Can you make a "bad" player "good"?

Caveat: I don't pretend to have all of the answers. This blog simply explains some strategies which I've successfully employed as a Guild Master in getting the best out of my players.

The Worst-Player-Ever:

Can you name the worst player in your raid?

Chances are you can, and one thing I noticed over the years running my Guild was that there was always at least one person who was frowned upon by others. Perhaps he wasn't the king of DPS, or if there was a puddle of fire on the ground with a corpse in it, most of the time it was his corpse.



So what are you going to do?

The response of most people would be "kick him", but sometimes you won't have that luxury. Perhaps he plays a niche role in a specific progression encounter, or you simply can't get the applications in to replace him. Perhaps he offers something to your Guild and raid outside of his uncanny ability to pre-empt where the fire will land on the floor and stand in it.

Turning "shit" into "gold" - the art of coaching:

Before I launch into this, I suppose the first question to answer is why should you go to all this trouble to coach your players?

If you actually help someone be a better player, not only will you massively increase their motivation, you'll earn their loyalty in a way you will never get with a "hire and fire" mentality. All it requires is some time investment on your part.
The best way I found to go about doing this, is with a stepped process.

Step 1: How bad are they really?

The first thing I would do in this situation would be to establish how bad the player actually is, both in terms of actual playing skill, and their ability to take onboard your constructive suggestions.

In all my time raiding, I've only met one player who I felt couldn't perform at the needed level and also couldn't take onboard any form of constructive suggestion - and in such a situation you might have no choice but to remove them, if only to make sure they don't bring down the motivation of your raid.

Making this decision is as simple making an arbitrary call from your knowledge, or if you like scoring them out of 10 on a number of metrics that are important to their role, so perhaps damage, spatial awareness, adapability, or attitude.
Once you've decided to coach them, you need to bring your other officers in on it for support and awareness.
I would suggest not revealing your plans to the Guild at large. There are occassions when highlighting someone's weakness isn't going to make them tractable, but instead just make them feel like the retard of the week.

Step 2: Knowledge is power.

So if you've established that Johnny-die-firepit is willing to listen but is lacking in some specific area, the next thing you need to do is educate yourself and get some evidence.

To educate yourself the threads right here on EJ are probably the best place to start. They will tell you everything you need to know about gearing, gemming, talents, and spell selection.
You might also want to speak to a good performing member of that class in your raid, find out where they get their information from, and how they adapt the theorycrafted choices to the encounters.

Your knowledge ideally will come from logs of your raids, World of Logs being my option at the time. This is important as you need to try and understand where you think the person is going wrong (especially if they are not doing enough damage, for example) and you need to be able to measure their performance while you're reviewing them.

Step 3: Feedback.

Armed with your knowledge, you need to invite the person for a chat to talk over your concerns. I prefer to be upfront with what my concerns are but in this instance, try and do it in a non-threatening environment.
I would say you have a few goals out of this conversation:

a) The player needs to agree there is a problem. If they don't think anything is wrong your not going to be able to help them.

b) You need to understand why the player is making the choices they are making. If you can get them to understand why their choice isn't optimal, they will be motivated by themselves to change it. You're just giving them the gentle nudge to change as opposed to a kick in the balls.

c) You need to be able to demonstrate you are correct. Is a classmate of theirs playing how you want them to and getting better results (in the case of damage/healing), or is their class generally performing better in other Guilds? For awareness, most players can't really argue that dying in a fire is in any way helpful.

d) You need to understand any barriers to improvement. If the player doesn't have a good relationship with their classmates, is there someone else who plays a similar role they can talk to and ask questions without feeling stupid?

Step 4: Continous Improvement.

Once you have the player on board, you need to set them some goals. If you work in business, you'll often hear about the requirements for targets to be "SMART", in this case:

Specific: Spell out exactly what you require, e.g. "Complete encounter X without dying."
Measurable: You need to be able to measure their progress by an undisputable source. Raid logs are ideal.
Achievable: Asking a player to "never die again in a raid" or achieve the DPS of your best player isn't realistic. Have patience and expect them to improve with your support over several raids.
Relevant: If the player is making no contribution because they're dead, they need to work on the "dead" bit first.
Time-Bound: Set a realistic deadline to achieve the improvement by. This will focus the player and force you to follow up on it.

Players with awareness problems:

If someone isn't doing enough damage, it's a pretty easy problem to solve. Either they're gearing wrong, or they are casting the wrong spells at the wrong times (i.e. they don't understand their rotation, see procs occuring). All of which should be obvious from their poor damage in comparison to optimal performance.

If someone has poor awareness, this can be a more complex issue to tackle. For some reason people like to suggest "make them PvP" as a solution to this, but I've usually found players with poor awareness fucking hate PvP and asking them to do that to improve doesn't meet our above goal of making the target relevant.

You wouldn't ask a PvP'er to improve their damage by practising on a target dummy!

I've found poor awareness usually boils down to two factors:

• User Interface
• Experience.

User-Interface:

Have a look at their UI. Your goals isn't to judge it's prettiness but to make sure that it meets raiding needs. Ideally they need to be able to see as much of the ground area as possible, and not have it obscured by combat text or addon panes.

If the person is a healer, it can be helpful to have their own health or their raid healing frames near the centre of the screen, that way they can see damage on themselves and others without looking away from the action to some corner of the screen.

Experience:

I find the best thing to do is discuss how they are currently dealing with a mechanic, and how a player who doesn't die to it deals with it. Ideally you want it to be someone of the same class, but if that's not possible, someone of a similar role i.e. you don't really want a tank telling a mage how to move out of the fire. Their experience is inherently different.
Talking through the scenarios and giving them strategies to deal with them will help them to react differently the next time around.

Finding solutions will accomplish more than just telling the player they are doing it wrong.

You can also (but I've rarely found it necessary) get them in a lower-tiered raid or dungeon which has a relevant mechanic so they can practice these new strategies in a "safe" environment.


Final Thoughts:

This has been a lengthy posting so thank you if you've made it through to the end. I hope that someone has found it useful.

My last piece of advice on this subject is not to be afraid to talk to your players, including the bad ones.
No one joins a serious raiding Guild because they want to be a shit player, and if the worst that can happen is that you might lose some dead-wood, what have you really got to lose?