I've come to believe that for some people, the inconsistencies based on lag are really hard for them to adapt to. Lag creates an environment that is fundamentally morphic, causing you to need to constantly observe, plan, act. For some people this is a large step up, they can do fine in fights or encounters where they need to learn distinct things and then forget about them. They can be stars in that environment. When you throw lag into the picture, some really good players go to shit.

A lot of the issues that people attribute to lag though, can be avoided entirely by playing smart.

For example, during the Twin Emperors attempts, I saw countless healers die to blizzard, as apparently they lagged for a second, got caught in the snare, and got hit by 2-3 waves. But if they were at proper range, they would never get hit by blizzard in the first place.

You see it all the time on Chromaggus too. Some rogue always tries to get that last backstab in, gets time stunned or lagged up, and hit by ignite flesh.

My point focused on the actual decrease in performance some suffer, not the 'IT WAS TEH LAG' excuse.

As a side note, as soon as we got CEnemyCastBars our 'stupidity' factor on chromaggus went down.
Which reinforces my belief that a lot of the sub-par performance we see is people not being 'good' with the UI that is typically available. The declining bar gave people a visual way to time how long they had to stay in... instead of the flashing text '10s till breath'.

Chrom is not really comparable to serverlags regarding AOE effects like blizzard, rain of fire etc.

Reading over this thread again, I can sort of look at things in a new light, because our so-called uberguild disbanded last week. We formed after a previous split because we had too many people that just didn't get Twin Emps and C'Thun and they weren't serious enough about raiding. So we made a new guild filled with the best from our old guild and the best from another raiding guild on the server. It was great for a couple weeks, we blew through C'Thun after wiping on it for a month. But people started getting lazy again, to the point that we'd wipe on Noth because only a few people decursed, we'd have multiple people dying against Faerlina that just didn't get out of rain of fire, the usual. As the OP posted, the punishment for bad play is getting more and more harsh.

Instead of re-evaluating who was "good" on the server and forming another guild, people soon realized that there weren't enough good players on the entire server to really form a proper progression-based guild. There are too many people that don't put in the effort and too many people that wanted to go backwards and do AQ again instead of Naxx wipes. So there's a mass exodus from the server currently and Alliance PvE progression is pretty much dead. Sort of interesting to watch in a way, because I always wondered if we had enough true raiders on Dunemaul. Guess not.

As far as people being disloyal and jumping ship like it's a bad thing -- it's a bunch of BS. There are very few people in our guild that I actually talked to and played with on an individual basis and would consider "friends." The rest were just people we needed to fill the raid, and truthfully, they were the crappy players that were always wiping us. How is it being disloyal if those people wasted your time and effort by causing wipes, which caused you further grief through repair costs? Why should I be loyal to someone that made playing the game miserable? I pay my monthly fee like everyone else, and if I'm not having fun, I'm going somewhere else.

I think relying on mods to tell you when to move etc are sort of detrimental to a raid, especially when you reach something like C'thun. I will give you Chromaggus because it is completely timed breath-wise, and you don't see an animation before he breathes. However people become too comfortable with just relying on an announce mod to tell them what to do and it end up showing on C'thun where people are constantly getting dark glared and claiming they moved and C'thun managed to hit them. The only times I ever have gotten hit by a dark glare was when I got backed into a corner that gave me a bad camera angle and I was unable to see C'thun and instead relied on the mod to tell me when to run. So I do think mods are a help and can be a detriment when people get to the point they pay attention to nothing but the announces on the fight ... C'thun does a damn good job weeding those people out.

Another one is shadowflames on Nefarian, in my old guild people would just not heal and damage would spike every shadowflame, asked them why they were not prepping heals into them, and their claim was the timer for the mod was off .... I suppose no one looks at Nefarian and sees his huge exaggerated shadowflame animation.

Bocheezu, do you think maybe pushing Naxx to the point that you are doing no other instances in the game was a driving factor in people becoming lazy/not showing up?

Just curious because you said people wanted to go back and do those old instances as well, maybe not making hte time to get people gear from the prior instances while forcing wipe nights every night might have a factor in the eventual crumble. I don't know your entire situation ... but it sounds vaugely similar to ours that I think we have recoverred from a bit.

People doing the work to kill C'thun Ouro and all them, then doing them for like a month and then telling everyone who were unable to get their stuff that progression means not going back to BWL/AQ40 because we need to 100% focus on Naxx. Doing naxx is great and all, but you guys weren't exactly farming it forever ... I think there would be some animosit towards discarding it in favor of all Naxx all the time. Like I said I don't know any more than how I read your DKP page and the 6 pages of goodbyes on our forum.

I've been watching this thread with some amount of interest. I have a pretty vast background in MMOs / high-end raiding / guild management, and its always great to see threads like this which provide insight into how others approach things.

There are a row of problems associated with forming a stable high-end guild, that continue to need to be resolved throughout the history of the guild if it is to survive. Generally speaking, solid leadership (which can, hand-in-hand, produce solid rulesets) is what will ensure that a given guild stays afloat for any amount of time. Motivation is a very grey area and it tends to come and go, but stamina and persistence through tough times (whether thats lack of members meeting up to raids, people not farming enough pots, people not understanding an encounter and wiping you for the umpteenth time, etc) is an area where guilds who've formed personal bonds with one another have a great advantage - Newer guilds will generally have less loyal members, who at an oppertune moment will perform what EQ coined as 'guildhopping' or 'stepstoning'; Moving up the ladder, so to speak. Or just plain out quitting when faced with a brick wall instead of climbing when told to do so.

I'll paraphrase some of what Curse (I don't recall who from Curse wrote it) wrote about high-end guild management, as it applies to this specific case: Goals are vital. You're playing a game online with a vast crowd of all sizes and shapes; Just as in real-life, bringing together people who have completely different expectations and goals in the game is going to ensure drama and conflict - The so-called killer of guilds. If you have no hope of uniting those in your guild under goals that at least resemble eachother, you're going to continue to go through the tough times.

As far as morals go, that really depends. I burned out from WoW after leading a guild for roughly a year, and one of the reasons I can attribute that to is input:output. I felt I was giving far more than the vast majority of the guild was willing to go along with - That, alongside artificial content blocks, and the public statement that they would be focusing on 'smaller' instances and Naxx would supposedly be 20 or 25 man, burned me completely out. I spent 6 months in EQ2 and ended up coming back to WoW under a different guildtag on a different server. While I certainly feel sad about not being able to play with some of the same people I did before, I feel better about where I am now than I did before; And while I do play this game purely for the raid-aspect, feeling good about the guild you're in and not feeling as if those around you are 'dead weight' is important if you want to keep playing without burning out.

As for addons and UIs, I feel the same about those as I do about the 'threat meter' add-on. If you play well, you play well with the default UI. Learning to tweak your UI and AddOns so that you perform even better, and the setup is more pleasing through hours of wipes and raiding can easily improve performance - But its not a cure for a bad player, its merely a patch on a wound if the person plays bad. Relying on timers too much is bad if you do so because you don't understand the underlying mechanics of the fight. If they're understood and the timers and warnings are simply an addendum not a requirement, then I think its fine.

And err, since I managed to type all that without actually adressing the initial post...

I think 'guild poaching' is slightly annoying and I don't approve of it - Guild poaching being actively attempting to cajole others into leaving their guild for yours via methods which one might not consider entirely 'friendly' (Offering them rewards/immediate gear/money or other such compensation, repeatedly spamming the same people about joining, talking down about their current guild as a method to attempt to recruit and such).

I think keeping an open eye on solid players who might be willing to find that their interests lie elsewhere is perfectly fine - Its a rather thin, beaurocratic line I know; But I'm not sure I can specify better than that. Be friendly, don't be pushy, and if people still want to jump ship to you then they most likely have reasons to want to do so outside of your control (/point their guild/guild leadership/situation).

The officers really felt we were plenty well geared and there was no reason to go back and spend a long weekend raid day for C'Thun loot. After the 2nd week, we'd killed Maexxna on Friday and had a couple raids on Patchwerk. At that time, it looked like maybe another week on Patchwerk, then we'd be open to Thaddius pretty much, which I could accept getting stuck on. At least then we'd have two wings of loot to get + Razuvious and Noth. So the holiday week we were sort of expecting to get Maexxna by Friday, then a couple days off, then a Patchwerk raid on Monday. But it all went to hell fast and we had to raid that weekend and we still barely got Maexxna down on Monday before the reset because nobody was showing up. So we were backpedalling big time.

It's a catch-22 because you want to get to a certain point each week, but people get burnt out and keep stretching shit out, causing more people to get burnt out. That holiday week, it basically took an entire raid to beat each individual boss -- all day Wednesday to kill Anub'Rekhan, we killed Razuvious Thursday and couldn't kill Noth, took all day Friday to kill Noth, the entire raid Saturday for Faerlina, Sunday off, and Maexxna all raid Monday. This is something we were hoping to get done in two days and it took five.

It felt like our six-week marathon to kill Emps, and people just had much less tolerance for it. We saw where things were going and pulled the plug.

Losing motivation is dangerous and extremely contagious. Solutions vary so extremely depending on the individual player, guild atmosphere and environment that its hard to say much - One suggestion is variety and breaks, but both can cause an equal amount of burnout so its always difficult to figure out IMO.

Yeah, I was pretty amazed at the types of people we were picking up to make Subversion, and at that point, I felt we were sorta the Alliance All-Stars of Dunemaul. We all did. Two guilds that were pretty bitter rivals for a time came together to make a superguild. It took a hell of a lot of luck and good timing for that to happen, and it still wasn't good enough. It makes the future seem pretty bleak for Alliance raiding on the server.

I know that I will probably be flamed for this post but nevermind.

To put it short: WoW has become too hard. Let me explain: my guild has been formed with one of those "mergers" that many people have mentioned in this thread. Our players come from the former 2 top alliance guilds on my server. We have cleared AQ and we killed five bosses in Naxx (now we are on a raid break due to vacations). We will never compete with the top guilds, but still we are miles ahead of most of the guilds on my server. Consider that on my server around 30 guilds are farming Ragnaros. Only 2 guilds have progressed beyond Huhuran.

I often hear people saying that Twin Emps and C'thun are the best designed fights in the game. Well maybe if you consider the challenge and the mechanics of the fight. But if you look at their impact on this game, they are the worst designed ones.

Let me explain: we have people in the guild that have around 50% chance of dying if their group is targeted by a glare. When faced with this situation, the usual comment I read is that the problem is the guy who dies. He needs to l2p, he needs to be trained, he needs to be kicked from the guild. Let's face it: if you put 40 people together, you will have people with different levels of skill. As I said, my guild has been formed by hand picking people from the best guilds on my server, and if we have to recruit, we can choose the best guys because we are the most advanced guild. Still, we have members that simply do not have the level of skill required for C'thun. Sure, if you keep on banging your head against a wall, you will eventually knock it down. But what is the price? How many gdisbands do we need to see before realizing that content is getting too hard?

To make my point even more clear, let me introduce you the concept of "suckage level". Every guild has his "suckage level", i.e. the point where a fight becomes too hard for them to beat in a reasonable amount of time. Guilds react differently to reaching a fight above their "suckage level". Usually they disband either because too many members burn out and quit or because they leave to form a more "pro" guild. If Blizzard keeps on rising the bar, more and more guilds will stumble into fights that are above their suckage levels, with predictable effects.

When designing encounters, Blizzard has to stop thinking about how hard they will be for DnT or some other top guild. They have to stop designing them around zero lag. They have to design them around a raid of 40 people with skill levels going from "awesome" to "poor", playing over an unreliable medium like Internet (i.e with lag, disconnects). It is simply retarded to design a fight where 4-5 poor performers will wipe the raid, because it is GUARANTEED that in a 40 man raid you will have them.

The difficulty level of BWL was about right, anything more than that will only cause endless guild drama, splits, and cancelled subscriptions.

Yup; But only because your conclusion is totally off and the term 'too hard' is very vague and pretty useless ;)

Before I move on in what you wrote. Cold, hard fact: In an encounter ability that is 100% predictable with a CTRA-supplied warning (Along with MukkaTimers if you want), yes, it is 100% the players own fault if he dies to Dark Glare. There is *no* excuse, beyond getting a lagspike.

You assume that different levels of skill mean you have people below a certain amount of skill. That assumption is false. We have people with varying degrees of skill in my guild, but I seriously doubt any of us will be getting killed by Dark Glare.

You also assume that guild disbands are entirely related to not being able to beat raid encounters. You're underanalyzing something far more complex than you're giving credit for. Having played EverQuest 1, I took part in beating my head against a buggy Rathe Council for a long, long time (or unbeatable Overlord Mata Muram, completely impossibly buffed Hate MPG trial, et cetera et cetera). I also wiped a lot in EverQuest 2 on Lord Vyemm, Mutagenic Outcast, and to move on to WoW we wiped a bunch on Vaelastrasz because we had a constant 3-second ability lag for a week straight (wiped over 60 times) until it cleared up. And yet in the 8 years I've raided, I've never seen a guild die due to not being able to beat an encounter. Ever.

You need to look at guild management, motivation and the goals that the guild sets for its members. Its not a binary 1|0 - You won't guild disband just by wiping on an encounter. If you're pushing hard for something that your members don't want, then you've got the wrong 'handpicked' members for what you're trying to do. I refuse to believe that a guild that can 'handpick' anyone they want can't assemble a crew of players who can all dodge Dark Glare and stand wiping more than twice on a boss before burning out.

Usually ? I'd really like to see some statistics on this that clearly indicate that after wiping X amount of times on a boss purely because of the incompetence of all of the guildmembers, it then disbands and such - Much more likely is an incompetent raid leader, or guild leadership in general. And that has nothing to do with hitting content blocks, except they serve to highlight the fact that something is wrong.

And of course if they keep rAising the bar, more and more guilds will be split up into what they can achieve and what the best can achieve. Thats sort of the plan, you see - Do you understand the importance in game design and community development for an MMORPG that impossible goals serve?

1) They don't. If they designed encounters after DnT, most guilds would really be fucked. Really. Because honestly, ask DnT how hard a time they've had in Naxx - No, wait, let achievements speak for themselves. We're not very far into Naxx release and its already close to being finished - That is an indication, to me, that the level of skill required to beat the instance is not DnT level. And on a sidenote, since when is DnT a measure for raid encounter difficulty ? :P

2) Encounters aren't designed around zero lag - The only ones I can think of that are, is Thaddius. Not a single encounter I've seen outside of him could be called 'designed for zero lag'. If you don't move asap you'll polarize your raid on Thaddius - No other encounters require that form of movement, even Heigan the Unclean is doable with a small amount of lag. And what the heck, since when are you supposed to design encounters for the lowest common denominator ? Are they supposed to design the UI around 640x480 screen resolution, 28.8k baud modems and such too ?

3) I'm sorry to say, but 99% of the raid game is already designed for people with skill levels going from 'awesome' to 'poor'. Everything up to Naxx, with the exception of the final boss in a top-end instance (CThun) can be done with plenty of poor players. If you have competent leadership, then by the time you do reach CThun your raidforce won't contain poor - Not in the sense that you mean. In addition, Anub'Rekhan and Instructer Razuvious are *very* doable with a raidforce that isn't too well composed.

4) Why is it retarded to design a fight where everyone needs to play well, exactly ? Its certainly not guaranteed that in a 40 man raid you'll lob around retards who have no clue what aggro is and how an encounter works - You put yourself in that position by recruiting said retards or not teaching them well enough. All of this just sounds like a whinefest to scale down the difficulty of the raidgame because of incompetent leadership.

Will difficult raid encounters make SOME people quit ? Yes.
Will ezmode raid encounters make SOME people quit ? Yes.
Does the difficulty of raid encounters have ANYTHING to do with guild drama ? No.
Does the difficulty of raid encounters have ANYTHING to do with a guild splitting up ? No. The only argument there would be 'cockblocked' encounters, ala CThun pre-fix.

And before someone jumps down my throat and goes, 'My friends guild split up after they wiped on Vaelastrasz 20 times, so you're wrong and you suck!' let me re-phrase:

If you are wiping on an encounter, there is one of several reasons:

1) You do not understand the encounter fully, and thus your strategy is flawed/unfinished/still being written
2) Your raid force is unable to comply with the strategy.
3) Your level of gear is not at a high enough point.

All 3 are valid reasons to wipe, and all 3 have 'bad' reasons as well. If you don't understand an encounter fully and thus write a bad strategy and then don't proceed to tweak/fix it, you are wiping because of your inability to adapt - People aren't sucking, you are. If you use a pre-made strategy that isn't tailored for your raidsetup, you're asking for it.

If you're wiping because your raidforce can't follow the strategy, its either a wrong strategy or people need more time to practice it. As people try more and more raid encounters they'll eventually become better and better, as long as they are forced into roles where they make an active difference. In Naxx this happens all by itself - If people screw up, the whole raid will feel it right away in virtually every encounter in the instance. In other instances, that might not be - Then its up to YOU to force people into active roles, and make sure people are doing what they are supposed to; And in the cases where they aren't, get them to fix it.

As for point 3, thats avoidable by picking proper raid targets and progressing correctly.

I don't see how 1, 2 or 3 lead to guilds splitting up unless handled poorly by the leadership. If you aren't fixing or calling out obvious mistakes in raids then its YOUR fault the raid is wiping, not the person who keeps screwing up - Most people need their hands held, and thats as much a personality thing as it is anything else. I'd make an obvious exception to guilds who are past that point and require people to own up to their own mistakes, and realize/fix them without having to be called on. But until you reach that point, you do need to take that active role as a raid leader.

If 3, you need to be stepping down to easier stuff.

Your entire point is confounded by the fact that most of the raiding in WoW is very approachable to casual gamers, and very very easy. Having a natural progression from easy to difficult doesn't somehow magically make guilds disband - The guild itself (or its leadership, in other words) are most likely responsible for that.

I don't think that the current 40 man content is 'too hard'. It should be hard, and it is exactly the kind of challange a lot of guilds play the game for.

I think the problem is that blizzard offer just one sort of genuine content progression these days: difficult 40 man instances. They need to produce more smaller, easier, content (i.e. 5-10 man dungeons) for those people who (lets face it) are just are not capable of performing to the levels the toughest dungeons demand. Im not saying there should be 5-10 man dungeons with comparable loot upgrades, but there should be some upgrades/new content in this department... with 6.5 million subscribers (many of them lacking the skill or time to participate in 40 man content) there just really isn't any justification for not providing a little more variety in content.

Morfina, sure, a guild is not guaranteed to disband when they meet a cockblock. But let's consider a fight like C'thun. Some people will learn the encounter the first day of tries. For other people, it might take weeks. What happens when you put together those two kind of people? The first ones will probably be pissed off that they have to wipe again and again while they do nothing wrong. Fingers will be pointed at the people that fuck up. And maybe they are really doing their best, but still they die. Attendance will go down because people of type 'A' can't be arsed to come to wipe raids when there is nothing more they can do to improve. People of type 'B' will skip raids because, let's face it, nobody likes to be shouted at. And if wipe raids are not guild killers, cancelled raids surely are.

Let's look at some cold hard fact, ok? How many guilds on your server have killed C'thun? How many have killed Twin Emps? How many top guilds have disbanded/reformed/merged since AQ40 came out?

Just for my information, I guess that your guild killed C'thun, right? But you say that you quit WoW for months and came back...did you attend the wipe raids on C'thun? Or he was already on farm when you joined?

What I want is very simple: I want encounters where you can compensate for poor performers or where you are not guaranteed to wipe if someone disconnects or fucks up. Because, I repeat, in a 40 men raid you will have bad players, you will have clickers, you will have people that can't dodge dark glares consistently or can't move out of rain of fire fast enough. And this shouldn't force me to spend nights wiping for other people's faults.

There are basically 6 key factors that determine how well your "end game guild" will do.

1) Strategy - How quickly your guild can analyze an encounter and develop the proper strategy for your guild to beat it.

2) The quality of your core members - Any encounter that requires a few people to do specific jobs that the rest of the raid does not have to do tests the quality of your core. (Instructor - Mind Control, Anub - Tank/Hunter, etc)

3) Tanking - The quality of tanks in your guild which determines your ability to beat encounters that are heavily dependent on tanks. (Positioning fights, agro intensive fights, crowd control fights requiring tanks to tank multiple mobs)

4) Healing - The quality of healing in your guild which determines your ability to beat encounters heavily dependent on healing. (Mana efficiency fights, spike damage fights)

5) Damage - The quality of your damage which determines your ability to beat encounters heavily dependent on damage. (Generally timed fights which include fights that enrage after a certain time, or an encounter that overwhelms you if you don't beat it quickly enough)

6) Overall skill of your members as a collective unit - The quality of your guildmembers to analyze the environment and react to it (Any encounter that requires awareness on the part of most or all members in order to beat it)

Every encounter falls into any combination of the above. The strategy part generally falls onto the shoulders of leadership and it generally can't be fixed without new leadership so there isn't much you can do to fix that short of joining a new guild and is generally the reason leadership is the most important factor in a guild's success.

Everything else can be improved upon, and the better you get at everything, the better your guild will be able to tackle new encounters. What you need to do is simply analyze your mistakes, identify the problem, and come up with solutions to the problem.

If your guild is wiping on vael, follow the guidelines I posted above, and figure out specifically what is causing the wipes.

If your tanks are screwing up the positioning and can't hold agro, the problem lies with your tanks.

If your tanks are simply dying while tanking due to a lack of healing when they should not be dying, the problem lies with your healers.

If you are correctly tanking / healing the encounter until the buff wears off and wiping, then the problem is obviously your damage.

If you are wiping because people are not noticing the bomb in time, and exploding on other people, then the problem lies with the skill of your collective unit.

Once the problem is pinpointed, then you can work on fixing it. If the individuals responsible for the problem are incapable of fixing it, then you have a decision to make as a guildleader. Again going back to leadership, you need leadership that is capable of correctly analyzing a situation and pinpointing what the problem actually is which is usually different then what people think it is. One of the main reasons for this is simply bias. People tend to think more highly of people they like, and think less of people they do not regardless of the actual results. A lot of times when people merge the "top" players, it's usually more of a guild clique that thinks more highly of itself then it probably should.

Slightly better phrasal than mine, to say the least ;)

I've seen a huge amount of guilds in WoW wither and crumble completely by employing leadership which all knows eachother IRL - Not that I think the prospect is an entirely bad idea or that that was the only reason the guild(s) died, but knowing someone IRL is definately extra hassle unless you handle it very well. I had someone threaten me IRL after I dkp fined them in-game, for example; Most people will tend to ellude conflict altogether from my experience --> and branch into favoritism.

Figuring out how serious you are is also definately important. If you are really serious about progress and value it highly, then you'll need to make tough decisions that will piss people off and occasionally remove people whom are very nice but simply not up-to-par to the raidgame. Inability to make decisions like that can cause a lot more trouble than its worth.

On the other hand, if you are less serious about progress and cater more towards social atmosphere and family (with progression there but clearly on the sideline of the previous two) then you might not want to make decisions like that. Figuring out exactly where you stand on issues like this is important if you want to maintain stability, as well as be fair towards your members (So they know what they're getting into).

How likely is it that many people will run AQ by the time they are level 70? I'd say until Blizzard lets out what items and rewards will be like from the 5 and 10 man instances and normal quests, it's difficult to assume there will be progression in this manner.