(Related post: Take the Group Role)

The following statements are all true for raiding guilds:

• The health of a PvE guild is dictated by its ability to progress through the game’s content at the guild’s expected rate.
• Groups and raids live or die based on being able to assemble, launch, and progress. A successful raid has all three roles (tank, heal, damage) filled to sufficient levels.
• The ratio of tanks/healers/damage in a typical successful raid is something like 2/3/5.
• The ratio of tanks/healers/damage in total available, raid-ready players on my server (and I have no reason to think this is unique) is along the lines of 2/3/25. I just made these numbers up, but this is what I’ve seen. You can always, always find another damage-person to come along.
• Officers are invested in their guild’s continued existence and success.

The logical sum of these points is that officers of PvE raid guilds, even casual ones, should take up the roles that are most needed to keep their guild raiding, namely tanks and healers. Even if the character is not their main, they should have an alt ready to step into one of these needed roles should someone decide to retire from the game, lather up with crazy sauce, or just hit the next stop on the progression train.

Your ability to raid, your entire health as a guild, can be brought to a screeching halt if a couple key tank/healer roles leave the guild. I’ve seen this happen and have dealt with keeping the crippled guild afloat after that. It’s ugly, and amazing to see how quickly you can go from healthy and winning to despondent and bleeding members.

“We haven’t raided in forever (one week)!” “What about my zomgepics!” “I don’t wanna run the previous endgame just to gear the new tank up, I wanna raid just like we were again! AND I WANT IT NOW!” (It’s really funny to hear grownups speak in these tones. That’s the only upside to guild discomfort.)

Anyone can do damage. Extra tanks can do damage, extra healers can do damage. Maybe not progression-content-role damage, but enough to get the group through farm content. Conversely, extra damage dealers can only rarely heal, and nearly never tank… at least without a unwanted respec.

Officers: roll a healer or tank.

Since I bought Rock Band (RB) for my PS3 a few months ago, Guitar Hero 3 (GH3) grew roots on the shelf. GH3 was my first fake-music game, and I enjoyed it very much. But the same source who prodded me to try Guitar Hero implored me to try Rock Band. And sure enough, I liked it more.

The multiplayer in RB would have been enough all by itself. Having my buddy over to jam on “March of the Pigs”? My wife singing “Call Me” at the top of her lungs? All of us laughing and cursing at how hard Boston music is to play and sing? You just can’t put a price on that.

(damn you Foreplay/Long Time! Daaaaaaamn Yooooou!)

But it’s not just the multiplayer–RB is simply better in every single way. The single-player game is better in RB. The note tracks are better. The graphics, the gameplay, the presentation, the customization, the buy-what-you-like content store, everything. I was blown away right out of the gate and the overall experience kept me locked for the months between then and now. It’s just more fun.

On a whim last night, I pried GH3 from the great videogame dusty-shelf-grave and gave it another try. You know what? Time has not been kind to GH3. Whatever nostalgia I felt was wiped out as soon as the cheesy graphics started up. Everything I remembered was true; GH3 is completely inferior. Even more so since I’ve been on Rock Band for months now. So the thought of Guitar Hero Aerosmith and Guitar Hero Def Leppard does nothing for me, even though I’m sure I would have fun in playing music from those bands. I’d rather buy the albums from Rock Band. And since I can’t have that due to exclusivity, I’ll just enjoy Nirvana’s Nevermind when it comes out.

I do enjoy the GH3 guitar more than the RB one (which is no big deal, since I play drums in RB). And there are maybe 10 GH3 songs that I desperately want on Rock Band: Barracuda, Even Flow, Rock and Roll All Nite, Ruby, etc. But that’s it. You don’t often see a competitor completely stomp the competition, but here you are.

I think that’s why Activision is desperately, blatantly ripping Rock Band for their own next Guitar Hero iteration. They might as well call it Guitar Hero: Rock Band.

Only Guitar Hero fans who haven’t tried Rock Band could still be fans of that game, and it’s just a matter of time before they do.

I’m a healer. I have other toons: a raid-ready tank that I love to play, a couple of decent dps toons. But in my heart, I love being a healer.

I’ve recently realized that people who are annoying tend to die more often in raids where I’m healing.

For example, my guild’s current offtank is as annoying as hell. He’s the living example of the Dunning-Kruger effect… I could go into great depth, and I very well might in a future piece, but suffice to say that there is often an undercurrent of private tells deriding him during every raid he participates in. However, our guild is like a family, and he’s the weird cousin who makes it to every cookout. His availability is decent, he’s not completely terrible at his class/role, and he tries to be friendly even if he lacks the social skills to pull it off. But there are all-too-frequent occasions where I wish I had a button I could push that gives him an anonymous electrical jolt in his real-life chair.

Actually, as it turns out, there’s a little button that I don’t push that does the same thing. It’s actually a series of buttons, each of them bound to healing spells. He dies more than average.

I only realized this pattern of behavior a couple of weeks ago when, over guild chat, this fellow was instructing new raiders to make sure they do their dailies every day in case of high repair bills, and also how elixirs are a waste of time–just get flasks, even for farm content. I was ready to type out a reply saying that we only die often enough to matter in progression runs, then thought… hmm. He does die pretty often, but the new raiders won’t. And I somehow know this ahead of time.

It’s funny how you can suddenly realize that your behavior is completely counter what you thought your goal was.

I don’t seek out the opportunity to let him die, and I don’t try to manufacture events where it will be possible. Because he’s an offtank, there are many events where we simply don’t need his offtanking. In the remaining events, you only need offtanks up to a certain point. Outside of that? Opportunities. And I occasionally partake.

It’s not just me. I mean, we often have two or three healers on our 10-man runs, so someone could bail him out. But it just doesn’t happen. Consistently.

This behavior isn’t limited to just this person, or just raids. In one of my early Magister’s Terrace runs, I ran with an annoying shadow priest who told us all how ineffective all healers are without a shadow priest in their group. He died a few additional times. Not a word was spoken. The other three members of the group knew exactly what was happening.

The same thing happens when a dps class pulls too much aggro or breaks crowd control too often. In the past, I’ve advocated letting those people die, because they’re hurting the group/raid from a tactical sense and need feedback. However, I guess that via my example I extend that behavior for other reasons too. I know that my healer friends all do the same thing, even though we rarely speak about it.

Is this counter to the group’s goal? Sadly, yes. We want smooth and speedy progress. Is this counter to my goal? No. My goal is to have fun. Is this part of why I love being a healer? I’d like to say “No!” but I strongly suspect that the answer is “Yes.”

I’m not proud, but I am smiling.

Like most people, I learned the hard way about second chances at relationships–backsliding, regression relationships, whatever you want to call it. Namely that they don’t work, despite the fact that regression sex might sound like just what you need after a series of terrible first dates. However, unless one of you has been in a coma or similarly life-changing event, inevitably the crazy in your ex or the behavior that brought out the crazy in you (or both) manifests again… and then you finally wake to find yourself stuck in a supremely depressing place: exactly the same kind of unhappy situation you were in before, except you’re older and you have demonstrably not learned your lesson. You’re connected again to this person who makes you unhappy.

Then you somehow break it off. Whether you’ve extricated yourself via your own force of will or via external causes, you’re free of this person and you now have some ability to see this kind of situation coming again. When faced with future backsliding, eventually you either:

1. Realize that the number of seconds you have on this planet is finite, and perhaps regression sex-and-crazy this isn’t the best way to spend those seconds. You opt out from that person.
2. Let them back into your guild.

Big jump, but stay with me. I suspect that those of you who have walked both the dating road and the long-time guild member road see where I’m going with this.

You’ve got this guy, Bob, in your community who appears to be friendly/funny/talented and has learned to cleverly disguise his crazy. Bob knows how to sound aligned to the goals of your guild, because how hard is it to sound like that when said goals are likely written on your guild’s front page? Honestly, only the really thick people ever do anything stupid enough to warrant immediate kicking. Not Bob–he can seem like a good guild member… but at some point, you know from firsthand experience that he’ll will do one or more of the following:

• Feel justified in a broken give/take ratio
• Complain whenever they don’t get instantaneous service from guild resources, like officers and crafters
• Pick fights with people inside or outside the guild
• Beg for anything over /g, especially gold
• Be an embarrassment in public, like /trade, hurting your guild’s continuous recruitment efforts
• Make suggestions that involve a lot of work, not offer to help with execution, and then get pissed and complain
• Sow dissension
• Only participate when there’s a clear chance for personal reward/suggest large guild investments in their own personal improvement
• Speak in txtmsg like they’re not sitting at a keyboard (”y cant i come 2 ZA”)
• Link random people’s gear over /g with text-drool of how much they want that gear
• Tell Chuck Norris jokes or other completely played-out memes
• Freak out when they don’t get attention frequently enough

…or whatever it is that pushes your Button of Incompatibility. The fact that Bob is talented and/or funny and/or generous isn’t the question; it’s that he brings out the crazy in you. The experience of being in this Bob’s company makes the game unfun for you.

How do you personally deal with Bob? For me, a notice of silence followed by enforcement of silence works. “Bob, I wish you well but I’m going to do my best to avoid you.” No conversation after that is necessary. I’ve tried “having it out” and “an honest conversation”, but honestly an extended conversation about incompatibility, however you deliver it, isn’t necessary. You’re not going to enlighten this person. The equivalent of silence in MMORPGs is some variation of /ignore and refusal to group with this person. Do not break this silence for any reason. It works great!

If only it were that easy in MMORPGs.

The problem is that you’re in a guild. The pool of people around you on the server is mostly static and is certainly limited. Your friends in this guild–the ones whose company you seek out and that you’ve come to enjoy–are perfectly good people with the glaring exception that they don’t share your opinion on Bob. This person who you’ve concluded is a complete waste of your time, he doesn’t drive them nuts like he drives you nuts.

As long as Bob plays the game and you play the game, you’re going to exist in the same limited social circle. You’re going to be around him. You’re going to see him in the bank, he’ll be grouping with your friends. He might even still be in your guild! The only method of escape is server transfer, but that means leaving everything you enjoy about where you are. The vast majority of the time, this is an unacceptable solution.

So what happens? Drama, that’s what!

Now take this two way relationship that can happen between any two people and bring that to a group of ten people. Or forty! The odds of this happening between any two people is small, but the more people you add to the mix, the more likely you are that it’s going to happen. Add the variable of time and you can pretty much guarantee that it’s going not just happen to someone in your guild, but happen to you. No matter how good you try to be, drama happens.

This is why there’s always one thing you can count on in massively multiplayer games: Drama is Inevitable.

As Blizzard announced last week, every WotLK raid will have a small-raid (10-man) option.

So if there are (guessing) four endgame raids at launch, each will have a 10 and 25 man version, creating a completely parallel path to the current 25-man raiding standard. Every subsequent patched-in raid will follow the same design. No more of this “two raids for small group raiding, eight raids for big group raiding”. All 10-man raids will be able to physically visit every raid instance, see every boss, gear up and progress along a similar path, and ultimately see the entire expansion.

This is like ice cream in digital form. Strike that, this is like a pack of ice cream wolves wearing ice cream shoulder-cannons running through the streets, shooting ice cream fireworks everywhere. This is simply the best news since the game was released.

This raid design change is a much, much larger change than shrinking large-group raids from 40-man to 25-man. This is huge. This is an attempt to change everything about endgame raiding, not just the encounter size. And although I know that my little essays are read by beautiful and intelligent people, and I know that Blizzard didn’t read my post on raid sizes, but… It’s just absurdly freakish that they’re doing exactly what I wished for, even though I didn’t think they would until WoW2. (That alone made me feel weird while writing this. If you’re reading, I love you too, Blizzard.)

I strongly suspect that this will create interesting (and for my guild, extremely welcome) social repercussions throughout endgame raiding culture. Mainly because the loot still won’t be the same. The 25-man versions will probably be a half-tier or full-tier higher than the 10-man versions. Oh no!

But really, who cares? This is good news for everyone involved, both large-group and small-group raiders. For my guild, if you’re the kind of person who absolutely needs the best loot, then neither of us is going to get what we want by you being a member of my guild. Yay! We’re filtering each other out! What difference does it make that my EndgameA loot isn’t as good as a parallel EndgameA loot? They both allow access to our next EndgameB. That’s it. That’s the whole game. Small-group raids can basically ignore 25-man raiding now, as they only have better loot, and not more encounters, more story, or more of anything except people.

But what about the “10-man is normal mode, 25-man is heroic mode” stigma? We’ll encourage it. Please, fictional-Mike, go swim through the constant churn and drama that is the hardcore raiding guild experience and leave my happy small-group guild and all those like it alone. We’re not hardcore enough for you, and we wish you luck and good fortune.

My guild will just continue on in our own little raiding utopia, recruiting friendly people and continuing to have fun. Except this time, we’ll be running all the content in the game. We don’t have to choose between social and exploration any more. We’ll see the final boss of WotLK. We’ll see the conclusion of every story thread.

Great days are ahead!

I’m working on a couple of pieces based on the WotLK news updates. Before that flurry of announcements, I was working on boring posts like “Master Looter is the only option”, “Pace isn’t that hard” and other pieces that sound even worse. Blah blah. I got bored while writing them.

I write everything concurrently, so when I do update it will be with a series of posts. This is how I wrote fiction, too.

Part of writing about the expansion is typing out the name of said expansion. I mistype WotLK every time. What should be:

Wrath of the Lich King

comes out:

Wrath of the Licking

(Insert massively multiplayer punchline here.)

Being a brand new dad has attuned me to Mother’s Day. I used to obey when my father told me to get my mother a gift, but that’s because there was the threat of physical violence if I didn’t. That turned into a habit, but I never really got it. Ah, parenting.

If you already understand Mother’s Day before becoming a parent yourself, then I raise a toast to you. If you don’t understand it or simply go through the motions like I did, all I can say is that you’ll get it as soon as you have kids. I’ve already called my mother to apologize for not understanding it sooner. She laughed at me.

So Happy Mother’s Day everyone, especially to gamer moms and writer moms.

(Yes, this is a day late. I thought it defeated the purpose if I took part of her Mother’s Day to write a post on my blog about Mother’s Day. So my new-mom wife got the whole day. Part of that day was giving her a crafted [Belt of Deep Shadow]. You might chuckle, but she loved it, and it was a large upgrade over her Netherstorm blue questing belt. And yes, there was a real-life gift as well.)

A friend told me that Feedburner is a better way to go for managing feeds. Now there’s a new subscribe button in the Meta section, I recommend that you use it. I also turned on email notification for you the rss averse.

WowInsider and Mmo-champion are drowning us with links the first huge wave of WotLK news. Most of it is awesome, while some of it is outstanding.

So now at least I have a large number of topics that I want to write about. My very boring, unfinished “Master Looter for the win” article can blissfully go back to the drafts.

I’ve been reading Tobold and Potshot lately. They’re talking about loot and game design as it relates to endgame guilds, specifically guild hopping and progression problems due to it. I haven’t seen a decent explanation of the problem, but as a guild officer/leader I’ve seen it in action twice now, once with the original WoW endgame and now with the TBC endgame. I don’t have a solution, but I can frame the problem.

For me, the most fun time in WoW is right after an expansion hits, when there’s limited collective endgame exploration. All the content is new and fresh, then I find myself grouping with not just my long-term guild friends, but also my friends who left to get on the progression roller coaster. It’s glorious! This is what the first two months of TBC was like.

Then, endgame progress starts to happen, and a tiered system begins to form.

Some guilds progress quickly while others progress slowly. Before long, you have some small percentage of guilds at the top level, a larger percentage slightly below them, and ultimately many at the bottom. Now let’s follow a person, Mike, through his ascent to the endgame.

First, Mike belongs to a leveling guild. He groups with and rides that guild up to the maximum level, but the guild doesn’t have the wherewithal to group up for the endgame content, for whatever reason. Ultimately, Mike decides that he wants to see some of this content, so he joins pick-up groups, and he finds that it’s fun. He does a little research and applies to an entry-level endgame guild. Mike is accepted! Wait, why is this endgame guild recruiting?

Entropy is constant in all guilds. A personal dispute can’t be resolved, or someone can’t afford to fix their computer, or they get divorced, or die, or become parents, or get sent to jail, or change jobs, or any number of other real-life reasons. Or they simply get bored with the game and never log in again. Regardless, even good people with no other issues leave the game. Every guild’s membership is never constant, and therefore every guild must constantly recruit.

At Mike’s first endgame guild, he learns to group, and the guild is sweeping through EndgameA content and is trying to get through EndgameB content. Mike is getting loot upgrades at a decent rate in EndgameA, because the guild has that under control. The goals of Mike and the guild are in perfect alignment for this time. Let’s define these goals. Endgame guilds are easy:

• The goal of an endgame guild is to raise the total level of gear of its members so that they can explore the next level of content. The ability to run endgame content is dependent on both the size of the group and the collective loot level of that group. This means that taking a slightly-underequipped person is acceptable, because it’s better than the empty spot you have that threatens to kill your guild’s basic ability to raid.

Players are harder. Each endgame player is a combination of the following three goals:

1. A loot-driven player wants loot upgrades. Zomgepics.
2. A socially-driven player wants to play with their friends.
3. An exploration-driven player wants to see all the content available.

(There are obviously more goals, but bear with me for the purposes of this article.)

Mike participates and gets all the gear available at EndgameA content. After some variable amount of time (due to the randomness of loot drops), Mike has nothing left to gain from EndgameA. He finds that his guild’s progression on EndgameB–where progression is not easy and where the guild is currently stuck–is simply painful and too slow. Unfortunately for Mike’s guild, Mike would rather see new content or get loot sooner without the struggle of doing it the hard way. His goal ranking is: loot/exploration first and social last. The people in his guild don’t matter as much.

Luckily for Mike, there is another guild on the server which is exactly one step up in progression; they have EndgameB conquered and are working on EndgameC. The minimum requirement for gear to be successful in EndgameB content is EndgameA gear. Thanks to the random loot system, most of this new guild is still gearing up in EndgameB, so it’s fine for a new applicant to simply be in EndgameA gear. Thanks to the effort of his current guild, Mike has EndgameA gear! The door to his second endgame guild is open.

After some amount of sweating, Mike leaves EndgameA guild to join the more-progressed one. The new guild gladly looks the other way at how the player came to them. Who can be certain what happened? The new guild is hoping for the best, so they welcome Mike with open arms and a big cheer. After all, this new guild is trying to get through EndgameC and needs active participants, because they keep getting poached by EndgameD guilds, who are getting poached to EndgameE guilds. And so on.

The problem is that the best situation for people who are loot driven is to be in a guild where the average level of gear of its members is higher than his own. This grants access to higher level content without the difficult part of sweating through it the hard way. Loot-driven people like coasting easily through content. They like getting rewards for minimal effort.

As you can see, this leads directly to guild-hopping. And endgame guilds, in their state of constant recruitment, make the problem worse with their constant poaching of each other. If they don’t recruit this player, then some other guild will, and increase their chances of progression, which is just another guild to poach from them.

Thus, soon after endgame is explored by some, a guild stratification system sets in. A clear path through guilds emerges. Start in guild 1, jump to guild 2, then guild 3, and so on. This continues until the ladder is reset at the next expansion.

Blizzard has taken steps to combat this: reputation levels with instances; attunements; badges of justice; tier set tokens; exchanges for pve to pvp gear. Each has helped, but the problem is still there. The individual gets all the rewards, regardless of the relative efforts involved.

So while people say that Tobold’s “loot belongs to the guild” idea is crap, that’s not the point. There has to be a better way. Any suggestion is better than no suggestion.

In the meantime, the system churns on and the socially driven players who are close friends in an endgame guild–like mine–end up bitter that they’ve helped so many people up and along their own personal ladder, while the guild progresses very slowly because they hang on to a fraction of the people who pass through. Remember, we socially-driven people aren’t purely social, we want to get upgrades for our characters and see the next endgame, and the one after that. But we won’t give up friends just for loot or to visit another part of the game. Our only options are: 1) continue to hope that we can find enough like-minded people to get momentum to clear our current hurdle and experience the joy as a group; 2) give up on the endgame altogether. Giving up isn’t a good solution because raiding is fun. Seeing new content is fun. Clearing obstacles with your friends is fun.

So we loyal ones stick together and keep recruiting, hoping to find the rare person who values camaraderie over loot, while we quietly look forward to the next reset (the next expansion). The ladder won’t exist for a little while, and we can play in ideal environment, briefly.

I’m cheering all of you on, Tobold and Potshot and the rest.

(edited on May 2 for some grammar flubs)