On Goblins of Avaricious Nature and the Social Aspects of WoW

Greedy Goblin, whether you disagree with him or not, is not known for pulling his punches. In one of his latest posts, he equates WoW with a drunken poker party he attended in college. The point of the party was to drink, have fun, meet new people, etc. Not to make money. If you know Greedy Goblin, you can probably guess who walked away with the most money! He feels that WoW has become Second Life with NPCs and decoy-monsters. Over time, he feels these attitudes will dumb the game down to a level he can't justify paying 15 dollars for. That's a justifiable stance, I honestly can see his side on this. However, I disagree on it's ability to ruin the game.

Like Nesh and I have often said, "WoW is the world's most complex internet chat client." I have a lot of one-player console games, books, hobbies( knitting is not a team sport! or a sport for that matter... )with which to fill my time when I don't want to play WoW. But, unlike GG, I play for the social aspect of the game. I do not hang out in /trade swapping Chuck Norris jokes, I do not spam BGs with my inanities( and I have many of them! ), I share my tim w e with people I value. I've spent time building a reputation both for myself and for my guild - an activity I've found to be worth my efforts.

When I log in, I'm usually innundated with /tells. Some of these are guild business, but a large number of these are personal. I get people asking how my daughter is if she's been sick. I get people who just say hello and ask me how I've been lately. Tells from people both in guild and out of guild.

Are these people that I meet in a bar regularly? No. Coworkers? No way. Old Schoolmates? Not a single one. They are, in fact, people that I've -chosen- to associate with and that is the most important part. I spend a lot of time surrounded by personal contact of which I have no control - the people in my office, the people in traffic with me, telemarketers, professional associations, etc. The people I stay in contact with through WoW are all by choice. They are all people who have met my, admittedly, strenuous checklist of "worth my time"-ness.

Even some of the short, one-off contacts I've had with people have been enjoyable. I happened into a PuG Heroic UP, Heroic DTK, and OS-10 with a small guild full-to-the-brim with hilarious players. All of them were well geared, exteremely well played, and laugh-out-loud funny. It was one of the best PuG experiences I've had. If I see any of those guys in LFG I go out of my way to include them or to be included with them!

At one point, while needing more information about Discipline priests, I sent Matticus from WorldofMatticus a message and asked for insight. In no time, Matticus is hanging out on KoU vent, talking Disc priests, then Hockey, then the American Justice System. It was a valuable interaction, not just for the information that Matticus was willing to give freely, but because I -enjoyed- the time spent discussing these things.

I feel that GG sees the other players in WoW as a mean to his ends. He has stated goals and prepares to succeed at those endevors. On the other side of the scale, I prefer to look to the person behind the keyboard and monitor. Their contributions to my successes as a raider, guild leader, and player have been enormous but pale in comparission to the value I place upon them as friends and confidants.

Leadership from the Rear: A Day in the Life

(A guest post by Neshura, continued from The View From Behind)

As a player, my goal in the game is to maximize the amount of time I spend accomplishing fun things, and to minimize my wasted time. (Blizzard doesn't make this easy, since one of the requirements of the game bearing some resemblance to a real world is that it wastes your time with things analogous to real life like sitting on transit.) As a guild leader, Kyuushi has told me many a time that his number one goal is to minimize the amount of wasted time for *everyone*. He does this by staying on top of information, keeping up with organizational tasks, and delegating. The day-to-day tasks of running a guild aren't unenjoyable, but neither are they optional.

Lots of people talk about running a guild, but very few get down into the nitty-gritty of what actually happens. Let's step into Kyu's average day, shall we?

• Promptly at 6AM, every day, get up and feed the baby. Yes, real life baby. She wakes up at 6 and makes noises, and must be fetched, fed, changed, dressed, and have her hair brushed and adorable ponytails installed. Then, she must be entertained for 30-45 minutes further so that Nesh (me) can grab a shower, finish morning chores, and get everything trundled out to the car that needs to go to daycare along with the baby.
• An hour, maybe two more, of napping, before the dog needs to be fed, let out, and walked.
  
• Head to real life work, do real life work as it comes in.
  
• Monitor the KOU forums, respond to raid signups and class questions, answer private messages, txt messages, out-of-game emails from officers. Staying in contact through many channels is important. Monitor all these things even while logged in to the game during the evenings.
• Promptly at 6PM, stop everything else, take the baby upstairs, read her some stories, make lion noises. Grrrr grrr! Show her how butterflies flutter their wings. Fix a sippy cup of warm milk and give her some snuggles while she finishes it off. Unstructured play time, rolling a ball, patting the dog, identifying body parts (finger in the eyeball!). Change her, dress her for bed, rock her into drowsiness, and put her down.
  
• Dinner. Make it some days, eat it most days.
• Read the blogs. Wowinsider, class-specific blogs, tankspot, elitistjerks forums -- all scanned and kept up with on a daily basis. Industry information, if you will, like reading the Wall Street Journal, Economist, and Fortune magazine every day. If there are changes coming that will affect the group, Kyu is the first to find out and start letting people know and start making plans.
  
• Recruit new people for the guild. Sit in a city and spam the recruitment chat channel with information about KOU. Armory interested recruits sometimes, interview them always.
  
• Direct quote from Kyuushi: "The primary question is 'What do you expect to get out of being in a guild,' if the answer is 'a place to farm up epics', that person is usually rejected. If the answer leans towards, 'A friendly community to get to know people and progress as a player,' that's a big plus."
  
• Do the JC daily quests on an otherwise-unplayed 80 toon, so that the guild has the resources to make gems with which to equip its people. Coordinate with Kvasira on which gem patterns to buy, so that there isn't too much guild overlap.
  
• Over the course of 24 hours, conduct lengthy private conversations based on in-game /tells from roughly twelve to fourteen different people. Not all at once, usually no more than three at once. Shoulders offered for tragedies small and large, because getting to know Kyu as a friend is remarkably easy. Answering questions is a big part of /tell time. Intra-guild problems, one person vs another, are currently quite rare. Lots of /tells are simply socializing and enjoyable chit-chat.
  
• Investigate complaints about players. This is more common now that we've got new recruits coming in. They walk around the game wearing the "KOU" guild tag, and misbehavior is reported to and dealt with by Kyu.
• Work with the raid leader and officers to make current guild projects, namely Naxxramas, a success. Daily discussion about strengths and weaknesses of particular teams, goals to be accomplished, schedules to be worked around, available resources. This takes the most amount of work, but also has the highest level of delegation to officers.
• Direct guild chat questions to the right person. If Kyu doesn't know, he can tell you who does know.
• Review policies when there are gray areas brought up to him, then delegate a rewrite or clarification.
• Negotiate with leaders from other guilds if necessary, though this is mainly done by letting the officers work out the details of multi-guild raiding.
  
• Once a week, ordered off the computer and over to the couch for a movie with his wife. That's right. He's mine, back off!

When all this work behind the scenes is done, the optional stuff begins: instancing, raiding, quests, and having fun. At 1AM or so, log off and get a few hours of sleep before the 6AM wake-up cry.

From the theoretical to the very specific, I hope this has given you some insight into the story of who Kyuushi is as a guild leader, how he makes decisions for KOU, and what goes on behind the scenes to keep the most number of people happy most of the time.

Happy Valentine's Day, sweetheart!

Leadership From the Rear: The View From Behind

(A guest post by Neshura, continued from the Introduction)

There are three major roles for players in WoW -- tanking, dpsing, and healing. Tanks and healers are utility roles, dps is... well let's just put that aside for now. By and large, tanks set the pace, choose which monster to kill first, issue orders, and are generally in the front seat when it comes to a group effort. Quite literally, tanks are leading the charge to keep the monsters' focus and attention. Healers, in contrast, have the job to stand in the wings, stay unnoticed by monsters, and keep everyone alive.

It's very natural for tanks to take a leadership role in any short-term (1-2hour) group, inviting people and kicking them out, and giving very specific instructions to the people (dps) whose job it is to actually do the killing. The one person who tanks don't typically instruct is the healer. Usually the most they say is, "Do that thing that you do, healer". Healing is more mysterious, hard to quantify, and unique than any other role. You know a good healer when you've been in a couple groups with them, and you know a bad healer, but you can't say why. All you can really point to is that you died, or you didn't die. I could say more about why tanking and dpsing have more in common but I don't want to get off on a tangent.

Now, Kyuushi was a tank for a long time and enjoyed it. The nature of tanking is such that it attracts people who naturally prefer to set the pace, issue orders, and pick which monster to kill first. Kyuushi likes tanking okay, but healing... Kyuushi loooooooves healing. As a healer, you typically have no direct front-end control over how a scenario plays out. It's a fundamentally reactive role -- you see or sense incoming damage, and you make a snap judgment to heal or not to heal. (If you don't play a healer, you might think "Ummm why would you ever not heal...". Contact your friendly neighborhood healer and ask them about their kill priority list to find out more.)

So this is kinda crazy if you think about. Here's a guy who is a guild leader, and his preferred role in actual game play is one that, fundamentally, has the least direct influence in the middle of the fight. If a tank heads left, the healer follows. If the dps clumps up near the tank, the healer moves to be within range. The healer tells no one where to go or how to do their jobs. Occasionally, a healer will tell you how to make the fight easier on them. But again... tanking is proactive, healing is reactive.

Leadership though, is a proactive skill. If he's not running the raids, and he's not tanking the instances, how does Kyuushi keep from getting insanely frustrated by only being able to react once gameplay starts??

Here's where this gets interesting to me. What Kyuushi does as a healer is to play around with a concept called "starting conditions". I doubt Kyu would ever put it that way, I'm just using an odd term from another field to convey this concept. What Kyuushi does is to research, prepare, make rules, pick people, stack the deck, juggle gear, and get familiar with fights so that ultimately, the group should already have won the fight before it even starts. Kyuushi tends not to either create or join groups that have too many unknowns. The old Boy Scout motto of "be prepared" starts to capture this, but not very well. I have no doubt that there's probably a Sun Tzu quote in there somewhere too.

Kyu has, in fact, followed this same approach for raiding. He's taken a half-assed social guild and rebuilt it into a casual-core raiding guild around the approach of tweaking the starting conditions for raids:

IF (you pick a good group of enthusiastic team players),

IF (all those people have read the strats and reviewed the videos),

IF (the raid leader is prepared, competent, and patient),

IF (everyone is gemmed and enchanted and has brought every possible consumable),

IF (you have a stated guild policy for common sources of disagreement (like loot)),

IF (everyone shows up on time so invites and buffs take place while the night is still young),

IF (we pay attention to emotional momentum, by not wasting time pugging and armorying like we used to do with Karazhan)...

BEGIN raid

In Kyu's world, there is simply no value in skipping any of those starting conditions just to save a little time up front. There's not a point, for him, in attempting a raid in which you haven't done everything possible to guarantee success before you send out the raid invites. The appropriate quote from, I dunno, some guy, would be, "Practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect." Kyu obsesses up front because, and here is where I either wholly agree with or have possibly influenced Kyu, your in-game and in-raid time is valuable to both you and us, and we don't want to see it wasted.

Now, this approach is going to seem, like, "Duh" to some readers, especially the ones in KOU.

But it isn't -- there are plenty of people who pug raids every week. When you pug a raid, the assumption everyone makes coming into a pug is that individually geared and talented players will make or break the raid. There are plenty of guilds who don't keep the almost-military orderliness and rules that Kyu imposes. Guild cultures and styles vary widely, and Kyu's style has for sure chapped some asses in KOU. An alternative to Kyu's approach is leadership from the front - the tank is the raid leader and says, "Don't worry, I'll explain the fights to you as we go. We'll take our most talented people and just go." That's very common and is effective, because the tank usually knows the fights well. It's also easier to put together more raids if you simply take every single opportunity to run one spontaneously whenever 10 raid-quality players are online in your guild. KOU rarely does that; we schedule ahead of time so that we can make sure that our raiding schedule gets people in for roles where there is an excess of players.

What it comes down to for KOU and Kyuushi is that, when you are basically helpless to do anything but try to heal up people that are unprepared and running amok and losing their heads in a situation, and everyone dies, it's basically a setup -- where the healer is set up to take the fall. People get pissed off and blame the healer(s) at least as often as they blame the tank. Kyu, I think, has an innate and intimate understanding that if your starting conditions are imperfect, your outcome will be AT BEST imperfect. So what he does is, he makes it so it's a rule that your contribution as a raider is to understand your personal best starting conditions and bring those to the raid, along with a readiness to take the raid leader's orders, have fun, and execute an elegant smooth win that just makes everyone feel great. When you emphasize player preparedness over player talent, you get a third bonus -- player experience. Because if you can take 7 prepared talented experienced players, and 2 prepared noobs, you can give those noobs the benefit of gaining high-quality dense boss fight experience, which is critical to developing talent. If you don't get past Shade, no one on the team will ever get to practice the Prince fight.

Kyuushi and his KOU management team have rebuilt, from a scorched earth guild implosion, a raiding team out of a group of remnants, that from the moment KOU was reborn started destroying progression content and never looked back.

My view is that this combination of the view from the front as a tank and the view from the rear as a healer has shaped Kyuushi's approach tremendously. It's now like second nature to all KOU raiders to be efficient and effective with fewer resources, time and people.

I coined the term "casual-core", but Kyuushi brought together the team that defined it.

Leadership From the Rear: Introduction

(A guest post by Neshura)

To talk about leadership in WoW is necessarily to talk about guilds and raids. The four people who read this blog are going to be familiar with the difference, but it's always useful to establish a common metaphor. A guild is like a department of a company, whereas a raid is like a project, short-term and long-term. I might touch on raid leading a bit, but I mainly want to talk about guild leading. I wouldn't be the first to compare a guild to the corporate world, but I think I'm the first to suggest that you avoid thinking of it in terms of "guild equals company". Guild leading has far more in common with the middle management world than it does with the corporate executive world.

What does a mid-level department head in a faceless company have in common with a WoW guild leader that a CEO does not?

1. A lot more actual work, for

2. None of the glory

Woof. Sounds like a mind-numbing daily grind, so why does anyone do it? How do they do it? There are twelve million people playing WoW and probably thousands if not hundreds of thousands of guild leaders, who are paying $15/month and drawing no salary for the privilege of having a second (or third) job that requires countless hours for no tangible reward. The "how" and the "why" are, then, a pretty interesting set of questions! If I were ghost-writing a best-practices book for the corporate executive marketplace, my answers to these questions would start with something facile and non-specific like

"Define success."

Namely, that as a leader, it's your job to define how your company will be successful, how you'll measure success, build consensus, and how you'll constantly reevaluate the parameters of success.

Horseshit. That has nothing to do with how you keep a large group of people from imploding on a daily basis. It could be a volunteer organization, it could be a school class, a church, a military group, an art collective. The fact is, large groups of people organize spontaneously, and somebody has to keep them from imploding. We call those people "leaders". Americans tend towards the subconsciously associative concept that a leader is a CEO and a CEO is a leader. The intellectual rigor of that statement is lower than that of your average bumper sticker.

Seriously, folks, if you want to go spend $39.95 at Barnes & Noble to read about the parameters of success and then come back and try to apply that to a group of real people, you go right ahead. It could easily work for you, but I don't want to talk about how you are going to lead your guild, nor am I about to tell you about the color of your parachute. Please don't mistake me for the kind of person who puts a metaphor out there, like "guild leadership is like middle management", and then tries to prove that it is true.

I have nothing to sell you. I am the observer, the storyteller, making the slightly crazy attempt to make sense of complex social interactions. I am giving you a metaphor, not to prove its accuracy as a model, but to simplify and frame, so we can get on with the story. My goodness, look how much I've written and the story is, as yet... unstarted.

So, this tale is about leadership, one guy, and how and why he does it.

On clearing Naxx-10

Last night, Knights of Utopia took a couple of shots at Kel'Thuzad in Naxxramas-10 and downed him after about 4 tries. We had him on the first attempt, but one of the melee DPSers was a wee too close to our tank and iceblocked him.

As you can see in my screenshot, I'm running boomkin on this fight. For Kel'Thuzad, too much Melee DPS spells death for a raid and we were running heavy this week - heavier than I'm ever comfortable running. To combat this, we swapped out Kvasira for her resto-shaman alt Karika and I respecc'd to Balance so I could Laser Turkey.

Our loot rules are such that you can spend DKP on off-spec stuff( but not roll against a main-spec user ) and I spent heavily for Balance gear feeling that the versatility of Druids made it a reasonable idea. Now, what this means is I'm exchanging priority on resto loot for flexibility. Sharing my T7 Tokens with Rogues, Mages and DK's, I'm almost guaranteed to not see a T7 token for some time - which is something I'm fine with. Kyuushi is nearly out-gearing Naxxramas-10 in both Restoration and Balance gear so I'd almost prefer to see the tokens get spread out to others. In fact, given that I have the highest attendance in raids due to being a healer, it's not such a terrible deficit that I can't get myself back up to positive numbers.

On Ranting...

I have a problem with specific classes/specs. I don't like that Ret Paladins can top a damage meter and I don't like that Survival Hunters can top the damage meters. Not because I dislike either class or either spec, but because, in my view, utility is like a talent spec. You have three trees: Damage Dealing, Raid Utility, and Healing. Just like talent specs, the deeper you go into a tree the better you are at that role. So lets take a look at some of the possible specs.

Warlocks: Spent heavily on DPS, a couple points in Utility, and just enough points to heal themselves a small mount.

Mages: Spent heavy on DPS, a point or two in Raid Utility, and none in Healing.

Rogues: Every single point is in DPS.

Retribution Paladins: Spent deeply in DPS, deeply in raid Utility and only a little bit in Healing.

Survival Hunters: Spent Deeply in DPS and Deeply in Raid Utility.

No, comparitively, Mages, Warlocks and Rogues should be able to easily out damage a ret paladin or a survival hunter since they've spent considerably more points in the damage tree. I wouldn't expect a druid with a deep moonkin build to be able to out heal my resto druid for the exact same reason. I would expect that Survival Hunters would be able to easily out damage a ret paladin since they only spent deep enough to get Hunting Party ( mana regen ) where as paladins picked up the mana regen, poison cleansing, disease cleansing, raid saves, some of the best class buffs available, AND enough in healing to use Lay On Hands, Judgement of Light, and some instanct cast heals.

What this says to me, is that it's not, as the developers claimed, "bring the player, not the class", but instead that unequal footing is being granted to classes that were previously looked down upon. Frankly, it's a Blizzard "pity f**k". If I was the type of guild leader that looked at nothing but progressing our raids and I was given the choice of bringing a Ret Paladin, a Rogue, and a DPS warrior, there's no compelling reason to bring anything but the ret paladin! Not only can they go neck and neck with the DPS, but they provide more raid utility as well!

Same goes for Survival Hunters; Why would I bring a mage, warlock, Moonkin Druid, or even a Marksman druid? Survival DPS is -huge- now that they've buffed Explosive shot - to the point that the eponymous BigRedKitty respecced! Add in that they can return mana and I'm sold! What does the other class bring to the table thats worth passing up on the Survival Hunter?

I agree with Blizzard's sentiment that it should be about play-style, but raid utility -IS- a play style. You have to be willing to be middle of the pack in Damage Done to provide the utility that will help your raid succeed. You have to know how to best provide for it just like you'd need to understand how to maximize your DPS.

On what stats are important and how important are they...

When you're levelling up, obviously, your goal is to crash through as many quests and instances as you can do your the best you are able in your chosen role. Once you get to 80 and turn an eye towards raiding, a fair amount of thought is going to be introduced into the picture.

My guild, and a lot of guilds that I know of, maintain minimum stats profiles for specific roles but sometimes, especially as you're gearing up you need to understand the "weight" of those stats. Often times you'll see forum posts where people ask, "What stats should my warrior tank stack?" followed by a list of stats, sometimes in no particular order. If the answer said "Stamina, Strength, Dodge, Defense, Block, Armor," those stats would be both incorrect and correct. A warrior tank should stack those stats but there's no indication of priority. If that warrior hasn't stacked Defense because it was 4th on the list, he's probably going to eat a lot of critical hits and drop like a raid-wiping stone in a repair-bill pond.

For example, if you're DPS, Hit Rating is often heavily weighted over things like attack/spell power. Once you've reached the hit cap( your chance to miss with an attack on a raid boss is 0% ), the weights will shift and Hit rating will move to the bottom of the list as it stops helping to improve your DPS. There are several addons such as Lootster or Pawn that will help you make gear comparisons. For my uses, I've chosen Pawn. Here's a quick screenshot of Pawn in action in it's two major roles.

The first is an integrated tooltip. I've set up what are called "Scales" for each spec I maintain gear for and can see the combined weight of the item via tooltip when I mouse over. You can see if the item is well stated for Resto, Moonkin, Feral DPS or Feral tank.


Secondly we have the comparison between two items. You can reach this window via the /pawn command. Here we see two main hand weapons being compared. The Titansteel guardian and the Blade of Dormant Memories. You can see that while the Titansteel Guardian does have 49 extra spellpower over the Blade of Dormant Memories, it is severely lacking in other others such as Intellect and Haste! When making comparisons such as this, it's best to have an understanding of where you are weak in your gear. At the moment, I feel that I'm at an acceptable level of unbuffed spellpower and that more intellect and more haste will make me a better healer! In the end, item comparison mods are an effective guideline for upgrades, but have to be used by someone with a brain to back them up. They simply don't work in a vacuum.

Now that you know you need to be looking at stats, the difficult part comes in, finding those stats. As you'll see in this series, the premiere number crunching site is the Elitist Jerks forums. Some classes
have stat weights listed in their class-specific topics and some take some digging. Another great tool is the Item Comparison available at wowhead. Simply add an item and then select a weight scale. You can click "show details". You can take the numbers listed there and create a scale in Pawn with them. Again, you have to use your head when you're looking at these things. Knowing the stats that are valuable to your class is a big step towards maximizing your value, but understanding where you are lacking is the other half of that equation.

Another invaluable asset, and I'll touch on this later in the series, is to have someone who is smarter and more hardworking than you are. When I want to dine on some crunched resto druid numbers, I pull up a seat at the Resto4Life buffet and tuck the table cloth into my collar! Nobody crunches numbers as well or has a higher dedication to understanding the ins and outs of resto druids than Phaelia and I'm perfectly willing to bow to her knowledge and intellect and reap the benefits of it! Many times, bloggers such as Phaelia will cover things like "Pre-raiding" gear, or "best-in-slot" lists and those are -great- resources for tracking down gear and making yourself a gear progression list.

What's a gear progression list? Well before you walk, you have to crawl, and at max level the first thing on your list is get ready for the heroic dungeon crawl. You have to be well geared for the level 80 instances to start doing the heroic instances, and you have to well geared for the heroic instances to start doing the raids! You'll find a lot of pre-naxx gear guides online. In fact, googling for "pre-naxx gear INSERTYOURSPEC INSERTYOURCLASSHERE" will likely bring you up a good list for you to shoot for!


Up next: Researching your spec