Sup.

Recently my guild has been crawling through AQ40 with all the trailblazing tendencies of a drunk snail, and seeing as I'm an officer I guess it's partially down to me to come up with some sort of action plan. Well we've got our pro EJ-rip off loot system, and our penalties for holding the raid up and numerous other procedures that are supposed to be conducive to 'serious' and successful raiding, but I don't think all the regulations in the world are gonna make much difference to how we do in the future. Because I'm pretty sure we fundamentally fail at raiding, and I'm as much to blame as anyone.

WoW is my first MMO and this guild is my first experience of raiding. I have no idea of most of our players' histories, but in all honesty if any of them have ever raided in another game with any real degree of success then they hide it well. Furthermore, we've only been raiding for a year, and for most of that time we did reasonably well from copying other people's tactics. But that only gets you so far, lets you play catchup. Now we're trying to move away from that way of doing things, so that we can gain proper raiding skill in order to better prepare ourselves for more difficult challenges, not to mention glean a far greater sense of accomplishment from our kills.

But herein lies the dilemma: I don't know, and I don't think anyone else knows either, exactly how to go about this. We have literally never had cause to do it until now, because we formed very late and have just been spoon fed tactics. We never needed to suss out anything in Blackwing Lair using trial and error healing strats or combat log parses, because some dude had gone "hay guys here's some videos and write ups and MS Paint diagrams we can use", and then it was just a case of not fucking up. Trying to move away from that and be a little bit more like a 'progress' guild is all well and good, but if you haven't got the first idea how those guilds go about their daily business then you're going to have a problem.

Before I posted this I sent Gurg a PM making sure it didn't look like someone asking for boss handouts or anything like that. He told me he thought it would make a decent thread, and informed me about typing /combatlog to get a parse to a text file. Now you may chuckle, but I had no idea that command existed. Not a fucking clue. That's the level of ignorance we're dealing with here. And to give you an idea of what things are like right now, after AQ40 wipes we might have a brief natter over TS and discuss what was wrong in the most vague of terms, and then in we go again for an identical wipefest. Rinse and repeat, and take 4 hours to reach Huhuran if you're lucky.

So now I know that, I can begin to look at them for clues on what's up with the healing (there's ALWAYS something up with the healing), or why people started dying, or numerous other things, because I assume that's part of analysing an encounter and formulating a plan. Now I'm not stupid, and neither are the other officers in my guild, but I think I probably speak for all our members (and I'm sure there are plenty of other guilds in our situation who probably come here every day to theorycraft in an effort to improve themselves) when I say that I wouldn't really know what to look for. My knowledge of other classes and their abilities is decent, but right now I couldn't experiment with healing strats based on a perceived flaw in a wipe attempt, and I couldn't get my parsed combat log and go "ah ok, the MT died because of X, and we can do Y to make that better". It's not a case of being lazy, but I don't think anyone knows the process for that sort of thing. How do you go into a new encounter, wipe, then use what things you learnt in order for the next go to be significantly better? I'm fucked if I know.

So to all you pros out there: how should we be going into encounters if we're wanting to learn from our mistakes? What is the standard (if there is such a thing) protocol for learning a new encounter and bettering yourself and your entire raid group? How do you guys do these things? I'm not looking for specific super secret guild strats; I just really need to Learn2Play.

Well, IMO the fights up to AQ were not very dynamic aside from a tank trasition every now and then. essentially jsut heal the tank and DPS the mob. AQ is where you start to see more interesting fights... Satura being a great example. you healers now have to pay attention to their surroundings vs. just playing wack-a-mole with CTRA. Fankris, your OT's have to be on the ball for tanking mother fucking snakes and possibly calling for a stun from a rogue if need be. Huhu is just a NR cockblock IMO (fuck you very much blizz). and then come the Emps. Where you have to use all those fancy new skill you learned in the previous AQ fights, use them and not suck at doing it for 15 minutes. Its tough the first few weeks.

but really, heres the greatest skill you will need and possibly need to learn. communication. Communication is key. as is understanding where and why you are failing at an encounter. not enough DPS? not enough healing? people pulling agro? is the DPS taking damage? too much healing on the tanks and none for the DPS?

you really just have to communicate what you see goign wrong with an encounter to be able to fix it. some guilds are better/faster at this then others.

we have threads in our general member forum where we talk about theory of an encounter. IE this is happening, we need to counter this with that or the other thing. any and all comments are welcome, but there is one main focus, picking apart the encounter. then from there each specific class talks about their roles in the fight, and what we need to do to make sure it isnt our fault that we wipe. then we go and pratice (aka wipe/learn). and if we win, GG our comunication before hand worked. if we lose... back to the drawing board. and we start pickinh apart smaller things about the fight.

it also helps to have people that know how thier class works inside and out. that way then can possible suggest some rare obscure thing that their specific class can only do and just may win the fight. these type of people also help at pickign apart encounters and seeing where you may be failing.

There really isnt much to it, most of the things you already know. Trying to beat a new encounter you first have to start by annalyzing everything the boss does, the first time you engage him is to try and survive as long as you can. Have everyone check their debuffs if they get any. What does the debuff exactly do, how long does it last. Is it timed? can you stay out of range of it, can you somehow remove it, How much dps is the boss doing how much healers do you think you need for it etc etc.
You basically go in and make a list of every little thing the boss can do, assign multiple people to different tasks have some be ready to time events, others stay away from the raid and see if they get affected by anything the boss does.

Thats when you just sit down and try to figure out a counter for every thing the mob can do, and you slowly move on from there.
Fixing mistakes is kind off the same thing, you just ask yourself why did it go wrong and what went wrong? is is the positioning? is it the group setup, or is it a skill the mob does which is working differently than we thought?
Then you just do the same thing again, fix a counter for what went wrong keep adjusting it untill it works. You'll wipe a fair amount of times before you exactly know how everything is working then even more wipes to get a strategy going then all there is left is learning it. Thats the stage you already know how to do, it's just like copying a strategy form someone else but this time you're the one who came up with it.

You need as much help as you can from members tho, without them the whole process can be a lot slower. Everyone needs to be awake and know what is going on around them, make sure everyone knows what they have to look for and report it after a wipe.
I think the whole process is kind of fun, people like finding things out.

Involve your members as much as you can while figuring out stuff, especially if the raid is still going on let them talk about the stuff in /raid while you and the officer use the good info you get from it and try to come up with a battle plan. Try to keep the whole process fun for the whole raid no one likes to sit infront of their pc waiting for the officers/raid leader to come up with something while they pick their nosses for 30min or something.

And dont forget patience, some people tend to get "down" fast once they start wiping a few times. But thats the way it is, if you want to figure out stuff on your own you will have a lot wipes. Sometimes you'll go on for a day(s) or two with no progress before you start seeing a change in things.
Thats where you come in and try to keep the spirit of the raid up for those who feel "down". Keep talking with the members even outside the raid make a thread on your forum where ppl can give you input and talk about the encounter.
Just involve everyone with the whole process, be alert on everything that happens and have patience.

I think one of the problems Norg's trying to explain, is that getting information about a wipe is like getting blood from a stone.

Basically we're looking for a way to check on the actual data that happened in the fight, so we have all the information.
It's not even a case of people not owning up to doing something wrong, half the people don't even know that something they did WAS wrong, and I think the Officers want a sure way of looking at letters, numbers.. whatever, and going "Aha!"

like both the above posts mentioned... comunication is key. second is skilled players IMO. Its not always visable to the officers. And in fact, no matter how good a leaders/player is, it still takes 39 other people playing to the best of their ability to win a new encounter. gear helps, consumables help, skill helps, communication helps the most IMO. communication between the entire raid. between the raidleader and DPS. raid leader and healers. leader and tanks. leader and people that were jsut watching the fight. discussing the attempt, analyzing combatlogs... seeing how long DPS lasted, the tank lasted, who died first... who died last (hunters.. how i hate hunters...) and why people died in what order so to speak. once again... this all falls back to communication. its key.

When attempting a new encounter I usually throw Detect Magic on everything to check if the mobs have any buffs. The tooltips on the buffs tend to be quite good hints as to part of the strategy.
Another good way to analyse your attempts is to record them with fraps so you can watch them back afterwards. Often the fight is too fast paced to take everything in.
Recording a combat log (as has already been mentioned) is very useful too. Remember that the combat log has a range (about 25-30 yards I think), so sometimes it's best to get your tanks to record logs close to the action. That way you should catch all the important events from the boss properly.
As for analysing the combat log, I always start by looking for events like this:

"<bossname> begins to cast <some spell>"
"<bossname> performs <some spell>"
"<bossname> gains <some buff>"
etc...

Then you can check things like how often a certain event happens, what type of damage the boss puts out and so on.

If you have a forum for your group, create a thread for each boss you encounter and get people discussing it. We have a strategy section on our forum where we discuss all our attempts, and come up with new things to try next raid.

The "how do you do it?" part has been covered pretty well but I think it is worth mentioning the practical parts of this as well:

1. You need to foster the right sort of atmosphere in your guild about wiping when learning. One of the biggest hurdles is getting everyone to stoically accept the necessity of wipes as you learn without getting pissed off. Once you have the right atmosphere people will turn up to learning phases instead of avoiding them for when the encounters are farmable.

2. You need a selection of intelligent and motivated people feeding information from each class / role on the raid through to your officers or raid leaders so they can have a good overview of the encounter from points of view other than their own.

3. You need someone with the ability to take / analyse logs and write simple mods to help out in this process.

The first doesn't happen.. at all.
The second.. well :D

I think everyone would like to know how to achieve this point :) any tips?

Well, the question is whether the guild at large wants to be cutting-edge and learn stuff on its own, or whether it's only the officers and a few hardcore members want to do this. If most of your guild just cares about getting epics, and doesn't really care about the challenge of conquering new content, then there really won't be any way to have a positive atmosphere when you're in there wiping for 3-4 hours.

We don't even always have this. When we wiped to patchwerk for a few hours people were pretty pissed off and there was some bitterness. Thankfully Gurgthock is almost always positive and never sounds truly defeated so we came back the next day and destroyed Patchwerk.

Being a large guild is really quite an advantage for us in this regard as someone who's sick of wiping for several days in a row can take a couple days off and we'll still be able to field a raid. The only time we really had a hard time getting a full group was for attempt #230 on broken Cthun.

I love the way you phrase things :D
If it is a dodgy healer how do you go about dealing with it?
If you aren't in the situation where you have many players to choose from and not taking the drooling healer leaves you short then what?

I think Chalon has a very good point too, if there are too many players in the raid who don't care about learning the new encounters you are fighting for a hopeless cause.
I would love to be in this situation but I am too far behind in content and don't really want to skip it by applying to a guild further through it. I just can't see me enjoying killing a boss for the first time in a raid with 39 others who could have killed it before and could do it without me :(

The only thing I can suggest which hasn't been brought up directly would be using CombatMonitor, I run it even as a healer so I can see what damage the mob did to me, the tanks find it very useful for choosing the right gear.

Most of the important things have already been covered by others; I'm somewhat of a tactics junky and I can spend inhuman amounts of times drumming up solutions to fights because its something that I find incredibly fun.

To re-iterate a few things and add some:

1) Communication is key. Directions have to be clear and understood to the point where players can follow them, and feedback has to occur. Lack of feedback will be a direct contributor to the amount of time you wipe on a given encounter. Questions to ask, or questions for your members to all consider after a wipe:

Why did I die?
Was I doing what I was told to do correctly?
Is what I'm doing working; If not, what isn't working about it?

2) Problem/Solution approach. A raid encounter is merely a series of problems that must be solved in relative unison until the encounter is finished.

3) Step by step process. i) Analyze whats going on ii) Figure out solutions to the problems occuring iii) Fine-tune based on the result.

As you get used to this process (I've been doing it, or trying at least ;) since 2000 and EQ1) it becomes easier and easier. The same goes for the rest of the guild. You begin to find common trends, common 'types' of fights (and probably unconsciously start to coin terms like, 'this is an add fight' or 'this is a DPS fight' and similar) and thus you can begin figuring out solutions without having to test too many different types of solutions because you know what your raidforce can do and what tends to work in this situation.

One fairly good example is Noth the Plaguebringer; The fight itself bears a resemblance to what Nefarian would be like, if he were to land right away (balance issues, mana issues aside) and knowing that you can immediately start to figure out:

1) How do I deal with the adds
2) What is the minimum amount of people required to keep the MT alive, and deal with the adds?

From then on, you can start looking at things like how to deal with the mobs that do arcane explosion (Is there a way to prevent it? If so, what is it?) and which mobs to kill first over others - Keep things simple when and if you can, but theres no harm in creating a solid strategy and reducing chaos as much as possible. WoW is mostly about dynamic chaos control (I'd draw comparison to EQ1, DAoC etc but thats another interesting topic that doesn't quite concern this).

It isn't as hard as it sounds or looks, you merely have to change how you approach things and have a solid knowledge of how the game works. Knowing how every class plays, what their strengths are, what utility they have and what their weaknesses are will help immensely; If you don't, you'll need to have someone to poke about that if you have a question on whether something is viable.

One point where guilds often encounter trouble is because people don't speak up; Either they don't understand what their role is, or they're afraid of admitting mistakes or similar (Usually). Staying quiet when something is wrong is dangerous and wastes a lot of time. To continue on the Noth encounter example, having to ask every single section of the fight individually during groundphases and balcony phases is a lot of unneeded work if you can just get people to mention where things go wrong for them.

Meh; This is probably pretty repetetive, I sense. Its 7 in the morning and I still haven't slept, so I'm pretty sure this ended up as more of a rant.

In any case, I hope this was of some use.

Right. You need to know your people. There's very little sense in bullheadedly grinding your people down night after night on somewhat optimistic goals that are realistically un-obtainable with any manner of ease. If the 5-10 diehards in your guild are dictating what your guild goes and does over the majority, you've got a problem beyond that of lazy players. 30+ people shouldn't have to be miserable week after week in order to do what a minority wants. I suggest mixing it up when things get tough. If you're on week 4 of a given boss and haven't made a lot of progress (or sometimes even when you have), cut your entire crew a break and go do something easy for a damn change. It'll relax them some and take the edge off of the wipefests you've been subjecting them to. You'll often find that when you come back after a break on something difficult, your people are in much better mental condition to actually get it worked.

If people get nothing but negative experiences in a given zone, they will very quickly adopt an attitude of "screw these idiots and their damn fool quest...I'm not wasting my time". Don't push people to that. Sometimes your diehards need to remember who got them to where they are and throw out some respect. Learn to give your casuals a break and do something they want for a change, if you heavily depend upon their support. BWL, AQ40, and Naxx aren't going anywhere, after all. It's not like there's some manner of deadline you're up against.

Sometimes, you do have to suck it up and admit that something just isn't worth doing given the resources you have to work with. Don't be afraid to take a weak raid from the content you'd planned for that evening and do something less straining instead. If you're running a raiding guild that only has a dozen people in it who actually come to raid, though...why torture everyone? Just be sure of what people want on the whole before you go jumping to any conclusions or giving up on something entirely. The loudmouthed and the hardcore will always get their way if you let them. Learn when to ignore them for the good of the guild as a whole, and you're on the right track.

Before you can deal with the bad players among your group, you must first know who your quality folks are. When you know the people you can always count on in a tough situation, you can look at your resources from there and the demands of a fight or instance to figure out how best to approach your slackers. Talk to the people of that class or jobtype to find out if anyone is slacking or doing something stupid. Your individual raiders almost always know or see things about your raid that you never would have noticed and will be happy to inform you via tells. (Psst...Gurg...'Mage X' was casting fire spells at the fire immune mob that entire fight...)

Actually handling those people varies a great deal depending on the particular situation at hand, however. There's not an "across-the-board" fix you can go to that will be the best move for every potential situation. It can be a royal bugger depending on your guild composition and pool of players. It's not just a healer issue, either. The problem flows through to any "fight critical" class on a given boss, so you have to address it proactively for each area. If any particular class has to be 100% pro on a given fight, you have to find out who your best people are for that sort of job and stick them with the key tasks so your lazy or unmotivated sorts can't bone it up for everyone. Sometimes, your key guy might not have his head in the game, and you'll need to give him a less important job just for that run, perhaps; but not really enact any manner of serious dicipline over it. You have to be able to recognize an "off day" from a "crappy player" and just cut folks a break on occasion.

In most guilds, you will almost always have someone that wants the ball in all the "big game" scenarios. If you don't have those people already, you need to work at creating or recruting a few in each class before you worry overly about who isn't performing on an individual level. Quality players will almost always want the jobs that carry the most responsibility and they will always strive to do it as best they can. If you're having problems with folks stepping up to take a dangerous or difficult task, your first step is to try and find someone within that class you can build into a responsible individual. Ultimately, you want multiple people in every class that are both willing and able to take on any critical job at any time.

Until you have serious leaders among your crew, you'll find it hard to deal with the slackers. You never get much out of shuffling a pack of people who are terminally afraid of responsibility, after all. Having people you can always count on for class duties drastically decreases the amount of damage that can be done by the people you have who suck or are just inattentive.

That's a rough one. In other guilds I occasionally roll with, you're lucky if you've even got 40 available for a raid night and the "kick them/scold them" thing is not a very good option. For people in this situation, you have to be very careful about how you approach the people who aren't pulling their weight. Sometimes you have to build around them by giving them an easy group of people to keep up or some task that keeps them actively engaged and busy. You seriously need them, so you can't insult them or actively call them out for sucking (as we do in EJ). It becomes a game of knowing your people and learning how best to motivate or work with the individual personalities you have available.

I've seen a number of lackluster players turn into clutch individuals when given a task they actually enjoyed. In another guild I occasionally cruise with, they had a paladin that sucked and sat around at full mana or afk'ed a lot of the time on raids, so they stuffed him on "casual dps heal duty" and left him there. I got him stuffed into a main tank healer slot for a run and he absolutely bloomed. These days, they rotate some of their healers so nobody's stuck with a task they consider "boring" or "lame" for very long, provided they have appropriate gear to do what is asked.

Ultimately, it will be different in every guild because the people you have to work with will be different, as will the situations. For a leader, it really is all about getting to know people and finding out why they don't do well, then seeing how you can help them. Is there anything you could assign them to that they would feel better about? Talk to them. (Preferably not during a raid.) Tell them you're trying to fix some problems with healing/dps/whatever and ask what you can do to help them perform better on future runs. If you go straight in and accuse them of not paying attention or being a lazy jackass, they'll just get defensive and obstinate on you, which only makes things worse. Are they unhappy with something? Do they need tips? Do they want a different job or a different group to heal?

Sometimes the solution to a problem of that sort is much easier than it might first appear, but you only find out by talking to folks and approaching them with respect. Cheers and good luck to those of you who are having tough times.

Well Slug, I know I've talked to you briefly about some of the situations in your post, it mirrors my thoughts almost exactly.

This is what we try to do, but we end up wiping on molten giants. You know how it goes with us. :)
Things like first kills of certain bosses, as well as killing world spawns every now and again are great morale boosters. The other night we killed 3 green dragons and everyone was on top of their game after that, it raised people's spirits and I think we downed Firemaw shortly afterwards. ;)

I think having a class lead type member is excellent in these situations. Having someone closer to the other members of their class, who knows each person's strengths and weaknesses is great. In a situation where there aren't millions of players to draw from, i.e a 40-50 man guild, then you need someone who is evaluating their class members and talking with them one on one if their performance isn't up to par or they're causing drama. I'd also suggest having officers who aren't working part time and in university/college since they will end up yelling a lot.:ninja:

monitoring would be a good start (i watch rogues/dps warriors most of the time and whisper them if needed).

1. it normally takes only 2 posts in our forums untill the 1st "your mom!/ash learn your language" post occurs (with only 3 people under 18 in our guild) - almost same in TS and guild chat (and having 2x 16 year olds in warrior channel makes me mad, really its like sandbox kids all time and pisses older people like me off to the point i want to log out)
2. our learning is slow because of the big fluctuation of people in raids. when was the last time we raided with 40 members, not 30+10 trials/alts ? try and estimate the average wipe/learn-time (or tries on a specific mob) per person over all acounts, its still very low
3. we got like 30 people who know the fight and strategy we actually use ,theres no written down strategy in forums on most bosses, its just in our heads or a collection of ideas in some forum posts
4. downtime between wipes is huge , like 20-30 mins prep for 5 mins wipes
5. most people only log in 20 mins before raidstart, theres almost no outside teamwork anymore except within a core of 10-15 people (out of 80+ accounts), alt playing is fine but still gives me no idea what a player can do with his main, or what i have to keep an eye for if i play together with his main.
6. some people pvp all day, you think they can still give 100% the last 4h of a night ?
7. its game
8. few people are retards and often cause mistakes/deaths because of that if you dont watch them and shout at them every 20 mins
9. more diversity, thats why i think pushing naxx back was a mistake (even if it means more wiping)
10, stable tactics and execution, dont know if its just the amount of retarded fights (lack of control) on bosses now, but if we wipe 5 times to a boss not even close to a kill, then have a perfect kill at try 6 (no deaths) then something is fishy or something really changed in raid setup and should be written down.

so thats guild internal stuff mostly (and this is not the place for that) and guess its not different from the stuff other guilds have to deal with (if you have, tell us what you did pls). i still suggest 1-2 people more per class and 1 more raid day, and/or dropping MC / sharing MC with another guild.

PS: after reading it again i see that this is a bit offtopic (remove if you think it doesnt fit), but id still like to see how others deal with all of this.

yep noticed its a bit offtopic , but i thought it helps people to understand why we are slow (or at least what i think why we are slow). the points people suggested will more or less hit on the points i listed. e.g. my pt1 vs. the various suggestions for better communication. <- chtuluh (not a sig)

What Slug wrote is key to having people accept wipes without too much grumbling. Know your guild and its limits. You need someone in charge who is very sensitive to the mood/morale of the raid and the likelyhood of beating the encounter you are engaged with. Know when to push on for that kill and know when everyone has had enough for the night. Know when shouting is going to work and know when everyone has lost too much concentration for it to work. Know when you've run out of ideas / need a rethink and know when its important to keep practicing a strat to get the execution down properly.

All of that is based on the players you have. Are you challenging for world firsts? Server firsts? Just killing the damn thing? How much wiping will people take without the morale booster of a first kill or a couple of days break farming old content? It seems to me that the longer you demonstrate a good understanding of your players and their limits (sensible raid schedules that suit your members, not pushing too hard on a lost cause and so on) then the more they will come to trust you when you ask them to wipe on a new encounter for no reward.

Also I think learning quickly and effectively from each wipe is important. Never have a wipe that you didn't learn anything from if you can avoid it. Setting small, intermediate objectives on the way to killing a boss helps as well (eg. forget about running out of mana, just keep the tanks alive and lets not have anyone die in the first 2 minutes - after that we'll work on extending the time we can survive for).

I think one of the keys to approaching new stuff is attitudes. Any wipe where you learned something was worth it, period. Any wipe where you didn't learn something can be treated as practice of execution, in which the current strat is defined and individual learning takes place, refining of execution.

Another thing to keep in mind is that simply put, figuring out a fight is extremely expensive, I can't even imagine the amount of times a guild would have to wipe to a boss like the Twin emps to fully learn everything there is to know about the fight. Sitting here now I could tell you all you need to know, but I didn't figure any of it out on my own - and it still cost us an arm and a leg to get them down.

People mentioned communication but it can't be stressed enough, not meaning talking on vent while the fight is going, having 40 people discussing their observations and potential improvements - but this enviroment needs to be setup, it can't be a ffa discussion on vent/ts, it really needs to be done in class channels, with everyone involved. A bad habit that we sorta ran into is that we had maybe 10 people who put critical thought into hard encounters, developing solutions then just handing out orders, but often without much explanation into why.

Game mechanics, one of the things that bothers me sometimes is how much time people end up dumping into the game and not understanding fundamental mechanics of whats going on. I remember hearing a healer who pulled aggro from Vek'lor complaining about how he wasn't even healing the Vek'lor tank, things that as a tank I use as common knowledge (in this case Tank/Dps aggro being single target, while healing aggro is global for mobs you're in combat with) are unknown to people. Another example is that a few of our rogues/warriors had no idea what the 5second rule was, something that any mana user learns before they hit their first instance. I guess what I am trying to say is that its important to know your class definately, but don't discount knowledge of other peoples classes either - its important when trying to crack an encounter from zoomed out view of whats goin on.

It's strange being in a guild. There's undoubtably a hierarchy which is odd because you have younger people in ranks above you and oldest members sometimes as Disciples. Saying this though I think most people agree that that is never ever a problem among guilds.

However, one problem I think you need to be able to evaluate and a decision you need to decide on; is your guild going to be run buy the Officers, or the Members.
In most cases I would always always say the latter. If all members have their say and you come to decisions together, then there's less threat from low moral or mutiny.
If you have the Officers run the guild, then they have to be knowledgable to the point of being infallible. They have to be respected too. It's easier to do this with older members, but younger members who present themselves with the qualities you look for in an officer are diamonds in the rough, you'll never be in any doubt why you appointed them.

Whichever way you run your guild, your Officers still need to be the guys at the front of the queue with a megaphone telling the retards at the back to hurry the fuck up. We can't rely on meeting 80+ people on the internet who all have the morality, compassion and embarasssment to give as much as they need to, so sometimes you DO need people to give the orders.
But far from being a drill sergeant telling everyone what they're doing wrong, they need to be more of a Scout leader with a long wooden stick, hiking their way up a hill and urging their little Scouts along behind them.

I'm very much the sort of person whome, if I feel I'm not being led to the right extent, I'll try and do the leading. I am most always not in a position to do this so I will humbly sit at the sidelines and percieve and give opinions and offer suggestions as much as possible. In my mind, if you see a problem you have little right to announce it unless you have some sort of interest in trying to put it right.

The point of my post (little though it may be) is I think our guild has a personality disorder when it comes to being either a Democracy or an Officer combined Dictatorship. Instead we have the peons running amock in the village, and the King and his Knights are posting wanted signs which get littered with hyperthetical tomatos.
Basically, we come up with some really good ideas and solutions, but I don't know if we have the capacity to carry them out. And the blame falls on every level.

I've always wanted to be able to use Fraps more. How do you make it interact in a resonable way with Vent? I can't seem to get both to work cleanly at the same time.

Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about here. I remember when we were learning MC way back in the day (early '05), we encouraged people to roll alts of opposite types of classes to help them understand how the members of the raid worked. Personally, I had my 60 warrior and had a 60 priest alt and still leveled a rogue to 40ish to get a general feel for the dps role. It helped our raid force a lot IMO.

As for being on the main topic, I won't repeat what's already been written. Above posters have already pretty much hit the nail on the head (communication, respect, maturity).