I had an interesting conversation with a friend the other day. Lets call him Tim. Tim is a very strong player and I have no doubt that he would do well in any US first or world first guild. No exaggeration, he is that level of player; but he has been tossing around in the minor leagues for some time now, enjoying limited success.
Why does Tim settle? Because of the time commitment. Until recently he has been able to enjoy an amount of success and raid progression that is not the best, but is acceptable given the amount of time he has to put in to it. Were there baddies in Tim's raid? Sure. Did his back get sore from carrying them? Regularly. Did he keep pushing because it was the best he could do on two nights a week? Exactly that... until recently.
With the release of Cata all of Tim's baddies got worse. Or, more accurately, their badness was put in the limelight. He is now starting to go through the same frustration that I went through in WotLK. Carrying people is no longer acceptable to him. It is too much work for too little gain, especially when the people he is trying to help and carry along are dragging their feet the whole way.
It is like they don't mean what they say. They say they want to raid and be good at it, but then they don't do what needs to be done in order to make that a reality. Instead they always have an excuse for why the failure wasn't their fault.
"I couldn't see the fire. How can I be expected to move if I can't see it?"
"I guess I just need more gear for this content. I need epics in order to run the content that gives me epics."
"Lag killed me. Every time we do this boss. Every week. On the same void zone. Man lag sucks."
So what did Tim do to combat this growing incompetence? He set standards. Let me say that his guild has always had standards, they were just loosely understood and never expressly stated. Now they have a benchmark. A bar that the raiders must rise above in order to raid... and it is pissing everyone off. All of the lazy, incompetent people who were enjoying being carried through content are having that taken away from them, and they don't like it.
The baddies in Tim's guild have started throwing around the term 'elitist', directed at Tim and others of a like mind in his guild. They are claiming that Tim expects too much, that he sets the bar too high, and that his refusal to allow people to play below the bar is just elitism of the worst kind. They want Tim to structure the guild for the lowest common denominator.
I say Tim is making the right choice. Good job to Tim! There is a very big difference between elitism and having standards. Let me use high school football as an example. In high school you have tryouts for the football team. The experts (coaches) observe the kids that are trying to make the team and gauge their skill level. Then they place the kids on different teams according to their performance. The best players get to be on the varsity team. The next level down is junior varsity, and below that is the "just for funzies", or recreational team. The people on the junior varsity team are less skilled and/or less experienced than those on the varsity team. They just can't compete at the varsity level, and the coaches recognize that. Are the coaches being elitist assholes? Are they being mean spirited and saying, "sorry kid, you can't belong to our club"? Absolutely not. They have set standards and the kids on the junior varsity team did not meet those standards. In the future, as the junior varsity players improve and sharpen their skills they will have more opportunities to move up to the varsity team. When they do move up they are welcomed excitedly as part of the team. No one is shutting them down and saying "you are not elite enough to join us. Just go away." They simply have standards. The varsity team is designed to perform at a certain level and if you cannot keep up then you do not belong on the varsity team. Maybe later, when you have gotten better, but not at this time.
In WoW, a lot of people refuse to see things this way. They think that being told they are not 'varsity' quality is an insult and that makes the people telling them 'elitist assholes'. In reality, people like Tim and myself do not want to see these players fail. We do not want to see them be bad. We don't expressly enjoy kicking them off of the team. We want to see them succeed, learn, grow, become better players, and be a valuable member of the team. Great players are hard to find. If you can become one, we want you! Here is the kicker, we aren't going to do it for you. My raid group is not "How to raid 101". My raid group is for people that are already good. I have standards, and to raid with me you have to meet or exceed them. Tim is finding out that he wants the same thing, and that most of the players in his guild just don't get it.
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P.S. Tomorrow I will write about some practical ways to help yourself make the 'varsity team'. If you are struggling with getting better at the game there are most likely some very simple things that you can do to fix yourself that may not have occurred to you, and they don't require as much time as you might think.
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