Fagrim

I have many times asked myself the very same question. I think this is about power gravity in a guild structure.

Firstly, you recruit/kick/state a vision about a guild to ensure that the majority of your players are skilled. I believe this is the easy part (even though many guilds do this wrong).

However, even if you have clearly stated that you raid 3 times per week there will come points in time when people want to raid more to ensure faster progress. And the people that will advocate this the most are those with ample time. And those with ample time will be listened to since they are online the most. Slowly the guild starts to creep towards increasing the number of hours per week they raid and tension mounts.

At this point the Officer group really needs to lead the guild instead of just slowly gravitating (passively) towards more hours per week. To increase the amount raided per week is just not a small decision - it is a major change in what the guild is. And major changes are not easy to implement succesfully.

A question: Assuming that a guild does not compromise about the skill level in the player base, how many guilds out there are capable of handling a wider range of days played per week in the player base (different ranks? not doable? etc)? I am thinking about a having players that raid 2-3 days per week at the same time as having people who raid 4-5 days. Possible? Impossible?

 

Kink

My guild runs 6 raid days a week. However one of those days, Friday, is for Kara (albeit recently we have tried to get Kael tries on Friday). The officers are quite strict about skill level and being reliable. However we have absolutely no rules on attendance. We ask that if you sign up, you turn up and that you bring your pots and pans to new fights. Some people, including the main tank, have exceptional attendance in our 25man instances (95%+) so we have important positions covered. Others though have wide ranging attendance.

I think a hardcore guild can have casual players providing those important roles are filled by the hardcore. If you changed MT every other raid you would really struggle with progress, but keep a core of the healers, the MT and some of the DPS and you can pad out the rest with casual players who are skilled no problem.

There is light at the end of the tunnel.
The only problem is, it's often an incoming train.

 

Nezralix

Here's a related question: Would it be possible for Blizzard to somehow enforce or encourage a 3-4 hour time investment per raid? There are certainly a number of mediocre raids who wipe on farm content attempts a few times on practically every attempt, and compensate by spending 6 hours in the instance. How can Blizzard encourage doing things right in a reasonable time window, without just saying "okay, you've tried this for X hours, enough is enough!" Because apparently, time efficiency for the sake of time efficiency isn't a rewarding goal for many players.

 

Valjean

I would think that would have alienate the players who want to put in 6 hours per raid. These are the guys that get the world first kills, and Blizzard needs them just as they need the 2 hour a raid night guys.

Blizzard could do a bunch of things, from adding insane respawn timers, to some of reduced incentive/loot if you take too long to clear an instance, but none of it would be popular in my opinion.

In my opinion, the best way for Blizzard to create an environment where everyone gets their cookie is to have smaller raid sizes, more 10-mans and fewer 25-mans. More 10-mans lets the players who want to raid every day do so, while fewer 25-mans lets the players who want to raid 3 days a week focus on that.

 

jaehunkin

Do you mean a enrage timer on the instance where after Xhours or Xwipes, everything down to the critters inside start hitting for 10k or some absurdly high number?
Anything that would discourage players from playing would be against what a game like WoW is all about, and would do nothing but cause headaches for guilds.

 

Nezralix

I was thinking more in terms of rewards for completing on time, but I suppose some minor punishment could be part of the solution also. That's obviously not as fun.

What are you saying that WoW is all about? Time investment for the sake of time investment? Don't forget that Blizzard makes the most money off of players who pay for an account or two every month but only log on a couple of hours a week. There's no direct requirement for time sinks. There is a requirement to prevent people from completing everything the game has to offer, but that doesn't necessarily have to be based on time investment.

 

• gunsmithx

There's a better way to do the time thing and they are doing it with ZA. The fast you complete an instance the better loot you get or perhaps a special chest with unique loot for those who clear it quickly (the carrot rather then the stick approach) it can give agreat deal of incentive to play well and finish quickly while not really hurting those who end up taking a long time to finish the instance.

 

jaehunkin

WoW, like any game is a time investment, it all depends on how much time much effort/time into it. Right now you dislike that content that should take 2 hours to complete( if done correctly) is taking 4-6 hours and you want to add incentive/punishment to keep people on task. ZA is going along with what you want, faster time=better loot, but it really is not the game's fault that it takes you 2-3times to do something.
and that blizzard makes most of its money off people who do not invest as much time/energy into the game does not mean that they have to tune everything to be finished in exactly Xhours, while certain instances(BM/hyjal) are made to be completed on a somewhat rigid time frame, the majority of content can be completed at the pace of the guild/raid/whatever, be it a 1shot 30ish minutes in gruul lair or a 8 hour wipefest.

 

Nezralix

Actually, not so much. Virtually every athletic sport has strict time restrictions. Many other games have implicit time restrictions. You can play a game of chess for days, but your opponent might get rather annoyed with you, and opt for a timed game next time instead. In either case, you don't have to deal with cranky teammates who desperately crave loot.

MC has been done in about an hour. Did MC require an hour to complete? No, it required more than for virtually everyone. Blizzard typically doesn't officially state how long it *should* take to complete raid instances, so any judgment call you make on that topic is arbitrary. Blizzard could fix that pretty easily. It's certainly within their power to implement positive pacing mechanisms instead of negative ones.

 

jaehunkin

Blizzard can implement positive pacing mechanisms and they are with ZA, however there really is no reason that they should. Your average guild who first steps into ZA is not going to go tearing off and completing it as fast as possible no matter how much of the carrot Blizzard gives them. While there is no set time limit on how fast a instance/boss will take you there are reasonable expectations, like an enrage timer on the max, and your raid's dps and the boss' abilities/hitpoints/armor on the min. Pride and the amount of time a raid/person has to spend are the only things that should affect a raid's motivation to move forward. You cannot make a silk purse out of a pig's ear, no matter how much you try.

On the subject of sports/games and the time investment an athlete will spend a large amount of time preparing for the hour long football game, the same way a chess player will have to take the time necessary to learn chess and become good enough to actually play. The same thing happens with an endgame raider, a person does not simply say "i think im going to raid SSC/gruul/BT/TK/whatever today" and finish it in under 10minutes before breakfast. He or she must put time and energy into the game before becoming good enough to compete( trying to think of a better word).

 

Lavode

Re the time commitment; Basically. Yes, you can.
it is highly unhealthy for the mood in the raid group to have people with widely diffrent attitudes about potting/reading strategies/actually watching the screen during boss fights. if everyone isnt on roughly the same page about these things, you get resentments flying all over the place, and life sucks. but, if, as you say, you dont compromise on skill/preparedness, then diffrent levels of days/week activity can be accomodated, Pick the miminum level of activity you (and your raid in general) are cool with, and bob's your uncle.

 

• Kaacee

Our guild is really trying to combine the casual and hardcore players.

I took over leadership of our guild in early June. And we’ve gone from clearing KZ with one group to just killing Magtheridon on Sunday on our sixth or seventh pull. I think the important goals for guilds who are combining casual and hardcore players are:

Raid less: Someone who wants to raid five times a week is not going to be happy in a combo guild. We raid three, and biweekly have a Friday night raid, for a total of 7 raids out of 14 days. It also distinguishes you from the wanna-be uber guilds that are probably ahead of you in progression, but led by 16 year olds.

Schedule: Someone needs to take control of the schedule. We do signups for nights, not for particular raids. I then pick the raids for those nights based on the signups. This has allowed me to work around the player’s schedules to make sure stuff dies in a reasonable time. I can schedule progression for the nights we have our 20 best players, and HKM/Gruul for the nights our MT needs to do RL stuff. Phpraid is awesome: phpRaid :: Apatheia Raid Page of Khadgar :: raid management made easy

Status: You need to clearly distinguish status between raiders and non-raiders (our guild uses Legacy Member to distinguish someone’s girlfriend, wife, buddy at work). If you do not distinguish these members, they will expect invitations to raids before you are ready, which will slow progress and stall the guild. Once the guild has significantly outgeared an encounter, then revisit the content so everyone can run their buddy through HKM.

Recruitment: Be proactive about recruitment. These types of guilds attract a real niche of player. There are tons of guilds with 5-7 good players who are dragging their 10-15 buddies through KZ 2-3 times every week. They need to know about your guild before they start looking for options. Also, do not be a jackass on recruiting. I always try to contact the guildleader of any applicant to make sure there are no hard feelings, and the person left on good terms. You’ll not only improve relations, but might even learn a few things about the applicant.

Core roles: Your most consistent raiders should be your tanks. They are your most important people, and can make poor healers look good. You can over recruit healers, just make sure they are willing to chain super mana pots. The easiest classes to gauge are usually DPS. WWS has made evaluation much easier.

Loot system: I really wanted to do loot counsel for our guild, but we have a few to many cliques. We decided to go with SLS, which is a modified bid system (half, min, fun). It should help distribute loot amongst the folks in a reasonable manner, and give people some influence over their upgrades. Normal DKP systems are probably not going to be a good idea unless you can find a way to solve the difference in dkp between the 100% attendees and the 50% attendees. I sure could not figure one out.

 

Onomatopeizator

Something like this is already in game, I'm not sure if you like it though:
nothing says "time to end the raid" as strongly as another trash respawn ;)

By the way, wasn't this the case with Ragnaros? I've heard you could only attempt him for 2 hours after spawning, when those passed you had to wait for the instance to soft reset. Never checked it myself though, the guilds I were in either killed him in this time or gave up.
There was a similar thing for leveling in WoW beta: the "tired" state which made you receive up to 50% less exp from kills than normally after some time, but it got pulled before release.

I suspect the reason is there are few things in the game that are more irritating than wanting to go on but being prevented by some artificial barrier; if you enjoyed the Shartuul event as much as I did, you'll know about it.

A thing that can, should and is to some extent done is designing dungeons in such a way that people can spend 2-4 hours a day in them and come back another day without major setback. There were some things that encouraged raiding long hours that got removed. Molten Core and Zul Gurub were hell for splitting it in a few days due to most mobs respawning, other instances are much better (the amount of time spent on Karazhan trash on a clear is a bit overboard though). Smaller raid sizes and meeting stones contribute to raids taking a much shorter time to gather.

If anything in WoW needed a safety mechanism on it, it was the old HWL/GM grind, but that's another story.

 

Unaz

It's still there, they just switched the terminology to rested and changed the mechanic on how it regenerated a bit. Making negative reinforcement into positive reinforcement.

Regarding the trash thing, that is exactly what trash and trash timers are there for. At Blizzcon, Tigole specifically mentioned it as being one of the key things to clue people in on maybe they've been attempting a boss too long. It's why the trash respawn at the beginning of Karazhan is on a very short timer, and the trash near the end is on a longer timer, based off of how long they think you should be attempting a given boss before giving up.

 

elessar

Our guild has a few very casual individuals in it. The understanding we pushed was that we will work very hard to get them in on some farm stuff. Luckily the casual individuals are understanding and are also liked in the guild enough that there are plenty of volunteers to sit out for them. But they also realize they do not have an equal say in how the guild is ran. I think we coexist fairly well. There is a mutual understanding that both can coexist with a bit of compromise. I dont think our guild could add new members that are casual though. Our recruitment is entirely based around them being able to be available for all our raid days(we only do progression 3 days a week).

 

• songster

Size is a red herring IMO. What they need is entry-level raids with a shorter reset timer. 7 days on the entry level instance is a killer for morale. Of course, an instance with a shorter reset would have to be arranged much more nonlinearly so that you don't have to clear all the easy bosses to get to the hard ones.

 

MasterLoco

This story is one that sounds very familiar to me

Myself I am playing in a hardcore guild since october 2006. Before this I played in a guild much like yours for almost 2years. The guild was started up at very low lvl but some RL friends (think they are abouts 30 yo IRL). They recruited whoever wanted to join their guild, I joined them when I was arround lvl20, back then it was just a bunch of noobs exploring this wonderfull new world. For alot of us WoW was our first MMORPG ever.

After a few months alot of us got to lvl60... some players wanted to venture into Molten Core. We formed an alliance with 3 other guilds & started up raids. After some dificulties we managed to get in there in the fall of 2005... Initialy we only raided on sunday nights. (replacing sundaynight's Xroads & Ogrimar raids). More people dinged 60 & got the taste of raiding, we increased our number of raiding days to tuesday - thursday & sunday from 20 to 24. By the time we finished Molten Core we broke loose from the last guild remaining in the raid alliance & added a 4th raid sunday afternoon from 14:30-17:30. We kept progressing at a steady pace. Razorgore however appeared to be a wall. People didn't show up, only for Molten Core & the easy purplez. The more hardcore players got worked up over the fact that they showed up every time & alot of people didn't even bother to show up or post AFK's.

Thus was created the rank of core raider. Each class got assigned 5 core spots & 1 of the core raiders got promoted to class leader. To be a core raider you had attend 80% of the raids, in return you got priority on all loot above normal members regardless of the DKP.
In the start this worked out great & we boosted past BWL. We then started doing Ahn'Qiraj, but summer kicked in... our casual members didn't show up for raids cause they rather went out, also some of the people in our core were strugeling to stay above 70% attendance, let stand 80% so we often ended up with 35 people instead 40 & raid cancels.

We managed to get back on top of things near the end of the summer, we recruited new people. We killed the Twin Emperors, C'thun, Anub'Rekhan & Razuvious. Then, items were released from TBC Alpha version. People quit playing all of a sudden cause "the items would be useless with TBC anyways" etc. That's where it ended for alot of people. The real core swarmed out over other Frostmane raiding guilds, so did I.

Currently my old guild seems to be still doing what they've always been doing... they've merged with another guild somewhere in march tho. But atm they are managing just fine with about 3-4 raiding days a week afaik. & currently they are on Kael'thas to just like your guild.

The problem now is, or will soon be... there is so much to do, for such a limited amount of raiding time... If I can give you one piece of advice... focus your efforts on SSC & TK. Leave Gruul & Mag for what it is, they only take arround 2hours to clear if you play well but it's 2hours to much if you only have arround15-20 hours of raiding time a week... ESPECIALY when you enter MH & Black Temple. You do NOT need gear for the first half of Mount Hyjal & Black Temple. Once you kill Kael'thas & Vashj I would go in there again next week... attune a second wave of players. & then go for MH/BT full out next week, leaving SSC & TK for what they are.

For the time being... don't push to hard on Kael'thas. Especialy the more casual players in your guild will be burned out before you notice & it can't be good for your guild. Kael is one of the hardest encounters in WoW to learn... especialy if you constantly have to rotate people. Just be patient & give it some time. You'll see that once you kill Kael'thas, 5-6 other bosses will follow very fast...

 

Leveret

From what I've experienced, many guilds break up due to a mix of casual and hardcore players. Especially since the availability of server transfers, a lot of hardcore players will feel like they are being held back by the casual players and will simply server transfer to find a guild more suitable to their playstyle. I've seen two guilds break up for just this reason, when the guild is unable to fill their ranks with enough hardcore players who can make the necessary time commitment to progress at a fast pace, the guild will suffer a slow trickle of hardcore players one after another leave for other servers and eventually collapse.

 

◊ Vectivus

As I continue to lead raids in what would appear to be a guild that fits the parameters for the discussion here, I've come to a conclusion:

Every guild has this problem. The only difference is the disparity level.

If you have two players, X and Y, that are the polar opposites in their guild, the only thing that matters is what separates them - not how much physical time/effort is put in.

If X is the 'hardcore' player, maybe he puts in 50 hours a week vs. Y, the 'casual' player, who puts in 40 hours. If the average player puts in 45 hours, X is 'too hardcore', and Y is 'too casual'. They're the ends of the spectrum.

Similarly, in a less motivated team, maybe X puts in 30 hours, Y puts in 10 hours, and the average is 20 hours. This is more of an issue - the disparity between the most hardcore player (is 30 hours hardcore? We could argue that point all day), and the most casual player (again, is 10 hours casual?) has increased exponentially.

In reality, that disparity - the gap between your most committed and most apathetic - is what dictates the severity of this problem. If it is significant enough, it will begin to feel like you're housing two guilds under one roof; normally, that is the point at which a split has become inevitable.

This problem, though, is manifested in different ways in every guild. It's just a question of perspective.

 

sluma

From my own experience and from what I've seen from most people in this thread, you can actually do just fine in terms of raiding if you have Good leadership. My suggestion is to appeal to the masses and find a happy medium. It usually comes down to the number of days that your guild raids. Personally I would say push for 4 raiding days and get an extra 3-4 people to make up for the loss of the type A's that you have. This in turn will satisfy the players that want to spend more time on bosses and still allow the others to be there and feel like they contributed without going over their limit. You pretty much have to keep juggling this balance and it's never a one time fix. I hope this helps

http://sigs.guildlaunch.net/sig.php/596976LZprt.png

 

Natural

I am a firm believer that the most successful guilds will absolutely not have both casual and hardcore raiders. Between Nihilum and Joe Raider on his first Karazhan run there is a continuous spectrum of raiders who are all prepared to devote a certain amount of time and energy to the game.

Guild success can be measured in a number of ways, most of which directly or indirectly tied to time played. Player retention and happiness, mutual respect for other guild members, player efficiency (# of guildies vs. raid spots), and raid progression all eventually link back to how "hardcore" a player is.

Players will be happy with their guild if they feel it matches or exceeds their level of progression. If you have hardcore players in an average guild he will feel repressed and wish to leave. They will view the most casual players in the guild as lazy or unfitting for the guild's goals. Likewise, the more casual players find the hardcore players to be theorycraft mongrels and DPS/WWS addicts who put pressure on the casuals.

A guild full of casual players should be perfectly happy to progress casually, so long as they have the desire/coordination to log on at the same time. Similarly, a guild full of hardcore players will not be happy unless it is progressing aggressively.

 

Xertigo

I think one, often overlooked, category that significantly impacts raid performance is computer configuration/setup. I've played with a number of people that just seemed horrible, but when I talked to them, I found that out that they are running WoW with 512Mb Ram, a 5 year old video card, etc. and get less than 1fps during some fights. Even in my own experience, incompatible or out-of-date mods can either trash my framerate or cause the game to freeze at the most inopportune moments. I couldn't imagine playing under those types of conditions regularly, but many people do. If you identify people in your raid who are like this, you can either help them upgrade/fix their system or use the fact that their setup is not good enough to raid as a legitimate reason to sit them.

I think that a significant part of this problem comes from the fact that WoW has a broader appeal than the hardcore PC gamers who understand the impact that their rig has on their gameplay experience. While more casual gamers might not like the fact there is often significant money involved to upgrade their hardware, it really is one of the best ways to improve in-game results.