So any guilds considering doing this? We have a large guild so there is just no way we can run 1 regular 25 man raid without cutting a lot of people, so it's something we have to think about. But there are a lot of factors that need to be considered. For example:
1) Go with 2 entirely separate groups? Or change people around each week? Going with 2 separate groups has its advantages. For example you can have 1 group of more hardcore people and everyone else in the rest. The 2nd group could raid maybe only 3-4 days a week and the hardcore group 6 nights a week. The hardcore group would learn the encounters then provide the strats for the 2nd group. The raid leaders for each raid will know who are in their groups and run them basically like 2 separate guilds for the purposes of raiding. Everyone will get used to raiding togther and with a certain raid leader etc Mixing the groups would seem to be a lot more problematic unless both were able to go at the same pace.
2) How to handle DKP? In terms of DKP, if you mix the groups then it's going to be extremely difficult to manage. Standard dkp systems aren't meant to handle 2 raids happening every night. If you don't mix the groups then you can run 2 separate dkp systems. But you have to assume there will be some people changing from 1 group to another for whatever reason. Then you have to figure out some way to convert their DKP.
3) How to ensure best loot distribution? What if for example raid group A is really lucky with a certain dagger and all their rogues have it. Whereas it never drops for raid group B. It would make sense to have a rogue from raid group B raid with the raid group A to get the dagger in case it drops. But then you have the DKP problem and the fact that if raid group A is more hardcore and 1 week 2 rogues switch, what happens when the rogue that subbed in only turns up for 2 nights because he is more casual or if he hasn't done half the encounters and isn't up to the standard of raid group A and thus causes wipes etc
4) drama. If one raid group is better than the other, then of course everyone will want to be in that raid group. And if 1 raid group is ahead and leeches the best players from the other raid group then that's going to cause a lot of drama. And if 1 raid group is created as the 'A' team then you have all the people who get left out and have to go into the 'B' team, getting upset.
In the end it all ends up as being one big headache. But can it work? Is there any other option for guilds who have 80+ raiders and don't want to boot people?
No guild serious about progression is going to deal with two raids and two sets of raid ids trying to overcome the same content.
I'm sure some will try and hey, some may even succeed. Either Blizzard tweaks the raid_id system though or I expect a lot of splintering and reforming will be going on. Well, the pace people level to 70 at will probably do this anyhow and that's ignoring that many guilds will likely fracture before the expansion even hits.
I figure the biggest stress points are going to be the month before the expansion and the six weeks after the servers become playable again.
Our guild has been going for almost 7 years in various games, we have well over 100 members and 90% of our members who have quit WoW will be coming back to try the expansion. So if anything our current numbers are going to swell even further with the release of BC :/
Nurru you say no guild serious about progression will try and run 2 raids, but no guild serious about progression will be able to rotate 60-100 members through 25 slots either. By running 2 raids we could theoretically at least, have the top raid with all the best hardcore players focus on progression, while the 2nd raid is more for fun/casuals/pvp focused people to pick up some loot.
Goon Squad happens to have some experience in running multiple concurrent raids, since our raiding organization consists of, at this writing, 225 active members on the DKP site, and they all want their purples, dammit.
The last time we had this thread, about a month ago, Thorvoquien (one of our officers) popped in and gave a long description of the advice he had on the subject. Since I agree with his conclusions, I'll just go ahead and link to him:
Having done dual MC,ZG and AQ20 runs reasonably succesfully I have to say it can be done but good luck avoiding the drama, for aq20 after learning on our previous experiences we even tried to put two perfectly equal groups together and yet less than a month later half the way people in one group are saying why did you put me with the lesser group.
I would say a singular dkp otherwise the two groups will never get to mingle.
My guild for now is ignoring the issue, if people arent discussing it or thinking about it then it cant cause any dramas to disrupt current raiding. I imagine that at some point 20-30 people will be ready to start doing 25 man raids and they will form the core of the eventual group. Depending on how many people leave or come back or are playing pvp or leveling alts a month or two later we may have enough for a 2nd 25 man raid.
If you have the members to support it why wouldn't it be possible to field two raids for the same content? If one group pulls ahead and beats the instance quicker than the other, just keep the groups the same until the instance is beaten and then start mixing in members so they've all learned the content.
This is actually something that Goon Squad did when they were using the "guild within guild" model where people were assigned to specific raid groups and stayed there. Basically to speed up the learning of BWL, one of the officers implemented an exchange program where each week 5 raiders from a lower group were taken in to be run through BWL.
Well if you don't care about beating new content as fast as possible, you could always mix up each group every week. The only drama that could come out of this method is that people will become disatisfied at the progression.
Really, there'll be drama but people will probably prefer 2 raid groups over only one, even if they raid in the group progressing the slowest. After all, purples are purples even if you aren't getting them as fast as the next guy ;)
I've been thinking about the changes that we are going to face in TBC as raid guilds, and when I consider that a lot of the fabric of the way we play the game now (scheduling, subbing, RPP) will potentially go out the window, I'm not sure to what extent guilds can survive with a singular focus on progress.
We have 60 odd people on every night. And the prospect of having all of them playing each evening (in 5/10/20 mans) instead of merely 40, is definitely a good one. But if the goal of progress comes at the cost of alienating and rupturing the ties between half of the guild, I think that's too high a price to pay. I would rather progress slowly and play as much as I can with my guildies than completely sideline half of them just to kill that extra boss. Everything about the way the game will potentially look over the next year almost feels like we're being forced to play more casually or risk playing alone. I think the majority of guilds that will most likely survive the expansion with the spirit and character of their guild intact will be the ones that hold the community of players above the element of progress.
No guild serious about progression is going to deal with two raids and two sets of raid ids trying to overcome the same content.
What would you suggest then?
Did people just go retarded when I wasn't looking or do most guilds have < 50 people in them?
Originally Posted by Lyta
I've been trying to concentrate on studying for my Proof Methods test tomorrow, and all I can think of is your hotness, radiating out from the pixels on my monitor, seared straight into my neurons.
Maybe I'm the one who's retarded, but I don't get how it can be productive to leave out (what will probably amount to) a large chunk of your guild should you choose to only take one group each week. In our experience, it's not lack of numbers that hurts progression - not that that can't be a problem - but lack of familiarity with encounters. "Can we work on Boss X tonight?" No, because we have some new people in the raid tonight and we keep wiping on the boss before that one.
And let's not forget the rifts that will form when the same people get into that 25-man each week (in the name of "progression" of course). It won't take long for people to tire of playing the 6th man and leave for other guilds. Soon afterwards, that 25-man permagroup loses a person or two to work/school/burn-out and the guild lacks a bench to fill the holes in its raid group. Oops.
My point is that we're going to be playing a new game and we need to establish a new approach to how we play. Right now, one group of 40 makes sense and can be justified by the percentage involved. But in a guild with enough people for two groups? That just feels ass backwards to me.
Originally Posted by Lyta
I've been trying to concentrate on studying for my Proof Methods test tomorrow, and all I can think of is your hotness, radiating out from the pixels on my monitor, seared straight into my neurons.
Well, remember, we're coming at it from a different place than most guilds.
Most guilds have a core of 15-20 people who have been there from the start, and then lots of turnover in those remaining slots as people come and go. For those guilds, the answer is simple: Now you don't need to keep going through as many applicants/recruits every few months, because your core fills most of the raid. Stop recruiting, and fill the rest of your raid based on merit. If people get tired of always being on the sidelines and leave, no loss.
Now, for guilds whose "core" is more like 35-40 players, it's a very different matter. Such guilds are a decided minority, however.
Yeah, there are definitely more guilds numbering 30 man or less than those ubergilds (in terms of members). Even if a guild consists of 50-60 members quite often there are rifts between the the subfactions of a guild. If such factions exist, the addon will serve as a katalyst for the evolution of smaller more tighter knit guilds imho. Smaller groups will make it easier to compose a homogenous (?) group.
As I said before: the addon is a chance and a challenge alike for most guilds/raids.
Right. My point only applies to a guild with enough members to actually have two consistent groups. If it's a smaller guild that's currently having problems building a consistent 40-man each week, then the question of "1 group or 2?" is moot to begin with.
Originally Posted by Lyta
I've been trying to concentrate on studying for my Proof Methods test tomorrow, and all I can think of is your hotness, radiating out from the pixels on my monitor, seared straight into my neurons.
Well, remember, we're coming at it from a different place than most guilds.
Most guilds have a core of 15-20 people who have been there from the start, and then lots of turnover in those remaining slots as people come and go. For those guilds, the answer is simple: Now you don't need to keep going through as many applicants/recruits every few months, because your core fills most of the raid. Stop recruiting, and fill the rest of your raid based on merit. If people get tired of always being on the sidelines and leave, no loss.
Now, for guilds whose "core" is more like 35-40 players, it's a very different matter. Such guilds are a decided minority, however.
You don't think there's a bit of fallacy here? Part of the reason a guild might have a 15-20 man "core" is because it's sized for a 40-man raid group. When a person joins a guild, there's a certain probability distribution of how long they're going to stay, and that doesn't depend much on the raid size. It seems much more likely that guilds will look like they do now, just scaled down, than it does that somehow only the most ideal parts of the guilds will continue on to form the new, smaller guild.
Right. My point only applies to a guild with enough members to actually have two consistent groups. If it's a smaller guild that's currently having problems building a consistent 40-man each week, then the question of "1 group or 2?" is moot to begin with.
Well, my point is that there are many guilds that have rosters of 60ish, but still only really have a 15-person core. A key question for any Naxx guild to ask is, "How many people who were at your last 'first kill' were also with you when you first killed Ragnaros?"
If we had a roster of 60 but only 20 of those had been with the guild for more than a few months, it'd be very different than our present situation.
You don't think there's a bit of fallacy here? Part of the reason a guild might have a 15-20 man "core" is because it's sized for a 40-man raid group. When a person joins a guild, there's a certain probability distribution of how long they're going to stay, and that doesn't depend much on the raid size. It seems much more likely that guilds will look like they do now, just scaled down, than it does that somehow only the most ideal parts of the guilds will continue on to form the new, smaller guild.
I disagree. Yes, if you take random recruit X in a 40-man system or a 25-man system there's no reason to suppose a different probability of his remaining or leaving after a certain period of time. But if you now assume the antecedent condition that this person has been an officer and has sustained 80% raid attendance since day one of the guild's formation, the odds on his departure are quite different. And most 40-man groups do have a dedicated core of players who have been with them from the start. And those people are, I think, less likely to quit or move to other guilds than a random player.
(Un)Fortunately my guild is in the decided minority. Although we are only starting BWL, we've done pretty well for ourselves in my opinion. We have 66 accounts and consistently we raid with 30-35 people, and if we fill up to 40 it's usually with an hour or so left. The other officers and I talked about this lately and we think we'll, "trim the fat," when BC comes around. We have players that AFK quite a bit, have to be told instructions several times, players that cannot keep their buff assignments striaght, and we warlocks consistenly get accused of double SSing. We have a core group of people that we know can perform well and be an asset to the raid, but we can't get rid of these other people because we need bodies to throw into these places. We also can't pick and choose the classes we bring to an encounter because of this. We often bring more rogues to Onyxia than mages and warlocks combined (they all seem to have fallen off the face of the earth)
I don't think that will work when it comes to the larger guilds that are in AQ40/Naxx right now, you guys are generally all good players and many of you have been rolling with the same group of people for most of the game or longer than that. I don't see how you could not have 2 raids going simultaneously, lest you turn your back on a lot of people.
I would rephrase that question: how many folks were really there, when the raid needed them during the last 6-18 month. Check their attendance, their commitment. In my experience core doesn't define itself only by the length of membership but by their contribution.
The other question is, how is progression defined in BC. We will see the simultanous release of several instance for the first time since the original release about 18 month ago. Of course there will be some hardcore raiding instances. But will they be that tough that you need an A Team to secure a good progression? I can really imagine that there are instances which do not follow a strict line of difficulty. TAQ was a first step in that direction, where the difficulty level did not start where it ended in BWL (though quite a lot of folks consider the instance as a failure in terms of design) Will it be possible to maintain a flexible rotation between groups or will ID management and similar constraints limit this to a great deal?
I disagree. Yes, if you take random recruit X in a 40-man system or a 25-man system there's no reason to suppose a different probability of his remaining or leaving after a certain period of time. But if you now assume the antecedent condition that this person has been an officer and has sustained 80% raid attendance since day one of the guild's formation, the odds on his departure are quite different. And most 40-man groups do have a dedicated core of players who have been with them from the start. And those people are, I think, less likely to quit or move to other guilds than a random player.
Are we talking immediately after the transition or long-term equilibrium?
I have no doubt it can be done and just requires organization.
Some changes Blizzard could make would be to allow certain titles in a guild to change the raid ID of other guild members. Not sure of the tech if this will disallow non-guild members from coming on raids or sharing of raid IDs to allow people to use alchemy lab in BWL.
This way if you have a different mix of people one night or you need to get another class in to fill a spot then you can assign them the same raid ID so they can get in.
Raid trackers exist now that show who showed up for raid so raid leaders can use that. The raid leader would need to track who showed up and then post that ID and the participants, or have something auto-pot that with DKP for showing up.
The problem I forsee for the guild I'm in right now is when we do BWL/AQ40/MC, we normally have maybe 42 people online. Obviously 2 25-mans would not be possible with that.
For the "just perfect" sized crowd that won't be come expansion, I'm curious if perhaps, there will be enough reasonable 10 person content such that keeping a reasonably deep roster with a rotating 25 and a 10 would make sense. This is a completely off-the-wall idea, but pretend for a moment there were a level 70 10-Maraudon that, by the by, got you the resist gear awfully handy for that other level 70 25-AQ raid instance that you're also working on. Think about it: instead of farm versus progression nights, all nights are both - maybe not a big deal to always eager raider types, but many guilds have to deal with fair weather raiders... and surely the constant mix would even be good for morale?
The original sale of the raid game (as I understood it) was a multi-tiered, multi-path dungeon system ("Omg raid fire dungeon 1 to gear up to raid fire dungeon 2 or raid frost dungeon 1 to gear up to raid frost dungeon 2!"), which pretty clearly fell apart under release date and development cycle pressures. Given the expansion resetting the clock (and getting a lot of front-loaded development, if one looks back to talent reviews for example), could this be actualized?
I know the current WoW raid game is littered with the very ugly corpses of these ideas half-realized, so "Yeah, right, it'll be great running UBRS and BWL simultaneously :eyeroll: !" seems like a valid response in that context. But you know, practice makes perfect.
Everybody is your brother until the rent comes due.
The problem I forsee for the guild I'm in right now is when we do BWL/AQ40/MC, we normally have maybe 42 people online. Obviously 2 25-mans would not be possible with that.
Don't sign your posts.
You are in the majority of raiding guilds I believe, so when TBC hits, you pretty much continue as is. You will take you best 25 to the big raids, and whoever left will do the 10 and 5 mans or leave your guild if they don't like it.
Millions of words are written annually purporting to tell how to beat the races, whereas the best possible advice on the subject is found in the three monosyllables: 'Do not try.'
09/12/06, 12:46 AM
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