Sometimes it's just not your night. If people are tired, or you're undermanned, it's often best to just cut your losses and move on. In Naxx, that usually means killing a different boss and leaving the one you're stuck on for another day, or taking a moment to figure out what's going wrong.

On progression content, make sure every wipe has a purpose. If we ever find ourselves, beyond the first day, in a position of "ok let's throw ourselves at the boss again and hope something magical happens," then it's time to stop, analyze what's causing the wipes, and come back with a plan.

http://www.sigilguild.net/hamlet/Scr...s/Roulette.jpg

And yes, it can never be said enough, a fun raid is a good raid.

Whoops. You're totally right it was Digo. Here's the thread I was quoting from back in May:

http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewt...hp?id=6791&p=1

I had a bunch of quotes I found helpful from that thread, and mixed up a couple. Here's the one from Gurg about recruiting I really liked:

As for sex, I don't think I've ever skipped it for raiding, but the enthusiasm part still applies. I did skip a Tribe Called Quest concert to lead a raid recently. It only stung on the "release and run back" part.

I find it interesting that I find the reverse is more true: A good raid is a fun raid.

It's probably a matter of personal priorities & preferences which version applies to you more. They're also not mutually exclusive concepts, they can coexist and when they do it's a neat little nirvana.

The thing I've found is that discipline really plays a huge role in things, if you're a disciplined player, you can joke around and have fun, while still maintaining your A-game. However, developing that discipline often means temporarily shelving joking around, something a lot of people aren't willing to do.

A slight derail, but I'd like to get some thoughts on what you guys think about class representatives / leaders.

Our guild currently does not utilize CLs, but I think I may appoint them shortly. They'll be in charge of disseminating strategies, assigning positioning / targets, recruitment of that class, and handling crafted resist gear (and distributing them) within their class. These CLs would take the first 8 spots when forming a raid and would probably distribute raid invites for their class accordingly.

It seems to me that this is a great way to expedite communication as I'm finding it more and more unruly to have to go through each class and even individual members when assigning various things for encounters. Are there any pitfalls regarding CLs/CRs that I should be on the look out for? Anything about appointing and handling CLs/CRs that I should avoid? Just looking for some general advice. :)

As an officer in the Army I've often found this to be true. The most disciplined units were always the ones having the most fun. They'd gotten all the kinks worked out, every soldier knows how to do their job and whats expected of them, and the mood is much lighter as a result. Unfortunately I'm usually told (quite emphatically) that this is *not* the army and I shouldn't expect "discipline" out of a bunch of gamers.

It can be good or it can be bad. You'll start to develop some animosity of those class leaders get the raid spots every week but don't seem to do much to earn them. It can create an elitist atmosphere. Also I think it makes the classes a lot more territorial. Suddenly the druids don't want to be told what to do by the priest class leader, etc etc. Might depend on your guild I suppose. Certainly there should be some props given in some way for a rep from each class who can teach their newcomers or help refine their strategies, but other than doing just that I'm not a fan of the CL system.

I think it goes without saying that a good raid is more fun than a bad raid. I was pointing out that people who are having fun will perform better, and that it's always good to remember that.

You have to be able to transition smoothly between joking around on Vent and getting something useful said. When you're clearing trash or something, it can almost two indpendent threads occuring. People can be talking about [whatever], as long as it's accepted than I can jump in mid-sentence with "pull," "wait," "who's tanking the square?" etc, and they'll pause and not drown it out. Then they pick right up immediately afterwards.

Boss fights, even very familiar ones, you don't really want to do that. It just lulls the raid into complacence. You can 3 minutes of silence on Vent at a fight like Emps where everyone has a rhythm, and then as soon as someone says something random, a tank goes down.

Concentration is a funny thing. I had to explicitly ban people from saying "fuck, disconnected" on Thaddius because it inevitably caused concentration lapses that made us wipe where otherwise we'd have been fine. People would stop and try to see where the disconnected person was, if he was on their side or not, etc., and next thing they know they've just zapped half the raid.

Does anyone else find it necessary to scream into vent every single time when polarity shift is about to occur? I didn't do it once, and four people bombed the raid.

http://www.pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF010..._Turtle.jpg#79

The funny thing is, part of it is just expectation.

For a good solid 3-4 months during/after our first Vael kill, I would say, on Vent, "Rogues, please vanish" at the appropriate time, as a reminder.

So, 3 months down the road, I figure "OK, enough of this shit, everyone knows to vanish at transition 1". Nobody new in the raid, nothing different from normal, same tanks as always. Tank transition 1 never occurs, because rogue 2 pulls aggro at the transition instead of the tank.

"Why didn't you vanish?"
"I was waiting for you to call it!"

If people expect to be cued, and are cued consistently, removal of the cue very often will screw them up.

Our mod actually talks sexy to you when its time to move.

I think raid leading is pretty analogous to being involved in "serious" athletic endeavors or the military or civilian safety/peacekeeping organizations (police, fire).

I often find it amusing how much gamers strive against any type of discipline or negative (or sometimes even positive) reinforcement, but it makes sense. Most gamers aren't athletes and have not been in any of those types of organizations. I've found the ones who have been generally understand and work better under raiding conditions, and are better gamers (at least in this type of environment) than others.

yes. we call every polarity every time (despite the fact that there's an obvious graphic for it!). we actually use vent to call almost everything on fights, even those things for which we have mods explicitly set up to handle. spore groups on loatheb, bandages/pots on loatheb, locust swarm on anub, spawns/deaths on gothik, etc. lots of times people are so focused on what they're doing (and so used to hearing the calls on vent) that they don't always watch the warnings on their screen. better hear myself talk than listen to people say "oops", because oops is never good.

We've got Thaddius at 10%. Would have killed him last night but one guy lagged and bombed us. It's been like this for over a month. 3:30-4:00 into the fight and we're on track to kill him well ahead of schedule, one person lags, someone's computer hangs, they sneeze wrong, we wipe. I used to be all for ambient effects in raid fights, but now that I see the technological backlash, I thought better of it. We have one guy who simply cannot participate because his client will not update his debuff until 2 seconds after everyone has started to move. He's a great player, but can't do this fight. When he wants the helm, someone will have to play him. Playability of content shouldn't be dictated by your ISP or router.

I really want to write a long rant to the devs about fights like this and why they are a colossally bad idea. We don't have bad players. Generally, my guys are very good. This kind of thing is intolerable and should never be done again. Granted, lots (-.05% of WoW's population?) are killing Thaddius, and we may very well kill him tonight, but does anyone else find this kind of content completely absurd?

True story from thaddius last night...

one of the rogues didn't move during a polarity shift, raid wipes.

Raid Leader: "why didn't you move"?
Rogue: "I was alt tabbed playing D2 and you didn't call out the shift like you usually do"

To bring the last few anecdotes back in to relation to the topic, lets bring up the subject of accountability. What do you do to hold people accountable in a video game in which they have no personal stake? Its already been mentioned that yelling/screaming only goes so far before a person quits the game/guild because its not fun being yelled at. So other than just a gkick (the most obvious solution) what other methods are out there?

Edit - from a leadership psychology perspective you could classify people in terms of of intrinsic and extrinsic reward patterns; those who respond well to internal rewards (praise, accomplishment) and those who respond to extrinsic rewards (shiny phat purple epicz to pwn noobs with). So when one of those 2 types of people is consistently screwing up, how do you hold each accountable in a video game, make them improve, punish/discipline them?

Peer pressure?

As Gurg mentioned a while back - being able to appeal to your players' sense of reason makes a huge difference. Ensuring that your guild is filled with folk for whom this strategy works would be my suggestion. Recruiting folk who have a sense of pride and committment to success/perfection goes a long way to ensuring this.

Stop bringing them to raids. It's simple and quite highly effective, if that's the motivation for the person to be playing the game. If that isn't their motivation, maybe you have to ask yourself if they're in the right guild, or perhaps if you're in the right guild.

I generally try to sound dissappointed rather than angry when people make mistakes. I also sub out people who are underperforming and that's often the kick they need to not do it next week.

Replacing them. If you gkick immediately, you give the person no time/oppurtunity to dwell on his situation and consider improving himself. If you replace them for that spot, they can either gremove themselves if they don't feel it's justified or they can analyze their mistake and rise to the occasion next time.

If the person really wants to rage against the machine, gkick and "hey we're bringing in soandso to replace you tonight since you seem off your game" are pretty much the same thing. If they're of the rational persuasion they're going to consider the reasons behind your change before reacting.

You have to have some level of penalties in place and visible so that it isn't a surprise when you use them. That can mean DKP docks, and replacement at the extreme end (it helps to actually have people that you can put in and replace a player with). If someone doesn't actually care about the people in the guild, progression, epics, or beating a difficult encounter, then they probably won't care at all when you remove them from the raid.

Those other 39 people are always your basis for how you lead raids and make decisions. While they don't want to be screamed at, and they might not really want to be the next uber raiding guild, they probably don't want their time wasted, so someone that screws around and wastes everyone's time is going to find little support from the others when they are screwing around. You can't expect perfection, but "I was playing D2 between polarity shifts" is kind of a big F U to the other 39 people, and needs to be dealth with. If you don't feel comfortable dealing with that type of thing, you'll have a problem leading raids.