Raiding does not mean Skilled

(Related post: Max level does not mean Skilled.)

There’s a class of player who feels that their status in the raiding game means that they’re Right. They label other people noobs, and the silly thing is that people believe them. “I have this awesome item, you don’t, therefore I know what I’m talking about and you don’t.” This frustrates me a great deal.

My guild recently brought in a new recruit. Her main is a holy priest, just like me! I’ll call her Mary. She was very personable, online a lot. She had raided a lot in the original WoW, all the way through AQ40, which I’ve never seen. She had taken over a year off from the game, and in her return was looking for a more relaxed playtime requirement while still playing at a high level. A perfect fit!

One of our top dps’ers had levelled a priest to maximum level and was looking for a rundown of how to heal as a holy priest. (He wanted to be able to fill out a heroic instance or raid in the case that we were short healing) He posted in our guild forums, asking how to manage mana, which spells were good where, the differences between instancing and raiding, and so on. The other primary holy priest in the guild and I posted a decent overview of general strategy and how to use the various tools in the priest’s toolbox.

Mary, still in her first week, posted a lengthy and emotional rebuttal to what we wrote. Her entire priest healing strategy is: Flash Heal. As far as she’s concerned, it is the only spell anyone needs as a holy priest. Her defenses were long, full of passionate and anecdotal evidence, and even had bad math to back her up. (I love bad math of all kinds) She was fully entrenched, she downright took offense to the thought of using other spells, and basically framed her argument such that to disagree with her was to start a fight. (I’m not going to go into details about why she’s wrong, just take my word for it.)

Needless to say, she didn’t stay long.

We chuckled about it, but I didn’t understand how she was going to find what she wanted. How was she going to even pass the application to a mid-tier raiding guild?

The answer: Mary could succeed in raiding, because her other healers could heal around her. I remember this in painful detail from the 40-man days. But there’s no reason that it couldn’t continue in 25-man or even 10-man raids. So Mary moved right up to a SSC mid-tier guild, where she’s no doubt the 25th person in some raid. They’re probably progressing, too. She’ll get overgeared and then be back to her elite flash healing self, and looking down at everyone who isn’t geared like she is.

The funniest part of this is that Mary could only ever find success in large raids. Not smaller group play, not ever small raids. And yet, raiding is supposedly a prestige environment. Raiders are serious business. They’re seen as elite players. I mean, these people have zomgepics that are simply inaccessible to most. They have to know the game, right?

Ah well.

Now don’t get me wrong–there is a tier of players who by definition of where they are must know what they’re doing. They’re the ones pushing new content as it’s released, who write the wowwiki articles, and write and tune the spreadsheets. The rest of us are, for lack of a better term, scrubs who execute well-defined strategies. I’m not saying that raiders don’t know what they’re doing, I’m just saying that their position in raiding guilds doesn’t mean that they do. They’re hit and miss, like everyone else.

(The title of this article really should have been “Mid-tier raiding and below does not necessarily mean Skilled”, but it wasn’t catchy.)

Max level does not mean Skilled

(Related post: Raiding does not mean Skilled)

World of Warcraft, and every game like it, is really two different games. I first read this thought at Penny Arcade (can’t find where because their search function is weak). Basically, you have the levelling game where you start at L1 and then play until max level (currently L70), and then the game that happens after the levelling game, which is filled with group activities of all sorts as you improve your max level character.

Which brings me to another iconic player, Lisa. I’m sure that all of you have met her before:

“I’m max level! I couldn’t have gotten here unless I knew something about my class. Let me tell you about why…”

“…my retribution paladin has a lot of defense.”

“…my hunter has a lot of spell damage.”

“…my holy priest only uses flash heal.”

“…my warrior tanks with a two-handed weapon.” (Note: reroll deathknight in a few months)

“…my mage loves to wand.”

Lisa feels like she knows what’s what, because all these super-raiding-types she sees in the common cities? They’re the same level as she is. Aside from their zomgepics, there’s no visual indicator that what they’ve done is any different than what she’s done… in her mind. And frankly, since anyone can get zomgepics in battlegrounds, even that is less of a clue than it once was.

The problem is that hitting maximum level in one of these grinding-type games has absolutely no relation to knowing anything about the game and how to play it. All it means is that you have been dedicated and persistent, and hopefully had fun along the way. Especially in World of Warcraft, the game is extremely forgiving and easy to solo play.

There’s no smooth transition between the first game (levelling/solo play) and the second game (endgame/group play). I’ve read a lot of intelligent suggestions on how to bridge that gap, but the reality is that as long as Blizzard sticks with their design choice of letting anyone get to maximum level, with no intermediate checks along the way relating to their skill of play, then the vast majority of players are going to go the easiest way possible, because people are fond of success. Also, Blizzard is fond of money, and this super-casual crowd is a decent chunk of their base.

When a hunter can level to max level by using only melee weapons and never once firing a ranged weapon… don’t get me wrong, I think that what Gweryc did is cool. He deliberately made the game challenging in the levelling process, which is an interesting turnabout for a hunter. What makes Gweryc notable is not that that he did it, it’s that he did it on purpose.

There are thousands of people making those same against-the-grain choices but not understanding that they’re doing so. I usually find them waiting for a battleground to begin, wondering aloud if their 20-game losing streak is ever going to end, and silently weeping for the 15-45 minutes I’m about to waste in the upcoming losing effort.

What makes Lisa so annoying isn’t that she’s max level, it’s that she doesn’t understand the difference between the levelling game and the endgame. She doesn’t understand that there’s more knowledge to be attained, so she dismisses any advice or criticism out of hand. After all, she’s been to the zones, done the quests and gotten the quest rewards, same as you. She doesn’t care or even really think about the fact she skipped every group quest and every instance.

You: “Hey Lisa the pally, what’s the cooldown on Divine Intervention?”

Lisa: “Divine Intervention?”

You: “Yeah, it’s a spell I heard about that you have.”

Lisa: “O rly? Let me check my spellbook.”

(time passes)

Lisa: “Pssh, I’ve never seen this spell before.”

Actually, she did. Lisa just instantly dismissed it when she saw that it killed her to cast it… which is opposite of the whole point of the game when you’re solo’ing. What possible use could it have?

Max level isn’t even a hint.

Officers should all have Tanks and Healers

(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.

The Downside of Endgame Guilds

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)

Second Magister’s Terrace run

Ran it for the second time with my guild, again on my healing priest. This time I better appreciated its virtues, I think. It’s a fun, interesting, and relaxing instance, perfect in length. It runs like a greatest-hits version of Burning Crusade boss-fight design.

Of course, both times I’ve healed it have been with a very talented protection paladin doing the tanking. Protection pally tanking everything is easy-mode for everything but boss fights. I haven’t had to heal the group with a protection warrior yet, which I’m guessing would be (cough) a bit harder due to the aoe encounters. The sad state of warrior tanking is well known. We had a mage, rogue, and hunter, which gave us ample crowd control. The hunter was one of those lovely people who like to put an ice trap in front of me instead of him. Just a nice run from start to finish, and the reason I like the game. Group up with guildies, laugh through an enjoyable instance together, where effective teamwork matters.

I forgot that someone gets a zomgepic just for completing normal mode. Last night that someone was me, when I lucked into [Kharmaa's Ring of Fate] off Kael’thas Sunstrider. The socket (on a ring, whee!) goes perfectly with the quest reward gem ([Teardrop Crimson Spinel]). I’m not sold on priest healing with spell haste yet because priest healing is a mix of instant/non-instant spells, but I’ll experiment to see if it’s better than my [Band of Halos]. Not that you can actually tell most of the time. More on that later.

An interesting healing note is that in both wins on the Kael’thas, two dps’ers died. It actually got much easier after that, when you have only three people to keep alive instead of five. Most of the time when someone dies, that means that the full damage of that part of the encounter then turns to someone else. This event has constant global damage, so the group takes 100% damage with five people, 80% damage with four, and an easy-to-heal-through 60% with three. I’ll shoot for four teammates alive at the end of the next run.

This is a very fun instance. I’m looking forward to trying this on heroic.

SPHOs

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.)

If you’re in a friendly guild, you almost certainly have some of these. The guildmaster’s boyfriend/girlfriend. An officer’s uncle. The guy who works a few cubicles over from one of your core healers. It’s like the tax that comes from being in a friendly guild with players who accumulate good karma. That karma gets spent quietly over time.

A SPHO’s core skills are being friendly and trying hard. Their ties usually don’t extend too far beyond the RL-tie that brought them to this guild, but sometimes they’re fully vested members who are good at everything except the game you’re all playing together.

In terms of playing the game effectively, you can think of people in your guild who are 50% to 100% more effective than they are, and not because they have better gear. SPHOs raid or pvp frequently enough to have great gear. There’s simply a problem between chair and keyboard that prevents this amazing toon with great gear from dominating their chosen role the way you’d expect.

A small selection of SPHOs:

The healing priest who only uses flash heal.
The rogue who never has slice and dice up.
The hunter who can’t break the habit of using multishot to break CC at the wrong time.
The warlock who insists on fearing in every encounter, no matter how close the next group is to you.

These players have no idea how hard the people around them are working to cover their playstyle. They take full credit for everything that happens in their presence, because hey, they were there and pushing buttons too. You’ll never be able to explain that if they are one healer out of three, they shouldn’t be doing 8% of the healing while doing no damage. If they’re a damage-dealer, they’ll cheer that they got a huge crit, but won’t notice that they do less than half the total damage of the next person over. If you swap them out for a random person, you’re likely to have the same or better success. They don’t understand that.

SPHOs make group leading difficult because the leader always has to watch what that person is doing. While a SPHO will never learn the game, they can obey simple instructions like “stand behind this boss when in melee” or “gank the healer first”. And those frequent reminders have to be gentle, because they’re friends with someone who make take it personally.

SPHOs make group management difficult because the easiest reason to turn someone away is because they’re not geared enough. But what happens when they are geared enough, and they just don’t play well? It’s difficult to have the conversation whose theme is “you can’t come because we’ll die more and find less success less with you than with someone else.” Because you are, in essence, telling your friend in the guild to solve the problem, and most of the time, that person does not want to.

World of Warcraft isn’t serious business. But it is a team activity. And just like you shouldn’t invite an unathletic, uncoordinated person to play halfback on your soccer team, you shouldn’t invite someone who isn’t good at the game to your groups without clearly explaining why they are there: namely, that they’re filling an otherwise empty spot and are liable to be replaced. Sometimes you just need someone who can fog a mirror or else the group doesn’t move, that’s fine. But you have to set expectations accordingly. Otherwise, you’re giving birth to a SPHO who is going to feel like they got in once and contributed, so they’ll get in again. And again. And once that SPHO is in, it’s really hard to get them out without a conversation whose subject is: “It’s not that we don’t like you, it’s that you suck at this game and when you’re around we lose more often than what we consider normal.”

Or, you can just resign yourself to groups with less success. That works too. Honestly, that’s what my guild does. I just dream about the alternative every now and then.

casual/raiding

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.

Our casual/raiding guild runs five-man normals and heroics with ease. We’re capable of doing any level of content. We laugh when instances get nerfed, and we’re laughing right now when we hear people complain about how hard the new Magister’s Terrace instance is. Our sweet spot as a guild is the small raid content, which in vanilla WoW was Zul’Gurub and AQ20, and now is Karazhan and Zul’Aman. Smaller raids are the right balance of management/reward.

Our guild can never seem to top that crest of enough people to raid the largest level of content. This (mostly) doesn’t stress us out, although of course it’s different from person to person. Back in the day, we took 28 to Molten Core, and stuck with it until we had success. I don’t think we’re stubborn enough to do that again. We’ve tried out 19 in Gruul, wiped a bunch, shook our head and walked away. Other people have written at length about the strange guild hierarchy that happens due to the most development time being put into large-group raids. We’re happy where we are.

Our guild’s recruitment is passive and constant. People who want to learn endgame from scratch start here and then leave, some kindly and some unkindly. We have people who have left who we’re still friends with. We’ve had cliques splinter off to form their own guilds. We keep recruiting despite the overhead and energy lost, because every now and then we find a person who is a perfect match for what we’re about, and they find that this is exactly what they’ve been looking for, just like my wife and I did. And then we become friends to laugh with and play this game with. It’s a good system.

We don’t give people a hard time when they go on vacation, or when they want a break from raiding. We also have guild members who have no intention of ever raiding. People haven’t given me and my wife a hard time when our family expanded and our playtime has permanently decreased. Our guild is friendly. People are more important than raid progression. Casual. But the time that we do spend together online, we work to be the best group that we can. Raiding.

That’s casual/raiding. It’s not perfect, but it’s perfect for us.

One week with patch 2.4

I’ll start by saying that Magister’s Terrace (MrT) is wonderful from start to finish. It’s beautiful to look at, the music is great, the bosses are fun, and the gear potential makes me want to bring all my characters there. If it were none of those, it’d still be a new place to go with my guildmates. But it’s great, so kudos to Blizzard.

(Also, the in-game cinematic should be something that they do ALL THE TIME. Not just in instances, but quests. ALL THE TIME. When you create a soulwell, or a ritual of refreshment. You should get an in-game cinematic when you click your hearthstone. Just get that world of warcraft narrator talking, and you feel epic.)

The game mechanic corrections and tweaks are all welcome, as always. New crafting rewards are welcome, new faction, new zone. New combat log, new portals coming. New zomg epics. I was glad to see the excitement of my guildmates as they purchased Nether Vortexes (Vortices?) and upgraded their crafted gear.

All good fun.

Maybe I’ve been following the game’s development too much, but I’m still underwhelmed. Not by what’s been given, but by the long barren months between here and the next expansion, which is presumably six or more months away. The new 25-man raid instance is going to keep the high-end guilds happy for a while, but it means absolutely nothing to me and my wife, as well as our guild. I’m guessing that it took Blizzard a while to make.

The dailies? Well, they’re mostly kill X quests. Yes, the quests eventually open up new parts of town, and it’s fun to progress as a server and feel actual community with all these people I’ve been bumping shoulders with for a couple of years. But the Ogrila quests themselves were more fun: you have a roping quest, a bombing quest, a portal quest. Here, you have a bunch of kill quests and one bombing quest. I’m just saying, we could have some story quests mixed in with the unlocking of phases.

Oh, a note on the Sunwell bombing run: get a partner. Otherwise I don’t see how you could do it in one pass (it’s taken me three tries every time when I’ve tried it solo). With my wife, we did it in one pass.

I’m really looking forward to Wrath of the Lich King. It’s a long way away. In the meantime, I’ll be doing the dailies and enjoying Magister’s Terrace.

There are Many Ways to Win

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. Granted, there was an epic hunter quest, and a few limited crafting bits, and world drops, and a top-level pvp set that only a handful of people could get. But in all, the reality was that 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.

Compare with the current WoW, TBC. The reliable ways to get epic items include:
25-man raiding
10-man raiding
heroic five man instances
crafting
participating in arena
participating in battlegrounds
purchased at a vendor with tokens (Badge of Justice) obtainable from 10/25-man raiding or even daily questing
and also the world drop/auction house

People who play in hardcore raiding guilds miss the days of when they were the only ones with epics. Despite their complaining, Blizzard has consistently introduced more ways to get epic items, not less. They’ve made the game more accessible to those who can’t or won’t hardcore raid. This is great for players like me: a new father, full-time working, and so on. If I get spend one or two nights a week online, I’m happy and will continue to keep my account active. And the game will reward me for it. And when I do participate in raids, my gear won’t be a liability, only my rustiness.

With 2.4, every last crafting profession yields BoP benefits akin to useful epics, even alchemists. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next expansion, Blizzard expanded the BoJ purchasing scheme even further, allowing (in essence) crafted Badges of Justice.

The best part is that these paths to success aren’t finite anymore, either. Now when a higher-level of loot is released to 25-man raiders, a waterfall of upgrades cascades down to those who aren’t involved in 25-man raiding. New heroic loot, new badge of justice rewards, a new arena season, upgraded battleground gear, another tier of crafting or relaxation of material requirements. Basically, they’re giving everyone new ways to continue improving, without ever having to set foot in a 25-man raid. You’ll never have gear as good as all those dedicated raiders, but you won’t be left in the cold, either. Blizzard now adds loot across the board.

In short, there are many ways to win.

This hurts guilds trying to build up to 25-man raiding (including my own), because in vanilla wow you had a lot of players who were in raiding guilds solely for the loot (again, like my own). The primary reason the people are in my guild stick around is because they like each other! This makes my guild more fun, and therefore the experience of playing the game more fun.

I’m looking forward to the next expansion to see how this trend continues.