This thread is inspired by several comments in both the Archimonde Thread and the Keeping your raid focused Thread.

What I'd like to discuss is the idea of personal accountability.

There are plenty of fights where your strongest players can carry your weaker ones, and it is possible to progress without exceptional play from all 25 members in any given raid. I'm sure most guilds have a few players who are generally expected to be the first people to die in any given fight. What I'd like to know is this: At what point is this detrimental to the overall success of the group, and how/when are people addressing poor performance?

For example - You have 3 rogues who all have virtually identical gear/stats, and one of them consistently performs 1-2% behind the other two. Is this worth addressing? If the weaker player understands combat cycles and knows how to gear/enchant appropriately, but just isn't able to quite keep up, how do you 'help' this person?

On the other hand - You have a group of healers, and the least geared of the group is totally dominating the others (30-40% more effective healing done) when they share the same healing roles/assignments. Clearly there is a discrepancy there in terms of play. Is it considered OK to allow the under-performers to continue along if it isn't holding the group back yet?

On non-meter related performance, how many times does somebody have to wipe the raid on Archimonde before they need to be replaced? (Obviously not just that fight in particular)

How are other people dealing with these sorts of things? Where do you draw the line on individual performance expectations?

first of; healing is a joint effort which is really quite hard to measure on meters since the only metric that really matters is essentially binary. IE: Do people live or not? as long as the answer to that is "yes" then your healing squad is fine, and meters are mostly a way to spot people that just totally slack during trash or whatever.
Minor dps diffrences between rogues like the one you describe is most likely down to connections, hardware, ect - and no, not worth replacing people over. Nothing in the raidgame is really tuned hard enough that its worth risking the drama involved in /gkicks over stuff like this. Drama will, after all, set you back infinitely more than 50 raid dps more or less ever will.

Which gives you the obvious answer to your third question. You kick people from the raid and in severe cases, from the guild, when they have killed the raid enough times that the raid wants them gone. This number is guild specific.

There is no way you can pull someone up over a 1-2% difference in DPS. That's fully attributable to luck (i.e. did you have to bandage/use a health pot rather than a haste/destruction pot/etc).

As far as healing, meters are largely useless for comparing different people/jobs. They are good for fine tuning individual performance, though.

I see what you are saying, but if the healer's job gets done, then the healer has done their job, as circular as that sounds. If I'm healing, and someone else is capable of doing more than enough to cover the role, I'll let them so I can conserve mana. If my target dies, then sure, I've messed up, but if not, I'm going to be more effective at dealing with things going wrong.

The amount of slack a raid leader usually gives a slacker is (usually) directly proportional to how easily that slacker is replaced.

Generally, since people tend to dislike draconian policies, you're better off trying to teach and explain to get more improvement. If there isn't sufficient improvement, look to find/train a replacement for that slacker, until the slacker isn't as big a liability anymore (raid gets better geared overall). If the slacker just cannot learn, then you either disallow the slacker from the raids, or kick him/her.

There's a lot of intricacies involved, but that's pretty much how it goes. The details are typically the varying degrees to how tractable the slacker is.

This is a great point about healing. If people arnt dying, it can be better for a healer to conserve their mana to help pull the raid through in the case of a bad fuckup (or bad luck), then try to squeeze in some extra effective healing when things are going peachy.

Essentially, accountability comes down to 2 factors.

#1: Did you get the job done without suffering any real pain? If the answer is yes, then you can be satisfied that people did their jobs for the most part.

#2: Are the differences on the meters significant AND unexplainable?

This one is a lot more complicated than the first part. First, you have to define significant. I'd define significant as equal gear with a 20%+ difference in output between that player and the leader. If thats the case, then you either have one exceptional player or one weak player and need to determine if that individual brings other things to the guild/raid that offset his lack of production.

Now, to be 100% honest, the machine matters as much as the player. We had one of our top officers who was awful on the DM, but good at specialty roles and strategy. As soon as he upgraded to a new PC, his damage shot up from like 10th or so to top 5 every single time. Now, he brought plenty of other stuff to the table that more than offset his damage, and once we had it the fights became even easier.

Essentially, you have to define what you see as not adequate. Generally, when someone blows chunks or cant get the job done, it is obvious. When player X screws up Archimonde more than say twice in a night when you already know the fight, thats when player x needs to be seriously looked at for sucking. If someone cannot manage themselves, then they are useless. We had a paladin who could not stay alive, who didnt blow his bubble before dying. That guy didn't last long.

At the end of the day, no one can tell you what is "unacceptable" Its really more of a feeling that you and your guild develop towards a player after seeing him. If you all are making comments about his play, then obviously there is something that merits evaluation there. The obvious ones always get caught, but i'm fairly sure every guild has a few people they know they COULD replace, yet chooses not to because of stability. An extra 5 or 10% damage from one spot is not worth losing a 100% attendee over, particularly given the LARGE cushion factor of most fights.

My 2c, from a raiding retiree,

While my guild was still raiding, we had a mage who made herself infamous in officer discussions for consistantly underperforming despite having the best gear of all the mages. Unfortunately she was the only mage that showed up consistantly and was good friends with many valued players. That made it almost impossible for us to try to replace her because of the crap we would get from her and her buddies. Our very very skilled, but unfortunately 1-day-a-week-raiding mage tried to make her his project to help improve her performance, but he just ended up giving up after months of no progress. We never did figure out what she was doing wrong, but our GM assumed she must have been jotting down everytime she pressed the fireball button in her journal or stopping to knit or something.

So where was the line drawn? It wasn't. If we were to g-kick her, her friends would follow and we would lose valued members. If we were to try to not bring her to raids, the same thing would happen - she would raise hell for being the only mage to consistantly show up, and she's losing raid spots to people who come once a week. So we brought her every raid until the guild fell apart for unrelated reasons.

I'm posting this just to illustrate one thing: it's always more complicated than you think. Unless you are a real hardcore guild, you will find it extremely difficult to weed out consistant under-performers without making a bigger mess than just keeping that person on. That's why it always gives me a chuckle when I see people post things like "well if they aren't performing as well as other mages, just gkick them!" If only it were that easy.

One way i would consider dealing with this is to get the guild 'on your side' including those who are friends with her. If you raise the issue, be honest about it and convince those close to her that her performance is a problem that needs working on and get them to be the ones that make the changes. One time i managed to convince my friend that he should teach his significant other to avoid keyboard turning and she listened to him - much more than she would have ever listened to me. Not only that she is happier now because playing the game is easier. It is especially important to get people who can contact the person in real life so they can go over and find out what is going wrong.

Of course, you have to act respectfully and avoid personal bouts otherwise it's all over, but if you can command the respect of the people around her by being upfront they will listen to you and try to come up with a solution for her. If there's still no improvement it's still a win to have her friends respect your decision when you dont invite her to a raid.

Well this is much depending on how hardcore your guild is. Our guild for example expects players to play 100% at all times and play as good as needed. If they cant, they will get replaced or if they cant improve they have to find them self a new home.

At least I play for progress not just guild progress but my own as well. Playing with slackers, ignorant or just people that don't care is just a wast of time.

And as for the healing, if one player is 40-50% behind almost every time regardless of assignment, then he/she either slack, lag or just lack the skill. Either way if he/she cant improve then we have no use of him/her.

I'm half asleep so sorry if it got a bit messy.

*EDIT* And you need to tell the player(s) that fuck up that you don't accept it, and tell them right away. If they cant take criticism they probably shouldn't be raiding in the first place.

This sounds oddly familiar... Before BC, I was in a raid alliance with a Mage who did less damage than the tanks, went /afk in the suppression room, could not be relied on for CC or decursing, etc. But this Mage was an officer in the raid alliance and therefore had to be rostered week after week. It got old.


On topic more, I think even casual guilds should draw lines in extreme circumstances. I've been in several raids where 1-2 members were clearly not ready for the content. Whether they were doing very poor DPS, couldn't position properly, broke CC, or whatever. They were a burden on the raid.

I'm all for bringing friends to raids and trying to be more "casual," but there's a point where one player is making the rest of the raid work harder. If someone is doing that, I think they need to show rapid improvement or it becomes extremely frustrating to raid with them. If it's not dealt with, this can lead to stress, morale, and attendance issues for the entire raid. Often, this frustration comes out all at once when someone finally loses their temper with the underperformers, and it may not come out in the most constructive manner. I've done that myself from time to time.

Extremely poor performance can be due to ignorance. Most players don't theorycraft at all. They don't even read the official forums, much less obscure sites like this. So a bit of advice can go a long way. Extremely poor performance can also be due to players who don't care if they waste 24 other player's time. There's not much you can do about that, except stop inviting them.

I don't think it's worth the trouble to figure out small differences. A 2% difference in DPS, even if it's consistent between several players, is hard to diagnose and could be RNG gear choice, lag, slow reflexes, or other things that aren't entirely under the player's control. Even if you figure out the difference, there may not be an easy way to "fix" it.

Because small performance differences are such a subtle problem, you might try giving the underperformers personal goals. Make an informal contest between Super Rogue and Mediocre Rogue on the charts. Remind Mediocre Rogue periodically that his goal is to beat Super Rogue. Or ask underperformers to make a special effort on some encounters to try to get into the top 5.

It's not easy to come with a similar system for healing.

There is a fine line between being a douche bag and using constructive criticism to help a player improve their playing skills. If your just going to be that monkey throwing shit at people without any regard to bad luck or rough situations, or even player potential, your just shooting yourself in the foot. I honestly take pride in helping a player get their act together or helping a guild family and friend cross the line between casual noob to serious raider.

I'd lean more towards being a douche bag. At this level of the game where the majority of EJ posters are at, there are no excuses anymore. If we were starting KZ and this was March of '07? Sure. January of '08? Hell no. If they can't pull weight, time to find some new weight pullers.

This is really the time to make sure you inform them that you do look at meters. More often then not they feel that their personal effort isn't needed because others will carry the slack for them. WWS is a great tool especially for this purpose.

At this level of game play most players should understand their class mechanic if one person is consistently under performing vs the rest. Ask them if everything was ok did they need any help. There are many ways you can go at this without directly attacking their pride. More often then not it basically is just a lack of focus or making one or two mistakes in their cycles. Take a look first at their WWS try and pinpoint their problem, Ala are they not hitting their button fast enough not flasking etc. If you can figure out whats wrong bring it to their attention and 90% of the time it will be fixed. Also promote intra-class discussions more often then not everyone can learn something new.

The biggest problem is if players get complacent once sunwell is out they won't know how to rev it back up the thing with these encounters is it get boring fast. Try and make it a competition into getting better every week. If you consistently track WWS try and improve on kill time every week and see how you do. It gets people alot more interested and it also pushes the tanks to improve their TPS to allow the dps to do that. Especially if they see they are getting their asses rided on in terms of TPS.

On the topic of Archimonde. Basically it's 2 craters and your out. Dying to doomfire=bad as well. Standing in AE on council pulling aggro on illidan transitions all basically are on a short lease depending on how stupid it was.

As for the point where you cant afford less-skilled people anymore, i believe it is Lady Vashj. It is the first boss fight you encounter where every single person needs to be able to do reasonable damage / healing and movement (striders, nagas, tainted cores).

Up to 5/6 SSC and 3/4 TK, you can raid with few people who screw up. You can ress them at alar if the die in flame patch, you can shout out names at astromancer. But at Lady Vashj, everyone needs to do their job.

It's a pretty subjective point to be honest - what standards do you expect?

Our raid leaders select their raid composition and leave it up to the class leaders to swap who exactly attends, but we have been known to ask the class leaders to leave the people in the raid that we nominate for certain "learning" encounters.
These would be the people who ony take one death from Airburst then never die again, who never have to be told to move for Solarian debuff/Illidan parasite, who always see that loose add first and taunt it back under control, always see who's about to get flattened and PW:S or cast a pre-emptive heal etc etc etc. Are the other raiding members crap? No. Some people just learn faster than others.

It's all down to your tolerance level. How fast do you expect someone to learn? Of course if a person truly sucks then you should at the very least demote them to "casual" status if they can't improve.

I think you have to make some allowance for any new recruits, especially if you are far more progressed in content than they are accustomed to. It's pretty tough to jump straight in at Illidari Council if you haven't had the learning curve of completing Kael/Vashj for example.

I think it goes with out saying that personally until I wanted to better myself as a player and stumbled upon this site and others like it... my performance may have been one that raid leaders fussed silently about. I think nowadays with programs like WWS we are able to fully analyze raid members performance and see some, not always all, of the issues when it comes to personal DPS and HPS.

As a concerned raid leader use these tools to figure out the cause and hell, maybe they want to be a better player! Direct them to sites like this or have some TC posts in your guilds website. Not only lead but inspire them. I even find myself crunching some numbers of my own now!

Good point and nice topic guys, although the solutions seem related to certain social circumstances as well, next to having the ability to actually replace members...

We went for gorefiend last night, after clearing the trash (wich is nice) we started with 3 prot warriors on the fight, somehow lowish but we made 3 or 4 attempts <5% but still wiping.

After the reclear of the trash we switched 1 prot warrior for a feral druid, but we oneshotted him afterwards, with raid DPS waaay higher then before (1-10 on DPS >1300 DPS, with the previous attempts only 3 mages >1300 DPS) but we only replaced one member...

How ? I'd like to call it social furry aura. The bear (cat) that came in is a peacefull guy with loads of experience and knows how to play his class, topping meters in every way, albeit in healing, DPS or tanking/threat. People respect him, and I've just became a raidleader 2 weeks ago.

Next to that I decided to tune healing/dispelling a bit, wich helped. And ofcourse Teron started his shadows on a person who knows how to handle it, another lucky thing (or the social furry aura) being me. I know how to handle it, help out on others peoples ghosts and shielding a healer or two in the process.

The social factor is still a bit grey area for the raiding community, motivation and awareness, helping out friends with a flash heal or two, all factors involved to make a raid a succes...

Having the "famous" guy in the group can raise the overall focus - I agree with that in some way, but in your very special example the reasons should be quite clear: The -real- dps was that much higher because less dps classes were selected by Gorefiend and the dps you are talking about totaly seems like your damage-meters also count the damage from ghost-phases. Healers can have their 1300 dps too, but I promise it's not because of the furry auras...

Quite off-topic... well...


The biggest problem with slackers for me - and obviously not only for me - is that you can't work with some sort of "protocol". I wouldnt really call it a problem after almost 3 years of leading guilds, raids and whatsoever, but it surely its nothing I can decide within 2 short seconds. People are involved in the guild, and also have some friends or even their husbands in the guild.
As long as the slackers dont stop the raidprogress, they're something most people have to live with and try to give them some sort of useful tips and advice. Beating on someone will cause drama, drama will lower the overall focus and usually the beaten guys didnt even learn anything at all (besides "our raid leader is such an a**hole").
Deciding where the tolerance ends really depends on the social structure of the guild, the actual progress and also your realm - you can't threaten someone with replacing him when there is nobody to replace him.

For me it is not quite clear what the op is meaning with 1-2% behind.
1) Rogue1 = 100% and Rogue2 = 98% damage? This can be attributed to luck, hardware, connection etc.
2) Rogue1 = 12% raid-damage and Rogue2 = 10% raid-damage? If the equipment is really virtually identitcal and the damage difference between the Rogues is constant over the course of a couple of raids, there is a problem with the playstyle of Rogue2.

How to deal with it? I would check different wws logs for differences in DPS time, using cooldowns/abilities and deaths. Luckily in our two man Rogue team the differences in damage are sometimes as low as 10k over the course of 5 million damage. Which could also mean that we are both terribad, but thats another topic.

Edit:
we have never ever replaced somebody because of bad performance.

Going after someone for slight differences in DPS among his class is going to do way more harm than good, especially if the person is otherwise a loyal, high attendance member of your raid and guild. Think of it in terms of worst case scenarios:

Worst Case Scenario of Doing Nothing: Person continues to lag slightly in DPS.

Worst Case Scenario of Confronting and Sanctioning Person for "Non-Performance": Gquit, likely followed by his friends.

Unless you had equal or greater DPS bench players, that's going to cost you a lot more progression and DPS than 1-2% behind the others in his class would. And it will happen. Presumably if the person is slightly less than optimal, they aren't the most hardcore of the hardcore and "I don't need to take this fascist BS" is an entirely likely response for minor underperformance drawing serious heat.

At the end of the day, you are still a guild in an MMORPG. There are virtually no exit costs for a person who becomes dissatisfied with his guild leadership. Berating people for what, from their perspective, is probably nothing wrong at all, has been known to cause quick resignations from businesses with far higher entrance and exit costs, i.e. Sullivan and Cromwell (NYC "elite" law firm), JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs. People spend years if not decades positioning themselves to get these jobs, they are paid at least three-to-four times the US median income with the potential to make millions, and they will still quit if abused.

If you want to actually confront someone (as opposed to coach them) it really had better be over a performance issue serious enough that you wouldn't mind replacing them, with whatever that may entail.

-

Consistent, major, raid wiping mistakes are an entirely different matter. Letting these continue have massive costs. The rest of your raid gets pissed, both at the loss of time and mats, and at the toleration of clear incompetence. While they might not even know or care if someone is not perfect DPS, they most certainly do care when someone does the modern equivalent of being hit/feared into the whelp caves by Onyxia. It's easy to spot, should never happen, and it matters.

You risk losing a lot more than an upset dodo brain if you don't make raid wiping mistakes close to zero-tolerance. Gkick is rather extreme, but letting it be known that someone will be sat out "for the good of the raid" on specific fights is certainly an option.

The thing is, what if it IS lag? I'm not afraid to own up when I make mistakes, in fact I take it almost as a point of pride to admit each of my mistakes (ironic, huh). On our first night on Archimonde, I cratered on our 2nd or 3rd attempt, because I was trying too hard to minimize fall damage, when I should have just popped it earlier and expected 1-2k damage. I fucked up, I admitted it, we moved on.

The next week we come back for Archimonde night #2. Again, on our first try, I get airbursted. I spam my intercept key as normal but it doesn't go off. I wait as I arc through the air, and at a reasonably safe point, I press my tears hotkey. Nothing happens. I continue falling, I land. Nothing happens. I'm still alive. 'Uh-oh', I think, and start running back towards archimonde. 2 seconds later, the Tears animation plays, I fall over, and the 'You are dead. Click to Release' dialog box opens up.

Suffice to say, my connection was unstable most of the night, and after another try showed similar amounts of lag, I left the raid and the raid leader got someone into replace - there's no way I'd try to play on any raid encounter, let alone Archimonde, with that amount of latency. However, I think I'm justified in putting that one down to lag.

The worst thing is when you have a connection that is usually stable, but occasionally fucks up. It's all fun and games until you disconnect just as your Shadow of Death debuff ticks to 0...

I think some posts are going in to the right direction, i can understand people who do not want others to suck and wipe their raids, and i can also understand those who want to help other/weaker players to improve.
Frist of all it is important that you should not kick someone out of a raid or guild who has a bad day and sucked for some tries. you should kick him if he really does not want to improve and keeps failing on the same fault every single try although you told him how to do better. I look at my self as a very focused and good computer player, I always wanted to be a "good" player in the games I put some effort in. But we all have a bad day, even a week or a month, on which we can clearly suck. That can be personal problems, like family, girl/boyfriend, problems with the job or with studying or just because it is raining outside.
We all have those phases, and I think nobody can say that he is always(!!) able to give 110%.
In my old guild we had some problems with a paladin, she always died first, progress and farm, she did the worst healing was always inferior to all other healing classes, and sometimes even behind shadow priests. You know the gimmicks all chars do if you don't do any action? Like she plays Bloodelf and the model of her char always moved the head and looked to the side, so you could tell that she wasn't doing anything at all. It really frustrated me since i could not understand how anyone could play with that small focus to the game. I often told my guildmaster to kick her or at least don't take her with us to progress stages but he always refused since he did not want to have a bad clima within the guild (her boyfriend was a officer and thought she would be doing a great job).
After I left the guild I still was chatting with my old mates and was always hearing that she did not improve. So what would you do? In my opinion it does matter in which positon your guild is, like hardcore casual, or something in between that. But I also think that you can not always help people to improve in playing a game in which the original goal was to have fun. Of course some people like to help others improve, some are doing this just for fun, but I think you have to draw the line on some point. When people really try to improve, try to get better stats on dps or hps that is always good. But if the person just can not do it and still sucks you can not take her by the hand and let this person suck the energy out of other guild members. And when your guild is trying to get "harcore" people just can't suck over a couple of month. Even weeks are just too much time.
I remember our first visits to void reaver in TK. The mentioned paladin did manage it to pull void reaver ~ 3 times, without beeing told to do so. After those 3 times she was so carefull that she did not manage to heal the tank for over 10-15 seconds, which also resulted in some deaths. Anyway we did manage to kill the reaver but the paladin managed to cost us up to 2 hours to do so (respawn inc. etc.). Some ID's later she still pulled Void Reaver one or two times, and I can say that really sucked my energy out of raiding with her. I always tried to get off raid days where she would be in the roster and so on.
What I want to say is that you can not always wait for people to improve because it can turn out that bad, that the good players will leave because they do not want to waste their time on this. If you are farming content you can do improvements with players that suck but in progress time everyone should be able to do his or her best. And if someone knows that he has a bad day he should say "i am out for tonight, get some substitute for me" (if that is possible, on a maintank position you'll have a problem :>). Everyone wants to raid but if I will constantly wipe the raid due to some personal circumstances I really should know that giving up the slot is a much better thing than just doing your "job" and suck.
Some people just can play "good" and some can't. In the German Community it's always said you do not need "skill" to play wow, it's just pressing some keys. But in fact, like in any other game, or sport, or whatever, you do need an amount of "skill" to perform on difficult encounter. And that is nothing personal. I can do shit in math, I always use a calculator for the easiest tasks and i really am not happy about that. But it's a flaw I can't work around or get better in. So I will never be a math teacher or scientist or what so ever, that is a fact. That's nothing against my person, or my intellect it's just a fact. And some people can take the fact that they officially suck in wow. They always think you want to insult them, or get them out of your way. But in some times it is just the fact that they suck. They can do a good job at karazhan, gruul, even in SSC. But when it comes to the point where they have to do a really good job, they will fail.
Some people don't want this to be true, but it is