I wish the videos has never come out. It's entirely too much fun to figure out a boss fight for yourself, rather than being required to 'do your research' before even coming to the new instance.

I suppose that's what I get for being months behind.

There was even a WC3 time where tournaments organised by wcreplays.com were live streamed using some kind of external program. People had reversed engineered the oberserver protocol, and any battle.net game could be streamed by nothing more than broadcasting the observer data and people switching in to that game using their own WC3 client.
You would then switch into a shoutcast stream so you would have live commentary and a live game. And you would follow those tournaments for their duration of 5 hours.

Must be more people here who lurked in those IRC channels of wcreplays?

From a guild point of view, you can't stop people releasing vids and you can't stop people watching them. The only thing you can do is try to ensure that fights aren't spoiled for those that want to experience them 'fresh' so to speak. Razorgore was one of those exceptions because I think on first checking out that encounter everyone tried all sorts of crazy shit. Then suddenly the NA vid came out and every man and his dog suddenly started kiting.

The way we do it is simply that for the first night of working on a new boss, there are absolutely no spoilers allowed whatsoever. These attempts are spent observing, recording, frapsing, taking in as much information to analyze as possible. We have a forum specifically for strats, and a thread for each boss. All the combatlogs, diagrams, discussions and theories relating to that boss are dumped in there, and over time that all percolates into the finished strat. This helps both increase people's understanding of the encounter's mechanics, and encourages people to contribute their own ideas and suggestions. After we figure out the way that we want to approach the fight, people are allowed to research the boss's abilities (range, duration, etc) so that we have clear information in terms of what they do and how they do it. At no point however, is anyone allowed to bring up videos or strats that other guild's are known to use (Chromaggus was a great example of this.....people suggesting the ramp were called on it pretty much instantly since its glaringly obvious you can use the doorway), and as a whole the kill is more rewarding when your guild has broken it down themselves and seen the approach work effectively.

Related to this, is the usefulness of diagrams and maps. We've started getting blank images of the boss's rooms, and letting people go to work on them suggesting positioning etc. Aside from the comedy value, its a very effective way of people expressing their visions of the fight without having to struggle explaining it on vent or emoting weird hand gestures. The result of much doodling is this little masterpiece for Gluth: http://img143.imageshack.us/img143/6678/gluthhi2.jpg

Meh, I don't really buy this. Most people in progression oriented guilds are only willing to invest such an insane amount of time in raiding/farming etc for the ego involved in getting world or server firsts (not the only reason, but a very important one). You get the kill, you put it on your webpage, your epeen swells, you feel good about yourself and your guild. In progression posts on your realm forums, on your guild progression listing, or in the R&D forums, no one cares about whether or not you watched a video or flasked your whole raid or whatever. They care if you killed a boss. At the end of the day when you make your guild website update, you don't really care whether you watched a video, flasked your whole raid, or whatever. You care that you got the kill.

For example:

People want the kill, bottom line. I'm not saying it isn't fun to learn fights raw, but I'd wager if they were honest with themselves, most raiders would rather have leet epix and instance progression versus a good feeling inside that they beat x boss without watching a video. And if they did #2, they're going to throw that around for ego also, "hey we beat x w/o watching a vid, that's how hardcore we are!" This isn't saying raiders are some ego-whoring maniacs, but it is a competition, and this behavior is the same in any type of competitive activity, sports or whatever. That's being human.

And just to comment:

Is completely accurate.

IMO timing doesn't matter because videos can never teach you 100% of a fight. Sure they sometimes make you go "ohhhhhhhh wtf duhhhh", but you still need to learn all the little nuances yourself, go in there, and execute whatever strat you have. Naxx is full of examples where one guild's strat might not work for yours. For patchwerk, you can read all you want, but you still have to figure out if 4/4/4/4 or 5/8/2/1 or whatever healing strat works for your raid, considering lag and such. You can watch 50 Gluth videos, but you still have to learn the kite.

Some of you guys seriously get THAT much more fun out of going in blind as opposed to knowing some abilities and positioning first? I kind of like the "no spoilers first night" thing, though.

Timing aside, I love boss videos. Watching someone else's creation is fun, and lots of times you find great new music =)

Yup. I have a large portion of guys that get a very specific enjoyment out of the game playing it at their own pace and making discoveries through experimentation. Unfortunately as a raid leader I have to temper that mentality with the other portion of guys that want to kill shit yesterday.

The spoiler-free first night has a multitude of positive effects, because it teaches and encourages people to pay attention to the information available to them, and essentially, use their heads. To me as a raid leader, seeing my guys observe and break down encounters, and come up with discussions and theories is awesome because I know when we next work on the boss they know the mechanics inside out and are in the best possible position to help devise strats based on what they've figured out. I know for some guilds having a single strategist works well for them, but on a personal level there are definitely times when I am just stumped by an encounter, and having as many people as possible that are accustomed to analysing whats going on as opposed to just waiting for orders is invaluable.

Theres nothing like beating a boss all on your own, I like the theorizing and learning phase the best actually, those first kills are great, the loot is a means to an end, not the end itself. As for videos, I would prefer if nothing came out until after the place had been cleared, which it now obviously has, so while I dont like the nihilum video either, and wont watch it until after we've done it, I have less against it in principle then the earlier releases while naxx was still an undefeated place.

I still remember, when I was playing Tribes 2 competitively, that the ladder matches were sometimes/often shoutcasted by what was, for all intents and purposes, a sportcasting team - play by play and analysis, who'd be logged into the server in ghost mode and go around watching what was going on. Since you could also record demos of matches (either the shoutcaster or from players, basically a record of movements and actions of all people - since the engine would then replicate the graphics from the lowbandwidth command data, these were fairly small, even for 30 minute matches), after the match was over, you could download the demos and the shoutcast and have action+voiceover to watch - quite interesting to observe a top team's strategies/tactics.

I think after I stopped playing T2, they managed to integrate a way to livecast the video the commentator was seeing, too, at a decent framerate.

Perhaps a tangental topic; but from personal experience we would have the hardest time explaining things on new fights, until we started making diagrams of it all. The precursor to the now ubiquitos jpeg diagram was a flash animation I made in a night of frustration over Mar'Li in ZG.

We have Artpad renditions of nearly every encounter since AQ. I find it hilarious perosnally.

I like kill videos and I don't see anything wrong with releasing them right away. I don't care how people choose to use them either whether it's for learning an encounter, demonstrating to new players or just plain entertainment.

The only negative I could see coming from videos would be a guild that manages a world first and releases a video immediately for the purpose of discounting everyone who follows them.

"You couldn't have done it without our video!"

That's stupid and anyone with an opinion worth considering would recognize it as bullshit.