People don’t like to be wrong

This is one of those posts that started as a comment.  Then, when I realised it was getting a bit out of hand, I decided to make it a post.

So BBB wrote an excellent post defending his ongoing love of WoW against those people who seem to not just be burnt out on WoW, but feel the need to be aggressive about it.  Its not enough that they stopped playing.  Everyone else must agree with them.  I think the reason so many people rage against those who are happily still playing WoW is twofold.

A question of polish
Firstly, no other MMO has quite managed to be the all-things-to-all-players game that WoW is.  Others have certainly been strong in different areas – Star Wars blows WoW questing out of the water for me.  But people expect more from new MMOs than any has managed to give thus far.  If you look at other industries, when someone comes up with a good enough idea, everyone runs with it.  But that doesn’t seem to happen in MMO design.  Something for budding game developers to think about.

I play and enjoy Star Wars but I’m constantly baffled as to why it has failed to learn many of the lessons that WoW learned before it was even conceived of.  It takes FOREVER to travel between planets and its not even a ‘get on a flight point and go get a coffee’ forever.  Its a ‘run here, click here, run there, click that, choose this, run here, click this, run there, click this’ marathon.  Who thought that was a good idea?  Blizzard didn’t, because they changed it already.  Remember when it took 15 minutes to fly from Stormwind to Ironforge?  I do.  At first, Blizzard did that intentionally.  They wanted to create a sense of time in the world.  But ultimately, they realized that for many players it was just a waste of playing time.  Imagine trying to do Love is in the Air back then?  Every time Star Wars sends me back to the Imperial Intelligence HQ I want to slap a designer.  Not only do I have to go through the run-click marathon, but theres no direct flight point from the Starport to HQ so I have to run through the damn city too.  This doesn’t ‘enhance my sense of being in a world’.  I am not IN that world.  I am at my desk, wasting time RUNNING that I could be spending doing lots of more exciting things.  There are plenty of things Star Wars doesn’t show – why can’t travel time be implied?

So was there a point? Yes.  People don’t like to be wrong.  Some people have burnt out on WoW, but can’t find another game that has that special something.  They want the feeling back that they had when they first played WoW.  But no game has quite managed to achieve a similar level of polish given the way games have evolved.  In part I think this is because when WoW first came out, it was all about the levelling experience.  However, for new MMOs, people care about the end game too, because they know thats where they are going to spend most of their time.  SWTOR has focused on the levelling with the intention of adding the end game later, but has found that people are judging it on the end game it doesn’t yet have.  If a player has left WoW for another MMO, they want to feel that was the right choice.  But if you read the forums for a game like SWTOR, its just an endless raging whine.  And the reviews have been mixed.  And players like me, who play the game, also write about our criticisms of the game.  So, in the face of that negativity, they respond by making themselves right in their head.  If they are right, everyone who stayed with WoW must be wrong.  So you get the hate.

It’s not me, its you
Secondly, I think people like to blame the game for things they don’t want to accept about themselves.  WoW has NOT changed dramatically over the years.  Its been tweaked a lot.  There have been 40 man raids, 25 man raids, 10 player raids, LFR, LFD, heroic modes, hard modes, battlegrounds, rated battlegrounds, quest hubs, daily quest hubs, holiday quest hubs – variations on a few themes.  Its great at keeping itself up to date, but it still works on the same basic principles it had in vanilla.  The social dynamic has changed, but not as much as people think.  What does change, are the players.  People change over time.  They do different things, have different interests, make different friends, get educated, get jobs, find relationships.  Sometimes, people change so much that they lose that connection.  They play too much and run out of things to do, they play too little and lose the social connections that make the game fun, they play with the wrong people and end up feeling the whole game is full of jerks.

But, going back to what I said before, they still value that special feeling they got when they first played a game.  They still value that connection.   If the special feeling has gone it means one of two things – they’ve changed, or the game has changed.  For WoW, it mostly means they’ve changed.  But I don’t think most people think of themselves as changing beings.  So they blame the game.  And if the game has changed so much they don’t like it, why do other people still love it?  And then we’re back to the right/wrong thing I described above.  People don’t want to be wrong.  If the game has changed so much they don’t like it any more, and they are right, the people who do still like it are wrong.

I wholeheartedly agree with BBB whey he tells these people to just sod off.  I know WoW is not perfect.  I don’t like the current raid difficulty model as I think it panders too much to the elite few, though I do think LFR is a great solution to some of this.  I think LFR loot should be made non-tradeable and non-sellable to wipe out the current horrendous issues with people rolling on loot they already have to trade and sell.  If they had to type ‘delete’ for every piece of ninja’d loot it would soon get boring.  RBGs are largely inaccessible to people who might enjoy them, but don’t know enough fellow PvPers and are part of PvE guilds.Achievement systems make it hard to change toons even when you want to.  Its not a perfect game.  No game is perfect for everyone all of the time.  But I still like it.  And I am right to keep playing a game I enjoy.  If you don’t enjoy it, thats fine.  But your need to feel you are right does not make me wrong!  There are whole blogs I’ve read that now seem to dedicate themselves to insisting that WoW is broken and people who play it are all stupid suckers who are being robbed of their money by the corporate monster that is Blizzard.  You are looking to the wrong people to validate your decisions.  Look to the new people you are playing with who agree with you and you will find validation there without needed to harass a bear.

And thats why I didn’t end up writing this as a comment …

Ulduar: Fiero with friends

Theres been some talk recently about Ulduar and the nostalgia people feel for Ulduar.  I wanted to delve into that a bit.

My Ulduar experience
During Ulduar I was in a guild called Forgotten Heroes that raided 25 mans.  In the first tier we had cleared 3 drakes while the content was relevant.  It took a long time, but since Naxxramas was so easy, we had a lot of time.

Ulduar was definitely harder.  We cleared Ulduar while the content was relevant and did at least one hard mode (XT).  We worked on others and got a couple in 10 man I think.  We may have done slightly better in 25 man – I can’t recall.

The drakes weren’t removed from Ulduar, so when Trial of the Crusader came and died we started going back to Ulduar on 10 man to work on the Hard Modes.  In those Hard Mode runs were the foundations of my current guild, Dreamstate.  We had way more fun doing that than we did raiding 25 man Trial of the Crusader.  Once we started Dreamstate at the beginning of Icecrown Citadel we made a point of going back and finishing off Ulduar.

Why Ulduar was good
Ulduar was the last raid of the old regime.  It was good because people it allowed people the challenge of Hard Modes, with the satisfaction of a Normal Mode clear.  Let me explain.

One of the reasons we raid is for that moment of victory.  The psychologists call this moment fiero – the cheer when you down a new boss.  It makes us feel good.  In Ulduar, you could ‘complete’ the instance by killing Yogg-Saron.  You could then do some Hard Modes.  On the surface that doesn’t sound so different to today.  However, the Hard Modes of Ulduar were very much ‘optional extras’.  They didn’t exist on every boss, they were gradated so you could come at them gradually, and in some cases they were insanely hard so that the expectation of completion just wasn’t there.  The fiero moment given by downing Yogg-Saron was therefore more significant than downing a final boss on normal these days.  When you downed Yogg-Saron you had ‘completed’ the instance (Algalon never counted).  Now, when you downed Ragnaros you face the option of starting all over again.

That wasn’t the only thing.  Ulduar had a good difficulty curve with progression through being smooth.  That contrasts to Firelands, for example, where the step up to Ragnaros was too steep, especially on heroic.  The fact that Algalon was insanely hard didn’t matter as most people didn’t count him.  Thats the same model that worked so well with Sinestra in Bastion of Twilight.

What the numbers say … and what they don’t
Theres likely a part of the nostalgia for Ulduar that is just ‘rose tinted glasses syndrome’.  As I said, it was the last raid of its kind, before the Heroic Mode raiding we see today came in.  But I suspect that a lot of the love for Ulduar comes from people who aren’t on the chart published by MMO Champion.  I suspect that a lot of the love for Ulduar comes from people like me who went back later.  Especially while Trial of the Crusader was out.

Trial of the Crusader was an odd raid.  But I would suspect that Blizzard knew what it was doing more than we might think.  Trial of the Crusader was essentially the equivalent of an Ulduar nerf.  By giving us a little tier, we could gear up and go back to Ulduar!  That would explain a lot.

Ulduar’s success, in my mind, comes from its ability to transcend raid tiers.  Even two tiers later there was still motivation to go back.  That is not something Blizzard have managed to repeat in this expansion.  When players return to an older tier its often not through guild organised, formal raiding.  It was for the fun of trying to get the Hard Modes they never managed before.   By not nerfing tier 11 Heroic Modes, and by having Heroic Ragnaros be so very hard, players were less motivated to go back.  In Ulduar, the increased gear of the next tiers made the Hard Modes about as difficult as normal mode content.  So you could go and have fun in Ulduar with friends knowing the content would not be out of your reach.  And theres nothing more appealing in the game than fiero with friends!

So if Ulduar’s success is because of its social connections, and its easy access to fiero moments, then thats something Blizzard should look to achieve in all its raids.  Maybe then we’ll wax lyrically about up and coming raids too.

Whats in a main …

When I first played WoW I had one character.  Her name was Akandra and she was a priest.  It was relatively simple, then, to answer ‘What do you play?’ or ‘What’s your main?’

The changing face of a WoW player 
Then came other characters – Enalla, my druid, Morrighan, my paladin and Jera, my much neglected mage.  I finished The Burning Crusade with 3 level 70s – Akandra, Enalla and Morrighan.  And at that point I did something interesting.  I changed my main to Morrighan.

During The Wrath of the Lich King I mostly played my paladin (I had a brief time where Akandra was my main, but healing in Wrath was nasty).  I levelled two more toons to the new cap of 80 – Hesttia, my shaman and Arianrhodd, my death knight and my first max level Horde.

Then came the Cataclysm.  A little way into the expansion I returned to Akandra, because thats what the guild needed.  I am now considering changing toon to my hunter, Brynna, newly max level this expansion, because thats what would suit the guild most and because I’ve never had a ranged dps as my main.

The emotional connection
But my feeling towards these characters has changed.  In The Burning Crusade there was One Character to Rule Them All.  Morrighan saw a little time in Kara as a tank because paladin tanking was kinda fun.  Kara was the first time I participated in an ‘alt’ run.

In Wrath I spent more time in alt runs, taking Akandra and Enalla (and even Hesttia I think).  And again, in Cataclysm, Morrighan and Enalla have attended alt runs.  My changing main, between Akandra and Morrighan, has meant that I feel very torn between the two of them.  I have invested a lot in both.  I currently have position 8 and position 9 in the guild Achievement points list with Morrighan and Akandra respectively.  Both have unique achievements that I value because my experience in getting them was so positive.

And now, with patch 4.3 and the prospect of some form of merged achievements on the horizon, I find I don’t mind investing in yet another character.  And, in fact, I want to invest in all of them.  Because I want to get all of them into LFR and get some gear on them and enjoy playing them.  I find I don’t care what my ‘main’ is.  With raiding becoming somewhat repetitive the new represents an interesting change.

This is not true for everyone.  Some people have invested a great deal in one character.  But increasingly I am finding that even they are more likely to engage in activities on other characters, outside of the ‘alt run’ model.  And if you play multiple games, the dynamic changes again.

Does ‘main’ still have a function
If the emotional connection I used to focus on one character is now spread across all my characters – what purpose does it serve to have a ‘main’?  I would argue there is still a practical purpose, but even that is being watered down.

Within a guild a main is useful because it helps the guild to focus its resources, in PvE in particular.  A guild might provide potions, flasks and food for progress raids.  It will want people to bring a main to a fight so it can focus on gearing that main and make all the main toons better to enable progress.  If loot is spread over alts as well then that will slow progress a little (the exception is at the top end where the guild has time to gear both mains and alts as needed).  Limited resources such as time, loot and gold are focused where the guild needs them.

But even that is being eroded.  With many Dragon Soul bosses needing only one tank we find we are using an alt for a second tank.   My healer may also be a backup.  But the principle still stands – resources should be focused where the guild needs them.  And by asking players to choose a ‘main’ you are giving power to the player to make that choice.

Your online identity
Another part of the traditional role of the ‘main’ was the definition of your WoW identity.  I was Akandra the Holy Priest.  Akandra was the tag I often used in other games.  It was who I chose to be when online.  Within WoW, at least, this is being overcome by Real ID and the Battletag.

If the concept of main also references the concept of a single online identity, I would like to think that this, also, is passing.  Identity is far too complex to be singular.  I can be both Akandra the Holy Priest, Morrighan the Ret Paladin, as I can be a WoW player, a SWTOR player, a Project Analyst, a mother, a wife, a friend, a daughter.  All of those are identities that I hold.  People who know the Project Analyst have never met the WoW player and may not even know she exists.  Identity is multiple.  So gaming identity can also be multiple.

Maybe we need a new language for a new world
Games are changing to better support this new multi-toon world.  WoW has long supported players levelling multiple characters with Heirloom gear being its main method.  It is now looking at cross-account Achievements and pets, and maybe more.   SWTOR is introducing a Legacy system.  In its current form, it allows you to choose a ‘surname’ that all your toons will share.  But it also allows all your characters to accrue Legacy points and levels which will give further benefits later.  The advantage of this system is it does not require you to level one character all the way to max level before all your characters start to benefit.  You have to get one character to level 30.

So instead of talking about main and alt, how might we describe this situation?  We might describe our characters by what we do with them – a Raiding toon, a PvP toon.  We might talk about having a ‘guild’ or ‘active’ character that allows the guild to focus resources on it.  I tend to find I talk about my toons by class – ‘I’ve done LFR on my priest and my hunter’ – and sometimes by role.

What do you guys think?  Has the main/alt dynamic seen its best days?  Do you still feel that strong connection to one character?  Did you ever?  Do you still only have one toon, or are you embracing multiplicity and doing different gaming activities with different groups at different times?

Finding the right guild for you: approaches to WoW

I got the following comment from Warrior Warcraft on the post I made about Embracing Changing Rosters.  I started writing a response and then thought this was really a whole post.  Its definitely a related issue.

Changing rosters is also a little bit like the personalities of server/realms too. Sometimes you have WoW realms that are full of jerks that think they deserve special treatment just because they are there, and others you find with an enormous amount of high skill players or a vast number of newbies. Neither are really good for the other.

I suppose this is all pretty much like the real world though. At work you constantly deal with the inept whom see to make fast advancement and exude with arrogance and then you have the hard worker with their head down. You have the slackers, the loud mouths and the know-it-alls mixed in with the skilled and the introverts. I guess that is what makes life uniques and sometimes challenging to your sanity!

What does WoW mean to you?
At some point in WoW, in particular if you start raiding, you need to think about what WoW means to you and what you will and won’t accept in order to meet goals.  This will help you find the right guild for you and be happy in that guild.  I’m going to approach this mainly from a raiding PoV although I expect team PvP has similar issues.  Start by answering three main questions:

• What do you want to achieve in WoW?
• What are you able to give in order to reach those goals?
• What are you willing to accept in order to reach those goals?

Now I would give the following answers:

• I would like to clear all raid content quickly and easily and get the meta achievements.
• I can only raid after my daughter has gone to bed.  I cannot raid more than 3/4 nights a week.  I also need to sleep.
• I want to raid only with people I like and who are skilled raiders.

Now, those answers are completely unrealistic in combination.  There may be a few very rare guilds that can give you all of those things, but its highly unlikely.  So now to the compromise parts.

• I am willing to accept I won’t clear all the raid content quickly and easily and that I might have to get meta’s once the tier of raiding is out of date.  I am in no rush to complete content.  I don’t really like Hard Modes enough to slave away on them at the expense of other things.  I do really want the achievements still.
• I can’t compromise here.  Its too important.
• I would rather raid and have fun than progress quickly.  I am willing to accept working with newer raiders or less skilled raiders in order to make improvements.  I don’t expect more from other people than I am able to give myself.

Those conclusions took time to come to.  I spent a lot of time just accepting things I didn’t like before I realised this was ruining the game for me.  Answering those questions realistically is hard but if you can do it then that should lead you to the right raiding guild for you.

Fun with friends vs Competitive sport
I think these are the two main ways you can approach WoW.  I use the first approach.  I want to enjoy the game with friends and the people I play with are what the game is about for me.  If I am unhappy with them, I am unhappy with the game.  In this case you should find a guild where you are happy and make those new friends.

You could also choose to approach WoW as a competitive sport.  In this case the goals are more important than the experience.  You want to be the best you can be, given the limitations of what you can give.  In this case you should find a guild that has the best progress you can get for your own skill/contribution.  You can’t expect to be doing world firsts if you stand in fire all the time or only raid once a week, so you need to be honest with yourself.  But you should be able to find a happy fit.

Either way, you have to be prepared to be realistic and make compromises.  Neither type of raiding guild wants to raid with people who can’t be realistic.  The progress guilds don’t want to carry you and the friendly guilds don’t want to change the way they raid to suit you.  The best guilds are comfortable in who they are.

WoW is not a job
WoW is a sport, a game, a hobby, a social club, a drink with friends in a worldwide bar.  WoW is never a job.  I enjoy my job.  But if I didn’t need to work to live, I wouldn’t.  You accept when you go to work every day there will be aspects of your job you don’t like just as Warcraft Warrior says above.  Thats the compromise you make in order to make money to live.  Like WoW, you have to decide what level of compromise you are willing to make for what reward.  How many hours will you work for what pay?  How much enjoyment do you expect to make your job tolerable before you move on?  But ultimately you accept the compromises of a job because you must have a job.  You could easily stop playing WoW.  Or stop raiding.  You can opt out.

Whatever your approach to WoW you should be getting enjoyment from what you do in the game.  If you are not then you’re doing it wrong.  WoW is an optional extra in your life.  Answer the questions above and identify your compromises and you should be able to find that enjoyment.  If you can’t then WoW will feel like a chore.

Mist of Pandaria

In no real order other than obviously I ran out of ideas for number 10:

1. Its the next expansion.
2. Its Titan. [Unlikely since no matter how non-canon Pandaria is, its still technically WoW related IP rather than original IP.]
3. Its an upcoming patch.
4. Its a book/trading card game thing. [Debunked: the codes used on the application relate to online games]
5. Its a Facebook/iphone/other media game. [This would be my preference]
6. Its something to do with Blizzcon.
7. Its a mini game that will sit within WoW to try and give you something to do.  Possibly to do with Archaeology since that just fails right now. [My own original contribution to highlu unlikely theories]
8. Its a complete fake and Blizzard are just trying to throw you off the scent.
9. Its Blizzard’s secret plan for world domination that involves making huge amounts of money by treating all their players badly and not treating every one of them like a special snowflake who knows how to fix the game (puts on tin foil hat).  Because Ghostcrawler is really the head of a secret 15th century society that sacrifices REAL GNOMES.
10. Your still in Yogg-Saron’s brain room.  Only its filled with pandas.

How to stop it being the next expansion
If we sacrifice enough gnomes to the Old Gods, there just might be hope.  It is your duty to sacrifice every gnome you can until appease whatever twisted mind came up with the Pandaran.

Embracing Changing Rosters

This post has been hanging around in my draft posts list for a while, but two recent posts I saw made me think of it again.

Its a fact of every guild.  People come and go.  I doubt very much there are many guilds around who raid with the same roster they raided with in vanilla.  But even the closest 10 man guild made of real life friends is going to experience change over time as factors in no way related to the game have an impact.  WoW is on its fourth expansion and is over 6 years old.  Thats a long time for people to commit to a raiding team.  Its longer than some marriages!

Community burnout
Keeva at Tree Bark Jacket wrote a very good post about the difficulty in finding a group of people to raid with.   I think she fairly well sums up what a lot of people are saying about various aspects of the game right now.  Whats wrong when people are dissatisfied is very often not the game, its the people playing it.  When it comes to raiding, you need a group of people in order to succeed.  You can either pick those people at random each time, which often leads to problems because the attitudes and level of ability of those players will vary widely, or you can raid with a guild.

That guild, however, is not solving the problems for many people.  Keeva says:

I don’t think it’s much to ask really – to want to play with people who have the same goals and ideals. But it seems that finding a group is almost impossible, and you are forced to put up with stuff that irks you on a daily basis, because 25man raiders are so thin on the ground that you take what you can get. The solid player who is a jerk. The nice player who is a bit subpar. The hardcore progression player who is super keen but constantly moans. The person who wastes our time, but we can’t afford to lose his DPS. The guy who’s obsessed with loot and sulks if he doesn’t get what he wants. The one who has been around for ages and thinks he should get special treatment. I’m sure you’re all familiar with the raider grab-bag.

I’ve been in guilds where I’ve accepted raiding with people I don’t like just in order to raid.  I can think of people who fit into most of Keeva’s categories over the years.  In TBC in order to progress you needed 25 people to raid and you had to accept the people you didn’t like in order to raid.  In Wrath I went through something of a transition from a guild where that was the case, to a guild where we didn’t accept that.  Dreamstate was founded on the ideal of raiding being an enjoyable activity – and that meant being with people you liked.  Now I think we are a mixed bag of personalities and probably everyone doesn’t like everyone else, but we have more fun together than I’ve had in any guild since Kara times.

Accepting the inevitable
In tier 11 we lost three great raiders because they didn’t feel we were progressing fast enough.  Other people stopped raiding because of the need to do things in real life.  An Officer left because they felt people should be putting more effort into getting ready to raid.

Losing a big part of your roster will have an impact and the bigger it is, the worse that impact will be.  Three people out of ten was painful, but it could have been worse.  We were actually looking at a second group because we had so many raiders and replaced all three people very quickly.  Losing 14 raiders in a 25 man raiding guild (though I am assuming the roster was more than 25 people) like Matticus did recently.

If you are going to run a guild you have to accept that your roster will change and adapt to that.  You have to not take it personally.  You have to have strategies in place to move on.  No one thought our progress would stop because they left, though we knew it would slow down while new players learned the fights.  No one player is so important that the guild cannot survive without them.  If you can say this about your guild, your guild is robust and healthy.  There are key people in it who we would miss terribly.  But it doesn’t collapse just because someone stops raiding.

How not to look at changing rosters
There was a post by a blogger called Wugan that talked about applying Restricted Free Agency to raids.  Basically, WoW players would be ‘contracted’ into a raid team and could not join another team for a set time period unless their Raid Leader chose to let them leave.  Wugan accepts this would not force people to actually raid, or stop them changing to alts, but feels this would reduce the incidence of people leaving a guild for greener pastures.  It wouldn’t.  I don’t believe for one second this would make the life of Raid Leaders easier.  Think about why people leave a raiding team and how Restricted Free Agency would affect them:

Real life issues – RFA would have no effect because those issues are rarely a choice.  No reasonable person is going to keep raiding rather than go to work, or spend more time with their children.  Major personality clashes – say RFA meant people involved in such a clash did stay (and I find this questionable) – would you really want them to?  All this would do is put strain on your raiding team.  Lack of gear – in every case where someone has left a raid team because of this the raid team was better off without them.  Unless the loot policy was genuinely unfair in which case making them stay is the act of a completely selfish individual.  Either way, one party is definitely wrong and RFA would not be effective or fair.

And finally, lack of progress – this is the one that I think Wugan was talking about, however.  People leave because they think the grass will be greener elsewhere.  They think progress will be faster.  This is why Dreamstate lost three raiders and probably a part of why Conquest lost 14.  Note that Dreamstate has far slower progression than Conquest at this point in Firelands for all sorts of reasons.  So whatever your progress is, unless you’ve already downed Heroic Ragnaros someone is going to be unhappy with it.

So wouldn’t RFA be a good thing here? Would the player find they could get their progress in situ and have no need to look elsewhere? No.  No matter how much the guild progressed after that point, the individual’s would always have felt they could have progressed more elsewhere.  Instead of dealing with recruiting a new and enthusiastic player who wanted to raid, the Raid Leader would instead spend their time dealing the mass of bad feeling generated by being forced to stay which would gradually poison the entire team.

The individual leaving the guild would feel they are justified in leaving no matter what the reason.  The player leaving for greener pastures feels they deserve those pastures, likely because they are better than the other raiders in the team because they produce more dps or fill a valuable role like a healer.  Wugan the Raid Leader might disagree.  So might Akandra the Officer or Matticus the Guild Master.  But none of that impacts on the viewpoint of the individual.

This is why you should embrace changing rosters.  Because if a person feels so strongly that they don’t want to be in your guild that they are able to type /gquit you are always better off without them. 

I am not encouraging people to leave a guild.  Far from it.  If you are unhappy about an aspect of the guild try and talk to someone about it.  Talk to an Officer and listen to the alternative point of view.  I mean really listen.  People don’t make decisions for no reason.  If you can’t accept that the raid leadership will make decisions you disagree with, then you need to go make your own guild, because no raid team will always do things the way you want them done.

And one thing to note for the people who leave.  The grass is rarely greener.  I will say that the three raiders who left Dreamstate for greener pastures did not find them.  And the 14 who left Conquest probably won’t either.  All they will find is that Matticus dealt with a lot of headaches they didn’t even know existed!    Probably the only case where you will be happier is if you make a radical change in your raiding focus i.e. go from casual to hardcore or hardcore to casual (I actually think those words are hopelessly inadequate to define raiding teams these days, but they will do).  RFA wouldn’t be useful for these players either, because if you want to make that change in focus you are never going to be happy staying where you are and forcing people to stay would just build up that resentment again.

The silver lining
There are positives you can take out of accepting ever changing rosters.

Firstly, those people who leave because the guild isn’t giving them what they want are not a loss to the guild as long as you are running the guild to the ideals you originally set out.  We accept that maybe some of our raiders aren’t going to make us the top guild on the server.  We accept that people in our guild might not cap their Valor Points every week because they have families, jobs and other real life issues to deal with.  We would rather have fun in a raid than have miserable raids with highly skilled players who have bad attitudes.  If you have players who don’t like that and want the guild to change, then its a good thing when they leave because all that does is make people miserable.  The Officers get tired of listening to ‘the hardcore progression player who constantly moans’ because thats not the kind of player the guild is set up to embrace.  If it was a hardcore guild, the Officers would equally get fed up with ‘the nice player who is a bit supbar’.  And no guild likes ‘the jerk’, ‘the time waster’ or ‘the loot whore’.  I like my guild and the people in it, but when those people who left are clearly looking for something the guild was never intended to provide, I can’t help but feel they are better off leaving because its the tensions in expectations that are the biggest problem most guilds face.

Secondly, you get to meet new people and make new friends.  And that is always something worth doing.  Its the reason I like MMO’s above any other genre.  I know people through WoW that I have been friends with for years now, and I make new friends constantly.

Embrace your changing rosters.  They will make your guild a better place to be.

Why ask the devs takes time

A lot of the morons people who post on the official forums clearly don’t work.  Instead they flame the forums with crap they don’t understand.  Heres an example of what probably happens with the Ask the Devs posts.

Day 1: the question goes up in America and people start posting.  Lets say this is a Monday.
Day 2: by the time all of the different regions have had a chance to post its probably at least 24 hours later.
Day 3: By the time all the translations are done back into English and the questions are collated its probably another 24 hours.
Day 4: The developers meet today and write up some answers.  They get typed up and send them to the PR people to check through.
Day 5: The answers are checked.  They’re all good.  They get sent to the regions.

Day 6+7: Its the weekend!

Day 8: The regions get them and translate them.
Day 9: Answers start to get posted.

Working across time zones if very hard.  In my job I work with people in the far east.  I have 30 minutes in the morning after I get into work and before they go home.  Taking that into account, the above is an ideal world. What actually happened was this:

Day 4: The development team could not meet today as they had a meeting arranged with another team.  It took 2 months to get everyone in one room and they aren’t going to rearrange it now!
Day 5: Today key members of the development team are doing interviews with a magazine, arranged a month ago.

Day 6+7: Its the weekend!

Day 8: Today key members of the development team are at a training session demonstrating a new technology.  It turns out to be rubbish but it sounded good on paper.
Day 9: The developers meet today and write up some answers.  They get typed up and send them to the PR people to check through.
Day 10: The answers are checked.  They’re all good.  They get sent to the regions.
Day 11: The regions get them and translate them.
Day 12: Answers start to get posted.

Only its not that simple.  What really happened was this:

Day 10: The answers are checked.  Someone in PR thinks one of them could be misinterpreted.  They get sent back to Ghostcrawler.  Only he has about 1000 emails and only finds it late in the day after the person he needs to talk to has already gone home.
Day 12: The person he needs to talk to is in a meeting all morning.  GC grabs him at lunchtime to get an answer and rushes things back to the PR team who are all out to a long lunch.  It all gets confirmed by the PR team late in the day after several frantic phone calls.

Day 13+14: Its the weekend!

Day 15: The regions get them.
Day 16: Answers start to get posted.

But of course it never goes like that.  What probably happened was:

Day 15: The regions get them.  The translation teams are still working on the latest patch notes, the announcement of the new feature and the new Trading Card game announcement.
Day 16: Most of the teams get to their translations.  Only its a public holiday somewhere!
Day 17: Its still a public holiday.
Day 18: Everyone is back at work.  Final translations are done.
Day 19: It turns out one team was meant to have an away day today to consider how to make better use of new communications technologies.  They make a special arrangement to step out half way through in order to ensure they can post the answers.  So nearly 3 weeks later, answers get posted.

Does that sound familiar to anyone working in a large and complex organization that does business in different time zones?

Blue Post Archive

I’ve just found a great wesbite.  Its a Blue Post Archive.  You can access all the old Blue Posts through this.  And search them.

Heres just a couple of quotes from posts I found using the search term ‘raid difficulty’.

From Raid Guild Leader’s Perspective on BC by Panthero with the response from Tigole:

1) The scale up in difficulty from 5 mans to heroic 5 mans and Karazhan is intense. We cleared through MoV on our first timer, then spent this week banging our heads against Romeo and Juliet. Most of our team has the best gear out of 5 mans. Since our gear is not going to get much better, and our skills will improve only so much after 2 years of raiding, the only way we’ll be able to reliably beat this level of content is using massive amounts of consumables. At least 2-4 flasks, and food, pots, and elixirs for everyone.

Yes thats right Kara was hard once.

4) There seems to be a distinct lack of 25 man raids that are going to be doable by “normal” guilds. If every 25 man boss is Loatheb, where does that leave us? I understand the desire to provide a challenge for the elite guilds. I understand that you don’t want DnT or Nihlium clearing the black temple by July. However, you need to provide 25 man content that can be cleared by a group of adults with lives. Ideally, this would mean:
Perfect execution is not required – 1 or 2 DCs or random deaths (except the tanks) would not mean a wipe
Consumable use is minimized – Only flask the tanks and use mana pots for your internal tuning
Aim for a normal guild to be able to down the encounter after ~10-20 attempts – no barrier encounters
If you are going to make resist fights make the resist gear craftable and relatively easy to get

As a side note, Karazhan violates almost all of these guidelines.

I agree. As I have already stated on these forums, Magtheridon is proving more difficult than intended. We are planning on toning him down. We’ve made some minor fixes to Gruul as well but I think that encounter needs to be toned down too. Gruul and Mag should feel like Onyxia did 6 months into vanilla WoW.

Now this is interesting.  If the aim is for a normal guild to be able to down a boss in 10-20 attempts (i.e. within one week with the progress encounter only being part of your raiding) then this suggests raiding in Cataclysm is harder than in TBC.  It also shows that nerfs are not a new thing. Perhaps a part of the reason for nerfing the content is that its a little overtuned compared to this ideal?

From Why my guild dislikes 1.10 raid changes by Ukulkos with the response from Eyonix:

2) Time

I have to confess, I haven’t seen the changes to BRS yet regarding the lowered number of trash mobs. However, as I understand it Strat, Scholo and notably BRD are still the same mob density, and so the fact is that a 5 man group will still take longer to clear the instance than a 10 man group. I had trouble finding the time to do these instances two or three times a week even in a 10 man group. As a largely social and mature (read, employed) guild, I know a lot of my guildmates were in a similar position. If these early instances take longer in continuous stretches to do, it means we flat out can’t do them as often, which comes with a related difficulty in forming a group at the times when we can do them.

We’ve removed some tedium, but you’re right not very much. Rest assured though, we will continue to monitor the time it’s taking players to complete these instances. We ran many tests, and even when wearing all greens items, we completed Stratholme and Scholomance in under 90 minutes.

Basically, back in vanilla, many players did nothing more than run the level 60 normal instances.  Because that took as long as raiding!  Thats certainly all I did.  I remember running Strat and Scholo with friends.  I have to say I would like to see more of the ‘mini raid’ style heroics.  I think the troll heroics offer something along this line, and hopefully there will be more of these.  They should take more time, but offer a greater reward for it.  But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for short heroics too.  I don’t always have 90+ minutes to spend in a dungeon.

And in case you thought random ranting and WoW is dying and everyone agrees with me threads were new you can read this.

Skulls and how to use them

I’m not talking about actual skulls here, but rather a Skull mark.  But you probably guessed that already.  I’ve been running normal instances on my death knight Arianrhodd recently and I’ve noticed one trend – Skull usage is poor.  Some players use them wrongly, some players don’t use them at all.  So I’m going back to basics here.

*Warning: This how to guide contains ranting*

What is the point of a Skull mark?
A Skull is used by the tank to tell the dps which mob to hit first.  By using a Skull, the tank is telling the dps two things.  Firstly, its important to kill this mob first.  It might be the healer, or the one with the ability that does terrible damage.  It needs to die fast.  Secondly, the skull denotes which mob the tank will be concentrating their threat on so that the dps can hit it safely.

What should a tank do on a Skull mark?
Well hitting it helps.  Being in the general vicinity also helps.  If your on that group of mobs over there and your dps is hitting the skull you marked somewhere else … well lets just say that doesn’t work very well.  A Skull is a commitment.  Tank it. (Based on at least two runs recently where the Skull was marked, but not actually tanked.  I’m sure it wasn’t tanked because the tanks in question were nowhere near it after the first hit.  In defense of at least one of them the healer was front loading his heals and tended to get aggro on the pull.  Healers – relax, take a breath, let the tank at least hit all the mobs before you start to heal if possible.  Unless you have Fade, then stand near a mage and use it …)

Wouldn’t it be better not to mark a Skull then, in case I change my mind about what to tank first?
That depends.  If you can tank without the dps pulling aggro from you by hitting different mobs AND your healer is not going under half mana even on hard pulls, then you can dispense with the Skull.  If you can hold the aggro, a Skull is still useful to get one mob down faster and relieve pressure on the healer.

Shouldn’t people know what to hit?
Different people kill different mobs first for different reasons.  The Skull tells us which one it will be today.  The first pull in Halls of Origination is a great example of this.  I’ve killed that big mob that spews fire first, second and last with different tanks.  Unless the tank states that they want to pass the responsibility to someone else, the tank should mark because only they know what they plan to hit. Assuming a tank will follow a Skull you put up is a great way to kill your dps.

I’m too lazy to mark
Then you shall be told to learn to play.  Bad players are not inexperienced players.  They are lazy arrogant players.  You shouldn’t insult an inexperienced player.  You should offer advice if you have it and try to help them out.  If I ask for a Skull because on every pull each of the dps have aggro on a different mob and you respond with ‘I’m too lazy’ then you are a terrible, terrible player and should be told so.  If you can’t be bothered to manage your aggro through use of a mark then you had better learn to hold aggro another way.  I’m fairly tolerant as a player but there are two things that will make me tell a player to buck up their ideas and learn to play properly.  This is one.  Pulling when I’m the tank is the other.

A Change is as Good as a Break

Cataclysm Burnout.  The firey expansion has unleashed a wave of death not just on Azeroth but on its inhabitants.  Many people are quitting the game.  Its possible that its not more people quitting, just people quitting more visibly of course, but there are a number of long term players who are struggling to find the fun in Cataclysm.  Most have one or two particular niggles they can place a finger on and a whole bunch they can’t.

Thats not my Retribution Paladin, its rotation is too Rogue-like
Several classes in Cataclysm have changed beyond recognition.  Retribution paladins are one.  Restoration druids are another.  Arcane mages are still sad to see their spec not working in raids, and have to choose either Frost or Fire.  Hunters have a whole new resource system.  Death Knights have only one tanking tree.  There are probably more.  The difficulty here is that players who have loved their class for a long time aren’t enjoying it any more.

I’ll talk about retribution, because thats what I know.  Retribution has changed beyond all recognition and is now one of the most complex rotations in the game, right up there with feral druids.  Mostly because retribution paladins are feral druids.  With sparkles.  The rotation is similar in many ways – the use of combo points, fillers and finishers, the need to maintain a damage buff using the same resources as your damage abilities.  Its done a little differently, but not so much that levelling my feral druid doesn’t give me an eerie sense of deja vu.

So whats wrong with that?  Nothing really.  But its so very different from what came before.  Retribution needed to be made more complex as a rotation, but I can’t help feeling short changed by the Rogueification of my paladin.  Its not even that I don’t like the rotation.  I enjoy playing it.  Its the same feeling I had about priests at the end of TBC when I decided my paladin would be my main but for the opposite reason.  I left my priest because there were basically no changes to the class and I felt I didn’t want to keep hitting the same buttons for another couple of years.  I felt short changed by the expansion.  I feel that again with retribution, despite the fact that they did what I wanted.  They made the rotation more complex.  They balanced us in PvE and PvP.  But they did it using combo-points with sparkles and that was just lazy.

For many paladins, it was just too much.  They don’t like the new retribution (check out Unholy DKs for a simple but fun rotation these days).

Changing mains
When I decided to change from my paladin to my priest, the feeling of having been short changed definitely contributed, but I never would have made the change for that reason alone.  I started on my priest because that was what the guild needed, and found I enjoyed healing and particularly enjoyed the priest class again.  Wrath broke healing, Cataclysm fixed it.  I know some people who disagree with that, but I think they got it pretty much right.  I always felt the mana change in healing had not been good for the game – it changed the game into one of ‘who has fast enough reactions’ instead of ‘who can make smart choices’.  That one change affected raids far more than I think the developers anticipated.

As a quick note, people ask me why I didn’t go healing on my paladin.  The answer is that my paladin isn’t my priest.  When I heal, its always been with my priest.  If I try to heal on other classes all I can think is ‘Prayer of Healing would be better here’ or ‘I miss Binding Heal’.  I got used to the priest toolbox and I prefer it to any other class I’ve tried to heal on.  And I’ve played Akandra so long I know where all the spells go.  I’m pretty sure my buttons are in much the same place they were in TBC because if I put them anywhere else I end up using the wrong ones.    The priest class is similar to the one I left, but better with changes that fit in well with the class.

Where was I?  Oh yes, so I changed my main to fit in better with what the guild needed and it was a possibility for me because they fixed healing and tarted up the priest class nicely.  It gave me a better feeling than my short changed paladin.

Breaking up is hard to do
Its hard to change your main.  Very hard.  Especially if your an achievement hunter.  I remember struggling over whether to change to Morrighan and I struggled over whether to change to Akandra again.  But sometimes, change is the best thing.

I’ve mentioned that I didn’t change class because I disliked retribution particularly, but if you really do dislike it, change is the way to go.  I mentioned a few classes above because I know that many players are unhappy with those classes.  You can see it every day.  Those changes have taken the class they have played, in many cases since Vanilla, and made it so different they feel lost.  I talked about having kept my healing buttons in the same place for years on Akandra.  Well on Morrighan my buttons all had to change drastically because only a couple of them are used in the same way any more.  Theres nothing wrong with the classes (except for arcane mages) – they just aren’t the same.  For some players, these changes are too much and they are losing the fun in WoW.  I know a few people who are struggling with this right now.  At first they found it hard to put their finger on what exactly was wrong, but in most cases they just don’t like the way their class has changed so drastically.

The solution is to make a change.   If you’ve fallen out of love with your retribution paladin, then you should stop playing it and try to find something you do enjoy.

How to change your main character/role
Theres a lot to consider when making this change.  If you raid and want to remain in the same group, you need to consider the requirements of your raiding team as well as your own sense of fun.  You need to think about whether you are changing your role, your character or both.  You need to think about the transition period and if you want to try out your new choice.

Firstly you need to decide are you making the change just for you, or are you willing to be flexible to fit in with the raid group you are a part of?  If you want to keep raiding you firstly need to look and see what your raid group needs.  Have a chat with your officers to see what you can and can’t change to within the group.  If the group has too many mages, they aren’t going to want another one.  If melee is full, you will need to look at the other roles.  If theres a shortage of healers, would you consider healing?  Are there any other players who would like to change role also?  If your mage wants to heal and you want to dps then theres a solution.  It might be that the guild can’t accomodate you right now because what you want to do is oversubscribed – in that case if you are willing to wait have them put you on a ‘waiting list’ where you get the next available slot.  This also gives them time to recruit and can be a good way to make a change.

I mentioned roles there, because your second consideration is do you want to change role? Either on your current character or with another character? I mentioned my reasons for changing both role and character above, but for many people who are very attached to one character changing role can be a solution. Don’t like druid healing? Go boomkin.  Thats harder if your a hunter, for example, but its a consideration for hybrids.

Once you’ve made the decision to make the change, you also need to think about the process.  Is your new character ready for what you want to do with it?  If not you need to get it ready.  If you want to go melee but that will leave your guild short on healers, then I would suggest a transition period during which you heal when needed until a replacement is found.  Theres no point changing your character only to be unable to raid on it because there aren’t enough healers any more.  Discuss with your guild if you could ‘try’ your new main in a raiding environment to see what you really think about it if you aren’t sure.  This works fine as long as you explain to the team why those alts are suddenly raiding.

One of the biggest reasons people struggle to change mains is because of the achievements they have on their main.  But this can actually be a reason to change!  If you already have over 9000 achievement points, then a new main will give you something to do.  If you are an achievement hunter, this is obviously something you enjoy, so embrace the change to start again.  Set yourself some time to gather achievements/titles/pets/mounts on your new main.  See if people will come with you for old content for guild achievements.  Farm the new quest achievements in the new levelling zones allowing you to see all the new content.

What you should not do is just ignore your feelings about your class and hope they will go away.  They won’t unless your chosen class/spec is broken right now.  And most class/spec combinations are viable at the moment.  Even those that are broken may take a long time to fix.  If you think your class/spec is not viable at the moment make sure you read up on whether Blizzard thinks its broken.  If Blizzard don’t think its broken, then they won’t be changing it.  Blizzard have acknowledged the problems with an arcane mage, but they aren’t going to roll back the changes to retribution.  You can see all of the hate posts you want about new ret – its here to stay.

These are just some observations based on people I see playing the game at the moment.  Some of these I’ve talked to about their feelings, some not.  But its clear in every raid when people are feeling this way.  The people who have made the change are a lot more positive in those raids than those that haven’t.  They enjoy them more, they are better at raiding, they are enjoying the game.  So think carefully and if the drastic changes to your class are why you don’t enjoy WoW any more, then think about whether its time for a change.  Your new main could make the game fresh for you all over again.