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.

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While it’s a bad idea to link your damage meters over a common chat channel, it’s a very bad idea to link your damage report if you’re a damage dealer and you’re that one dps’er who consistently does less damage than the tank. What you’re trying to say is that you outperform the healer at doing damage, but what you’re really saying is:

“The healer’s good enough to keep everyone alive and also do 30% of the damage that I’m doing.”

The healer’s damage is basically like the rock bottom of damage performance in a raid. Healing does zero damage. You are also saying that you don’t understand groups enough to know what the different roles do, but you aren’t going to let that slow your spamming down. This is a chain of thought that will immediately lead others to group with you less, because veterans will sense that this is probably the tip of the iceberg:

• you roll for gear that doesn’t apply to you and then throw a fit when someone tries to tell you how your character works
• you don’t understand or don’t care about crowd control
• you cry and blame someone every time you die
• you go afk without warning
• you complain about repair costs
• you never have elixirs/poisons/food buffs
• you use curse words in a way that’s not interesting, relevant, or funny

Not everyone is all of these, but usually these character flaws don’t come in single servings. Most people went to the all you can eat Buffet of Broken.

And yes, this was all that a single damage meter post said. And incidentally, this person lived up to many of the above-listed predictions.

I healed through Magister’s Terrace this weekend to get a couple of friendly guildies ready for MrT heroic. My wife, in the next room, said “What’s wrong?” I hadn’t even realized I sighed. “This new recruit just spammed his damage meters after our first wipe.”

I had forgotten about this little slice of the game. Of course, now my blissful ignorance has been shattered, but it’s a good topic of discussion.

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Many guilds have outright terrible names. Ok, not terrible, just terribly bland. They’re all stamped from the same lame press: X of Y.

• Seekers of Truth
• Champions of Honor
• Seekers of Honor
• Defenders of Glory
• Champions of Truth
• Seekers of Glory
• Defenders of Truth
• Champions of Glory
• Defenders of Champions
• Protectors of Italian Virginity (kidding, this one would actually be ok)
  

Tell me that you haven’t seen dozens of these guilds lingering around. In my experience, they’re always recruiting. Their GM quotes Gladiator or other epic movies in his sig. I can just keep piling these stereotypes on, we’ve all seen people like this. They attach weight to the name of a group of people.

Next time I start a guild, I’m going to call my guild “X of Y”. Seriously.

The problem with most joke names is that nothing is funny after two days. Just like most tattoos aren’t cool in just a couple of years. What’s cool and funny now is never cool the fifth time you explain it. However, I suspect that as you see another guild form with a name like Harbringers of Misfortune, you might get another chuckle that will keep this joke fresh.

At least a guild with a stale joke name can be disbanded and reformed with a newer joke name… unlike those sad souls stuck with tribal tattoos.

In the meantime, I have an unguilded alt who’s about to start a new guild. It’ll be right up there with the Bankadins.

My casual/raiding guild is starting to build up to 25-man content. They’re raiding with a bunch of ex-guildies who have drifted through a handful of other guilds before running out of options and trying to start their own. This splinter guild doesn’t have enough people to raid even Kara, never mind their goal of beginning 25-man content, so they proposed an alliance to start the 25-man track.

There’s enthusiasm in my guild. New content! For many people in the guild, this will be their first big raid ever. For others, this would be a way to relive the glory days (cough) of Molten Core/Onyxia. The 25-man track is the big boy raid track! Whee!

There are a few problems, though.

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When I was raid lead in vanilla wow, I arranged and lead many many runs on Molten Core, a few on Blackwing Lair, and many in Zul’Gurub and AQ20. When news of The Burning Crusade’s reduction in raid size came out, that the new raids would be 25 and 10, I cheered. My guild thought I was being sarcastic (a reasonable guess), but honestly I was thrilled. I still am. Larger raids are for masochists.

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So let’s say you have a guild. Some of the people are good friends, you’ve known them for a long time. You know what they do in their lives, you know a little of their family life. You know about their pets! They raid with you, quest with you, arena with you.

Then there are other people who have been in the guild for a long time, but never make the list of people you think of when you want to explore new stuff. They don’t particularly care about knocking over challenges, but are glad to come along to raid or pvp as long as their real-life connection is going to be there. These people are the other half of a “package deal”. They have played enough to get to the max level, and they do like the sight of zomg epics. Who doesn’t? So they volunteer to come with you, whether it’s for your new arena team, or your raid. Some of these people evolve into actual gamers, people who get good at their role in a group, who understand the game and what they can do in it, and who socialize with the others. The others become SPHOs: sub-performing hangers-on. (Pronounced how it looks, rhymes with show.)
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Like I said earlier, my guild is casual/raiding pve. People in-game often ask me, “What is casual/raiding?” So I thought I would answer on my anonymous blog and then never link to it.

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The game indicator of winning in WoW is receiving an epic item. In vanilla WoW, the vast majority of epic items came from 40-man raiding. I’ll grant that there was an epic hunter quest, a few limited crafting bits, some world drops, and a top-level pvp set that only a handful of people could get. But overall, if you wanted a reliable way to get epic gear (and win), you hooked up with a raid guild and started raiding… whether you liked raiding or not.

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I started off playing World of Warcraft because my best friend said that he loved it. He’s usually a great gauge for what I will like, although I hated Heavy Metal 2000. (In all fairness, it was one of those times where he loved the original Heavy Metal in his teenage years and was horrified upon seeing the sequel ten years later) He asked me over to his place so I could try it out, and my first question was “Where’s the run button?” He laughed.

A couple of years later, and I’ve solo’ed to max level, had my wife join me in game (to great joy), grouped up to max level more than once since then. We’ve been in a couple of guilds, and ultimately found the guild that became our WoW online home. In this guild, I’ve been: an enthusiastic member, a newbie officer, a raid leader, guild master, and am now a veteran officer.

My guild is casual/raiding pve, which translates to max-level/light-endgame. We’re all adults with jobs, we play well when we’re on, but all of us have real lives that we don’t put aside for the game. We’re good friends.

I raid with a healing priest and a tank warrior (whichever as needed), and dabble with other classes as time permits. My wife raids with a combat dagger rogue and dabbles with a druid. We know a little about battlegrounds and arena, but not much.

The game is fun; it was my primary hobby before my daughter was born (less than a month ago). Now I’m a casual dad. I play when I can. I help out the other officers in other ways when I can’t be online.

I’ll expand on most of this over time, but this is a decent overview of where I’m coming from.