There really is only two ways to handle two raid groups:
1. Strictly have an A-team and a B-team. This doesn't compromise your guild's progress, but basically dooms the B team to mediocrity.
2. Try to evenly balance teams...ideally something you switch up maybe once per week so everyone can have an opportunity to raid with everyone else, over time. This however will be at the expense of your overall guild progress.
As long as raid ID's exist, fielding two raids will never work. As encounters become increasingly complex, the need for different class roles becomes increasingly diverse. Raids will always start out on equal footing, but as they progress further into the week and will require say... two priests to mind control some adds, or three warlock tanks, or three hunters to tranq, etc., how will the spares know which raid to join during the early moments of the week when they're asked to fill in roles as people log off for the night? They won't know that two priests will be mysteriously absent on the upcoming Friday and one raid becomes saturated with priests. The other option is to force people to not fill in raids after a certain hour of the night and if someone needs to leave, the raid needs to be called at an earlier hour.
I think it was EJ I originally heard it, but I like the idea of pioneering it with 1 group and then breaking off into 2 groups once enough people in each know the encounters to help the few who haven't go through it. We did that with Onyxia because we needed her scales for Nef (though surprisingly you only need cloaks for the warriors and a few healers, which was fortunate since one of our skinners got his account banned... with scales on it :rolleyes:) but I imagine it would be nightmarish for a long raid with multiple bosses and being locked into the raid long before the endboss was down. We had... spectacular failure with double ZGs but that could also be attributed to people not caring enough to go or leaving early so one raid cannabilises the few standbys and screws the other.
I'd say the biggest thing is you need a LOT of standbys. You'd also have to have rules on how many standbys one raid can consume and of each class. I was spitting fire when the other ZG raid managed to lock in no less than SIX warriors for their instance leaving us no replacements when we lost one of ours. Oh and all the standby priests. Bastards. Guess that's what you get for not being in the guild leader's raid. :P
Yeah, back when we two-grouped MC and BWL, our model was to learn the place with one pro group, then rotate in new people to learn the ropes over a period of weeks, and then split to two hybrid groups once enough people had the necessary experience. It worked fine, though the transition period was always shaky. That pretty much came to a stop with AQ, partly due to attrition that brought our guild size down to something less unwieldy, and partly due to hitting the Twin Emps and saying "Ok, two-grouping this would really, really suck." For MC and BWL, as long as you had 2-3 excellent tanks, a good puller, and a handful of good healers, you were fine. Later encounters have become less forgiving, and make our approach much less feasible.
The common guild composition for this is largely dependent on two things:
1. How hard is the content.
2. Is there any promise of 40 man raid content later.
From my perspective...
1 | 2
0 | 0: This will be like pre-MC days where people were gearing up rather haphazardly in BRS/Strat/Scholo. Inter guild PUGs(For those on Mal'Ganis, pugs composed of people in Ret/Pro-Baddies/Validus/SO etc) will be the first to clear them (Just like PUGs were the first to do a lot of the stuff on release), then it will quickly shift to guilds doing them one per reset, maybe two if they get organized and have a lot of excess.
0 | 1: People will do it the same way, except be more focused and have two even raiding groups.
1 | 0: This is most likely... unfortunately... guilds will try Team A/B, then Team B will dissolve as it goes no where in the hard content without key people. Eventually end-game raiding guilds will scale down in size.
1 | 1: Team A/B at first, once Team A kills Illidian or whatever, make the teams even so that both can kill Illidan to gear up for the next phase.
One thing that needs to be realized, is that the leveling curve is going to play a major impact in how the groups will form. I imagine that as soon as we get 10 people semi-balanced people to hit 70, we'll start organizing raids in Kharazan, same with 25 semi-balanced people that hit 70 and BCit, or whatever the 25man raiding content is.
The idea I pitched to my guild for splinting up the raid groups, is splitting by schedule. The basic idea is that we have some people on the east coast some on the west coast some Australians and other various people. Our raid schedule as of right now goes from 6pm tell 11pm+ pst. Most people in my guild are close to the same skill level, so splitting up between a team b team on skill would be more seniority then skill. Having the raids split up by schedule is going to make it so people can make more of the raid as a lot of the east coast people have to cut out if we decide to let the raid go late, and are sitting on there hands waiting for the raid to start. Im not sure exactly how this would work out but it was an idea im trying to pitch.
*edited for some spelling*
On a side note I think that blizzard needs to rework there raid id system, so that people in the same guild can swap between instances. Im not sure how they would accomplish this, the only idea I could come up with is having it so people with diffrent raid id's can zone in the same instance the instance would be formed on the raid id that is furthest in the instance.
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The only thing holding back a second group is leadership.
If you're like many guilds with one autocratic GM, 2 groups is going to fail miserably. Many, many guilds have a deep lack of leadership outside of the GM/Raidleader. There really is a certain amount of chemistry that these kinds of people bring out in a raid, and finding that with a second person is going to be extremely difficult for most people. You may find your raid not even listening to the second guy. Its really akin to a substitute teacher effect - not much learning is going to be going on that day.
Originally Posted by Apate
Zyla, International Man of a Certain Standard.
Originally Posted by Wraithlin
What have you brought to this discussion? The usual vacuous and contentless tripe that you contribute to these forums - no more and no less.
The only thing holding back a second group is leadership.
You pretty much hit the nail on the head. We ran into this in the past, and it is probably the single biggest hurdle in ovecoming the imbalance between two separate raid groups for us. We have plenty of excellent players, and handling new content with two groups is not an issue. Problem would be solved if we had a clone Gurgthock ability. The issue is not that we don't have a number of extremely capable people who know the fights in and out as well as the various logistical skills needed to successfully coordinate a raid - the problem is having the schedule, level of commitment and consistency to pull it off night after night. There is a certain degree of teamwork and chemistry that builds, and it all flows through the raid leader -- having to fragment that, and also the possibility of having different people do it on different days just puts kinks in an otherwise implicit reassurance of having the regular raid leader there.
Funny thing is, right now we field dual BWL raids on a weekly basis.... what is that gonna make for ... 4 Runs in the expansion? lol... thank god we have at least 6 or 7 competant guild officers/raidleaders in our ranks. This is gonna be nuts!
It seems pretty simple to me, start molding your officer/raidleader core group now. We rotate raid leaders weekly for BWL.... I realize the majority on here consider BWL to be so last year and trivial but it has lots of situations throughout the instance that can challenge your raid leader.
We have been using dual BWL groups each with a seperate raidleader.... over the past 4 or 5 weeks we have gone through 10 raidleaders and checked out what each could handle. You would be surrpised at the number of people who have stepped up and shown lots of promise!
Start early.... mold your leaders now if you intend to run dual raids.
The fact that having the main raid leader garnering more cooperation and greater response is one that guild leaders/main raid leaders will have to take into account with guild and raid management.
In our guild, for example, the main raid leader doesn't lead any of the AQ20/ZG raids, nor does he do BWL, various people lead those raids, not only relieving him of responsibility he doesn't need, giving players that lead a better perspective in the raid game(experienced leaders make better followers than people that have never led... usually), but also making a guild more able to adapt to a leader missing a raid or having to split up.
My advice to guilds looking to have two raids in TBC is to start letting a willing victim lead your BWL/AQ20/ZG or even AQ40 raids(assuming you're in naxx). Even if he's already experienced and capable, he will need to earn the respect of your raid team as a leader before he can lead said raid team.
The only thing holding back a second group is leadership.
If you're like many guilds with one autocratic GM, 2 groups is going to fail miserably. Many, many guilds have a deep lack of leadership outside of the GM/Raidleader. There really is a certain amount of chemistry that these kinds of people bring out in a raid, and finding that with a second person is going to be extremely difficult for most people. You may find your raid not even listening to the second guy. Its really akin to a substitute teacher effect - not much learning is going to be going on that day.
I am not sure I fully agree with that. Lack of backup raid leadership will definitely doom a second raid. But what also kills B raids is that the B raid is usually considered a filler for the A raid. Someone on the A team quits? Someone from the B team moves up. A team has attendance issue? B team is canibalized. There are only enough backups for one team? A team gets them.
How is a B team ever going to get good under those conditions? And how do you prevent the top B team players from quitting after the third raid was cancelled because the A team canibalized the B raid?
You can of course try to make the raids completely equal. However I am not sure that that will work either. First, it hinders guild progression. Second the top players from both raids will get together and think, why do we carry the dead wood around with us when we could just take the best of both raids? So eventually the top players will again be in the same raid - odds are the one that is run by the guild leader.
One of the big decisions now is to either recruit a bunch more solid raiders with the intent on having two raids, or stop recruitment and make do in Naxx in order to have an easier transition to 1 raid group... Kind of an annoying decision to make really.
Maybe if you were seperated by schedule, but even then, a lot of people are flexible enough that they'd just migrate to the "better" raid.
(In the end, I expect that TBC will result in the 3 top-tier guilds on my server sloughing themselves down to 25 man size, and a 4th guild forming at the same tier of content in the process. I don't necessarily mean sloughing as in "You're cut" but as in people who've been discontent with something - schedule, leadership, raid slot availability, etc. - leaving in the same time frame and naturally falling into a new guild. Most of us get along between the 3 guilds, so it wouldn't be totally unexpected.)
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The only thing holding back a second group is leadership.
If you're like many guilds with one autocratic GM, 2 groups is going to fail miserably. Many, many guilds have a deep lack of leadership outside of the GM/Raidleader. There really is a certain amount of chemistry that these kinds of people bring out in a raid, and finding that with a second person is going to be extremely difficult for most people. You may find your raid not even listening to the second guy. Its really akin to a substitute teacher effect - not much learning is going to be going on that day.
I am not sure I fully agree with that. Lack of backup raid leadership will definitely doom a second raid. But what also kills B raids is that the B raid is usually considered a filler for the A raid. Someone on the A team quits? Someone from the B team moves up. A team has attendance issue? B team is canibalized. There are only enough backups for one team? A team gets them.
How is a B team ever going to get good under those conditions? And how do you prevent the top B team players from quitting after the third raid was cancelled because the A team canibalized the B raid?
We had both of these issues arise. Leadership started out weak, and wasn't until later that it became better. And we had an easier time with the second group's leadership than most would have because we actually have many RLs who rotate so more people were experienced. The second issue was never resolved, and became a key sticking point. WarriorB was regularly available for the A lock when we were short, but that left the B lock a Warrior short.
There are methods you could use to keep the teams even, if you have the right amount/type of people, but they must be administrative nightmares.
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A guild on my server does the A squad/B squad thing. Pretty much everyone good on the B squad leaves their guild once they get geared because everyone that needs something from the A squad comes in for Rag/Nef and takes all the loot.
I've been trying to get my head around the 25-man raid concept idea, and I can't quite see how it will go.
The only way I see to really make sure you get more than 25-30 people actively raiding is make raidid's work somewhat differently. Having no raidid would definitely screw things a bit - so perhaps raid id's could create themselves based on looting an item - meaning you're locked in for the week if you loot an item. Loot is limited in input and thus still capped incoming, but you're not locked into a 25 man group forever. Obviously this is flawed and could lead to exploitation, but it's another way to deal with issues.
There are methods you could use to keep the teams even, if you have the right amount/type of people, but they must be administrative nightmares.
Exactly. I used to co-run a guild, and doing that is the very last thing I would want to do.
I predict that a lot of guilds will break up over varying leveling speeds of their members and the 40->25 transition. The newly formed guilds will be smaller and easier to manage. So the expansion will rule for people looking to start a new raiding guild or to convert a casual guild into a raiding one. But it will suck for those guilds that are trying to preserve their current structure throughout the changes.
well our raid group has had an interesting experience with this thus far:
1. we started doing MC with just a bunch of random people from various small guilds and kinda became home to all the people who were nice folks and good players but not part of any large raid guilds.
2. eventually we got to be about 70-80 strong and gripes started coming about not being scheduled enough etc etc. Also there were some others who did not like the slow pace and the "casual" raiding environment and wanted to be more "hardcore" about raiding. So we decided to split into two groups. Each had leaders and class leaders assigned and they each came up with their raid times and policies as far as requiring specs or consumables etc etc. Then we just let people just sign themselves up to what sounded good. People were still free to switch freely between the groups if they wanted and the loot system was still shared.
3. Eventually though (and in retrospect predictably) both groups just kinda seperated themselves from eachother aside from a common points table. Hardly anyone crossed over and there was the inherent competition of who got the next boss first. Things basically deteriorated over time and the sister raids basically ended up parting ways.
Now we may be faced with a similar situation here. We dont like the teamA and team B idea, but even TRYING to do two equal teams based on who you like to raid with or time zones or whatever else, from our past experience eventually just leads to the team A and team B thing and sort of animosity develops between the two groups over time anyways. We are thinking but it is definitely a tough nut to crack.
As a raid leader of Goon Squad, it is very interesting to me to see the issues of multiple raid groups discussed. In a sense the issues people are beginning to imagine the expansion will bring, are issues that we have been struggling with since day one.
I currently have 1160 unique accounts listed in our out of game database (blizzard in game db breaks after 500), more than half of them actively play today. Last week we had 242 players attend at least one Goon Squad 40 man raid. We have tried many different strategies for dividing people among groups. I will note and discuss a few of them here.
Managing multiple groups adds an extra layer of administration to end game raiding. The administration of player attitudes and perceptions. One player's DPS can double just by moving them into a group that they think will succeed, rather than a group they think will fail. Dealing with this is hellish.
Common group types
Unequal A team / B team / C team
This method puts your star players in the A team, and tell the rest to play their best in the B team while they wait for spots in the A team to open. Given the current style of blizzard raiding content, this is probably the best option if you are concerned solely with progression, at the expense of your members. This has your B team guys essentially gearing up as best they can waiting to be poached off by the A team as they need members. Terrible drama results, expect the B team attrition rate to be high.
Random Equal A team / B team / C team
This involves a mass signup with raid leaders dividing out balanced groups. This is generally worse for progression since you need to split up your leaders, your tanks. Maintaining the equality of the groups is terribly difficult. People are raiding with a different group each week essentially, it is tough to get a cohesive atmosphere. You get hung up on little differences in the way each group does things. Partially through the raid, oh damn I am in the other groups healing channel. People trying to manipulate the groups for better dkp standings. This setup also is precariously balanced, and without top notch trusted leadership managing the balance can easily slip into an Unequal A team / B team setup.
Fixed Equal A team / B team / C team
Guilds within guilds essentially. Fixed groups that dont have the option to move from the B team to the A team. Therefore since you are stuck with your group you might as well make the best of it. Avoids a lot of the balancing problems and underperformance problems of random/equal teams. Causes many problems as well. The egos between groups make it very difficult to trade players around to fix class balance/ sharding loot. Attrition hits this type of setup very hard. People don't want to leave their groups, essentially each group recruits from outside furthering the notion of separate guilds with one tag. Guild leader favoritism between groups can become a problem. Every decision that gets made will screw some group over in their eyes. People who do attend other groups are accused of "stealing loot." [from their own guildmates]
A team only
Have one team working on unconquered instances. And only once your best with the place to farm status do you slowly teach the rest in a much more stable learning environment than wiping with a subpar B-team. In my opinion this is the best option. It leaves a lot of people out in the cold though, especially in guilds where there are far too many skilled players for 1 team. Forcing people to not form up a B-team for the "good of the guild" to avoid the B-team problems just doesn't sit well with most raiders. Neither does simply not being able to raid.
---------------- Attitude Juggling
A-Group attitudes
A groups require constant performance evaluations, especially if they have well defined posted rosters. Once you make it to the A team unless leadership makes it clear that you could just as easily be kicked off, performance tends to drop off as people are comfortable with their cushy guaranteed A team spots.
B-Group attitudes
B groups tend to take on one of two attitudes. Either the I am in the B group, this sucks, I am not going to even try attitude, or the "they say we are the B group, lets show them who is really the B group" attitude.
The former tends to lead to a stagnating, underperforming B group that continues to fulfill its own prophecy of mediocrity and results in horrible morale and frequent quitting.
The later can frequently drive the previously undergeared/underexperienced guys relegated to the B-group with such energy (sometimes bordering on rage) that they will burn through content by simply outplaying it in a rabid attempt to "beat" the A group. Usually once this is done you are left with two groups that work well with their own members, but are highly suspicious of the motives of any member from any other group approaching "their" accomplishments. This tends to lead to Fixed A team / B team setups unless dealt with quickly by leadership.
Key notes with multiple groups:
As previously noted, presence of the previous / known leaders flat out improves morale and performance. Any raid with the guild leader in it usually does better. If your guild has multiple known leadership figure heads try to split them up between groups. If you don't ouch.
The decision of how the groups are created, no matter how the decision is made, be it fixed baselines, officer discretion, random split or whatever will be met with suspicion in all but the most tight knit groups. People will pull patterns out of nowhere (think blizzard forums discussions of random) and "prove" that the groups are unfair.
Group making is an easy scapegoat for failure and lack of progress "we were put in the crappy group, this sucks" rather than "we screwed up lets do this better." A guildmate of mine described this well after a bad night for two groups saying "As long as we all failed its OK"
In general, running multiple high end groups working on the same content within a guild is simply a bad idea. Unless you have some other outside force (other than desire for progression) that unites the members of your guild (be it an out of game situation, or just the relationships built from 2 years of raiding with the same 40 guys) you are really better off as separate guilds. If you do have that something that binds your guys together, something worth giving up a bit of progression for, then it just sucks.
That said, TBC may also open a few doors for certain people and guild types. Particularly in regards to time zone based groups helping with scheduling, as well as giving people who don't quite enjoy raiding as much as they appear to a chance to take a break.