Smores over Felfire

I’m going to be very frank here: I love the new LFG system. Maybe it’s because our server is full of people who really don’t know what they’re doing, but I’ve run a lot of pugs and I can count the number of bad pugs thus far with just one hand.

The problem: I never get to run a pug group with my warlock.

I’ve got a handful more triumph badges I need and then I will be running the priest for all my heroics because, frankly, the priest is still running around in lvl 200 gear. Yeah, I know, it made me cringe too. But on the other side, every time I upgrade from, say, moonshroud robe to Velen’s  Robe of Conquest, I get a noticeable increase in effectiveness. And due to the immense amount of dailies I can run as the priest (because no one heals in whirlwind… apparently), I’ve picked up 2 t9 tokens in as many days. At this rate, I’ll be geared out in about 2 weeks without USING the priest for raids. And therein lies the curse.

Currently, I have a guild that is rather short on healers, so the best thing for me, as a guild master, to do is gear out the priest and raid with it. The course of action I WANT to take is sending my priest on the sidelines and burn some face off with the lock. If the two raid’s days were staggered, I could take the best of both words (as the one I’m leading is short on heals and the one I subbed in for the other day was short on dps), but alas, I can’t as they… well… aren’t.

Damn… I’m sounding a bit more emo these days than usual. Next week, upbeat crap, I promise.

I have a confession to make: I hate scheduling raid invites.

I mean… I really hate it. Leading a raid, gathering the players, distributing loot, these are things I don’t mind (though loot-stuff may get dramatic at times), but scheduling the raid itself is something I despise throughly.

It’s probably a holdover from the last time I tried to pull a raid together over a month-long period of time. All I got for my trouble was a few bosses down (I think we cleared ToC twice) and a head full of frustrations. Healers deciding “we wiped twice, so I’m leaving.” and dps who can’t clear 2k. I had to make my tankadin heal for a few fights just because we were short qualified raiders at times!

So I did what any self-respecting person would do when they are faced with something they hate doing (and in my opinion, sub-par at doing as well): I gave it to someone else.

I find that most officers don’t like sharing power because, frankly, authority in the game is fleeting. A raid leader can only lead the willing, so giving someone else the opportunity to lead may lead to them replacing you. Thus, many RLs guard their “position” with fervor. My opinion? As long as we win, I honestly don’t care who leads (as I usually know when to get out of the fire, switch polarities, or click the cube, so you don’t have to tell me). If I had my way, I’d go back to dealing with intra-personal conflicts, gbank cleaning, and the occasional co-op with another guild for 25man content. But as no one else WANTS to lead a raid, I have to.

Bottom line for raiding guilds: if people aren’t raiding, they become unhappy. Unhappy people leave, which spread around the unhappy to the rest of the guild, ’cause chances are there were a few people who liked the people who left. So now you’re dealing with people who are raiding, but are unhappy (I miss so-and-so). This unhappy tends to stick around for a while, so the best thing to do is keep people raiding, even if that means YOU get a little less authority.

Right now, we have one raiding group which I, as the GM, am not a permanent part of. Am I happy about that? Absolutely not, but it’s better that at least one group be succeeding than me “shoving” two or three people out of the raid just so I and two other people can get in. That causes drama, hurt feelings, and (worst of all) unhappies. So instead I conscript folks who are better at scheduling raids than I am, so all that remains for me to do are things that I’m good at.

Kinda reminds me of the Regan Administration: Regan was a movie star who wanted to be President. He knew a few things about politics, but not a ton. So he surrounded himself with people who DID know what they were doing and, as a result, many people around the U.S. STILL think he was a magnificently well-informed president.

Teehee… “Arthas… tear down this Citadel… Teris smash! Teris smash!”

We are fortunate enough to know when our big moments are going to come in WoW. Cataclysm is supposed to be a world-changing event where earthquakes, tidal waves, and general nastiness will occur. If something similar were to happen in the real world, we would have no idea when it would happen.

Conversely, we not only know that it IS going to happen in game, but we’re anxiously waiting for the due-date.

The content patches act, in game, as a way to show that time has progressed in the world. Opening Ulduar, building the Colosseum, and breaking down the walls of Icecrown are all ways of showing that, though this is a static world by and large, time indeed is marching on.

For raiding guilds, it posses a unique conundrum. There is a frenzied rush to clear the new content as soon as it comes out, but as the next group of raids grow closer, the need to progress drops off. Personally, I see this as raiders thinking “well, we’re going to get a bunch of new instances that make the gear we’re looking at now 2nd rate… so why not just wait for the new stuff instead of working on the old?”

There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. People who are striving for achievements and hard modes run counter to this concept, but that’s because the emphasis isn’t on clearing the instance or gear, but on set victory parameters that haven’t been completed yet. Anyone, at this point, can drop XT-002, but very few (at least on my server) can do so in 3 minutes (or go for heartbreaker).

Assuming that the goal is to raid as much (and as successfully) as possible, the previously-mentioned points could give raid leaders an interesting advantage. You know that as soon as a content patch drops, there will be a flurry of activity to get inside the instance (at this point, 3.3 is going to be the center of the raid-storm). You can use this to your advantage guild-wise by teaming up with another guild and using them exclusively as your guild’s “pug partner” as it were.

The benefits:

1) An established pool of (assumed) talent for heroics, past raids, etc.
2) More loot opportunities (as there are now 4 lockouts you can attempt instead of just 2)
3) Assuming you are the all-around better guild, there will likely be a few people who will want to guild over.

The trick here, of course, is to make, maintain, and grow a working relationship with the other guild. As simple as that sounds, guild (and raid) leaders have enough trouble getting reasonable communication from you OWN group, so getting feedback from another guild may be problematic (as you are just as much an “outsider” to them as they are to you). The simple solution, though somewhat less effective, is to encourage members to use one specific guild for pugs, though don’t make a big deal about the “pug” guild being a sister-organization of sorts.

Does it get what you want? Probably, but you’ll have to dance around their pre-existing raid schedule instead of revising it to work together.

Guild Loyalty is a very funny thing for me. On the one hand, I personally want the guild I’m in to succeed and will do as much as I can to further its growth. In its creation, I purposefully delegated power to a number of flesh-and-blood people so I could never be accused of giving all-consuming power to one person. The guild leader acts as an advisor to the other officers and resolves loot/HR/policy problems that the other officers can’t do themselves (conflict of interests, deadlock, etc). The Raid leader(s) deal with their own raids. If there are multiple 10 or 25-man groups, then you have multiple 10 and/or 25-man raid leads. No cross-politics, no “we’re doing it my way ’cause you invited me into the group,” nothing. Role-officers (Tanks, Healers, ranged, melee) are given free reign to advise their individual classes as they see fit, though they will be challenged in their reasoning (and as they should be! Patch notes = change. Change = new specs becoming viable).

In a perfect world: I would have consistent raiders, a steady supply of promising new recruits, and 2 to 3 raids going on any given night. But this is not a perfect world, and real life often gets between me and Ony (on a frustratingly regular basis). So here’s the question I ask you all: If you’re part of a raiding guild, what is the price you would take to switch guilds?

If it were RP or PvP, the answer is fairly easy: when the RP or PvP group stops being active. If you want to be more active in raiding (ie: more than 2 or 3 nights a week), you switch from “casual” to “hardcore” raiding. But what is the breaking-point to go from 1 casual guild to another casual guild?

Here’s the issue I have: I would understand if you weren’t doing anything raiding-wise and it didn’t look like there was going to be any changes in the near future. I’ve had a number of people talk to me, say as much, and I wished them the best in their new endeavors. But when you are an active member of a currently successful raid-team and you switch because you want to do hard modes?

Bottom line, guild loyalty is more than a player’s willingness to stick with a <guild name> beneath their own, it’s the reputation and commitment that player has built with the other members. You are basically starting over with a new group and hoping they don’t ignore you based on the color of your character’s hair (or more realistically, if you jump around too much, spam gchat, or yap on vent). On top of that, you’ve alienated a lot of folks from the previous guild as they have to find more folks to fill the gap assuming there is still a gap to fill (ie: the raid loses too many people and dissolves). From a net-change perspective, you would have to gain a lot (ie: plenty of loot and achievements) in order to make the change useful.

At the end of the day, it’s a game. It will never be more than a game (except for the precious few who are paid to play) and working up a sweat over in game loyalties is a laughable use of time. What is important, however, is how those in game changes reflect on your out of game character.

Ah, the joys of real-life politics based on the politics of a game.

It’s something that I not so much “touch on” as “beat into the ground,” but HR management in a volunteer-based game is a hard game to advise. If you are in a well-populated server, then you have a slightly better bargaining position as you have, well, more people to shuffle around. When you’re in the bottom 5 servers (in regard to raid progression) like I am, you have an equal chance of losing a guildie to another guild or losing them to another server.

Regardless, if this game has taught me anything, it’s persistence pays off… the only uncertain factor is when it pays off.

I also know that the problems I’ve been having day 1 will persistently stick around until the day I deactivate the account.

Our ToC and Ony run were successful. There were a total of 4 wipes (1 Faction Champs, 1 Anub, 2 Ony) and much fun was had by all. I was a little skeptical at first as we had 2 trees as healers (which has historically been a sign of a bad night for our group) and a new DK tank in heroic naxx-ish gear, but as I mentioned we had cleared everything by the end of the night (which actually ended about an hour earlier than usual).

The drama-part of it concerned our DK tank and her propensity for talking for several minutes while I’m simply trying to say “go for pull.”

Personally, I understand that’s how she works. She likes to talk as the social aspect of WoW is just as interesting to her as the raiding side. She is likely going to re-guild with us BECAUSE we formed the guild to be a raiding family and not a raiding party. The flip-side of this, however, is the simple fact that several folks in our raid find the constant talking annoying.

Now here is where it gets a little iffy: if you are on a razor’s edge roster (ie: losing any one person could stop the raid for the night), how do you keep both parties happy?

The three most clear-cut options are:

Option 1: Tell the talking-party to clam up, or at least give the PTT key a break.

Option 2: Tell the complaining party to suck it up.

Option 3: Do nothing

And, as always, none of them give the desired result.

The compromise that got USED, however, has it’s own problems. The complaining party asked if there would be any major problem with muting the talker so at least HE didn’t have to listen to her. I OK’d it and the raiding went on as normal. The issue that arose: occasionally the talker would ask for a particular buff. The giver of said buff had her on mute. So naturally I had to re-state the request over vent so he would hear, but in the end it just made things more cluttered on vent for the rest of us. By the end of the run, the talker had just resigned to typing out the buff requests in raid, which actually helped out as it’s much easier to read something like “drood buff please” than trying to listen to 3 people simultaneously say why they clicked “no” on the ready check.

In short, the most you can ask your group is to simply find a workaround when personalities clash. If it’s a case of talking too much: muting or dropping their volume works fairly well, though buffs etc. would need a separate venue (ie: raid chat). If it’s a bad connection, then the lag-plagued player should only sign up for 10man raids. Simply stated: raids are not equal opportunity, they are merit based. And Officers will 9 times out of 10 pick up the best players they can, regardless of personality problems.

But if you can show yourself as being mature enough to turn a blind eye to so-and-so’s flaws… you might make yourself a little more desirable to raid with than the guy who has higher numbers, but lower tolerances.