader, you can turn that into 50 points in the Icecrown pool (using a 10:1 ratio).  It still lets you carry effort forward and tends to discourage the minor upgrade problem described above, but it’s a lot of administrative work for leadership.  You need a forum to request transfers and someone to keep on top of pending requests.  You may also find the need to limit the amount transferred, either in total or per week.

One Pool with a Complete Reset Each Patch

This is the simplest system to manage, but probably the least fair to your raiders.  You will have the same problem as multiple pools with people taking every last bit of gear out of the old instance as the weeks before the new patch wind down.  People who had a large balance but take a break are also hit hard in this system, as they can find themselves back at the bottom of the ladder but without any extra gear to show for it.

One Pool With Decay or Tax

Just like the EP/GP system has built in, you can add a periodic decay or tax rate to your system.  This tends to address list camping, but as players with higher balances lose more, expect to see the same level of loot grab as a new patch approaches.

You can also choose to implement a small tax (say 5%) while you’re actively raiding an instance, then a larger one-time hit (say 25%) immediately before the next patch drops.

Depending on your loot system, make sure that you decay all values that contribute to someone’s standing.  EP/GP decays both values, which means that while the EP and GP values change, the relative order never changes (because the PR value doesn’t change).

This technique doesn’t work with zero-sum systems, as the total points in that system should remain constant.

One Pool With A Complete Reset Each Expansion

This is what many guilds tend to do by default if they don’t choose one of the other methods outlined here.  It doesn’t tend to have as negative an impact on members, as you get a fair amount of shakeup during expansions and people can mentally get behind a point reset as being part of the gear reset that comes with every WoW expansion.  It isn’t going to make that much difference whether you enter Cataclysm wearing tier 9 or tier 10 gear – it’s all going to get replaced when you start the first raid instance of the new expansion.

There’s no real work for leaders to do here, and members can’t really expect any more than this unless you make promised to them, but taking a more strategic approach to loot system management does tend to make you stand out when competing for a limited number of raiders.

Can’t We All Just Be Friends?

No loot system is perfect.  Any loot system performs better when the people participating in it are capable of thinking about more than themselves.  But human nature being what it is, you sometimes have to take steps to protect your members from greed and collusion.  We’re approaching a major content patch, and the next expansion is on the horizon.  If you haven’t thought about the issues of managing your loot standings as you progress through content before, now is the time.  Your members are far more likely to accept major changes to policies and loot distribution methods when they’re introduced alongside a major patch.

Have you experienced problems with inflation, list camping, or other loot system problems?  Have you found a unique way to work around them?  Or are you using a completely different loot system that has its own unique problems (and no, /roll doesn’t count as a “loot system”).

Until Next Time

Related posts:

• On Loot Systems
• To Officer or Not To Officer?
• Guild Mergers

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.

But Why?

At heart is the reason behind the behaviour.  Either you:

• don’t know that you’re doing something wrong
• do know that you’re doing something wrong, just not specifically what
• know what you’re doing wrong but don’t care

Of these, only the second is excusable, and only if you try to analyze and improve your performance.  I’m much more impressed by an undergeared person who says “hey, I just got hit for 14k shadow damage, what was that?” than a full tier 9 DPS who stands in the middle of the hit and expects the healer to compensate.

If you don’t know that you’re doing something wrong, your situational awareness needs some work.  Not noticing that you just lost half your life in one hit or that you’re taking large amounts of periodic damage will not get you far in most raids.

If you know what went wrong and expect someone else to compensate for you, you’re essentially saying “I’m more important than you, so you fix it”.

Even though these mistakes are individually tiny and not worth getting worked up over, every time I see someone make more than one in a run (or in the case of things like not dispelling Hammer of the Righteous on Eadric the same mistake more than once), I mentally move them from the “possible recruit” box to the “average player, not worth thinking about” box.

Part of this comes from being in a stage where I’m trying to build a reputation as a tank and healer – I always feel like I’m in interview mode.  I assume that everyone else is either doing the same, or as I discussed in my last article, is at least trying to not tarnish their reputation.  I have a hard time wrapping my head around the “I don’t care” crowd.

Perhaps you have a solid spot in a raid guild right now and don’t feel any need to perform above the level of a faceroller in heroics, but that won’t always be the case.  Some (but admittedly not many) people will mark down your name and choose someone other than you when filling out their group.  You may not even realize that you’re being passed over or why.

What Will They Remember You By?

While most heroics go pretty smoothly these days, the level of communication and chat has plummeted, at least on my server.  There’s a few words exchanged when the group forms related to getting people summoned, sometimes a question as to whether anyone can disenchant after the first boss kill, then a thank-you and goodbye after the run.  There’s very little chat during the run, so the only thing people have to remember you by is your performance and failures.

WoW has always pushed players to gear up, then demonstrate their prowess in that gear.  Given how meter-driven the community tends to be these days, it’s not terribly surprising that DPS would choose to stand in environmental damage and get a few more hits in rather than move and save their healer some mana.  The former is directly measurable, while the latter requires someone to be watching to see that you did things right.  If nobody’s looking, then the only meters that record your action are “damage taken” being a bit lower along with “damage done”.  But how many people do you know that check the damage done meter and say “that dps did amazing damage, but took nearly as many hits as the OT”.  Not many in my experience.

How Do You Measure Yourself?

This comes back to the gearscore / experience / dead weight themes that have appeared in articles over the past month.  Judging an individual’s performance can’t be compressed into a single metric – it has to be a combination of meters, situational awareness, knowledge of mechanics and adaptability.  Meter-driven self-analysis pushes people to focus on tangible performance, even though the intangibles sometimes mean much more in a raid.  You can still take down a raid boss if everyone does 500 less dps because they’re moving around to avoid environmental damage – you can’t if everyone’s dead from standing in a void zone.

When recruiting, it’s not uncommon for the guild to either talk to you after doing a PUG or to run a random heroic with you to get a general feel for how your perform.  Just like a first date, the data from this is rarely reflective of how the person will work out in the long run.  It’s the glimpses you get of someone when they don’t think anyone is watching that are far more telling of the way you approach this game.

Do you roll your eyes when you see people making stupid mistakes?  Does it make you not want to group with them?  Would a negative experience with a player in a PUG before they applied to your guild count against them?  Do you even bother keeping track?  Or is this just the state of WoW today – the cost of having such a large and varied playerbase – and something that everyone has to learn to live with?

Until Next Time

Related posts:

• Wall of Text Crits you for Over 9000
• On Loot Systems
• Fear of Heroics

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.

Should It Be My Guild’s Primary Loot System?

NO!

This should be obvious, but GDKP works because of the imbalance between the lowbies and the people looking for the payout.  There’s no protection against collusion or inflation, and people can easily give themselves an edge if they have more time to play than others – or if the unscrupulous among them purchase gold for real world money.

Loot distribution in a raid guild tends to fall into one of two schools of thought: give the loot to the people who have put forth effort (DKP, EP/GP), or give the loot to whoever will improve the performance of the raid.   Guild loot systems are also stateful by design – taking loot should reduce your chances of getting the next drop.

GDKP fails to address any of these requirements – by design.  It favours those with money to spend, does not care if the gear is useful to you – only that you can pay for it – and requires no memory of the last GDKP run to be effective – or even that the same people be in the run from week to week.

GDKP’s Place in a Guild

For a guild, GDKP can be an attractive filler raid once you have the content of the current tier on farm and have so few upgrades available to you that you skip an entire instance.

Right now (the period between 3.2 and 3.3) is an ideal time to be organizing GDKP runs because of the lockout system in place in Trial of the Crusader.  You can dedicate the heroic run to your guild while saving the normal run until GDKP.   The changes announced to the UI for hard modes in 3.3 won’t give you this luxury – if you use up your raid ID for GDKP, there’s nothing available for you to use for a guild run.

When 3.3 comes out, I expect that we’ll still see TotC and TotGC GDKP runs, and getting close to Cataclysm we might see partial runs of Icecrown Citadel – where a guild runs the first half of the instance on normal as a GDKP run, splits the pot, then does the remainder of the instance on hard mode as a guild using their normal loot system.  This is fine, so long as everyone attending the GDKP half understands where the run is ending (and thus the gear than can reasonably expect to bid on).

If you sponsor a GDKP run as a guild, you have to choose the guild members who attend carefully.  Given the potential payout, interest may be high, but you need to leave space for people who are ready to spend cash or nobody will get anything.  Stick to the suggested ratios above, and rotate people from week to week (but not during a run).  If interest is especially high, you may even consider having people purchase spots in the GDKP run with loot system currency.  This is somewhat controversial, as it allows people to “cash in” on their DKP, but it may fit your guild’s policies and ethos.

You may also choose to do an all-guild GDKP run, but with the spenders being alts of members.  The run will probably go more smoothly because everyone will know your strategies, but some people may not like the idea of paying their guildies for gear boosts.  It depends on what your position on alt loot is – does the guild have any responsibility to gear up alts, or is it up to the member to do it themselves?  If the latter, does it matter whether they drop large amounts of gold on someone else’s GDKP run, or on crafted BoE items rather than paying their guildmates for the same level of gear?

Whose Reputation Is On the Line?

The person who organizes a GDKP run is putting their reputation on the line.  Blizzard’s official policy is that while they recommend you do raids with trusted friends and guild members, if someone promises a “loot for gold” looting scheme in a group and then tries to ninja the pot, they will treat it as a scam, just like trying to sell an in-game Spectral Tiger code.

As a result, starting up a GDKP run as an individual can be difficult if you don’t have some kind of reputation of your own.  If your guild has a reputation, people may infer that the run is happening with the guild’s blessing.  As such, make it clear to your members that if they choose to do their own GDKP run, they not use the guild’s name to promote it.  If problems arise, it’s between the members of the group to resolve – though you may take further action against your member if they violate your rules by being a ninja.

On the flipside, if you organize a run as a guild, you can use your public forums to state the rules for the run, organize attendees and announce upcoming runs.  Make sure that everything stays above board though, because a guild-sponsored GDKP run that sullies your name on the realm can impact guild members who weren’t even present.

Using GDKP to Retain Members before Cataclysm

As with all expansions, the three months or so leading up to Cataclysm is going to tax raiding guilds.  You’ll have all the loot you need to level up (does it really matter if your WotLK gear lasts you to 85 rather than 84?  It’s getting replaced either way).  Members will be off playing other games (Starcraft 2?) and you may find it very hard to keep a schedule together.  There’s just not enough reward to support the time investment.

But gold, that’s something that has always been and will always be useful when leveling up and starting the first tier of raid content in a new expansion.  Everyone can use more gold to help smooth that path, and if you can offer your members a regular income via sponsored GDKP runs, you may be more successful in retaining members during this difficult period.

As I’m not in a position to organize a GDKP run myself, I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who has or is planning to organize a run on their realm, especially a guild sponsored one.  What is your per-member payout?  How does it compare to keeping your raids all-guild and selling off patterns  and BoEs that drop?

Until Next Time

Related posts:

• PUGs and Loot
• Loot Collusion in Raids after 3.2
• On Loot Systems