What do you do when you become aware (or find yourself a part) of “The B Team”?
The B Team in a guild is a separate raid team (usually for 10 man raids) that just doesn’t seem to progress as quickly or as cleanly as the first or primary raid team.
Having two raid teams in a guild isn’t a problem unto itself. I suggested as much in a recent article on bridging the 10 to 25 gap. My advice in that context was to organize two 10 person teams if you found yourself short of the 20 regular raiders to comfortably back fill a 25 person raid with pickups. It was a means to an end, not a long-term solution.
I didn’t recommend running two 10 person teams long-term because of the balance and swapping issues it brings. You may find your second team short by two people, but the only extra raiders online are locked to first team’s instance id. If you can get around this, or if your guild runs two distinct schedules (e.g. a day and night raid), then you may find that one of the teams progresses faster than the other. When that happens, players can find themselves discouraged if they’re not progressing as quickly, or in some cases turn into jerks if they’re on the “winning” team.
How then do you try to avoid these problems, or address them once they’ve cropped up?
Foreward
Just to be clear, I’m not referring here to the multiple 10 person raids that a functioning 25 person guild may run on the side. Those are typically populated by alts or pickups, and often use a different loot system. I don’t think that anyone judges a player by the progression made in an unofficial raid. I’m referring to a guild whose multiple 10 person raids are the main path to progression.
Downplay Comparisons
While a bit of good-natured competition within a guild can spur people on, I’ve not found it to be a useful tool long-term. Perhaps one night you race each other for a speed clear of a farm instance, but to compare progression speed when the teams may not be equally matched isn’t fair. When learning fights, certain combinations of buffs and debuffs can make a major difference – just having heroism or bloodlust available can make or break an encounter.
Though I’ve used the term for this article’s title, never use the terms “Team A” and “Team B”. No matter how you try, these names (or any names from a set which has a defined sorting order like numbers) is a bad idea. The connotations of superiority are just too hard to overcome. Instead, use completely unrelated terms, or even made up words. I wouldn’t recommend going with pop culture references, in case they are polarizing (e.g. Team Spock vs Team Kirk). Quick: which is better: “Team Mittens” or “Team Flügelhorn”?
Answer: Neither. Team Pfaffendorf beats them both. Bonus points if you know why.
You should also be on the watch for teams judging each other, especially if one team ends up being joked about in guild chat. Once people start to think of themselves as part of an elite group within the guild (or outside of a perceived group of elites), you’re only a few steps from a clique. The best way to avoid that (if you can) is to mix up the teams periodically.
Mix it up
If you have 20+ raiders who all raid at the same time, try to mix the teams up a bit. For progression you probably don’t want to do this on a week-by-week basis, but at least once a month you should re-shuffle the teams. Have both raid leaders pick people much as you would in school sports – back and forth until only one person remains. Just don’t do this publicly – nobody liked being the last person chosen in school and it’s not going to boost morale in WoW either.
When mixing teams, try to keep the quality of the leadership experience the same for all members. Don’t put two amazing raid leaders on one team and leave the other team to learn everything from wowwiki. Also try to keep the strategies for each boss fight as close as possible. If both raid leaders have different approaches, sit down and discuss which is best. This will help members stay focused and effective when they move from one team to the other, and will continue to serve you if you merge into a 25 person team.
If you choose not to keep the strategies the same, then make sure that whoever “owns” the strategy (typically the raid leader) remains with one team long-term. The people they bring to the raid may chance, but members should know that if they’re on Foo’s team, they are executing a particular boss fight in a given way. It also helps to have the strategies documented on your guild forums, preferably with a descriptive mnemonic. On Lady Deathwhisper you might refer to the “normal” tactic and the “AoE kill zone” tactic for example.
You will need to set an expectation among members that when teams are shuffled, performance and progression might not be perfect from the get-go. It takes a few raids for everyone to get used to everyone else’s play style. Over time, this period of readjustment will get shorter. Be quick to shut down cries of “the other team is so much better at this” or “I don’t want to be on the sucky team”.
If you’ve let the raid leaders pick back and forth and they’ve paid some attention to balance, individual performance shouldn’t be a concern. You are more likely to wipe because someone decides not to give it their all or refuses to alter their playstyle to match the members they’re paired with.
Examining and Fixing
If both teams are progressing at exactly the same pace, you won’t have most of the problems I describe above. But that’s not likely to happen. Class balance, buff and debuff synergy, and the unavoidable differences in player skill mean that one team is probably going to move ahead quicker than the other.
If you’re switching things up once a month, you may not need to jump on this right away. If it continues even when people are changed around, then you might need to look more closely at how the raid is being lead. Are the raid leader’s instructions clear? When people fail to follow them, is action taken to make sure that it doesn’t happen again? Are subtle but important details about the fights overlooked, or does the leader assume that everyone knows them? Any of these things can be a thorn in the side of progression.
You may wish to have the leader (or just an experienced leader) from the other team “audit” the team that is behind on progression. Have them join on an alt. Don’t have them take over the raid – just observe how things are run, make note of things that are different, and see if anything jumps out as a causal factor. After the raid is over, take the time to sit with the raid leader and discuss what you observed.
Leading a raid effectively is an art unto itself, and just like playing a given class a little mentoring may be very helpful. You may find that the issue is one of occlusion – the raid leader doesn’t realize that something is going wrong because they don’t have a given addon or perhaps just don’t know where to look among the information they do have to determine the root cause of problems.
Recruiting
Make sure your recruiting efforts are tailored to the needs of each team. If you know that the reason one team isn’t progressing as fast is that they only have two strong healers, make it a priority to find a strong dps/healing hybrid so that you can move between 2 and 3 healers based on the fight without rearranging the group. If the end goal is to be a single 25 person team and you only have two teams as an interim measure, then make sure you’re out there looking for the bodies to bring you up to full strength.
When trying to merge two 10 person groups into a 25 person team, you have a little more flexibility in terms of who you bring in. 20 decently geared raiders can help carry 5 lesser geared people far easier than a 10 person team can balance even two undergeared members.
Different Schedules and Alts
If your guild runs two separate raid schedules, you may have some members who can make both times, and want to raid on two characters. Unless all of your main raiders are getting spots in a raid regularly, I would recommend against this. It can be quite a morale hit to be seated for a raid while your spot goes to someone whose main has already seen gear upgrades this week.
Unless you have a strong need for a particular members’ alt, I prefer a policy where the guild “owns” a given raid size lockout on your main, and all other lockouts are yours to do with as you please. Some members may choose to join PUG raids, some may not raid on alts and be available to swap into guild runs as required. But make sure that every individual gets a chance to raid before any one person gets to raid twice. Not doing so only slows down progression in the long term.
How do you deal with multiple raid teams? Have any of you maintained two or more long-running teams for more than a few months? If so, how did you work to achieve balance and keep everyone focused despite different progression rates?
Image from Robot Chicken Season 4, Episode 5
#1 by Spinks on February 22nd, 2010
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What do you do when you are organising 2 groups and behind your back, the more elitist members decide they’d do better if instead of spreading the stronger players around so both groups could progress, they all privately organise their own 10 man and don’t invite or inform anyone else.
#2 by Karatheya on February 22nd, 2010
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At that point, you’ve crossed over into having a clique. As to how to deal with it, that depends on whether they are using up the raid lockout that the guild “owns”.
As I touched on briefly: your guild should clearly lay out which of your lockouts are dedicated to the guild. That might be just ICC, or it might be ICC and TotGC if you’re still working on that. If people are organizing their own raids and are using up a lockout that the guild owns, then they’ve broken guild policy and whatever penalty or disincentive you feel makes sense needs to be applied.
If member decide that they can take over guild leadership, then you’ve got some serious trust issues to deal with that are larger in scope than just this.
If people are organizing such runs with a lockout that the guild doesn’t “own” (the 10 person lockout if you’re a 25 person guild), then there’s not much you can do, save for taking ownership of the lockout via policy – though you’re likely going to get a lot of pushback from that.
The attitude that leads to “I only want to play with the best players and I don’t care what the guild rules are” is full of anti-guild sentiment and selfishness. It’s the same as “I only run random dungeons for heroics and I don’t care what anyone else in the group needs”, just extended to a larger group. It’s worse in some ways because you’re supposed to be more loyal to those in your guild than to a random player.
Set up raid rosters on your forums ahead of time, and make sure that everyone knows what team they’re on. If people go and get locked to a team that wasn’t organized by the guild, slap them with a loot penalty, or if you have an attendance requirement mark people who didn’t do the raid they were assigned to as not having attended at all.
Is that harsh? Sure. You might lose some people. But you’re losing selfish, elitist jerks and in the long run those are not the type of people who make playing this game fun.
#3 by Malevica on February 23rd, 2010
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My first question would be, are you talking about a 25-man guild or 10-man guild? If your members don’t wish to submit to the organisation of the officers when it comes to the “main” raid then that’s a sign that the leadership within the guild, or the motivation of the members, or both, need to be re-evaluated.
If this is a secondary raid, that is there a policy on this? If the raid is purely optional, even if there’s a de facto organiser who tries to get two teams running, then you don’t really have much to fall back on except an appeal to their good nature.
We have had a similar problem with the VoA in the past. Without a clear policy on the ownership of the lockout a lot of people would rush out and pug this within hours of the servers coming back up on the Wednesday, while others would prefer to run with the guild for a smoother run with more guarantee of success and no chance of master loot ninjas and the other things that come with it. Now we just have a policy (if we don’t get time to run it on Thursday evening then it’s open to pug) and now there’s not two ‘camps’.
I’m a big proponent of pro-active policy, because as Karatheya says, adding policy after the fact tends to come with a backlash.
Another thought: you call these people “elitist” (which is a bit of a negatively-loaded term), but put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself if they might have a point? Can you pick out individuals who you have low confidence in? Do you tend to have relatively poor balance? Perhaps addressing some of these concerns and levelling the playing field a bit might help. I recall in a previous guild simply dreading being landed with one player, because you just knew the night was going to go so much slower with the silly wipes, the long AFKs and so on.
Finally, an anecdote: our optional 10-man raids are currently wrestling with this sort of conundrum because we’re working on the Lich King but don’t quite have enough raiders to make up 2 solid teams, so we’re having to use offspecs or alts to make up the “second” team, and they obviously don’t get as far. We decided to open up the debate, and posted a thread with some specific questions to guage preferences: do people want to extend the lockout, would we prefer one well-balanced team or two sacrificing some balance, etc.
Perhaps opening up a debate about the raid situation (maybe with clear boundaries to avoid wall-of-rant posts) might be helpful to re-engage these raiders.
#4 by Gravity on February 24th, 2010
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The header graphic you’ve used in a long time.
Gravity´s last blog ..Independent film: the Raid
#5 by David on February 24th, 2010
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One of the highest factors for guilds splitting up, happened just recently to a friend of mines guild, when they were running multiply 10 man raiding teams, causing a fair amount of elitism and causing the guild to disband… ah such is the WoW life.
#6 by Bawble on February 26th, 2010
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We’ve taken the advice and not named our 10 man teams Team A or B etc..
We have one team called Team Bear (led by a bear)
My team is called Team Elite-super-monkey-ninja-killaz
We kick Bear’s ass.
Jokes aside, we are a 25 man raiding guild and we have no restrictions on 10 man nor are they official guild raids. Team Bear do the bulk of their 10 man run on Saturday afternoons and Team ESMNK do late night runs after the main 25 man raid. We have different schedules so it works out well.