Rethinking the raid guild
#6
Quote:Short answer: Yes, I would be interested, assuming my interest in wow in general survives the expansion coming out (I'd say ~40% chance). I've seen a few guilds that I or RL friends of mine have been in who have tried things along the lines of what I think you want, but usually in a timid or too-little-too-late fashion. It's very leader-dependent, you need someone willing to make the time commitment and with the emotional stamina to ignore the BS and those who produce it, who is also competent at the actual mechanics of playing the game. I'll assume for the sake of argument that you're willing and able:)

Thanks that's very encouraging

Quote:There's two big decisions to be made; who you take to your runs, and how you split up loot.

For the first few runs of the month we want to get everyone to two raids each so priority is for people who haven't raided yet

After that, priority is by ranking within a raid role. So if we have 16 dps slots we will start inviting based on performance for the month so far. The raid leader can override this if he wants a particular class. If the raid leader wants 2 warlocks because of the nature of the encounter he can invite the top two locks even if they're 17th and 18th best rated dps available. It's all about optimising our chance to be successful on this night's raid

How we split up loot will be by buying them with points. Say a weapon costs 10 points. Someone who has raided twice so far this month and has scored 5/10 and 6/10 has 11 points and would get the item ahead of someone who has raided once and scored 8/10 (and would then have 1 point left in his bank)

This is not zero sum and is inflationary. However at the end of each month all players balances are zeroed. So there's very little motive to hoarde dkp and new players alway have a sporting chance to get something unless they're really awful

Quote:These are, imho, entirely seperate concerns. Things like whining about loot or being overly "greedy" are solved with a well-thought-out loot scheme; this is essentially a solved problem. Problems like taking ill-timed afk breaks, learn2play issues, general negativity and not valuing other people's time are not likely to be solved by messing with the loot, but I think your plans to keep that sort of thing in line by making you less likely to be invited back has a lot of potential.

Well I'm trying to tie poor performance in to 4 main reward areas: loot distribution, guild security, raid spots and e-peen. Most raiders are very egotistical, if a raider keeps getting 5/10 because he performs really well but constantly tells the raid leader how to do every encounter "better" enough for the raid leader to penalise him his vanity is likely to stop him from continuing to get these bad scores (or gquit in disgust and tell everyone I'm a noob, which is fine. I think frequent server forum flame wars will be good publicity for us and will help get us recruits)

Quote:And now, a little negitivity of my own where I point out things i've spectacularly not work before:
This won't work. You're not going to be able to offload responsibility for judging people to the people being judged.

OK I can see that. As I see it measuring performance is about 3 things: collecting data, analyzing data and assigning a value system

Let's use the Mages role in the Major Domo fight as an example. For anyone who hasn't played this fight there is a main boss and 8 adds, you can sheep 4 of the adds. To complicate matters the adds get a magic reflection buff at periodic intervals during the fight so if you let sheep break and they have the 10 seconds buff up you either have to wait the 10 seconds while your target rampages through the healers or if you're really stupid you cast sheep and sheep yourself

Now suppose mage #1 keeps his mob sheeped, refreshing sheep well before it wears off and still manages to dps
Mage #2 keeps his mob sheeps
Mage#3 does lots of dps but his mob breaks sheep a few times and about 5 people over the course of the fight
Mage#4 sheeps himself. Twice

As raid leader/guild leader I wouldn't want to collect this data. It's too laborious to keep track of every player in this way. So I want the mage leader to collect it and then perform a preliminary analysis by posting on our boards the scores for each mage and why they scored those marks. I then have a chance to glance over his post and see if I'm happy with it. If Mage#4 always screwed up and I was really cross with him I might downgrade his mark for instance, because I'm seeing it from a raid perspective. He wiped us twice and we had to call it a night. He doesn't even deserve 3/10

But also and just as importantly the Mage players can make their case. If Mage #3 wants to argue that his damage was crucial to the fight and a big part of why we won he has his soapbox and the debate can range back and forward.

Mage#4 might claim resists and lag, while it doesn't effect his mark since marks are tied to good results not good intentions it allows him to mitigate an embarassingly bad night

If dps leader is awarding himself high marks unfairly (eg a rogue who did much more damage than the mages because he didn't have to sheep and is basing scores off the damage meter) then the forums will explode in flame wars and the guild leader can step in. That's fine, I'm happy for things to work that way. It's a lot of delegation but with intense scrutiny of the marking by those concerned

I also suspect that if they're fighting each other they'll fight me less. My headteacher mother once explained to me why she liked school uniform. Teenage girls want to push the limits. With uniform they rebel by wearing jewelry and culottes. Without uniform it's boys and drugs

The dps leader steps down at the end of the month and whoever is top rated dps aside from him is offered into the job. Leaders earn +1 mark per raid and can't be kicked for performance (although they could be kicked the month after because they're no longer leader if they keep performing badly)

Now it's possible for a role leader to always mark himself up. There is the option for the guild leader to intervene. If every time a role leader publishes his analysis there are howls of protest he's jeopardising his position. Even if I don't sack him during the month does he really want to risk next month's leader hating him?

So I think it's possible to let role leaders decide their own marks. As so much of this, it depends a very great deal on the people. In my experience most really good players are very clear-sighted about the game, it's the people who aren't very good who have delusions

Quote:If you want the system to be somewhat more transparent I could see telling your class leaders to use some sort of carrot/stick point system and a general policy of taking the person with the better rating.

Yeah exactly. As I described above it may even be the most transparent system ever - people can work out exactly what they should be doing to score points

Quote:People should be permitted to accrue credit from day one; it encourages performance much more effetively than vague threats of being kicked from a guild that you just joined.

Both here and on the WoW EU boards where I also posted this idea players have felt very strongly that people should be permitted to accrue credit from day one.

I think I'll U-turn on my original idea of not paying dkp for the first week-month. There's enough incentive in the system to play well and with experienced raiders telling me people want to get paid from day one I can accept the point. There aren't many people who would work their first month of a new job free unless truly desperate

I think the key thing is that we offer a chance to practically every one. I don't care if people are furious with us and flame us, they're still welcome back a month later when they've calmed down and can't get a guild elsewhere. There are always going to be surplus warriors and dps, I'm sure we will have plenty of recruits there. I am a bit worried about healers but I think we'll have to suck it and see. I certainly think the guild leader should be a healer so that's at least one we'll have. What is nice for healers though is a bid on anything spec for anything policy. Want to stay feral and just heal in raids? Fine as long as you can make the cut. Want to go Resto and heal raids while collecting face melter gear? Fine. I don't want it to be a "omg, you don't need that!" atmosphere. This mainly hurts Rogues, Mages/Locks and people who want 2-handed weapons which are the most available classes of raiders. So the guild is more viable because we can attract the healers who want tank/rogue/mage loot and specs. Not ideal, but I hate the traditional wow attitude of "stfu and heal, you rolled healer so heal"

What I'm hoping is that we'll develop an elite of superb Rogues and Mages who take pride in being far above the Retrinoobs and KittyKats, while also having an enthusiastic bunch of healers who heal us because they know that if they get bored (which they won't) we'll support them in gearing up a different spec

Well I certainly think it's interesting enough to try it out, responses from the WoW EU boards were generally supportive too

http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?t...=70177024&sid=1
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Messages In This Thread
Rethinking the raid guild - by Brista - 10-21-2006, 05:19 PM
Rethinking the raid guild - by Monkey - 10-21-2006, 07:22 PM
Rethinking the raid guild - by oldmandennis - 10-22-2006, 05:01 AM
Rethinking the raid guild - by Professor Frink - 10-22-2006, 11:12 AM
Rethinking the raid guild - by Brista - 10-22-2006, 03:45 PM
Rethinking the raid guild - by Brista - 10-22-2006, 04:43 PM
Rethinking the raid guild - by Skandranon - 10-22-2006, 07:50 PM
Rethinking the raid guild - by oldmandennis - 10-23-2006, 01:20 AM
Rethinking the raid guild - by MongoJerry - 10-23-2006, 02:00 AM
Rethinking the raid guild - by NuurAbSaal - 10-23-2006, 05:11 PM
Rethinking the raid guild - by oldmandennis - 10-23-2006, 06:21 PM
Rethinking the raid guild - by Brista - 10-24-2006, 02:34 AM
Rethinking the raid guild - by Monkey - 10-24-2006, 04:18 PM
Rethinking the raid guild - by oldmandennis - 10-24-2006, 06:12 PM

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