I just noticed that some guilds have finished progression, and they still have a decimal rating. I was under the impression with your previous post that you starred people who finished - is this done by hand? If so that would make sense.

Once you finish the game it should stop resorting you - are the lockouts only for the first 10? It just seems strange to have your rank changed because you got poor/repeat loot over the long run.

Right now this is indeed done by hand. So this morning I woke up to see that both Drama and Premonition got their Illidan kills the previous night, so I had to figure out which event actually occurred first in order to lock them into the proper rank.

The lockouts happen once you've downed both Archimonde and Illidan, and it's not limited to the top 10.

Just curious but how would Zul'Aman fit into your rankings? Its 10 man, I would assume it would have no effect on the current "top" rankings or will you re-open up the completion star for ZA?

Edit: The discrepency I pointed out was fixed within minutes of the post. Odd timing.

Just to clarify, that was actually me going in and fixing it after I saw your post. Thanks for reporting it!

We've been going through and fixing many of these problem guilds recently, but there's a lot to go through.

On another note, we should be squared away to release EU support next week.

Currently my thoughts are either to:

1) Treat it as a completely optional instance and therefore have it not affect score at all.

or

2) Not have it affect already locked guilds, but require upcoming guilds to have it for completion.

I probably lean more towards #1 right now. All the current raid instances had some sort of placement on the natural progression line (although a lot of that is removed now due to attunements being lifted) but Zul'Amun is clearly going to be something on the sideline only.

I'm open to suggestions if someone had another idea.

I'd assume that any guild that is "score-locked" is going to clear Zul'Aman the first week it hits the live servers, so I wouldn't worry about figuring out how to handle it for those guilds. Just treat it like Karazhan 2.0 for the guilds that haven't killed Illidan+Archimonde in terms of the boss and item values, and ranking purposes.

Very true. I like it

I'll continue to lock only on Illidan and Archimonde, but will definitely include ZA in scores.

Is it possible to determine the speed of kills and the average amount of time a guild can be "stuck" on a boss?

If you use the ilvl of items to determine difficulty, it should be fairly easy to figure out where zul'aman fits in. Im going to guess it will be 125-135 which would put it above the entry 25 mans but who knows.

Are you going to enter all earlier archi/illidan kills by hand? :P
I looked at some us guilds and it seems the system does not work retroactively so wouldn't it be a gigantic mess for the guilds that have already finished content? And there is surely a lot that finished hyjal by now.

Aww, poor troll.

Cool that we are getting the tool for Europe as well, love it, great job. /applause

Is there any way to see the entire listing on one page, even as a plain text file? Just a straight list of guild rank + score for every ranked guild?

I ask because I'd like to do a rough plot of number of guilds versus (binned) score, like I did for realms in post #230. However I don't think I can be bothered to cut and paste data from 127 individual pages just for the sake of curiosity.

There's no way to determine whether or not a guild is making unsuccessful attempts on a boss, based on the data available at the Armory.

You could look at the dates within the individual dungeon pages for an idea of previous boss kills. If my guildmates have three weeks worth of loot from Hypothetical Raid Boss A before the first piece of loot from Hypothetical Raid Boss B, that might indicate we spent three weeks on it. Of course, we might have just called it a night after Raid Boss A on those weeks. No way to tell.

I like Praetorian's idea, but just to give another perspective: My guild is currently completing Kara, and is, at the moment, the top guild on our server that has done 0 25-man raids.

This is a VERY useful statistic to cite when looking for recruits who are have similar goals to ours. Not ranking ZA progression at all would hurt our ability to look for new players that would make it possible for us to get into the 25-mans.

Another useful statistic would simply be the total score for each faction on each server.

Sure, it will be massively biassed in favour of the servers with lots of guilds. That's the point - to use that data to explore the delta between servers/factions, and how big it is. If for whatever reason you don't want to transfer servers, it starts to matter a lot to you whether there's 10 Hordeside guilds in SSC or 1. The current server-by-server ranking looks at the top 5 of each faction at best, even if you assume an even A:H split..

I have browsed this thread a bit, and I am not seeing this, but is there a way to "report" guilds that are clearly out of line to assist in getting it straightened out? We just had a guild on our server break into the "Top 1000" US guilds with a single server transfer giving them 5-6 kills.

Guild is Relentless, Malfurion server. (Scion, on the same server has the same problem regarding its SSC progress, but it is not as substantial of a jump.) If this is the wrong forum, I'll happily delete this. I am very impressed with the quality and amount of work going into the site, can't wait till you have the kinks worked out =)

Just a quick question for Aspir (sorry if it's already been asked/answered, i stopped tracking this thread after page four or five):

About how long does it take for your setup to scan an item and register a kill to having it updated?

I ask, because today it showed that we have loot from a Karathress kill, but hasn't credited it to our guild standing.

I'm mostly curious, because we are right on that borderline for the top 1000 guilds and thats the difference between daily updates and weekly updates, correct? It would be great because I think the Karathress kill would bump us into the top 1000 and tomorrow's scan would show tonights Leotheras kill, which would further solidify our top 1000 standing.

You shut up. >_>

Repeating the exercise a week and a half later...

Comparing this to the previous curve, what do we see? Well, the front runners have moved on by around 50 points. In BT, the top end bosses are worth about 35 points each for a first kill. This would seem to indiate that on the front-ranking realms, each of the top 10 guilds has killed about 1.5 new bosses.

The main peak is now at 200, up from ~185. At that level, first kills look to be worth about 20 - take that with a pinch of salt as that's only a guesstimate. Even so, it looks as though the rate of progression here may well be less than 1 boss per week.

We still have the big subsidiary peak at 100-125, corresponding to realms where guilds are struggling to get beyond Gruul/Magtheridon. If anything, this peak is getting more pronounced as the absolute tail-enders catch up to the "wall" around 125.

What conclusions can we draw? At this point, nothing much beyond the obvious.

1) On some servers, it's hell on a stick just getting into raiding at all.
2) The majority of servers are progressing through SSC/TK at less than one boss per week.
3) Progress in BT appears to be considerably faster.

Now, there's two possible explanations for (3). It may be that BT is flat out easier than SSC and TK. Or it may be due to guild stratification. The better guilds (and by extension the better servers) progress faster because duh, they're better.

My feeling is that there's evidence for both. If you look at the top tail, you can see there's evidence of bimodality. There's *more* servers at a 412 average than at a 340 average. That's what you'd expect from a very rapid dash through BT after getting past Kael. However it still is only the very tail end of the server distribution that's pushing through, which is what you expect from the "server stratification" scenario.

It would be a lot more informative to run this kind of analysis on the raw guild distribution, rather than just the average of the top 10 guilds on each server - however as I said, I'm not cutting and pasting 127 pages of lists unless I get very bored at work some day.

With regard to that point though, I'd say that the image of the "average" progression as SSC/TK is falsely rosy, since this is the average of the top few guilds on each server. We're only looking at 2220 guilds out of 12762 ranked guilds. Eyeballing the main lists, it looks to me like the absolutely dominant story is the block in the early hundreds, in moving past Maulgar/Gruul. It's large enough to show up as a subsidiary peak in the above analysis precisely because on some servers even the top 10 guilds are blocked right at the start of 25-man content.


Edit: Further eyeballing again shows a "No shit, Sherlock" scenario. The three big blocks are:

1) Getting into SSC and TK
2) Killing Kael
3) Essence / Mother Shahraz

The list of upcoming nerfs looks like it's addressing 2 and 3 - Blizzard presumably intend for a large proportion of the people that got into SSC to progress into BT.

From my perspective, I'm much more worried about (1), since it's by far the biggest block. Blizzard presumably believe that the majority of this is people that don't actually want to raid 25-man. Hence ZA coming out as 10-man and being an alternative progression. And to be fair, ~40% of rated guilds (i.e. well progressed in Kara) haven't killed Maulgar, and might conceivably prefer to stay as 10-man groups.

However, I think the fact that the clear majority of ranked guilds (almost 60%) have killed Maulgar, and at least 50% have killed Gruul, is ample evidence that there's a large population who want to progress into 25-man content and (for whatever reason) are unable to get properly stuck into SSC and TK. Early days since the attunement lift, of course, so that may be part of it. But I think that unless we start to see *many* more people in SSC and TK soon, there will be another round of nerfs incoming to these instances. Perhaps even to MC levels, where you can actually enter before you hit the level cap and still kill things.

So when are we looking at European guild ranking? :-) Been waiting for that for while.

Edit: bah the author mentioned next week as part of another post. L2read more carefully for me.

Perhaps it's better to say that the majority of people don't even know what's necessary to do 25 man raids well. A 10 man raid has a lot more "flexibility" in group composition if only because there are fewer ways to distribute 10 people in 2 buckets than 25 people in 5 buckets. We might take it for granted, but here are some basic bits of raiding advice that most 10 man guilds haven't figured out about 25 man raids:

- You need at least one shaman, one paladin, and one shadow priest
- Your first shaman should be with the rogues and he should drop windfury
- You should not have a lot of PvP oriented talents
- Your gear should be enchanted and you should ignore most gem socket bonuses
- You should have a threat meter installed

Most of us here have been raiding with reasonable raid group makeups so long that we've forgotten how hard it is to raid with a seriously crippled setup. Yet almost every guild that's breaking into 25 man raiding is working through some of not all of these issues (and many more I haven't listed). It's not just an issue of getting 25 people online at the same time. They also have to learn the very basics of raiding, and a lot of them never do.