It's great when raid leaders don't do things to help the raid.

What you *should* do is roll DPS gear and then have priority on tank gear when the 2 MT's don't need something. This is the optimal approach to gearing the raid, IMO.

For the matter of simplicity let's assume we're talking about the standard Dps Mage that's been in the raid for quite some time and performed his job more or less on average of the rest of the raid. He also isn't such a bad guy socialy. Most people don't feel like such a player needs to be removed from the raid unless he really slips up repeatedly and damages the raid to a point where it becomes unbearable. However there is an alternative way of thinking about this person that many especially casual players are unfamiliar with. You have to ask yourself the question: "while he might be sufficient for his job, is he the best?".

Suppose you knew another mage looking for a guild and you knew he was superior to your mage. The other mage regulary reads EJ, has a smart interface and is just cleverer in general. And he also is a nice guy. Why shouldn't you invite the other mage into your guild and let him take the position of your old mage?
The reason to casuals is simple. Doing so feels too much like betrayal and unnecessary since the old guy already does a sufficient job. However you have to ask yourself, what is sufficient? Look at the raid in general. Is your raid performing to your full satisfaction? I bet not. Everybody wipes unnecessary and there are almost always guilds out there maybe even on the same server outperforming you. Exchanging those two mages will most certainly make your raid more efficient.

This leaves us with the betrayal. It basically comes down to this: Would you rather raid with friends or good players. But while you think about this, keep in mind the other mage you might invite is also a nice guy and given enough time he can become as close a friend as the old mage.

Then there is one final thing to consider. What if you spotted a player that was not outperforming somebody else in your raid but you. What then?


This is a choice every guild/raidleader has to face, even if it's just subconscious. Some decide for their friends and become casualraiders. Some decide for the better player and become esportraiders (if they do it correctly). However, while it may appear that way so far, this is not a simple dichotomy. Those are only the two ends of a scale that would look somewhat like this:

(yes it's good old paint)

And then there are those people that can't decide and want both. They want to play with their friends and at the same time lead their guild to fame and victory. The way they usually seek to achieve this is widely known.

Let's take a step back at our example of the two mages. Suppose the raidleader is raiding with the old mage and he has the new guy ready to roll if he chooses to invite him. Now the old mage makes some mistakes, repeatedly causes the raid to wipe and by doing so makes our raidleader upset. On the one hand our raidleader wants to succeed through the instance on the other hand he doesn't want to kick his old buddy. So where is the solution? Right, he goes enrage in Ventrilo and slams his "friend" -100 Dkp in the face, justifying his actions with "something else doesn't seem to work".

Read this carefully, I claim that any sort of aggression between players caused by insufficient performance can be tracked back to this. If players stood back, looked at the drawing above and chose between left and right there would be no reason for aggression. Either you accept the player for what he is or you exchange him with somebody you think is better (if you have such a player in hand, if not then your hands are tied and you'll have to accept the other player).
The only thing you can then argue about is wether the other player is actually better or not.

I think you have the right idea, but it seems to me there is one thing we are missing in this theory: the ability to learn.

Players have different degrees of learning. Just like in school, some people will learn better by seeing, by hearing, and by doing. An 'average' player can improve to something more. They may never be #1 on damage, or lowest on deaths, but there is always room for improvement.

This isn't even necessarily a leadership issue. Peers often teach the best. I'm in a raid as you describe, in the middle. My first reaction to melee doing poorly is ask them what is going on, explain to them what I am doing, see if I can help.

Of course, there has to be a willingness and a drive to improve. If it is there I wouldn't count that standard mage out just yet.

I RL what is decidedly a casual guild, and the approach we try to take in this situation is to recruit the good mage and keep both. That might not be an option to an edge raiders with limited spots, but if you have the space for both it's a good option.

People of the same class will always be talking among themselves and I've found that whenever we get a new player in, that those people of that class not only improve through having a new set of eyes "on the problem" so to speak, but it also tends to promote a bit more friendly competition that drives people to play just that little bit better.

A raid completely unwilling to listen or recruit to new blood often don't realise how much of a rut they can fall into.

Learning capability needs to be considered as part of player skill. So naturally if I exchange one player for a better player I assume that the new player also is a better learner. Sometimes a player is better in one area and worse in another. This can make decisions tough but not impossible. You'll then have to decide which features of a player are more important to you.
I'd also like to stress that you shouldn't immediately remove a player for lifetime. You can get much more out of your raiders if you expose them to constant competition with people on the reserve. You can use farmbosses to compare players on a weekly basis and then when you get to the new content you take the player you have more confidence in.

In many ways, this is not dissimilar to management in the professional world. A good manager learns what his team members need in order to perform their best, and does his or her best to get it to them. Everybody is different, and people won't always tell you what will make them perform their best - sometimes it takes some work to figure out what each person requires.

I'm a raid leader who does want it both, and I intend to get it: I intend to kill Arthas with my friends before the next expansion comes out - it's just not fun to play with people who aren't friends, I'd rather play scrabble (and I hate scrabble). This has been quite a learning experience for our raid (resurrected from the rabble of a prior group that half-imploded), but we're getting there.

I'd say that roughly half of the raid are people who are highly motivated to become top-performing players - they read EJ, they use SimulationCraft/spread sheets, they know what gear they want drops from what bosses. A few are perfectly passable, and a couple really are a trial - but I'm finding that as long as we can trust each other and assume good intentions, we can eventually find ways to work with nearly everyone.

One player in particular was worrying the rest of us - when in one role they weren't proactive enough, and in another their raw objective numbers were low. We tried many times to outline several general principles that would allow them to play much better. No progress was seen, and they were unable to even repeat what the advice was. One day, another player gave them an explicit list - blamo, they went and did everything on the list before the end of the next day. They were perfectly happy to do some kinds of hard work, but figuring out what needed to be done was a block, for whatever reason.

Are they an ideal raider now? No. But this one clue with this one player turned someone from a Major Social Issue waiting to explode into someone who is a perfectly passable player doing their share to progress. Once this happened, other players in the raid expressed both relief and an appreciation that we worked through it.

The upshot is that I really only require two things from my raiders: that they have good intentions and are willing to work with the rest of the group to reach our common goals. It's really important to me that we work together as a team - and as long as there's no clear leeching going on, that means that we leave nobody behind.

To sum up your entire post - people theorycraft to perform more efficiently and kill bosses. Some people simply have the motivation to better themselves - and there is an inherent need for those people to do things properly - not just based on what "feels" best. There's a difference between doing and understanding.

When you quit WoW, 12 months later aren't still theorycrafting unless there is a hole in your brain due to physical trauma.

Because I can't play WoW at work.

I would say that many/most of those who do intensive theorycraft are not doing it for altruistic motives (let me help you, world!). Instead, I think that the majority of theorycrafting is done publicly with feedback to catch errors, discrepancies, or other problems. Doing a ton of work for yourself based on a false premise will hurt more than help, by making your work public other people scrutinize and provide feedback. You then have a better end result to help yourself/your guild. Then the semi-casual theorycrafters provide the feedback, suggestions, tweaks to these people. That's what makes the EJ community function so smoothly in my view.

The second set of theorycrafters are those that wanna be famous - if they produce programs, spreadsheets, websites, blogs, maybe folks will like them.

The third and smallest set are people who genuinely just want to help other people. If you're one of these - can I have some gold? For the record, yes, that's simply a joke.

Why do people theorycraft? The same reason athletes practice, lawyers research their cases, or the military runs training exercises: preparation vastly increases performance.

I would add a fourth set of people for whom some of the above may be nice benefits, but the primary drive is simply because that's how their brain is wired. For me, the question, "How does this work?" is purely academic curiosity. In this case, great, I can apply that knowledge to making my character perform better in a raid setting, but I'd ask the question either way. Ultimately, some of us just want to see the nuts and bolts because we like nuts and bolts.

Take a non-WoW example that might illustrate the point a little better: if you're familiar with D&D (or tabletop gaming in general), there's quite a range of motivations for playing, and approaches individuals take to designing their characters and playing the game. One commonly known extreme of player is often referred to as a "powergamer". The kind of player I'm thinking of here is similar to that, except instead of using the almost encyclopedic knowledge of the rules and mechanics of the game in a live context, they will often spend hours reading source books and creating characters that will never get played, just because it's interesting. The final product (the active game) isn't as important as the process of getting there (the set up, design, and underlying mechanics that make the active game possible).

Shifting back to WoW, these players may spend hours figuring out how something works and never bother communicating that knowledge, except maybe to the players they interact with daily, and even then only as a, "Hey, this is cool!" kind of anecdote. It might help how they play, it might not. Mostly though, it's interesting--sometimes far more interesting than actually playing the game.

...These players may also take a 6-8 month break from the game and still theorycraft the whole time, keeping up with patch notes and adjusting their formulas/spreadsheets/etc. I may or may not have done that a couple years ago.

That's not all, though. It can be a joy in and of itself.

Some of us have been theorycrafting since pen-and-paper tabletop RPGs, figuring out where game mechanic scaling curves get bent, figuring out degenerate cases, all because the activity of mastering a mathematical system can be simply fun, even if that mastery is never utilized. And there's certainly been tons of it for console and other single-player computer RPGs for ages -- look at the Final Fantasy 8 powerleveling guides, or the Oblivion powerleveling guides, or "gold box" guides to... essentially "twinking", I suppose -- there's some fairly non-intuitive stuff that people have figured out and documented after it was already proven the games could be "entirely beaten" without such tricks.

Don't know how common people for whom this is true are. But I know that it's a non-empty set.

Edit:
Guilty...