Cold Comfort

Guild Management and Leadership in WoW

Archive for category Ranting

Selfishness

Jan 14

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

selfishness Selfishness

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

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

I’m specifically talking about anyone who:

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

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

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

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

Jerk Pride

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

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

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

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

(more) Exploiting Anonymity...

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Time-to-Emblem Ratios

Dec 28

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

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

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

The instances I see this most often on are:

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

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

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

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

Minutes Per Emblem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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Performance-Based Loot Systems

Dec 17

Posted by Karatheya in Best Practices, Guild Management, Raiding, Ranting | 2 Comments

STRONGMAN Performance Based Loot Systems

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

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

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

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

(more) How Do You Fail Me?

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Sweating the Small Stuff

Nov 19

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

bang head here Sweating the Small Stuff

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

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

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

Failure 101

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

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

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

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

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

(more) The Reason for the Behaviour...

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The Importance of Dealing with Dead Weight

Nov 2

Posted by Karatheya in Best Practices, Guild Management, Raiding, Ranting | 2 Comments

anvil2 The Importance of Dealing with Dead Weight

Last night I joined an Ulduar 10 semi-pug (half of the attendees were from one guild). Only about half of the members had any experience with the fights, but most of the inexperienced people were receptive to explanations we gave.

Except one.

Our group included one member who had no experience in the instance, hadn’t read any strategies beforehand, put out mediocre DPS for his gear level, continually interrupted the raid leaders with inane comments, and didn’t pay attention to the directions that were given. When he inevitably died early in every boss fight, he continued to spew into raid chat, distracting those who were working to get the boss down. After every lost roll he screamed at the unfairness of the universe.

Basically, he wanted to be carried through the instance and didn’t care that he was making the experience worse for everyone else in the process.

As main tank, I used what latitude I had to address this: more than once I told him to go read strategies during breaks, but he didn’t. By the end I was outright telling him to shut up and asking the raid leader to kick him (as were others who were whispering me).  (as an aside, being on a RP server does  have it’s advantages: I can /yell “for the love of all that is holy, please shut your mouth before my shield shuts it for you” and it fits perfectly coming from a paladin).

This type of character isn’t uncommon in a pickup group. Depending on the instance, you can usually threaten them with replacement and let their desire for loot, but the raid leader last night didn’t choose that route. We got as far as Auriaya and the group disbanded.

We’ve All Seen This Before

The problem is that this archetype is far too prevalent in WoW. Someone who doesn’t feel they have to pull their own weight and doesn’t adjust their behaviour when told that it’s detrimental to the group. It’s not realistic to assume that such people only “turn on the jerk” when in pickup groups, so I have to assume that this was just that person’s personality and that he’d be the same among his own guild members.

As a guild leader, you’re going to run into someone like this really quickly if you haven’t already. How you choose to deal (or choose not to deal with it) can have an impact on your group or guild.  Whether it’s spoken or not, the members of your group or guild will expect you to deal with these situations when they arise.

Why should you care? Because your ability to manage a misfit member of a group is what makes or breaks you in the eyes of the others members of the group. If you can straighten the person out or get rid of and replace them, you’re making their lives easier and they’ll be more eager to group with you or follow your lead in the future. Conversely, if you refuse or are afraid to deal with someone who is pulling the group down, many people (myself included) will either take the job upon themselves (which leads to anarchy) or suffer silently through it and resolve to not join another group that you’re leading.

These more polarized positions are of course more likely to be taken when in PUGs. In a guild, the effect may be more subtle but also more damaging because it affects morale. Nobody’s going to quit because you failed to deal with someone causing drama during a raid. But the episode will be remembered, and when it happens again, you’ll be under increased scrutiny to do better. Fail to do that and you may find people not signing up for raids or otherwise avoiding guild activities because they don’t want to deal with the people problems that go hand-in-hand with large group activities.

(more) Management...

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Inexperience and Weakness

Oct 29

Posted by Karatheya in Cold Comfort, Guild Management, Off-Topic, Ranting | 5 Comments

experience cos hc Inexperience and Weakness

In my last article, a comment led me to another blog post which in turn led me to a recently released addon called Experience.  The idea behind the addon is that when you target someone, it queries their character statistics to see how many times they have killed the bosses of each instance in the game, converting that to a measure of how much of the game they have experienced.

Like GearScore, this is just a tool to provide quick insight into another player.  The graphic above is of a 5-man group I ran CoS heroic with last night: as you can see, most of them were very inexperienced, but we breezed through the timed run only slightly slower than my personal best (5 minutes remaining instead of 8).  We then followed that up with a heroic Trial of the Champion run that featured none of the deaths or “stupid” moments that are a hallmark of PUG runs in that place.

On it’s own, this mod gives a useful but far from complete view of players.  It has a few rough edges:

  • outside of combat, the boxes above appear every time you target someone.  I really don’t care about seeing experience for people I’m not grouped with, so I use the LDB toggle to disable it except when I first join a group, but the LDB launcher defaults to “on” and doesn’t remember the setting from session to session.
  • the total experience value isn’t very useful for people who do 10 or 25 person raids exclusively.
  • the default setting is to require you to kill a boss 3 times to get 100% experience.  For example, I’ve only killed Malygos-25 once, so I get a 33.3% rating.  You can change this via a slider – I find 2 kills to be more useful.
  • it doesn’t appear to count Onyxia.  As the addon was only came out on Oct 20th I’m not sure if this is an oversight or intentional.
  • As Malevica pointed out, not having the statistics be account-wide doesn’t tell me anything about the player.  I doubt that all the members of the above group were new 80s based upon their performance.

GearScore No More

I’ve decided to ditch GearScore and use Experience for a few weeks to see if it gives me a better view of what to look out for when doing pickup groups.

Even just from testing it last night, there were some moments when the experience value didn’t match performance.  The member with 9.2% total experience was pushing 4.5k DPS on bosses, which is more than you might expect from someone who had only done heroics (and even then not all of them).  In his case, he had been farming both EoC and EoT gear since the last patch, as he was sporting mostly tier 8.5 / 9 gear and obviously knew his class well.

As a tool for guild recruiting, I would be more comfortable using either Experience on its own or in conjunction with Gearscore to set a minimum bar for applicants.  I would probably set the threshold to one, just to see which instances an applicant had run to completion rather than using the default of three.

I don’t want to spend this entire post talking about this addon.  What I really want to discuss is the concept of experience, not just in terms of the content you’ve completed but how experienced you are at WoW in general.
(more) How Inexperienced are You?...

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The Great Gearscore Debate of ‘09

Oct 26

Posted by Karatheya in Guild Management, Off-Topic, Ranting | 14 Comments

Is it that different?

Is it that different?

Chances are that you’ve had a run-in with gearscore if you’ve been joining PUG groups in the last few months.  Gearscore is an addon which calculates a number based upon the gear you’re wearing.  It displays this information in the tooltip, and can query other people using the addon for their gearscore, adding it to the LFG interface.

The problem is that on many servers, people are becoming gearscore snobs.  They refuse to invite someone to a PUG unless they have an unreasonably high gearscore.  This makes it hard for anyone who hasn’t upgraded their gear to around the tier 8.5 level to get into groups.

There has been the expected level of outrage on the forums, with Blizzard being asked to ban the addon (which only goes to show that people don’t understand what it’s doing under the hood).  Blizzard has acknowledged the problem, with Ghostcrawler even joking that they were going to put an easily obtainable epic shirt in the game with an item level of 300 just to poison the data this addon and others like it use.

Today, I’d like to talk about what GearScore is, what it isn’t, remind people of what the various scores correlate to in terms of content, and look at how useful GearScore is with regards to recruiting and other guild decisions.

The Addon

The GearScore addon can be downloaded here.  There’s also a “lite” version here.  The full version remembers the gearscore of people you mouseover or encounter, and so over time will take up more an more memory on your system.  It also communicates with people in LFG who have the addon, displaying their gearscore for you.  The lite version by comparison only does the calculation on mouseover and then forgets about it, trading higher CPU requirements for lower memory usage.  Which you use is up to you.

The Score

The thing to remember is that GearScore is just a calculation.  You feed numbers about each of your pieces of equipped gear, it adds them up and spits them out again.  There are a few changes to the calculation to account for things like Titan’s Grip warriors (it averages the two weapons rather than adding them together) and classes that prioritize a specific slot (like Hunters), but for the most part it’s just adding up the result of a function whose input is the item quality (green / blue /purple) and item level.

Gearscore does not:

  • consider gems / enchants
  • consider achivements
  • consider talents / glyphs

It’s just a measure of the item level of the gear you’re wearning.

What’s worse is that the GearScore addon does not use the same formula as some of the other armory-driven websites that list a gear score.  GearScore gives my paladin’s DPS gear a 4300 score, but WoW Heroes gives the same gear a score of 2240, even though it still calls the value a “Gear Score”.  Be Imba gives me 487.14, calling it a “PvE gear score”.

Just because GearScore gives bigger numbers doesn’t mean that it’s a better measure.  Psychologically, we like big numbers.  But the numbers only have meaning when placed in context.  If I tell you that a place is “about 5 away”, you don’t know if I’m talking in terms of miles, kilometers, minutes or hours.  Likewise, if I tell you that my gear scores 487.14 but you think I’m giving you the value from the GearScore addon, you’d expect me to be clad in level 45 quest greens.

When asking, giving or judging a gear score you have to know what measure you’re using.

(more) The Way We Used To Do It...

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