Cold Comfort

Guild Management and Leadership in WoW

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Arouse in the Other Person an Eager Want

Mar 4

Posted by Karatheya in HTWFAIG | 3 Comments

This article is part of the series “How To Win /friends and Influence /guildies”.  See the introduction for more.

If you’re reading the original book alongside, this corresponds to Part 1, Chapter 3: “He Who Can Do This Has the Whole World with Him.  He Who Cannot Walks a Lonely Way”

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.

Henry Ford

The principle behind this rather long-named chapter is really quite simple, and eloquently summed up in the above quote.  There is only one way to get someone to do something, and that is to make them want to do it.

To do that, you have to talk about what they want, and not about what you want.   For a raid or guild leader, these should nominally be the same thing, at least at a high level.  Whatever your guild’s purpose is, that’s what everyone is showing up for – PvE progression, PvP dominance, or clean hard mode execution for example.

I won’t go into the examples that Carnegie uses in this chapter, as they’re all very business-oriented and somewhat dated.  Instead, let’s look at some situations in which you might be trying to win your members or an individual member to your side.

In a Raid

An impassioned plea for people to focus on the next boss attempt usually come after the basic “here’s how the fight goes, let’s give it a try” approach has failed.  You’re pretty sure that everyone understands the mechanics, but the execution is just going awry at some point.  You may even understand who’s going off the rails first, but know that calling them out won’t make things any better.

In this context, you probably are going to be talking to your raid as a whole or to roles within the raid.  What wants can you appeal to?  The most obvious are the material rewards from the boss, but this only works if the boss has intrinsic value to the raid.  Sometimes you get unexpectedly blocked by a boss that you’ve had on farm for a while.  The loot is no longer appealing, at least not to most of the raid.  You can appeal to everyone’s desire to just be done with the fight – perhaps asking certain roles to double-up and keep an eye out for people who you suspect are not focusing closely enough.

If the boss is linked to trash that is particularly annoying to clear, you can appeal to everyone’s desire to not repeat that the next night.  This is effective when people are requesting to move to another boss in a non-linear dungeon.  Do you remember pushing extra hard for a Shade of Aran kill in the early days of TBC just because of how painful it was to clear the trash after Curator?

If none of these seem appropriate or are having effect, you can drop one level lower and appeal to people’s desire for loot in the future (assuming you have a loot system that can offer bonuses).  It may seem cheap or compromising to have to offer bonus DKP or EP to get people to do what they should have been doing all through the raid.  Ideally, this is a last resort offered to encourage people to stay beyond a posted raid end or to go all-out on consumables in order to push progression.  Offering strictly material bonuses regularly dilutes their value.

I know we’re all fed up of this boss, especially since he went down so easily the last few weeks.  It’s late, and we all want to wrap up.  But I’m sure nobody wants to spend an extra 20 minutes slogging through that trash again tomorrow night.

I know we can do this, and I’m sure you all do too.  Let’s take five minutes to clear our heads, then come back and take him down.  1000 bonus EP if we do it without anyone dying in phase 2.

(more) One-on-One...

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Tools for Mentoring

Jan 4

Posted by Karatheya in Best Practices, Guild Management, Raiding | 3 Comments

mentoring Tools for Mentoring

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

Advice vs Mentoring

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

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

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

To Match Class or Not

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

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

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

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

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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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Nerdrage and How to Deal With It

Oct 22

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

emobear Nerdrage and How to Deal With It

In my last article, I debunked the myths and lies surrounding the upcoming forced Battle.Net merge.  I wrote those rebuttals off the cuff, in much the same way as I’d respond to someone in-game or on a forum.

Today, I’d like to talk about how to deal with the nerdrage that you may be on the receiving end of from guild members, and how best to deal with it.

So What Is Nerdrage, Anyway?

What we saw on the WoW forums in response to the forced Battle.Net merge was a specific kind of nerdrage, at least if you go by the Urban Dictionary definitions of the term.  A little bit of #2 (“extreme anger, offense indignation”) mixed in with some #9 (“an RPG nerd who is extremely angry about a gaming issue a normal person would consider trivial.”).

There’s something about the WoW forums that brings out this extreme type of post.  Perhaps it’s the anonymity of posting on a level 1 alt, perhaps it’s the fact that you don’t have to justify yourself to your guildmates later that week on ventrilo.  Whatever it is, you probably won’t see quite the same level of outrage when dealing with guild members.

What you will see is irrational hyperbole: someone blowing an issue out of proportion without justification.  This may be over a change in guild policy, a perceived slight against them with regards to loot or raid spot selection, or concerns over the direction or progression of the guild.

Much of this advice is not specific to online gaming.  If the working world, you will eventually find yourself in a position of defending something you have said against another person, possibly more senior or with more authority.  Learning how to respond to irrational people in WoW will pay off outside of the game.

For the purposes of this article, I’m going to assume that you’ve announced a change to guild loot policy, and someone who feels that they are worse off for the change has posted an angry irrational screed on your guild forums.

What to Remember

When you encounter irrational people, either in game or on forums, the important thing to remember is that the issue is important to them.  It may not be phrased properly, the justifications may be flimsy or non-existent, but to them it’s important.  Depending on the issue and the person, it may be the most important thing going through their head at the time.  Whether this is a good thing or not is irrelevant for you in composing a response – diminishing the importance of the issue is not going to win you any arguments.  If the issue has been blown out of proportion, you need to convince them that the impact is not as large as they think – not that the issue isn’t important enough to be dealt with.

I’m assuming that you have already determined that the person being irrational is not a troll.  I would hope that trolling is not something any of us have to encounter on our guild forums.  It happens all the time on the official forums and to a lesser extent on some of the community forums – if that is the arena you find yourself in, make sure you’re not dealing with a troll before you follow any of this advice.  Trolls feed on winding people up, and I am proposing a candid and honest approach to addressing complaints that will pay off with someone who is sincere, but backfire with a troll.

(more) What to Remember...

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Battle.Net Nerdrage Part 1

Oct 19

Posted by Karatheya in Guild Management, Off-Topic, Ranting | 4 Comments

emobear Battle.Net Nerdrage Part 1

Blizzard recently announced that all WoW accounts must be merged into Battle.Net accounts by November 11th.  Failing to do so will prevent you from playing the game until you do the merge.

Predictably, a wave of nerdrage has taken over the official forums.  The breakdown seems to go something like this:

  • 50% are people complaining just to hear the sound of their own voice
  • 25% are people who can’t be bothered to read the FAQ before complaining
  • 10% are people who think they’re being principled but end up looking childish
  • 10% are trolls
  • the remaining sliver are people who have a legitimate question or concern and articulate it as such

I’ve been using Battle.Net for all of my accounts since April of this year, and I can speak directly to the lies and myths being spread.  This article is going to debunk those myths.  The follow-on article will talk about how to deal with nerdrage when it flares up in your guild (I had hoped to do it all in one, but the debunking alone was nearly 3000 words).

Fire up the Debunkifier

Let’s first hit up the popular myths and lies being spread both on the official forums and various blogs.  And do remember that these are all myths and lies – some born of misunderstanding, most of ignorance, but all untrue.

“Blizzard is springing this on us with no warning!”

Slow down cupcake.  You know how you just scroll through the Terms of Use whenever a new patch is released, never actually reading them?  Well, you screwed yourself this time.  Or rather, you screwed yourself six months ago.  On April 14th 2009, the terms of use were changed to read:

… To access the Service, you will be required to establish a user account on the Service. This may be either an account for the Service only (the “WoW Account”) or an account on Blizzard’s centralized account system for various online games (the “Battle.net Account”). If you do not already have a Battle.net Account that may be extended to WoW, Blizzard may require you to open such Battle.net Account; …

And later on there is a section about what you can do when the terms of use change:

… If any future changes to this Agreement are unacceptable to you or cause you to no longer be in compliance with this Agreement, you may cease to use your World of Warcraft account and terminate the Account in accordance with Section XVII herein. After expiry of one (1) month following the notification the continued use of World of Warcraft by you will mean you accept any and all such changes. …

So you were warned that this was happening six months ago and you had a chance to terminate your subscription.   Even if you had prepaid time, you could have requested that it be refunded due to material changes in the contract.  But you didn’t.  You didn’t read the updated contract, kept on playing past May 14th and in doing so agreed that you would open up a Battle.Net account when Blizzard asked you to.

Blizzard’s Legal Department crits you for over 9000.  You die.

“I’ll have to remember another password”

No, you won’t.  When you merge your WoW account into a Battle.Net account, your WoW password ceases to exist.  When you log into the game, the account management web interface, or the forums, you use your Battle.Net credentials.  The net change in the number of passwords you have to remember is zero.

(more) Is Battle.Net less secure?

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