This post is mostly adressed to raid- and guildleaders and others that are in a position where your more or less responsible for the performance of your guild, and your raiding progression.

I think most of us recognice atleast some of the scenarios:

Some geniouses manages to bunch up on Gruul, killing of 5 people the 25th time your doing it...

Clicking the cubes on Magtheridon is still a problem after having SSC and TK on farm...

After 3 months someone still manages to aggro Hydross over the line and wipe...

5 people stand around like sheeps when lurker spouts them right in the face...

Warlocks fail at kiting the murlocs at Morogrim, eventho it's just stacking up SoC and running...

Healer suddenly forget how much burst Tidalvess and produce and let the tank die...

A whirlwinding Leo looks like a smorgosboard of DPS posibility, resulting in 3 warlocks, 2 mages and 1 hunter pulling aggro and dying...

In a stroke of genious a warlock manages to pickup a stray Strider, just to get a poison, 0 dispels, 0 heals and dies cause healers were busy scratching themselves...

Oki, i think you all get the picture. People fucking up severly on farm encounters which costs loads of raidtime, slowing down the raid and possibly costing valuable time that could be spent on progression. You KNOW your fellow guildies are more then capable of healing a tank, avoiding Thaladred or whatever (Cause they've done it over and over), but for some reason people choose to play halfarsed and not do it.

The question here is, how do you, as a leader, handle misstakes? Do you yell? Do you have a therapeutical talk explaining that it's all gonna be fine if they just try a tad harder? Do you smack them in the face with a DKP-fine?

The cries of "PUNISH SLACKERS" are widely thrown around, up until the point where the zealous punisher finds himself in the crosshair for a dkp-fine. Then it's suddenly "too harsh", "unfair" and "your just taking the joy out of it"...

The choise might of course be just to drop all the old stuff and focus on progress (where people tend to focus more), but for the sake of argument let's drop that, since this situation IS gonna come in BT/Hyjal soon enough.

So, how do YOU go about diciplining your raid? Have you tried different approaches? Can you treat healers as a collective (aka MT dies, noone healed, fine all healers)? Should you single people out where possible?

All experiences and thoughts welcome.

p.s. I know there's threads on leading, but i'd like this more to be focused on punishment, motivation and how to handle severly underperformance.

Its a delicate issue and is largely dependant on your guild aims, atmosphere and relationship with each other.

My guild has played with each other since wow started, and even though I'm a fairly recent recruit in comparison, they made me very welcome.

This is reflected in their discipline style. The large majority is sort of a fun mockery of the players that messed up which works okay. Occasionaly a raid leader will blow his top with one of our locks who manages to just fuck up continously, pretty much everything you said up there he does on a weekly basis.

You can also look at dkp penalities but these can cause resentment and turn the atmosphere sour.

Another good solution is taking the player aside and talking to them. Warn them that if it happens again you'll simply replace them in that nights raid. Can be a kick up the arse when they see the new recruit warlock being drafted in in front of them because they couldn't perform.

But at the end of the day these are what are called retard checks by the wow community. If certain people are failing them repeatedly, well the conclusion is obvious. Start looking for another player.

Often in our raids, it's just a formidable cascade of misstakes, but the problem is, it's near ALLWAYS different people... A warlock dies on lurker, another can't kite on moro, the third pulls aggro on a strider. It just seem to be a general lack of focus, and should that be harshly diciplined?

How do you find the time to discuss every misstake, which has been gone over and over and over and over the past 1, 2 or 3 months everytime your at an encounter? (And how in gods name do you have the patience :P)
It's not like the healers don't know that the warlock who's kiting Thelonicus might need a heal, but still NONE of the 5 healers who werent doing anything manages to land a single heal between the time the lock gets toyed, til he dies (misstake from last night).

Our server isn't very well progressed (we're the only hordeguild past Kael), so new recruits are hard to come by. And also we're trying to keep it friendly (in terms of oldtime members and alike) so kicking people over small misstakes would ruin all that.

yea i'd agree with the above poster (vaccine). outright abusing some one generally gets no results, instead just have an 1-2 additional raiders for classes that aren't performing, trial them and let people know if they're constantly making mistakes they will most likely lose there raid spot. its harsh but honestly if people don't pay a small amount of attention where it counts it really turns what should be a 15 minute boss into a 1.5 hour wipe fest in magtheridons case. happened more times then i can count in my old guild.

We had a similar problem this week on Archimonde. For the past month that we've been killing him, we've probably had a handful of people ever crater, yet this week, we had to devote a second night to him because the first night we had a dozen people crater, wiping us. There wasn't extraordinary server lag or anything of the sort, just lame ass excuses why people didn't click their tears ("was gripped/doomfired/low health/etc and tried to click my potion and cratered" or "i clicked it and it didn't go off" or "i was close to the tree and didn't want to land in the water"). We were kind of at a loss what to do, we had never had a problem with cratering before, and now we were in the midst of almost a dozen crater wipes in a row. We stuck with our usual system of calling out the people that fucked up in vent, and having them explain what happened. But beyond that, there really wasn't anything we could do, it wasn't like 1 person was fucking up each time, rather it was a different person every time.

In the end, we came back the next night, and instead of cratering, we had healer letting the MT die. We tweaked healer positions, and emphasized the goals for the week, and we ended up getting a kill after wasting 2 full flasks on the boss over two nights. It was really frustrating, but I'm really not aware of a discipline system that would have helped. Instead, we're kinda stuck hoping the same thing doesn't happen on RoS this weekend, with people unable to properly interrupt, etc.

Then it suddenly becomes an issue of the number of members... We're at 44 (i think) people right now, but we've made the choise to take in 1-2 extra of each class to accomodate peoples RL's, and we're often only +1 online from each class from what we need. By recruiting more, we'd severly piss people off with increased rotations and boredome cause theyr not getting raidspots.

This is what we generaly opt for, but the frustration just builds up over time, to the point where i'm so fed up with my guildies that i don't even know which way to turn.

Question is: Do some guilds just have a 0 tolerance policy for these kind of things? 1 misstake, BAM, dkp-fine, or alike?

Do you have general "guidelines" for this that your raiders are aware of? In the form of "If your responsible for a wipe, it's a 10DKP fine straight off". Or is it a spur of the moment thing?

How would that translate to healers, which often is harder to distinguish who really made the misstake, or where 3-4 people just didnt perform?

The problem is that the people who fuck up tipically aren't horrendous players, but they are good players that are just not bothering to focus. It happens a lot to us, Magtheridon is always agonizing because people in my guild are ADD and cannot be focked to focus on cubes.

I think every example listed above we have done multiple times, myself included. When we were learning Leothrass we'd always be a bit short on the damage meters so I'd go all out and sometimes forget to stop before WW was over, and I'd always pull aggro after a transition - it didn't help that the hunters never misdirected, but still.

There is no good solution, you cannot punish people who are playing a game unfortunately, the only problem is that minor mistakes have a way of cascading, because people start getting really pissed off after wiping 4 or 5 times because a different person keeps fucking up something different each attempt.

Benching/replacing people is the only way to go in my opinion. Aim to have enough reserves ready and available in front of the instance and replace people who perform way below their usual level. If you can prove stuff with sw stats and similar tools, they mostly don't even complain (because if someone still screws up after a warning, it's mostly because of connection problems or similar stuff).

We also had the "lemming syndrome" with people chain cratering on Archimonde once, a good yell from the raid leader "whoever decides to crater on the next attempt will see his sorry ass benched for the rest of the raidweek" helped wonders there =)

It really depends on the player themself in regards to how you approach them. Disclaimer however, this is from my past experiences as an officer/guild leader as I am not one now. However, I still notice problem players present in my own guild but typically keep quiet about it as its not my problem (usually to deal with).

Rememeber that every person in your raid typically acts different. Some people can't handle being publically called out, while others can. Some need to be talked in private chat, referred to others in their respective class about how to improve themselves, and some really just need to be kicked outta the guild.

It's a delicate balance really. Our raid group really isn't super hardcore about raiding in terms of hours played but we do have a really close knit family, so its important for us to maintain that atmosphere. In regards to that theres quite a few things people do to let people know they fucked up.

-Trial new players: This is typically a huge wake up call to those present in the class if they know that they may be replaced. I've seen poor un-attentive players turn a complete 360 when we recruited new members of the class and for it has made the original player far better.

-Send players to other guild members: As mentioned above this happens quite a bit. Whether it be through class forums on our respective forums or through tell. If they know they need to play better from a specific officer then often times the best person to go to is the player who typically plays the best in that class. Whether this be survival, healing, damage or nifty little tricks they may have been unseen to them in the past

-Publically Joke About Mistakes: Again, some people can't take someone just yelling at them with 23+ other people on vent listening to them. Instead what we've done and im sure many others do is joke about the mistake afterwards. Who really wants to be known as the guy who messed up the Magtheridon Cube forever? They often wear off over time but when you have a constant stream of guildmates jokingly reminding you of an attempt you botched, rest assured you don't make the same mistake again.

-Replace: Simply put, warn them... then remove them. If they don't improve within so many weeks then either take the raid spot away from them. They will leave the guild shortly after or strive to become better. Some players are beyond help it seems and you shouldn't feel too bad about it, I mean you had them in the guild for however long anyways. They joined most likely with the understanding of what content was exepected of them and should accept the consquences if they don't measure up later on. Bite the bullet and remove them, keeping them in the guild only hurts your raid.

Our guild is making a list of all the people who die from stupid things (i.e cratering) on Archimonde and having them cough up 25g when we finally do kill him. The total is split up amongst the people who didn't mess up.

The people I raid with tend to mock light heartedly about mistakes.

There's the occasional Orange Mark of Shame from my group before TBC as well. IE, cock up too much and you'll get the Orange raid icon over your head for a good while.

I used to be raid leader for almost all of Vanilla WoW and we tried a lot in regards to getting people to pay attention.

What absolutely didn't work out, were DKP fines for mistakes during the raids. We did have rules for them and usually I would call out a glaring mistake the first time with a clear warning that the same fuckup again would cause loss of DKP. Still most of the people were pretty pissed when they got a fine and didn't pay more attention (it wasn't even a high fine, more like 2 or 3 bosses' worth of DKP).

We often tried to substitute players that weren't performing well that night. We would ask them, if something troubled them in RL or so and then tell them, they weren't focussed enough that night and we would swap them out. This worked okay most of the time, since the new guy knew he was in because the old one fucked up and tried to show his best. The guys that got benched reacted differently, of course. Some really couldn't focus well due to issues in RL and were relieved, others would try better next time and still others would be pissed off and log out.
So depends pretty much on the personalities you're dealing with.

During Naxx we had the problem of people not reading boss strategies. So what we did there was, we would call out a random person to explain the boss for the raid ( first time we used a person we knew that read stuff, next times we used persons that we generally had in suspect of not knowing shit or had fucked up before). As a sidenote, we had the habit of almost always giving a short summary of boss abilities and stuff people had to watch during the encounter like positioning, timers and stuff. Also, we'd call out a lot of stuff on vent that was already announced by boss mods, since some people couldn't manage to focus on doing their stuff and keeping track of timers (Chromaggus and Razuvious "In" - "Out" springs to my mind ^^).
This seemed to work fine, mostly due to the fact people made mistakes during (farm!)encounters purely because they didnt know what exactly was going on -.-

Something we couldn't really influence was the discussing between "normal" raid members. For example when one of our druids would fuck up, another one often called out the mistake on vent and tried to discuss it with him. We would let them go a bit, then tell them to sort it out in whispers or after the raid. Often, the one that got critisized would try to do better the next time to show the other guy he could do it.

People are not reading the OP carefully. This isn't the case of shitty players who always perform like crap, the solutions to that are obvious, and easy enough to implement.

This is a case of players who tipically are great/good players 95% of the time who on farm content get extremly lazy and fuck up once or twice. This is usually horrible because that person tends to not fuck up later in the raid, but if a different person fucks up a later attempt it tends to cause a cascade of negativity and people start playing worst and worst.

What do you do if in 3 or 4 different attempts 3 or 4 different people each fail to individually fail cubes? Players who tend to be great players almost always, but just cannot be fucked to focus? What if someone always dies to early WW on Leo and your dps ends up being careful?

Getting people to play consitently and not fuck up is much harder than cutting out bad players.

Humiliation will not get you a better raider or a better raid.
In general people that fuck up, know it themselves as well and they won't have a good feeling about that either. ( hell I walked of a platform during Alar yesterday!! )

Sharing constructive critisism in raid chat is always good, blatent naming and shaming is not as far as i am concerend, people shouldn't be feeling to well by messing up on their own accord. no need for the rest to push them down even further.

Well, that doesn't matter. The person who fucks up won't do it again, but how are you sure the dude right next to him won't screw up the next attempt?

There's two seperate scenarios being discussed here; People who are consistently bad and people who are inconsistently bad.

Consistently bad people can be fixed by completelty replacing them, it's not like the old 40 man stuff where you could afford to drag a retard or two because they've been around for so long. Consistently bad people have a really negative knock on effect on your entire raid and people will stop trying regardless of whether the content can be beaten.

People fucking up inconsistently can be attributed mostly to boredom and distraction.

Boredom personally doesn't really affect me until the point where im in a zombie like state i can't really attain unless I'm fatigued on top of bored for a few hours. For the people I've seen who are prone to lapsing through boredom, switching things up and giving them different roles is enough to give them a kick up the arse to keep them on their toes.

Distraction is a killer, and I'm really really guilty of this one. I honestly can't think of any way to fix this apart from threatening to remove people from the raid if they wipe you more than once and distraction generally leads to boredom.

Farm stuff isn't exciting stuff and people aren't there to see and beat new content, you need to keep people mentally engaged, keep some banter going between trash pulls, keep everything moving as fast as you can handle it to keep people on their toes. When you get to the boss spend as little prep as possible and ask people to give their 110% even though it's just a farm encounter. Trying throwing in dumb fun stuff to keep people attentive like rotating Nefarian when you were in BWL and sacraficing people with corrupted healing, training down MC'd people (I honestly don't think I've ever seen people assist train anything like I've seen them assist down a mind controlled guildy), turn a cleaving boss on the melee when the boss is on his last 10% etc...

I'm not a fan of the shouty punishy kind of raid leading, don't get me wrong don't be a pussy and keep yourself firm but I honestly can't think of anything more degrading and demotivating than someone exploding over vent. Some of the best raiding I've ever seen from my guild were some of the most chilled out raids ever.

As mentioned, dealing with consistently poor performing people is fairly easy. Guilds have all sorts of ways of dealing with it, ours is just not inviting that person later, and not telling them why. Once they're bothered enough to wonder why they didn't get an invite to anything that week, an explanation is given, and we then decide if we want to give them another opportunity. It's worked in the past, meaning we've had people that were just poor performers have 2-3 weeks of not raiding, and when they finally were given the opportunity again, showed very good performance, and been re-added to the regular raid team. Other people couldn't deal with the time off, and left the guild.

But the consistently poor performers aren't the issue, it's the players that are excellent almost all nights, but randomly have an off-night, which just so happened to coincide with a half the raid worth of normally good players having an off-night. Thereby making farm content (or even not-so farm content, like Archimonde or such, that has only been down for a month or so) quite miserable, and throws the whole weeks' worth of goals off track.

The last few weeks, after finally getting back on track in terms of killing bosses (month-long break in progression after killing Azgalor because of vacations and such), the best way we've figured to handle these random off-nights is to emphasize the goals of the week. On Sunday or Monday, we evaluate where we are in terms of progression, and decide what we're going to do the next week. By the end of the raid Monday, we tell everyone what the plan is, which usually consists of clearing BT/Hyjal to where we are thus far progressed, and getting a couple nights in on the next boss. So if people end up playing like shit on a boss in BT or Hyjal, we try to connect the people who are messing up right now, to the fact that we're not going to get the appropriate amount of time on XX(Mother Shahraz right now, RoS last week, Gurtogg the week before, etc). It's a little more difficult if people play like crap in SSC/TK, because it's not quite so easily connectable. We do SSC/TK on the weekend, usually with a number of people that don't normally raid with us in BT/Hyjal, giving them an additional night off. The best way to make the progression connection there is if we are trying to attune people.

Which brings me to an off topic subject... WTB attunement scroll on Archimonde (and Illidan, though that serves me no good right now).

I'm very curious about this, too. One difficulty I have is that I tend to fuck up about as often as any of our "good" players, so it's kind of hard to criticize other people for not being 100% all the time when I can't manage it either.

Two things I do know are that if you're going to call other people out for their mistakes:

1) If they explain it and it turns out it wasn't their fault, admit you were wrong, say "sorry about that" and move on. Don't cling to the notion that you always have to be right.

2) You'd better be damn quick to point out your own mistakes and apologize for them. If you fuck up and wipe the raid, say "Sorry guys, my bad, I forgot to fleezle the iggybob on that last attempt." Don't try to avoid accountability for your own mistakes.

There is no criticism or discussion to be had when someone fucks up an otherwise clean 20th kill... It's just plain lack of focus and interest in what the raid group is trying to achieve... This is especially true when whoever fucks up has been there for the past 19th kills

From my experience, reminding people that they can't fail, and what they need to pay attention to before each fight is what works the best... Doing an innocent joke here and there, trying to make people not want to fuck things up is also a good way...
It's very easy for people to start thinking that they can fuck up, and the remaining people alive can still make it... Or that a wipe on farm content is not so bad after all... They need to be constantly reminded that fast farming means more time for progress...

If someone dies to spout, I'd most likely make a joke out of it, because we can still get a kill...
If someone dies to Air Burst on Archimonde, I'd most likely make a "not so innocent joke" at first, and the second time I'd just replace him, letting him know politely that we can't have that kind of fuck ups, or we won't be able to move on... There's certain things that certain people will never be able to do...

Sometimes people will even want to skip a certain fight if they do understand that they can't perform well... We have at least one player passing out on Teron, because he doesn't feel capable of doing the ghosts properly, and he doesn't want to wipe us, oddly enough... I tend to like this kind of responsible behavior, although I realize that our raid group would be in danger if more than a couple players manifest this kind of insecurity...

It's really an old problem which has become more obvious due to the nature of tbc encounters. People used to fuck up on farm content all the time pre tbc too, but the gap in different tier gear power and the nature of the encounters made picking up the slack possible for the rest of the raidforce (well, not everywhere, but for most encounters). I can't count how many times I have seen an mt die at vael much earlier than he should, but due to everyone being in aq gear, we could finish him off with 2 tanks only anyway. Or people dying to chrommaggus or firemaw or nefarian was kinda usual, but well, it didn't matter. In a lot of tbc encounters there are critical mistakes you can do that are propably easy to avoid but will cause a wipe if they happen, like forgetting to give your tank the staff buff at kael, people dying to anything at archimonde, hydross doing a double flip, someone forgetting his cube, and the list goes on. Someone who blew up as the bomb at Geddon or Vael no longer wiped your raid when you were in t3 or so. Someone who will cause a double flip on hydross, will propably wipe you (even if we actually survived one at 16% through brute force alone a few weeks ago).

All in all farming content in tbc is a lot harder and it requires more focus than before. Mistakes should be easy to avoid, but people will get overconfident every once in a while (or new recruits will screw up something they hadn't done before) and what should be a relaxed farming night will turn into a nightmare, I remember a raid we wiped 8 times on morogrim with different people screwing up each time (1-2 months after we first killed him too) or spending a whole day at vashj after our 6th kill or so with no luck.

I don't think it was more than a bad period for us as for the past 3 weeks we are pretty much flawlessly clearing most of the farm content with maybe the exception of Kael who will take 3-4 wipes, but things that I think might help:

a) Give a brief synopsis of the fight and key things people need to do before you do it, even if you have killed it 20 times before. We wiped 6 times to karathress at one raid before I found out I had to remind the tanks to demo/tc the shaman. Small things help. Take your time with explaining, it's better than wiping.

b) Call people out when they mess up badly. Some say it helps, some say it doesn't, I think it does. Being ridiculed in public is something most people want to avoid being done twice to them. I don't believe in punishment much. Usually a bit of yelling does the trick of us and everything goes a lot smoother next time.

c) Just cut bad raids short. Like if you are doing vashj for 2 hours already and it's your 7th kill, there's no point going on. Just come back tomorrow and stop people from becoming demoralised.