Furthering on from what Rhetorical has said, we're in a similar boat and for all intents and purposes CAN pug 25man content but choose not to as we'd rather keep our rank and enjoy being a 10man guild.

In doing this though, any new member we would ideally like to trial or accept has to go through a bit of a screening process as if we relax on this, and 10 people enter our guild with 25man kills, we're out. It's not really so detrimental, but i will say it's a burden.

You might be pleased to know that I am in the final stages of testing a new GuildOx feature that will show you how many players in your guild have any given strict exclusion achievement/kill. This will give all 10m Strict guild officers an idea on what leeway you have with regards to recruitment or pugging.

The feature should be available in the next few days via a link on the guild pages that will say "Check 10m strict" or something similar.

One bug I've noticed Polar is that if you're viewing strict 10-man progress or achievements and then select any of the links along the top to narrow the selection down (World, US, EU, etc) it switches back to overall 10-man rankings instead.

For example, clicking '10M Strict Prog. Ranks' lists all the guilds based on World ranking. Click US at the top switches to the overall 10M Progress Ranks for US (including all the 25-man guilds). It then requires another click of '10M Strict Prog. Ranks' to properly bring up the list of the US 10M Strict Progression rankings.

Seems like an unnecessary extra click.

Polar, I just want to say that while at times I've disagreed with the criteria you've chosen for the 10m Strict ranking, I do very much appreciate its existence and all the work you are doing for it.

I also look forward to returning to the list when 3.3 comes out and your new features sound nice.

I am putting the final touches on the criteria for 10m-strict eligibility for ICC.

Currently, we exclude any guild that runs ToC 25 - once you down Beasts of Northrend 25 you get excluded from 10-man strict.

Now if I translate this to ICC, I would naturally set Lord Marrowgar as the trigger for 10m strict exclusion. However, there is now a weekly raid quest that lists Lord Marrowgar as one of the possible targets.

I have some thoughts on how to solve this but I would be interested in what you guys think. I want to stick with the general intent of listing 10m strict guilds as those that don't run 25man ICC content - But I expect weekly raid quest pugs to become quite the norm.

you can kill the boss for the weekly raid quest on any difficulty and with any raid size, cant you? So strict guilds can just complete their quest by killing him on 10 man.

So we simply exclude all 25m ICC bosses for 10m strict rankings and not worry about people needing to get the weekly "Lord Marrowgar must die" done on 25-man since it can be completed on 10-man? I like it.

Any objections?

Edit: No objections! This is how we will do it - thanks all, for your input to date.

Hello all, I am new to the conversation and will apologize ahead of time for being long winded here.

Firstly, thank you again, Polar, for your fantastic website, especially the 10 man strict ranking. It’s a fabulous system and my suggestions here are only an attempt to improve upon it.

I have five points to make and I’ll try to be concise.


1. The Guild Ox criteria, as they stand now, are flawed.

They allow for a full 10 man group of players geared in 25 man raid gear to compete alongside true 10 man guilds. A guild can assign nine players to join 25 man raid groups and then fill in with up to four other players from other guilds. This is easily enough breathing room to regularly field a 10 man group fully decked in 25 man gear.


2. The strict 10 man listing is demonstrably too strict.

Despite the loophole I mention above, a quick perusal of the top 100 guilds shows that the criteria for 10 man is actually too strict. Note that all 100 of the world top 100 25 man guilds have completed all 35 progression achievements. If the strict 10 man listing is an attempt to similarly compare the best of the 10 man guilds we might see a similar result. However looking at the world top 100 10 mans only eight guilds have completed all 35 achievements. The 100th guild has only completed 28 progression achievements.

Looking closer at individual server results will show us the same problem. Only a very small number of guilds qualify under the current set of criteria for strict 10 mans. The audience for the current listing is extremely narrow and many guilds that self identify as 10 man guilds are left out.


3. The requirement to police all PuG activity of the entire guild as well as all future recruits is an unfair burden.

Players play to have fun. It’s perfectly reasonable that a handful of players in any given guild would want to occasionally PuG in larger groups. Holding the entire guild out of a ranking system because a few players felt like trying something new is unreasonable and actually harmful to the guild’s moral. Especially given that those players are more likely to be the ones not in the guild’s progression group, hence why they PuG more often.


4. A 10 man guild is a guild that completes 10 man content at the appropriate gear level.

There seem to be different ideas as to what the definition of a “10 man guild” should be. Recognizing that a line must be drawn somewhere, I suggest that we define it based on gear, not on achievements.

Hypothetically, we could all dress down to ilvl 200 gear and still have a nice challenge in Naxx 10. It’s primarily our more powerful, higher ilvl, gear that makes Naxx10 a cake walk now. Similarly, anyone could compete fairly as a 10 man guild by simply not equipping gear above a certain ilvl.


5. The 10 people in the raid are what is relevant to crediting a given boss kill.

The most accurate and fair method would be to take into account the ilvl of gear equipped by players during a given boss fight.

If it is prohibitively difficult to create the system to track this then at the very least the achievements of the members actually in the raid during a boss fight should be the ones examined. They should not be penalized for the achievements of their guild mates who are not present.


Summary: Taken together what I’m saying in my five points here is that the qualifying criteria for the strict 10 man ranking needs to be refocused. It’s perfectly reasonable to base the rankings themselves on the achievements earned by the guild at large, but we can see that it does not work as well to extend that general, guild wide, achievement count to the qualifying criteria.

I suggest that, if it is within the capabilities of GuildOx, the qualifying criteria be focused on the players who are present during a boss kill, either through measuring the ilvl of their gear or if that is not possible through their raid achievements.

A few comments from the post above.

This is somewhat true, except that the player counts are not accurate. A guild can have 6 strict qualified players (minimum required to get a 10man achievement on GuildOx) and fill with 4 players decked from 25man from another guild and still get a strict kill. This is already unfair enough because these 4 players can be tanks and dps (25man tank and dps gear are so much better than 10man).


I think this can show us two things:
- 10man strict achievements are just harder than doing the 25man stuff. (mostly because of the amount and quality of the gear avaible)
- 10man strict isn't that popular.

I actually go with the second option here, because as you pointed yourself, most server results show no competition at all on these brackets.

This is a choice you have to make when you decide (as a guild) to take part in the 10man strict rankings. Either you do it as a guild or don't at all.


I don't think this can be tracked accurately. Not even the in game achievements like Herald of Titans and Tribute do Dedicated Insanity are easy to track within an entire raid.


This is true. But I don't know how difficult it would be to track diferent raids inside the same guild. But I belive the 10man strict achievements should be tracked this way. If you 'guild' is 10man strict, you should have exactly 10 person doing the achievement at the same time. This would also solve the first point in this post.

Edit: A question to Polar. The strict 10man criteria already changed to allow 25man ToC? Or it will when the patch gets deployed?

We don't disagree here. In citing the number nine I was refering to the number of guild members who are able to complete top tier 25 man content without triggering the strict 10 man exclusion. Anywhere from six to nine of these players could be in a 10 man raid together with up to four players from other guilds. All of whom could be geared above the level of other 10 man guilds.


Taken together these two points you make are correct, I agree. Participating in 10 man content in the manner required by the Guild Ox criteria is not that popular.

What I am saying is that there are more guilds out there (some of whom have posted in this thread) who participate in the spirit of the 10 man guild but are excluded from the listing do to the method used to track them.

I think 10 man raiding is more popular than the Guild Ox listing would imply. I know of several casual guilds that run 10 mans simply because they're easier to organize.

Furthermore, I think that 10 man raiding has the potential to be more popular! I think listings like Guild Ox have a positive effect on the perception of 10 man raids in the WoW community. Part of what inspired my own guild to focus more on progression achivements was the fact that we were able to track and compare them with other guilds'.

Consider also that the criteria introduced in 3.3 is likely to stand for a year. Over the course of that much time only a very small segment of the 10 man raiding community will remain on the Guild Ox strict listing, under the current model.

Thanks for the comments and thankfully, Gotrage seems to have addressed most of these nicely.

A couple of points to clarify:

* It is probably a bit harsh to say the system is flawed. However, I am the first to admit that there does not seem to be a perfect system and, as discussed several posts back, the whole concept of what constitutes a genuine 10m guild/raid group is very much a subjective matter and is open to many different opinions. Most of our current 10m strict guilds are quite happy about the system and criteria and are prepared to play with the rules to remain ranked. In fact, most of the very top ranked 10m strict guilds don't go anywhere near the triggers for exclusion.

* As for the 10m strict requirements being too strict - we have over 10,000 guilds qualifying for the 10m strict crtieria. This is roughly 20%-22% of all guilds that ever completed any raid achievement as a guild - I believe this is quite a healthy pool. Naturally, 10m strict achievement rates will always be slower than the 10m achievement rates which include 25m raiding guilds. I don't believe comparing the number of guilds that have maxed out their progression achievements to be an accurate way of measuring the success of the strict criteria.

* Your points 4 & 5 talk about tracking which gear was used during the raid - how is it possible to do this? I am always open to new suggestions.

Not yet. I have updated the 'about' page but I will switching off the ToC25 exclusion around one week after patch 3.3 goes live.

Thanks for your reply, Polar. It is a good system, sorry if my critism came off harsh. It's intended constructively.

To answer your question on tracking gear, I'll confess that I do not know how to accomplish this. I don't know if the armory view of a character's profile is accurate enough to be able to say precisely what gear a character had equipped at the time they earned a given achievement. If it's not possible to do this then is it possible to track the achievements of the members in the raid?

Could you take a list of all guild members who received a given achievement on the same date and identify those who also had achievements from the top tier 25 man raids prior to that?


Schnappi, I agree. I didn't mean to imply that Guild Ox was responsible for the popularity of 10 man raids. I'm just saying that Guild Ox and sites like it can help a lot.

I can think of only two "flaws" in the current system that legitimately work against guilds who still maintain the spirit of the strict rankings, although it's very easy to understand why both exist.

a) Players earning 25-man achievements in a previous guild and then move to a strict 10-man guild count towards that guild's threshold.

I was in this situation before joining Vortex. The main reason I don't like this is the restriction it puts on 10-man strict recruitment. This is a generalization, but people joining 10-man strict guilds seem to be mostly disillusioned 25-man raiders who want to continue doing hard mode content without dealing with the logistics of 25-man raiding. As a result, the recruitment pool is almost always from 25-man guilds rather than fellow 10-man strict guilds. This is mostly accounted for by the leniency of the threshold, and for the most part, I don't see much of an issue with it since a tier later that player will no longer count against it. The current functionality is probably the best-case scenario given the limitations.

b) Alts and casual players have to abide by the same 10-man strict rules as the raiders in the guild.

This is the largest issue I currently have, and I do think there is a way to account for it. Players should only count towards the threshold if they have both the 25-man achievements *and* a corresponding 10-man hard mode achievement. If the players doing 25-mans in their free time aren't actually coming to the 10-man strict raids, then no benefit is actually conferred to the group. This seems like it should be possible to track since right now a Beasts 25-man kill works as the threshold doesn't it? I'm proposing to make it a Beasts 25-man kill + Beasts Heroic 10-man kill.

EDIT: That would allow guilds to treat alts and casual players in a similar manner to recruited players if they want to bring them to a progression raid for any reason. I think it's fair to place the onus on 10-man strict guilds to pay attention to who they bring to their raids, but I think it's unnecessarily strict to dictate that those are the only people who can exist in the guild itself.

Razzberry's point (b) is a huge one for us. It is the reason why we were removed from 10m Strict in 3.2 (alts and non-raiders pugging 25m ToC). Also, in preparation for a return to 10m Strict in 3.3, it has led us to kick many of our alts from the guild and require that (non-raider) friends stay away from ICC 25m or be removed from the guild.

A solution like the one Razzberry proposes would be very welcome.

I'd go so far as to set the trigger as ~5 people who have any ICC 25-man Normal/Heroic or ToC 25-man Heroic kill + any 10-man Heroic kill in ICC. A 10-man strict guild should have no reason to have more than 5 people with both (even if all are recruited, that's an abnormally large amount of turnover). This allows guilds to have alts/non-raiders PuG Normal raids all they want without messing up the ranking as well as give guilds a bit of a buffer for recruitment (which is the only real purpose of the trigger not being 1 in my opinion).

Maybe the best option would be to set a fixed list of players within a guild to represent on the 10-man strict ladder.
Guilds should be able to lockdown their strict roster this way.

But I guess the criteria should probably be a lot more strict than the actual one, to avoid exploiting.

That would even allow bored high-end 25man guilds to gear a set of alts to compete without having to create a new guild.

Polar, it's one thing to flat out say that you just don't feel like doing the extra work (which is totally within your rights as the maintainer of the website), but to suggest that as the best option is pretty inane and insulting to the strict 10-man guilds out there who already bend over backwards in most cases to stay within the current rules.

It is not that I don't feel like doing the work, it is more that I am far from convinced that there is a massive problem with the current system. I have over 10,000 qualified raiding guilds that are doing fine with the current 10m strict system - I don't have any plans to change the system in the short-term and with the patch dropping tonight, I don't see any other option available.

The system that you proposed - mandating that guilds do 10m heroic ICC before they qualify for 10m strict - will exclude thousands of guilds and make the issue far worse rather than better. It will be fine for the top guilds, but there will be many guilds out there that won't step foot into the heroic version for months.

There have been other suggestions - many good ones too - but they all seem to have an equal number of flaws (just different flaws).

So my point was, and maybe I was too brief in my reply, that if a guild feels so strongly about continuing to run 25 man pugs on their alts but still want to be considered a 10m strict guild then the quickest and easiest answer for them is to form a second guild for them. Currently, the only other alternative is for them to compete on the standard 10-man rankings.

Your opinion is noted though

Thanks, I appreciate you giving an objection based on principle rather than just shrugging it off as a problem with the user.

Your point makes sense, although I do still think the most ideal solution would still account for players in a guild not actively raiding with the 10m strict group. It is somewhat annoying (but doable as you noted) to have to enforce alts/non-raiders to rules that they shouldn't need to worry about. Can you imagine telling 25-man guilds that in order to be counted they would have to make a new guild for all of their alts and non-raiders? I'd imagine most would just dismiss the site altogether if that were the case. That's why I was as miffed as I was that it was your suggested solution.

Just want to throw it out there that my guess is that the majority of the guilds that actually care about having their progression tracked are those actually at the top of progression, although I could be wrong and that there's actually a lot of guilds that don't touch hard modes but still care about how their guild's progress shows up on a website.

I'm inclined to agree, which is why I suggested the parameters I did, but if Polar is intentionally trying to make sure that it's as inclusive as possible to 10m strict guilds not running hard-modes, then his resistance to the proposal makes a lot more sense.

For ICC, we've moved all alts who want to PUG 25m ICC to another guild, asked all friends (non-raiders) to stay out of 25m PUGs or join the 2nd guild, and none of our raiders will PUG 25m ICC. It sucks to have to go through these hoops, but I understand that there is no 'perfect' criteria and that GuildOx's 10m Strict ranking has the right intent and is the only show in town for guilds like mine.