Patch notes are in progress. I love patch notes. They give you great insight into the mind of the developers and the direction that they are wanting to take the game. Having a clear picture of the state of the game and then looking at the big picture of how they are adjusting everything is great. Does it make me a better player? Probably not except that I have more general knowledge about the game. It certainly won't increase my performance in a raid.
It used to be that I got excited about patch notes. When I say excited, I mean that I got fired up. I was frustrated by nerfs and ecstatic over buffs. Often verbally, with great volume, to anyone who would listen. I am not that way anymore. Why not? And why does it matter?
Well, I have been playing WoW for six years. Over the course of six years I have experienced a lot of different changes to the game. I have watched Blizzard ignore problems for months and years. I have watched them fix things the very next day. I have seen the game evolve, killing my class/spec. I have seen patches that make me the most overpowered thing the game has ever seen. Through it all I have gained a few things, one of them being perspective. Another is trust.
I trust the WoW dev team. Over time they have fixed every major issue, balanced every overpowered spec, fixed every glitch, and made solid improvements to every aspect of gameplay. I have also seen a steady increase in speed and accuracy in their ability to solve these problems. They have earned my trust, and I know that they will continue to improve.
So what happens when I am overpowered? I know I will soon be nerfed and just enjoy it while I can. When I am lagging behind it doesn't bother me, I know it will get fixed shortly. The joke 'Soon™' started back when the rare, once-a-quarter blue post hit the forums and nebulously said, "We are aware of the issues and they will be fixed soon." Then months and years went by with no fix and no updates. Everyone quickly became aware of the famous Blizzard use of the word 'soon' and what they really meant by it. Now Blizzard jokes at themselves by using it, and 'Soon™' has turned into a month or two.
This understanding and trust ends up turning into apathy. I read the patch notes diligently, and I care in that I keep myself acutely aware of the state of the game including class/spec specifics for all classes, but I feel entirely apathetic to the feelings of frustration or elation that others may experience when reading the same patch notes. I don't get up in arms about things because I know they will come around, and dealing with an issue in the short term is not a big deal.
This attitude has a great affect on my gameplay. I have to admit that my mood affects my performance. Anyone who claims otherwise is either not self aware or is lying. Morale matters. The apathy that I feel towards the nerf/buff swings in the game allows me to sit back and enjoy playing, untainted by the frustration of a favorite ability getting the nerf bat or my fellow raiders getting buffed to overpowered levels while I sit at the average. I don't suffer form over excitement whereby I make stupid mistakes in a raid because I am inappropriately using a newly overpowered toy. My performance remains more steady, more consistent, and thus allows me to push it ever higher as I perfect my skills and not backslide due to patch note feelings.
For what its worth, I know that this is something that is not available to everyone. Some people are just excitable and they always will be. But if you can become more self aware in this area, and perhaps learn some strategic apathy, it can help your play as well.
Showing posts with label Ramblings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ramblings. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Morons and Slackers
The following is a direct copy/paste from Gevlon's blog over at The Greedy Goblin. His first language is not English, so forgive the spelling and grammar errors. The content of what he has written here is what I wanted to share. I agree with him.
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About M&S
The morons and slackers are a central theme of this blog. I was surprised that many people still don't understand this concept and believe that I use this term simply on bad players. Some even defend them that they are just casuals, who are not even bad, just play less. This is nonsense.
The morons and slackers are indeed bad players, but not because of lack of gaming skill or effort. They are bad people whose badness is universal, applies to everything they do, including of course gaming. Let me point out the fundamental and non-gaming differences between M&S and other, less progressed players.
Any activity needs effort to be successful. You can't become an athlete, get good SAT, university diploma or keep your job unless you make appropriate effort. This applies of course to gaming. In MMOs effort correlates with time spent playing, despite it's not the same. I'm sure that over the full course of the 4.0 content I'll play more than some Paragon and Method members, without even getting close to Sinestra. "Effort" can mostly be defined as "sacrifice". I refused to sacrifice my schedule, I play when I want to. Therefore I can't be in a high-attendance guild, so no easy farmraids for me, every time I have to go with new people who takes some wipes to learn the strategy, so I spend much more time in farmbosses than the HC players, who oneshot everything with their fixed team. If I made the sacrifice of "I'll make it to raid on Wednesday, Friday, Sunday and Monday 19:00-23:00 every time", I'd kill much more bosses. Of course there is always someone who makes more effort and someone who makes less than you.
Two kind of people don't make the necessary effort to react top content: casuals and slackers. Yet their similarities end here. The casual is aware that he choose to not make the effort, therefore abandoning the goal. I'm fully aware that I won't kill Sinestra before the next content patch and gear upgrade, and I don't think I would deserve to kill her before that. The casual acknowledge the fact that there is no success without effort, he just believes that the reward isn't worth the effort. The casual is happy with his choice and doesn't envy those who have more, as he knows that they worked hard for it, and he didn't. Casuals can range from never-reach-85 funplayers exploring the world to "casual raiders" who "just" raid 3 days a week. Everyone is a casual in someone's eyes and hardcore in someone else's. "Casual" is a relative term, and it's inappropriate to use it on anyone. The proper usage is "X is more casual than Y".
The slacker also don't make the effort, but it doesn't stop him from wanting the rewards. He believes he is entitled for everything, simply on the basis of him being a human (him paying $15). He believes that others should make his rewards happen. "Others" can be Blizzard nerfing everything to his low-effort level, or other players boosting him. The slacker resent those who have more than him and believes that they are just lucky or evil who immorally keep him away from goals. He believes that the raid leader who kicks him for below-tank DPS is merely an elitist jerk who has no life and kicked him only because he has life.
The slacker is not defined by the amount of effort he makes. He is defined by the low effort/goal ratio. If you play "just" 8 hours a day and want world firsts, you are a slacker (despite much more hardcore than me). On the other hand if you play 8 hours a week and want to do one HC a week, completed the Twilight quests for 333 gear, enchanted it, you are a prepared player (more casual than me, though) who deserves his goals reached. Slacker is not a relative term, someone is or is not a slacker based on the question: does he do enough effort to reach the goals he set?
To reach success, effort is not enough. Skill is needed to make the proper choices where to make effort. If I spend 100 hours completing fluff achievements, I am much further from being ready to raid than the guy who spent 10 hours getting 346 blues. The unskilled person wastes his efforts. In WoW there are two kind of unskilled people:
The newbie don't know much about the game yet. He makes bad choices, wastes his effort. However he is aware of his ignorance and wants to learn. Reads the materials he accesses, listens to other, more skilled players and above all, learns from his mistakes. As with "casual", "newbie" is also a relative term and cannot be used on anyone. I am ignorant newbie compared to the guys who write EJ and a pro compared to those who don't know about spell rotations. Everyone is less informed and skilled (newbie) than someone and more informed and skilled (prop) to someone else.
The moron refuses to learn. His motivation can be a complete anti-knowledge culture, this case he devalues skill, believes that it doesn't exists and only effort and luck are needed. He is the "i just dun have gear" moron, who sometimes make huge effort to get gear, but still sucks as his rotation is a joke. The other possible motivation is a false belief in his knowledge. While he is ignorant, he thinks he is smart and refuses to learn from "the newbs". Both kind of morons believe that those above them made more effort (no lifers), just lucky or in worst case "got more help" (which of course means they are entitled for the same help).
"Moron" is an absolute, "you are or you are not" quality that is not based on your absolute knowledge but on "do you know enough to reach the goals you set"?. If you are healing as a shaman in a world first aspirant guild and don't know if 1.2 mastery rating or 1 crit rating is better for a you in avearge 364, and you don't even know that you should, you are a moron. On the other hand if you only know that both stats are good for a resto shaman, while hit is not, you are completely skilled for someone who does only Argoloth and 5-mans.
As you can see, the difference between casual and slacker, newbie and moron has nothing to do with spell rotations, boss tactics or ilvl. These are personality, value, meta-skill differences. While newbieness and casualness is limited to a game, being slacker and moron are universally true to the person.
Last question: why "M&S", why do I address them together, despite moron and slacker are pretty different in motivation, beliefs and values? Because unless I spend lot of time analyzing a specimen, I can't tell which one is him. Is he ungemmed because he doesn't know the importance of gems or because he doesn't want to grind gold for gems? Does he fails the boss mechanics because he don't know about written boss strategies or because he can't be arsed to read them? Does he beg gold because he doesn't know about goldmaking techniques or because he is lazy to do them? Does he stands in the fire because he don't know that the incoming damage is avoidable or because he is watching TV? Does he write "yo m8 cud u link mats 4 vial" because he really think it's English (and doesn't know that Wowhead has the recipe) or because he can't care less to write properly (and use wowhead)?
I'm not his therapist. It's not my job to solve his problems. If he aims for a goal, he must do the necessary effort and have the necessary skill to reach this goal. If he can't do it, he is either a moron or a slacker. A bad person who wastes the time of 4-9-24 other human beings. The title is about his skill/goal, effort/goal ratio. Since the only way to get something without proper skill and effort is boosting, the M&S is necessarily a leech, a parasite on the smart and the hard-working.
One more question remained: how could someone leave his current state and progress higher without turning into an M&S? I mean if you do the effort and have the skill for X goal, and it is inadequate to reach Y, at the moment you set Y as a goal, you become an M&S by the above statements. The answer is humility and openness. You should be aware and make every participants aware that you are not yet there to reach the goal. You must learn and accept criticism from those who are already there, seek knowledge and balance the lack of skill with extra effort.
The morons and slackers are indeed bad players, but not because of lack of gaming skill or effort. They are bad people whose badness is universal, applies to everything they do, including of course gaming. Let me point out the fundamental and non-gaming differences between M&S and other, less progressed players.
Any activity needs effort to be successful. You can't become an athlete, get good SAT, university diploma or keep your job unless you make appropriate effort. This applies of course to gaming. In MMOs effort correlates with time spent playing, despite it's not the same. I'm sure that over the full course of the 4.0 content I'll play more than some Paragon and Method members, without even getting close to Sinestra. "Effort" can mostly be defined as "sacrifice". I refused to sacrifice my schedule, I play when I want to. Therefore I can't be in a high-attendance guild, so no easy farmraids for me, every time I have to go with new people who takes some wipes to learn the strategy, so I spend much more time in farmbosses than the HC players, who oneshot everything with their fixed team. If I made the sacrifice of "I'll make it to raid on Wednesday, Friday, Sunday and Monday 19:00-23:00 every time", I'd kill much more bosses. Of course there is always someone who makes more effort and someone who makes less than you.
Two kind of people don't make the necessary effort to react top content: casuals and slackers. Yet their similarities end here. The casual is aware that he choose to not make the effort, therefore abandoning the goal. I'm fully aware that I won't kill Sinestra before the next content patch and gear upgrade, and I don't think I would deserve to kill her before that. The casual acknowledge the fact that there is no success without effort, he just believes that the reward isn't worth the effort. The casual is happy with his choice and doesn't envy those who have more, as he knows that they worked hard for it, and he didn't. Casuals can range from never-reach-85 funplayers exploring the world to "casual raiders" who "just" raid 3 days a week. Everyone is a casual in someone's eyes and hardcore in someone else's. "Casual" is a relative term, and it's inappropriate to use it on anyone. The proper usage is "X is more casual than Y".
The slacker also don't make the effort, but it doesn't stop him from wanting the rewards. He believes he is entitled for everything, simply on the basis of him being a human (him paying $15). He believes that others should make his rewards happen. "Others" can be Blizzard nerfing everything to his low-effort level, or other players boosting him. The slacker resent those who have more than him and believes that they are just lucky or evil who immorally keep him away from goals. He believes that the raid leader who kicks him for below-tank DPS is merely an elitist jerk who has no life and kicked him only because he has life.
The slacker is not defined by the amount of effort he makes. He is defined by the low effort/goal ratio. If you play "just" 8 hours a day and want world firsts, you are a slacker (despite much more hardcore than me). On the other hand if you play 8 hours a week and want to do one HC a week, completed the Twilight quests for 333 gear, enchanted it, you are a prepared player (more casual than me, though) who deserves his goals reached. Slacker is not a relative term, someone is or is not a slacker based on the question: does he do enough effort to reach the goals he set?
To reach success, effort is not enough. Skill is needed to make the proper choices where to make effort. If I spend 100 hours completing fluff achievements, I am much further from being ready to raid than the guy who spent 10 hours getting 346 blues. The unskilled person wastes his efforts. In WoW there are two kind of unskilled people:
The newbie don't know much about the game yet. He makes bad choices, wastes his effort. However he is aware of his ignorance and wants to learn. Reads the materials he accesses, listens to other, more skilled players and above all, learns from his mistakes. As with "casual", "newbie" is also a relative term and cannot be used on anyone. I am ignorant newbie compared to the guys who write EJ and a pro compared to those who don't know about spell rotations. Everyone is less informed and skilled (newbie) than someone and more informed and skilled (prop) to someone else.
The moron refuses to learn. His motivation can be a complete anti-knowledge culture, this case he devalues skill, believes that it doesn't exists and only effort and luck are needed. He is the "i just dun have gear" moron, who sometimes make huge effort to get gear, but still sucks as his rotation is a joke. The other possible motivation is a false belief in his knowledge. While he is ignorant, he thinks he is smart and refuses to learn from "the newbs". Both kind of morons believe that those above them made more effort (no lifers), just lucky or in worst case "got more help" (which of course means they are entitled for the same help).
"Moron" is an absolute, "you are or you are not" quality that is not based on your absolute knowledge but on "do you know enough to reach the goals you set"?. If you are healing as a shaman in a world first aspirant guild and don't know if 1.2 mastery rating or 1 crit rating is better for a you in avearge 364, and you don't even know that you should, you are a moron. On the other hand if you only know that both stats are good for a resto shaman, while hit is not, you are completely skilled for someone who does only Argoloth and 5-mans.
As you can see, the difference between casual and slacker, newbie and moron has nothing to do with spell rotations, boss tactics or ilvl. These are personality, value, meta-skill differences. While newbieness and casualness is limited to a game, being slacker and moron are universally true to the person.
Last question: why "M&S", why do I address them together, despite moron and slacker are pretty different in motivation, beliefs and values? Because unless I spend lot of time analyzing a specimen, I can't tell which one is him. Is he ungemmed because he doesn't know the importance of gems or because he doesn't want to grind gold for gems? Does he fails the boss mechanics because he don't know about written boss strategies or because he can't be arsed to read them? Does he beg gold because he doesn't know about goldmaking techniques or because he is lazy to do them? Does he stands in the fire because he don't know that the incoming damage is avoidable or because he is watching TV? Does he write "yo m8 cud u link mats 4 vial" because he really think it's English (and doesn't know that Wowhead has the recipe) or because he can't care less to write properly (and use wowhead)?
I'm not his therapist. It's not my job to solve his problems. If he aims for a goal, he must do the necessary effort and have the necessary skill to reach this goal. If he can't do it, he is either a moron or a slacker. A bad person who wastes the time of 4-9-24 other human beings. The title is about his skill/goal, effort/goal ratio. Since the only way to get something without proper skill and effort is boosting, the M&S is necessarily a leech, a parasite on the smart and the hard-working.
One more question remained: how could someone leave his current state and progress higher without turning into an M&S? I mean if you do the effort and have the skill for X goal, and it is inadequate to reach Y, at the moment you set Y as a goal, you become an M&S by the above statements. The answer is humility and openness. You should be aware and make every participants aware that you are not yet there to reach the goal. You must learn and accept criticism from those who are already there, seek knowledge and balance the lack of skill with extra effort.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Bigger is Better
We are moving servers. I know... big shocker, right? Honestly, the only thing I didn't see coming is that it took us this long to do it. I came to this server to raid with a friend, cannot raid with him due to R/L commitments, and instead of leaving I stuck around to try and make my own guild here. Bad choice.
The server I am leaving has a medium sized population. The only problem is that 80% of it is Alliance. That leaves a very low population on the Horde side, which has all sorts of awful effects. The economy is in disarray to the point where all crafting materials are a minimum of twice the price that you pay for the crafted item they create. It is bad enough that making 1k gold a day gross income is a good day; the supply of things you need are low across the board, even having gaps at times; and players are almost impossible to find. Notice that I said 'players', not 'good players'.
Let me paint a picture for you. It is Tuesday evening, prime time on reset day. The Horde just won TB for the first time of the day. What is trade chat filled with? Silence... even the crickets have left the server and aren't around to chirp. I form up a BH raid with the tank and healer spots already taken care of, as well as a couple of DPS. I decide to PuG the last four spots and advertise in trade. Please remember, my group has geared and accomplished players in it that already include the tanks and healers. I am asking for DPS... I get nothing. Not even some low level asking, "what BH is and can I come?" After 45 minutes of trying to get some DPS I finally get a retarded Ret Paladin that has half of his gem slots empty, the other half filled with crit gems, and a green AGI polearm asking to join us. Terrible, just terrible.
I did manage to recruit and impress some very skilled players (the only good thing to come out of this server). These players have also equally impressed me. They are sticking with me and following me to Area 52. They came to this server for the same reason that I did and want to leave for the exact same reasons. Why Area 52? It is huge, and bigger is better. Population size isn't the only thing that counts in a server; not by far. It is a great indicator of where to start looking though, and heavily influences almost every other important aspect of a good server. On Area 52 the Horde outnumber the Alliance by extreme amounts. The extremity of the faction imbalance is not necessary, but having your faction in the lead is... even if just by a little. The economy is stable and exactly what you would suspect. Demand for crafted items far outstrips the demand for the materials and creates a way for people to use their crafting skills to make gold. 20 of the guilds on the server are in the world's top 200 ranking, making raid drop BoE's and epic enchanting crystals much more available. Those guilds also draw players. Lots of players. Finding people has never been so easy, and we can afford to PuG our remaining spots while we wait for the awesome players that we actually want to recruit.
I knew all of this stuff. I have known it for a long time. I originally left Gul'dan because the population had dwindled to such low numbers that IF was actually empty on a Saturday afternoon. Why then, didn't I move servers sooner? Because I made a mistake. Yup, happens to everyone. The good thing is that this mistake isn't going to cost me the valuable players I have gained, only a little bit of time.
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P.S. I have started leveling my Priest and healing instances on the way up. Healing hasn't been this much of a blast since vanilla! Blizzard did wonders for the healing game and it really works the way it is supposed to. With that in mind, I am heavily considering switching mains. More on that subject later.
The server I am leaving has a medium sized population. The only problem is that 80% of it is Alliance. That leaves a very low population on the Horde side, which has all sorts of awful effects. The economy is in disarray to the point where all crafting materials are a minimum of twice the price that you pay for the crafted item they create. It is bad enough that making 1k gold a day gross income is a good day; the supply of things you need are low across the board, even having gaps at times; and players are almost impossible to find. Notice that I said 'players', not 'good players'.
Let me paint a picture for you. It is Tuesday evening, prime time on reset day. The Horde just won TB for the first time of the day. What is trade chat filled with? Silence... even the crickets have left the server and aren't around to chirp. I form up a BH raid with the tank and healer spots already taken care of, as well as a couple of DPS. I decide to PuG the last four spots and advertise in trade. Please remember, my group has geared and accomplished players in it that already include the tanks and healers. I am asking for DPS... I get nothing. Not even some low level asking, "what BH is and can I come?" After 45 minutes of trying to get some DPS I finally get a retarded Ret Paladin that has half of his gem slots empty, the other half filled with crit gems, and a green AGI polearm asking to join us. Terrible, just terrible.
I did manage to recruit and impress some very skilled players (the only good thing to come out of this server). These players have also equally impressed me. They are sticking with me and following me to Area 52. They came to this server for the same reason that I did and want to leave for the exact same reasons. Why Area 52? It is huge, and bigger is better. Population size isn't the only thing that counts in a server; not by far. It is a great indicator of where to start looking though, and heavily influences almost every other important aspect of a good server. On Area 52 the Horde outnumber the Alliance by extreme amounts. The extremity of the faction imbalance is not necessary, but having your faction in the lead is... even if just by a little. The economy is stable and exactly what you would suspect. Demand for crafted items far outstrips the demand for the materials and creates a way for people to use their crafting skills to make gold. 20 of the guilds on the server are in the world's top 200 ranking, making raid drop BoE's and epic enchanting crystals much more available. Those guilds also draw players. Lots of players. Finding people has never been so easy, and we can afford to PuG our remaining spots while we wait for the awesome players that we actually want to recruit.
I knew all of this stuff. I have known it for a long time. I originally left Gul'dan because the population had dwindled to such low numbers that IF was actually empty on a Saturday afternoon. Why then, didn't I move servers sooner? Because I made a mistake. Yup, happens to everyone. The good thing is that this mistake isn't going to cost me the valuable players I have gained, only a little bit of time.
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P.S. I have started leveling my Priest and healing instances on the way up. Healing hasn't been this much of a blast since vanilla! Blizzard did wonders for the healing game and it really works the way it is supposed to. With that in mind, I am heavily considering switching mains. More on that subject later.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Elitism vs. Having Standards
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.
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.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
A new guild is formed
So I decided to make my own guild.
I have done this before... a few times, so I am not very gun shy about it. I have a vent server set up already, a functioning guild website, and a recruitment plan all set. The normal details about loot rules and such are already taken care of. Having experienced some of the best (and having personally created some of the worst) I feel I have a good grasp on what will work and what I have the means to implement. The goal is to start 10 man raiding ASAP and recruit as time goes by for enough people to do 25 mans. I know that sounds like a big gap, but having a successful 10 man makes it easier to get people. When you can attract a few more people you can make a second 10 man. From there you are only a few recruits away from 25 man raiding.
The guild is Adept - US Perenold(H). http://adept-guild.wowstead.com (Yep, plugging my own guild. Get over it.)
I have found that new guilds often recruit way beyond their means. Their recruitment posts look something like, "New Guild is now recruiting! We have vent, a website, and a tabard; as well as a couple of guild bank tabs! We do PvP and Heroics, are starting raids soon, and love to level alts. Looking for all levels and classes. Come join us!" Oh how this guild is destined to fail.
First off, if you have people that joined your guild simply because of your tabard, or the ability to use your vent server and guild bank... boy are you scraping the bottom of the barrel. Secondly, what is your purpose? What is your guild aimed at? What can I expect to do when I join you? From your recruit post it looks like almost anyone and everyone will be happy there. Want to run heroics? Join us! Want to raid? We are trying to get enough people for a raid. You could be one of them! Want to PvP? We do that too!
It goes on and on; ad nauseam, ad infinitum. In reality you don't organize any of those things. You simply have a group of people that play together a lot and have realized that you need more people to be successful at some of the activities you enjoy. So you advertise that you do all of these activities. Do you? Sure. Do you organize them and put specific effort towards achieving success at them? No, you don't.
So what happens is a lot of naive players join your guild thinking that they will find the one thing in your recruit post that they are interested in. Maybe what you really want is people to casually run 5 mans and occasionally do other things when you are bored; but what you get is PvP focused players and raiders looking for a new raiding guild. These people will be unhappy in your guild and /gquit within weeks if not days or hours, leaving you with a sinking guild that can't hold onto members.
The solution? Identify what you really want to focus on and recruit for that purpose. My example would be that Adept is a hardcore raiding guild for people that don't have a hardcore amount of time to commit. We only raid nine hours a week, so all nine of them need to count. That means that I need people who are focused on succeeding in raids. They must have raiding specs, professions, experience, and a winner's mindset. My recruit post is also tailored to that end. Very few people have asked me about joining that weren't actually suited for my guild. It works. Tell people what you are and what you are looking for. Don't fill your recruit post with fluff, thinking that you might get the wandering superstar player who happens to like all of the random things that you advertise for but still really meshes with your core group. It won't happen.
It all boils down to this principle: Say what you mean, and mean what you say.
I have done this before... a few times, so I am not very gun shy about it. I have a vent server set up already, a functioning guild website, and a recruitment plan all set. The normal details about loot rules and such are already taken care of. Having experienced some of the best (and having personally created some of the worst) I feel I have a good grasp on what will work and what I have the means to implement. The goal is to start 10 man raiding ASAP and recruit as time goes by for enough people to do 25 mans. I know that sounds like a big gap, but having a successful 10 man makes it easier to get people. When you can attract a few more people you can make a second 10 man. From there you are only a few recruits away from 25 man raiding.
The guild is Adept - US Perenold(H). http://adept-guild.wowstead.com (Yep, plugging my own guild. Get over it.)
I have found that new guilds often recruit way beyond their means. Their recruitment posts look something like, "New Guild is now recruiting! We have vent, a website, and a tabard; as well as a couple of guild bank tabs! We do PvP and Heroics, are starting raids soon, and love to level alts. Looking for all levels and classes. Come join us!" Oh how this guild is destined to fail.
First off, if you have people that joined your guild simply because of your tabard, or the ability to use your vent server and guild bank... boy are you scraping the bottom of the barrel. Secondly, what is your purpose? What is your guild aimed at? What can I expect to do when I join you? From your recruit post it looks like almost anyone and everyone will be happy there. Want to run heroics? Join us! Want to raid? We are trying to get enough people for a raid. You could be one of them! Want to PvP? We do that too!
It goes on and on; ad nauseam, ad infinitum. In reality you don't organize any of those things. You simply have a group of people that play together a lot and have realized that you need more people to be successful at some of the activities you enjoy. So you advertise that you do all of these activities. Do you? Sure. Do you organize them and put specific effort towards achieving success at them? No, you don't.
So what happens is a lot of naive players join your guild thinking that they will find the one thing in your recruit post that they are interested in. Maybe what you really want is people to casually run 5 mans and occasionally do other things when you are bored; but what you get is PvP focused players and raiders looking for a new raiding guild. These people will be unhappy in your guild and /gquit within weeks if not days or hours, leaving you with a sinking guild that can't hold onto members.
The solution? Identify what you really want to focus on and recruit for that purpose. My example would be that Adept is a hardcore raiding guild for people that don't have a hardcore amount of time to commit. We only raid nine hours a week, so all nine of them need to count. That means that I need people who are focused on succeeding in raids. They must have raiding specs, professions, experience, and a winner's mindset. My recruit post is also tailored to that end. Very few people have asked me about joining that weren't actually suited for my guild. It works. Tell people what you are and what you are looking for. Don't fill your recruit post with fluff, thinking that you might get the wandering superstar player who happens to like all of the random things that you advertise for but still really meshes with your core group. It won't happen.
It all boils down to this principle: Say what you mean, and mean what you say.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Where I am coming from. Part 1
For my first ever blog post I have decided to give a general overview of my WoW resume and maybe some other thoughts. Why is that relevant? So you can know where I am coming from and what experiences I have had that influence my thinking, understanding, and grasp of the big picture. It will undoubtedly be longer than what will turn out to be an average post from me, as I have six years of personal history to get through. With that in mind, here goes.
Edit: I will be breaking this up into three posts. It was really long and I would rather not lose people due to the intimidation factor when faced will a "wall of text".
The Beginning
I started playing WoW in 2004, near the beginning of vanilla. It took me two months to level my first character (a priest that I leveled as shadow and specced holy at 60) to 60. When I was level 47 the AQ gates were opened on my server. That should give you a good idea of how long I have been playing.
After hitting level 60 I spent all of my time running instances. One day in Scholo I was healing for someone's guild run and they decided that they liked what they saw. An unguilded holy priest that didn't suck. I got invited to join their guild, and after asking a few questions about where they were in raid progression I decided to join Dragons of the Moon on the Gul'dan server, alliance side.
After joining I found out that they weren't quite as ready to raid as they claimed. I was told, yes we will be raiding. We are about two weeks away from our first ZG raid. A month later still no raiding. I pressed the guild leadership for it and about a month and a half after joining, off to ZG we went. Only one of the members had ever been to a raid before, so he volunteered to be the raid leader. It was horrible, but no one noticed. We were all feeling that weird mix of nerves and excitement as we tried to figure everything out. We ended up killing High Priest Venoxis (the snake boss) and wiping a lot on trash. Afterwords, when we were all talking about how it went, we agreed that the raid leader was bad at leading raids and someone needed to research how to do this raiding thing so that they could provide some good direction to the guild. I volunteered, and the spark of a raider's heart began in me.
I devoured all information I could find on the subject. I learned boss strats from other players, class mechanics from the forums, useful mods, anything I could to be successful. Now, you need to realize that at this time there wasn't much out there. Wowhead did not exist, wowwiki was a small site that didn't offer much, no elitistjerks, no bosskillers, no stratfu, no tankspot, no strat videos being made by anyone. Mods consisted of CTRA and Perl Classic. What was available was much more valuable than any of that, though.
Detailed explanations of class and game mechanics were available on the official forums. Tables where you could see each class's regen rate from spirit, full explanations of the five second rule and why it was important, Ciderhelm's original version of Fortifications: a Warrior's Reference Guide to Tanking, lists of every mob in the game that had a usable ability when you MC'd them, and much much more. These days when you want to find out how to kill a boss you can just watch a strat video. Back then you had to understand how the game mechanics worked and use that understanding to figure things out. Because of that, individual guilds would often have wildly varying strats for how they killed a boss. Thus it was left to me to come up with our strats. I loved it.
We cleared ZG many times as a guild and actually killed vanilla Onyxia quite a few times with only 30 people. Other than that we failed at raiding. We never had enough people to get into 40 mans, and AQ20 we could never push past the third boss. I raided MC with another guild (and earned my Benediction/Anathema), but personally never got into BWL, AQ40, or Vanilla Naxx.
When TBC came around I decided things would be different. I was going to form a real raid group from my guild (of which I was now the healing officer) and we were going to be successful. I was one of the first five people on the server to step inside of Karazhan, a mere 4 days after TBC launched.
Pre-nerf Karazhan was hard. 360° cleaves one shot melee DPS, AoE damage was high when we didn't have tools to deal with it well, instant random aggro drops got healers (meaning me) killed, and everyone felt way too squishy. Combine this with the fact that knowledge of things like the hit cap were not yet wide spread, 25+ people all wanting to get into a 10 man raid, and people changing mains to the extent that we lost tanks and healers... and what you get is a guild on the brink of falling apart. Which is exactly what it did over the course of a few months.
Edit: I will be breaking this up into three posts. It was really long and I would rather not lose people due to the intimidation factor when faced will a "wall of text".
The Beginning
I started playing WoW in 2004, near the beginning of vanilla. It took me two months to level my first character (a priest that I leveled as shadow and specced holy at 60) to 60. When I was level 47 the AQ gates were opened on my server. That should give you a good idea of how long I have been playing.
After hitting level 60 I spent all of my time running instances. One day in Scholo I was healing for someone's guild run and they decided that they liked what they saw. An unguilded holy priest that didn't suck. I got invited to join their guild, and after asking a few questions about where they were in raid progression I decided to join Dragons of the Moon on the Gul'dan server, alliance side.
After joining I found out that they weren't quite as ready to raid as they claimed. I was told, yes we will be raiding. We are about two weeks away from our first ZG raid. A month later still no raiding. I pressed the guild leadership for it and about a month and a half after joining, off to ZG we went. Only one of the members had ever been to a raid before, so he volunteered to be the raid leader. It was horrible, but no one noticed. We were all feeling that weird mix of nerves and excitement as we tried to figure everything out. We ended up killing High Priest Venoxis (the snake boss) and wiping a lot on trash. Afterwords, when we were all talking about how it went, we agreed that the raid leader was bad at leading raids and someone needed to research how to do this raiding thing so that they could provide some good direction to the guild. I volunteered, and the spark of a raider's heart began in me.
I devoured all information I could find on the subject. I learned boss strats from other players, class mechanics from the forums, useful mods, anything I could to be successful. Now, you need to realize that at this time there wasn't much out there. Wowhead did not exist, wowwiki was a small site that didn't offer much, no elitistjerks, no bosskillers, no stratfu, no tankspot, no strat videos being made by anyone. Mods consisted of CTRA and Perl Classic. What was available was much more valuable than any of that, though.
Detailed explanations of class and game mechanics were available on the official forums. Tables where you could see each class's regen rate from spirit, full explanations of the five second rule and why it was important, Ciderhelm's original version of Fortifications: a Warrior's Reference Guide to Tanking, lists of every mob in the game that had a usable ability when you MC'd them, and much much more. These days when you want to find out how to kill a boss you can just watch a strat video. Back then you had to understand how the game mechanics worked and use that understanding to figure things out. Because of that, individual guilds would often have wildly varying strats for how they killed a boss. Thus it was left to me to come up with our strats. I loved it.
We cleared ZG many times as a guild and actually killed vanilla Onyxia quite a few times with only 30 people. Other than that we failed at raiding. We never had enough people to get into 40 mans, and AQ20 we could never push past the third boss. I raided MC with another guild (and earned my Benediction/Anathema), but personally never got into BWL, AQ40, or Vanilla Naxx.
 | |
| Yep, I was in there with rez sickness. At that time it didn't reduce healing done, only damage. |
When TBC came around I decided things would be different. I was going to form a real raid group from my guild (of which I was now the healing officer) and we were going to be successful. I was one of the first five people on the server to step inside of Karazhan, a mere 4 days after TBC launched.
 |
| Hint: I'm the floating priest. |
Pre-nerf Karazhan was hard. 360° cleaves one shot melee DPS, AoE damage was high when we didn't have tools to deal with it well, instant random aggro drops got healers (meaning me) killed, and everyone felt way too squishy. Combine this with the fact that knowledge of things like the hit cap were not yet wide spread, 25+ people all wanting to get into a 10 man raid, and people changing mains to the extent that we lost tanks and healers... and what you get is a guild on the brink of falling apart. Which is exactly what it did over the course of a few months.
Where I am coming from. Part 2
My Growing Disdain for Casual Players Trying to Fake the Funk
During this time the elitistjerks website started to become what it is today, people were theorycrafting, testing mechanics, sharing their data, etc. Wowhead became widely known and used, wowwiki was getting bigger, mods were being written faster than anyone expected and you could find a mod for literally anything. Wowinsider and mmo-champion came into being, and I was devouring information. Since no one in my guild was doing their own research, I did it all. They quickly figured out that they could just ask me for the info instead of looking it up on their own and I let it happen.
When my guild fell apart I started looking around for a new guild. In the mean time I was raiding and clearing Kara, Gruul, and Mag with a friend's guild. I found what I hoped would be my new raiding home on the Vek'nilash server. So I server transferred and joined them as an applicant. Long story short, I failed. Back on Gul'dan I was the best healer in the guild. I always out-healed everyone else by large margins and never ran OOM. On Vek'nilash I was usually dead last, I died a lot during my applicant raids, and to top it all off I walked in with all of my knowledge about game and class mechanics thinking I could impress them with it. It didn't impress them, it made me look like a know-it-all prick. So they politely declined my application.
At that time there was a three month cooldown on server transferring, so my priest was stuck there. Meanwhile my friends back on Gul'dan had reformed and needed a MT, a raid leader, and a generally knowledgeable person. So I finished leveling my 57 warrior alt, and became those things for them. In light of my failures on Vek'nilash I was determined to become better. I became the stereotypical raid-nazi MT that people joke about. We progressed through Kara, Mag, and Gruul from a fresh start; but everything was not alright. Half of the raiders were not committed, refused to learn about their class and improve, and generally just wanted a free ride. Since Gul'dan was an extremely low population server, we didn't have a pool of players to recruit from. So myself and the core of the raid group all transferred to Dalaran.
While trying to recruit to fill our ranks on Dalaran we met with another guild in a similar situation and ended up merging with them. We became Twilight Ascension. The guild that we merged with had never been into SSC or TK, and out of my guild only I had experience in those two raids (from my applicant period on Vek'nilash). So off we went, pushing into SSC and TK. We made regular progress at decent speeds. This was helped by the fact that I already knew what to do and was able to easily direct things in my raid-nazi MT role. Then we hit Lady Vashj and Kael'thas Sunstrider.
We worked on Vashj alone for a month. We occasionally made it to phase three, but it was seldom enough that we knew it was luck, and not skill that was getting us there. During this process the glaring weaknesses in my raid group became clear. More than half of my raiders weren't cutting the mustard. I tried to recruit to replace them but it wasn't going well. People didn't want to join a guild stuck at Vashj, and I couldn't blame them. This situation was complicated by the removal of attunements to BT and MH.
That patch happened when we were on our fourth week of Vashj wipes. Suddenly my raiders no longer cared about the kill. They lost their hunger for the progression. They simply wanted to move on the easy way, and I lost my faith in them completely. We moved into BT and MH at the prodding of my officer council and started wiping in there instead of on Vashj. The "easy 3" (as the first three bosses in both BT and MH were called) were not that easy for my guild. This is because my raiders were unmotivated, unskilled, and didn't care to improve. They wanted relaxed and easy raiding. Replacing them was severely hindered by guild policy and a poor choice of recruitment officer. Why couldn't I change that? Due to the merger I was actually a co-GM, and the officer council had more weight to throw around than either myself or my co-GM. In short, it was a poorly set up guild command structure, and I learned to never try that again.
Eventually I decided that not having my Vashj and Kael kills needed to be fixed. So I grabbed the best of my raiders and PuG'd the other half of the raid. We killed Lady Vashj in 4 attempts in about 1 hour and 30 minutes. That experience put the final nail in the coffin for Twilight Ascension. I was not going to keep putting so much time and effort into a guild that was out-performed by a PuG. As luck would have it, some of the PuG players in that raid were from a decent guild that very recently became in need of players, including a MT.
Over the course of the next few weeks I staged an exodus. I took the 12 best players I had and left Twilight Ascension. About a week before it happened someone let the cat out of the bag and drama ensued. The Reader's Digest version of the story is that we left the guild, got our invites to Heroes of the Command, and Twilight Ascension fell apart completely over the next month.
Heroes of the Command impressed me. They were fast, the raiders were on the ball, the strats executed well, exactly what I had tried to coax out of my old guild, and they did it without a raid-nazi leading them. They were in need of so many raiders due to real life circumstances. We were able to keep the guild's raid group in business and they gave us a much needed home. We joined them when they were up to 8/9 BT and 5/5 MH. I became the MT and as a guild we worked for, and achieved, our Illidan progression kill.We also earned our Amani Warbears and started our way into Sunwell. Unfortunately, that is where HotC stopped being a raiding guild.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Where I am coming from. Part 3
With the release of WotLK I became a retribution paladin. I had leveled one during TBC to use as a PvP alt specifically because, at that point in time, ret was the laughing stock of all specs and I was determined to become good at it anyway. In WotLK, that obviously changed. HotC started raiding two weeks into WotLK and had a rough start of it. People that were the core of the raid team before were now displaying extreme amounts of apathy and disinterest. Performance was low everywhere, and my frustration started running high. Then after several conversations on ventrilo with the whole raid group, it was decided that we weren't going to push our raiding forward as a guild. We would raid, but not place any emphasis on min/maxing, achievements, hard modes, or even trying to correct failing raid members for the betterment of the team. Several influential people felt that all of those things created a hostile environment that they didn't want to be a part of... but they still wanted to raid. So the guild slowly declined into casual-ness. As it did so I ramped up in being an asshole.
Fast forward to ICC, when the 5% buff had just gone active. HotC was still trying to kill Professor Putricide; I had gotten every 10 man achievement you can think of, including all achievement mounts, Algalon killed, and ToC completed on heroic with 50 attempts left because I formed my own group that I ran my own way. In the HotC 25 mans I had blown up on vent with outbursts of frustration and telling people off so many times that I only had two actual friends left in the guild. During a late night conversation one of the officers asked me what it was that I liked about HotC. The answer? From where I sat there was not very much to like. So I gquit, faction changed to horde, server transferred to Firetree, and joined Relax.
When I joined Relax we were #32 in the US. While I was there we went from being #32 to being #24. This was the hardcore raiding that I had wanted since I first stepped into ZG. This was a group of people whose motto was "Rule #76: No excuses. Play like a champion." (Yes, that was our motto. Yes, they stole it from Wedding Crashers). We completed every hard mode, every achievement, earned mounts in both 10 man and 25, and raided hard modes with alt groups. The people there were all self motivated, success driven, and goal oriented. They didn't require prodding to min/max, that was the expected norm. You never had someone show up to a new fight that hadn't gone over several strats and videos with a fine-toothed comb. They were in it to win it, and it showed... and with them I proved that the heart of a hardcore raider within me wasn't just pie-in-the-sky dreaming, I proved I could hang. I was hardcore.
Contrary to popular belief, they were not all dicks to each other. They were not a bunch of people who hated each other that banded together anyway because they needed to for success. They were just as fun and congenial as any guild mates I have ever met; they just had that drive to be the best.
When WotLK was nearing a close I came to a point in my life that required lots of change and upheaval. I moved cross-country and started a job that worked me 12 hours a day. Needless to say I had to stop raiding. At least for a while. When I settled in and came back to WoW I was trying to figure out what I was going to do. I had always had the heart of a hardcore raider, recently had been able to fulfill that heart's desire, and knew without a doubt that I was not going to be able to do that again. Real life is way more important and I no longer have the time.
This is not going to change any time soon. I was offered a spot with Relax in Cataclysm, which I declined due to aforementioned lack of time. The idea of starting my own guild from scratch again didn't seem fun. I knew what was coming in Cata with regards to difficulty and how the game was going to change. Knowing that, the prospect of retraining a bunch of people who learned how to play for the first time in WotLK was a big turn-off. As I was musing over what to do, I got a call from an old friend. He had played with me since TBC and was with me all the way through WotLK, right up until I quit HotC. When I quit HotC, he had also quit. He had become Horde and was now raiding in his cousin's guild. He wanted me to come raid with him. As he explained their raid days/times, the attitude of the raiders, and what the guild was like it all started sounding pretty good.
So here I am in Cata, I am geared to the teeth for raiding. Completely min/maxed. I have power-leveled new professions because their bonuses are now the best for my class/spec. And I cannot raid. Due to my real life schedule I am not able to make the raid days of this new guild. So I am left with a few choices: make my own guild, find a new guild, or stop raiding. I don't know what I will do.
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P.S. Heroes of the Command is still on Dalaran. I am still friends with one of their officers. They have changed. Over the course of time they have decided that being so casual is not what they want and they are back at going for the gold. If you are interested In joining them then I suggest you make a level one alt on their server and whisper someone in the guild. I recommend them to anyone who is not willing to/doesn't desire to be super hardcore, but wants a competent group of raiders that gets content cleared. As for me, I have burned too many bridges there, and am not entirely convinced that I would be happy there if I did go back.
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