Archive for June, 2008
A View from Outside: Dying and Struggling Raiding Guilds
1Lately I’ve noticed a lot of guilds dying or struggling in terms of recruitment and progress. Everyone from Forte and Juggernaut, formerly two of the best progression guilds in the world, to the two guilds on Proudmoore who are supposed to be hot on the heels of my own guild.
In regards to Forte, they have officially disbanded, citing a lack of motivation and satisfaction from certain members regarding their performance. They aimed for number one, but only achieved the 40th world kill of M’uru. So I can understand the disappointment, especially considering they were the third guild in the world to have killed Illidan. But competition is fierce these days, and I could see it coming from a mile away. Many guilds had lost the drive to continuously recruit and keep their raids in top shape leading up to Sunwell Pleateau (SP). Also, given the increase in difficulty of SP, any amount of struggling was bound to create a sizable amount of frustration. Winning in Hyjal and BT was more about time investment than anything else. Succeeding in SP, on the other hand, is a combination of both time investment and skill, in addition to maintaining a balanced raid with an adequate number of classes needed to defeat each encounter.
Juggernaut, meanwhile, has reasoned their lack of applications is based on the fact that they were situated on a PvE ruleset, rather than PvP. So they have rerolled on a PvP server (Mal’Ganis; the same server Elitist Jerks is on) with the intention of building a top raiding guild there. Personally, however, I can’t help but suspect their lack of applications are partly a result of some of the infamous “Sebudai, Motivational Speaker” images one of their members made in homage to their leader. That’s not to say Sebudai isn’t a great leader, but a lot of people dislike negativity and anger. And the fact that SK Gaming, Nihilum and Elitist Jerks are so positive is, I believe, one of the very reasons they have been able to overcome their problems and survive. Even though Nihilum lost to SK Gaming, you don’t see them folding entirely or packing their bags.
On my own server (Proudmoore), the #2 and #3 guilds have been having problems of their own. One of them recently had to call off a Sunwell raid because they only had two priests log on for Felmyst, and it is extremely difficult to even bother attempting Felmyst with that number of mass dispels. So they ended up raiding BT, instead. However, they did eventually end up killing Felmyst that same week, but that didn’t give them much time to work in an Eredar Twins kill and progression time on M’uru. I suspect they didn’t even manage to kill the Eredar Twins, considering the absence of the encounter last week from their DKP site. In any case, such a situation is going to make it difficult for their guild to live up to the claim one of their leaders made to another member of ours: That they would put in extra time and beat us on Kil’Jaeden, just like they did for Illidan. But then that’s one of the dangers of SP. Putting in extra time is risky, because the place has so much potential to burn people out. SK Gaming and Nihilum can overcome this danger, because they’re sponsored guilds and have the reputation as numbers one and two in the world. Elitist Jerks can overcome this, because pretty much every raider in SP reads their damn forums. So they can find people willing to put in as much time as they require. But any non-sponsored or average guilds might run into some major problems. I personally experienced this during our first week of SP, when my guild added an extra five hours for the week. A few of our core raiders told me they simply couldn’t raid five times a week, as it would strain their marriages or relationships and make it difficult for them to be productive for school or work. And this is the very reason I argue with one of our members that we shouldn’t add extra time to the raid week unless we’re damn close to killing Kil’Jaeden.
The other guild on our server, meanwhile, has simply had some internal drama. I won’t elaborate, but it seems some members are in disagreement with certain leadership philosophies and are expressing their frustrations over poor raid performance of specific members of the guild. I won’t take sides, because it’s not my guild to lead, but I will state that avoiding such issues is the very reason my co-GM and I try to keep our raid finely tuned and ready to defeat the content we’re up against. If there’s a flaw in the engine, we’ll simply break down and become absolutely frustrated.
Now, my co-GM seems to think other guilds’ problems are simply due to a lack of applicants. But I can’t, for the life of me, understand why many of the upstanding guilds out there survive, while others collapse. Personally, I think it’s primarily due to poor leadership. When word gets around that your guild leader is an ass, people decide to first look elsewhere. In fact, maintaining a calm and collected raid atmosphere is one of the primary reasons we’ve picked up a couple of our recent recruits. Simply put, they find it extremely refreshing that we don’t constantly bitch out our players after every wipe. And some of them are trying to entice their friends to apply to us for this very reason. We understand that mistakes happen and we try to rectify them, but we don’t spit into our microphone or mash our keyboards to point out our problems. And, as we work on our progress in this manner, most of our players improve vastly over time. Those who don’t we end up “benching” for fights where their problems would hinder progress, and this keeps our good players content. And I know damn well I wouldn’t be able to tolerate being in a guild where the raid leader is constantly bitching people out. It would grate my nerves very quickly. So we try to keep the raid generally positive.
I do imagine, however, that we might have a few players disappear after Kil’Jaeden goes down. I can’t help but think the sense of accomplishment is what a few people want, so I can see this being a reason why some guilds might have some major problems. But I think if you’re on top of it, and people are willing to take a step backwards to replace members with people who actually want to be there whether content is on farm or not, you can survive. And I don’t think there will be as large of a drought of applicants as my co-GM seems to think there will be. But we’ll see.
11% M’uru Phase Two
1Aaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrgh! We were on track for a kill, but either we didn’t move the melee off a void zone or our dispellers missed the dark fiend. I’m not sure which it was, but either way the dark fiend exploded for 5K and wiped us. Frustrating, but also rewarding to know we can kill this fucker!
A GM’s Perspective: Sexism
14June 8, 2008
by Lume
in A GM's Perspective
One of the major topics that has been on my mind for the past few years is that of sexism in gaming. Ever since DAoC, I’ve come across guilds that explicitly deny women the right to apply. WoW is no different. Vanquish is particularly well-known for its sexist policies, complete with an official statement and “witty” graphic:
Due to our history and experience we’ve had with female gamers, we currently do not recruit players that lack a penis. This can be taken another way but in this case, we mean literally lack thereof. Some of you may think this is sexist, but you have to understand, when you put a female in an organization with a bunch of sex deprived World of Warcraft nerds, their hormones get the best of them. Women in World of Warcraft guilds cause more drama than ‘TNT’ and this is a no-drama organization.
Perhaps the argument that sexual tension and tendencies have potential for drama has merit. However, I don’t see how it’s any different than non-sexual tension. In every guild I’ve been in, I’ve seen people quit or take “prolonged absences” more over disagreements in philosophy and policies than anything else. And I’ve seen situations where having women in raids is beneficial.
In our guild, we’ve had two women on the opposite ends of the spectrum and one perhaps in the middle in terms of drama (as in, she merely got caught up in other people’s problems by taking sides). On the one end, we have a member who is married to another member of ours. Nothing negative has ever come about from her presence. On the other, we had a woman who had relationships with two of our members, both ending poorly. But you could say we’ve had male members falling onto a spectrum of general drama in the same sort of ratio. So the only difference I see is the possibility of nude pictures flying around in the background (from both sexes). But I say that tongue-in-cheek. Has it become reality for some guilds? You bet. But, really, what do I care if people want to have relationships? Is it really any different than a male member causing the ire of other male members for simply being overly bitter and sarcastic? In my mind, no. Drama is drama, whether it wears male or female genitalia.
Don’t get me wrong, however. When a woman joins, inevitably many of the guys start making sexual jokes. Often our female members have been the target of jokes like, “My character’s tits are bigger than yours!” But they typically have some witty retort to bring like, “I’ll turn on my webcam so you can compare.” Or, in the case of our married member, she typically asks her husband to back her up. But even when women are not present, jokes are sexual in nature. So I don’t understand why people see women specifically as distractions. People are distractions.
In my previous guild, during vanilla WoW, we had a woman join us who was a cornerstone of our healing crew. And while I had ceased to raid frequently with them (due to time differences), I was still there to see the dynamics of her membership with the guild (of which she is still a member). While many jokes became sexual in nature, she showed herself to be a strong-willed and independent woman. And, thus, she became a major asset to their guild on a functional level. And this is one example of many in my life that has proven to me that women are as much of an asset to society as men. So why should guilds be any different? As long as they can play well and contribute, I don’t really care what sex they are.
Now, normally, I wouldn’t bring up this topic. It has been discussed before on many occasions amongst many gaming circles. But I recently had a member of my guild express concern over recruiting a woman. Of curious note, this is a member who had a relationship and subsequent issues with a former member of the guild who happened to be female. That’s not to say I absolutely know his motivations in regards to this “situation,” but I heavily suspect the root is sexism. Luckily, my co-GM stepped in with a very blunt opinion ringing with extreme truth.
I’m not going to turn down someone on the basis of gender. If it really would prove distracting for someone, then they really need to grow up or something, I dunno. Getting over gender distraction is a requirement for being successful in life, the workplace, etc – I see no reason why wow should be different.
And if you don’t think women can be successful raiders, much less guild leaders, maybe you should start reading Chick GM.
Twisted Nether: Bringing the Blogosphere Closer Together
2I’m not sure I exactly want to get “closer” to certain members of the WoW blog community. However, most of us are benign, even if we’re opinionated. And some are even extremely interesting (not me, obviously). So I’m all for supporting the intentions of Twisted Nether, which hopes to highlight various topics and posts circulating around the WoW “blogosphere.”
Raid Performance and M’uru So Far
1I haven’t made too many entries lately for two good reasons: raid assessment and recruitment.
Raid Performance: Sunwell’s Blessing and Curse
At this stage of the game, in Sunwell, you begin to realize the shortcomings of your raid. This is something both Hyjal and BT fail to do.
Archimonde is a great “retard check,” but I think people fail to realize it was not that intensive of an encounter in that regard. Healing through a soul charge is not impossible. You can easily succeed with one or two people dying. You also don’t need to put out a huge amount of DPS, like you do through most of Sunwell. And these two factors are really key in the reasons why Hyjal and BT fail to help guilds realize their shortcomings: you can live with a few people dying on each encounter, and you don’t need to put out metric tons of damage.
That’s where Sunwell has completely changed the raiding game. Brutallus is certainly doable with gear only from Hyjal and BT, but it’s only just doable. This means you can’t risk having people die, or you will fail to meet the DPS budget. Certainly, people can die, but you most likely won’t get your first kill if you don’t have battle rezzes lined up for them. That said, this is not true once you’ve picked up a lot of Sunwell gear on top of your BT and Hyjal gear. We can now do it with one fewer DPS, as proven by our last kill registered at 5:15 (Brutallus is on a 6-minute enrage timer). But it certainly creates problems for guilds that have terrible DPSers who don’t understand how best to optimize their DPS. Simply put: guilds with too many terrible DPSers will never kill Brutallus, no matter how much gear from BT and Hyjal they have.
So these factors have created a situation where my co-GM and I have done a little soul searching. In Hyjal and BT, having a few weaker players was forgivable, because we could live through their mistakes here and then. But, at the same time, while these players are weak in certain areas, they are strong in others, and they have been in the guild for quite some time now. So we don’t exactly want to tell them to bugger off and find a different guild. But we’ve decided we’re going to have to sit these people when their shortcomings are a problem. Otherwise, we’re simply going to frustrate our better and more dedicated raid members.
This is especially true on M’uru, because he is even more of a DPS and problem check than Brutallus. In fact, he is being called the most difficult encounter in the game by many. And I certainly agree, thus far. When anyone dies for any reason and there are no battle rezzes available, it’s a sure wipe. When someone doesn’t bring the proper consumables for the raid, it’s more than likely you will wipe. And if too many key members of the raid have to leave or don’t show up, you risk not having the proper raid balance necessary to succeed.
This means our standards for recruitment have become considerably higher. I no longer have the time to repeatedly demand that our melee and hunters bring demonslaying potions for Brutallus or Entropius until they do so. Nor do I have the desire to coach some applicant rogue on how to properly time AR so they can use it twice on Brutallus or Felmyst. I don’t even play a rogue, so why should I be telling one how to play? I want people who bring the best consumables without being prompted. This is a great indicator of people’s desire to succeed and impress their leaders. Additionally, I want people who already know how to play. No more of this “well, he has potential” bullshit. Sunwell is here and now, not months away.
So I’ve taken recruitment extremely serious of late. With that said: LF a well-geared and highly skilled elemental shaman. PST Lilume on Proudmoore and post an application at http://www.lunacy-guild.net on our forums. Yes, this is a semi-serious call for recruitment. It’s not my normal outlet for recruitment, but I’ve had great applications come in from unusual sources before.
M’uru
We’ve been spending about a month or M’uru now. No doubt, that seems like a long time. But my guild only raids four days a week, so we’ve spent a cumulative of 48 hours on him. This is less than what SK Gaming spent to kill him (and much less than what Exodus spent). Thus far, we’ve seen phase two about a dozen times. That said, we’ve finally managed to get two solid looks at phase two: 69 and 51 percent. We’re also consistently getting M’uru down to less than 20% in phase one, and this consistency should only increase and give us a better look at phase two. The most important thing is that we’re getting there enough to actually get an idea of what we need to do to perfect our transition and stabilize phase two. Once this happens, we can begin putting in serious work on the latter half of the encounter.
That said, however, it’s difficult to predict just how far we are from a kill. Certainly, phase two seems very simple, but it took us 50 seconds to get to 51%, which means we have a lot of work to do. Ideally, we need to get him to around 40% by that point. We also need to stabilize the raid The primary reason we only got to 51% was because shit had hit the proverbial fan and people started dying. I’m not sure if this is because we missed something like a dark fiend (which can wipe the raid), or if our healers were getting hit by the ball that knocks everyone all over the place when they’re hit with it. It’s pretty difficult to heal as it is, much less when you’re getting tossed all over and don’t have many instant heals to work with.
In any case, I think we have the DPS for it. 51% in 50 seconds on only our second serious attempt of phase two is pretty good, considering our tank hasn’t even had much of a chance to optimize threat while avoiding the ball that knocks people all over the place. Nor has he had much practice of generating threat while actually being knocked around by it when he gets caught. Also, our ability to survive currently is extremely poor, as people are still mystified by the fact that we’re getting to phase two smoothly. There is typically a huge degree of improvement between our first two attempts at something and those consequent.
One thing is certain, however: seeing well into phase two twice has greatly increased raid morale. And I think it has likely solidified confidence amongst our new recruits that Lunacy is the guild they’re looking for. And considering we’ve picked up an enhancement shaman that can put out over 2K DPS on occasion, I am damn well content at this point in time. Here’s to hoping for the best for our remaining progress!
