Ghostcrawler has been answering questions raised by the recent announcement of Cataclysm changes in this thread.

Why Guild Talents Were Removed

Guilds are, for the most part, groups of friends. We don’t want features to drive wedges between them. We don’t want you to guild hop looking for the talents that suit you best; we want you to play (or in many cases keep playing) with your friends. With a talent tree, guilds would naturally have different talent trees, which creates a reason to bail or guild hop that doesn’t exist today.

Would anyone jump guilds based on talents alone?  I find this a bit hard to believe.  When people guild hop it tends to be to jump ahead in progression.  If you move guilds while retaining your progression, then the move probably had more to do with the people than with anything else.  It might have been a personality conflict or a failure of the guild to focus and start progressing, but I doubt it was over something like whether the guild paid for raid repairs or provided free flasks.

Furthermore, we felt like the decision-making, for many guilds, would be up to a relatively few people, possibly as few as the guild master. Talent trees work for classes because the decision is up to you. We didn’t want to create the risk of drama over choosing those talents or even not being consulted in choosing them.

Again, I don’t really buy this. Most policy decisions in guilds come down to a few people, possibly just the GM. Good guild masters consult and take member input into their decisions, while bad ones just do what they think is right. Adding talents to the myriad of other things that guild leadership decides isn’t going to change the way in which good and bad guild masters operate. Perhaps it would exacerbate the problem that members face under bad guild masters, but that’s not in Blizzard’s remit to solve. That’s a social problem that should be dealt with by the members of the guild – typically by leaving.

Blizzard certainly hasn’t shied away from making changes to guild organization that caused drama in the past.  Just as a few examples:

• the change from 40 to 25 person raid groups in TBC
• the loot disparity between 10 and 25 person raids in Wrath
• the four separate lockouts on Trial of the Crusader
• the entire “Bring the Player, not the Class” controversy
• the loot parity between 10 and 25 person raids that Cataclysm will bring

All of these things caused guild leaders massive headache, and created considerable drama in guilds.  I’m not saying that all of these decisions were flawed – far from it.  If they’d never tried the four separate lockouts on ToC, they wouldn’t know how bad they were, and they might have chosen to set up all the Cataclysm launch raid content in that fashion.  That would have been far worse than the failed experiment that was Call of the Crusade.  Likewise, the change from 40 to 25 person raiding was in retrospect a good one, as was the decision to have both 10 and 25 person raids.

I just don’t think it’s Blizzard’s problem to eliminate drama from guilds, nor do I think that the introduction of guild talents was going to create drama in guilds where none existed.  Drama tends to be the result of lack of communication – and if you’re not talking to your members today, your guild likely has problems that are completely independent of guild talents.

Another advantage of the perks system is that it’s easily expandable. If we want to add new levels and / or perks in later patches or expansions, we can, without having to re-juggle a talent tree.

Ah, this one rings true. They don’t know how powerful guild talents are going to be. As with all new features, they may very well get it wrong the first time. When you get it wrong and your re-balancing effort hits a large subset of guilded players rather than the 6 to 15% of all players that are affected by class talent re-balancing, you’re opening yourself up to a lot of pain.

Of course, a change to a guild perk will still more people, but the difference is that it will affect everyone identically. Let’s take the talent that increases gold found on mobs: what if it maxed out at 3% and many guilds didn’t take it. Later on they re-balance it so it maxes out at 6%. Now it’s very attractive. Do they offer free guild talent resets for everyone? If they do, then any guild with inactive leadership will lose out on all talents until the GM logs in and resets things. If they don’t, the forums will be full of people complaining that they have to pay gold (or guild currency) to reset their talents because of the re-balance.

So yes, this was probably required to avoid guild talents becoming a thorn in the designer’s sides. I just wish they’d be more open about it rather than make up excuses that don’t really measure up.

The Perks are the Talents

The effects of guild perks are the effects that guild talents were meant to bring:

The only difference in the way we are handling the guild talents is it will be possible to get all of them instead of having one person in your guild pick and choose which ones you got. The feature has always focused on leveling your guild to unlock new perks. In fact, you’re getting more perks this way than you would have if the decisions had been exclusive.

The bottom line is that  we’ll still get the extra gold, mass resurrection and reagentless buffs, but in a Blizzard-defined order instead of one we might choose ourselves.

I hope that some of the perks will come from achievements and not just from leveling.  From the image they showed at Blizzcon last year:

There certainly seems to be more than 25 available talent points in the tree (notice the scrollbar).  I count 28 talents, and two of them show 3/3 points.

I’m fine with having certain high-level perks come from the guild focusing and achieving something, but I’d rather not see Mass Resurrection given out just because 20 people logged onto do their dailies for three months.  Perhaps we’ll get the extra gold perk for hitting level 10, reagentless buffs at 25 and mass resurrection when we’ve cleared all the raids available at launch.  That type of hybrid design feels right to me, but doing no raid content and getting the same rewards (especially those whose primary benefit is to raiders) doesn’t.

Guild Rewards Purchased with Cash are Yours to Keep

There are two categories of rewards. The perks are things earned by the guild. If you join a high-level guild, you get those benefits immediately and you lose them if you bail on the guild. They are passive bonuses and a couple of spells, not items. Separately, there are also items you can purchase. The items are yours to keep even if you leave the guild. In order to discourage guild hopping, you have to make some kind of investment in the guild. But you can still choose to leave if in the future you just find that you’d rather be with someone else.

As I suspected, the guild reputation is the protection against selling invites to a guild with many achievements just to purchase their items.  Expect ground mounts to require revered and flying mounts to require exalted.  I would also expect the “grind” with your guild to take about three months of two or three days per week activity to get to exalted.

The Change was Essentially to the Guild UI Only

Some players focused on “cut guild talents” without reading what we are doing instead. [...] We haven’t cut any content, but just changed the UI from boxes with prereqs to a list.

Fair enough, I’m guilty of that in the title of my previous article. But to be fair, GC’s explanations should have been woven into the original press tour. Why they kept half the information given to the press corps under NDA for three days after the first bits came out is beyond me. Sometimes Blizzard really creates their own PR nightmare.

I guess I’m feeling a little bit better about the changes now, though I’m still annoyed at how the changes were communicated and the lack of specialization. But at least the meat of this Cataclysm change has not been cut.

From the department of corrections: as a few people commented, I had the move to a different raid ID thing backwards – it is a move forward and not back in progression to stop people farming the same boss. I’m not sure why that initially struck me something they wouldn’t do, given that it is just like missing a raid night. Again, I blame vague language. Don’t use the word “that” to refer to one of two equivalent subjects without clarifying which is which.

Until Next Time

Related posts:

• Guild Changes in Cataclysm: Part 3
• Cataclysm: Reforging Your Link to your Guild
• Minor Updates on Guilds in Cataclysm

Well, this is a bit of a kick in the teeth.  After waiting patiently for a chance to play the beta, or get information from those in the beta on the guild changes coming in Cataclysm, it now seems as though there will be far less of those changes to test and report on.

Blizzard held a press event.  I can’t find the original post, so I’ll link to the copy on worldofraids.com.

There’s more than just information about guild changes in there, and to be fair some of the changes are positives.   But the changes to guilds are pretty much negative across the board.

Removed: Guild Talents

This was the feature I was most excited about.  Guild Talents were going to differentiate the huge number of gentry guilds from each other.  You’d choose a guild not only based on their progression and policies, but the perks that the guild had selected for themselves.  When you were thinking of moving guilds, you would have to consider what the loss of said perks would be.  Perhaps you’d gotten used to not buying buffing reagents, or getting more gold from enemies, or the free repairs that having a neutral bonus cash policy entailed.

Well, forget all that, because they’re gone.  They are being replaced (in a fashion) with guild rewards and guild reputation, but those will be the same for everybody in every guild.  Your decision when moving will now simply be “do I want to grind reputation with my new guild or not?”.

Removed: Guild Currency

Guild Currency was to be generated in lieu of experience when your guild hit maximum level.  The maximum level is now 25 rather than 20.  In my mind, the point of guild currency was to keep people doing things that earn the guild experience even after hitting the max level cap – much as you keep doing dailies once you hit 80 to fill your personal coffers.

Now, guild rewards will be purchased with gold.  So not only have you lost this “free” alternate currency (because you received it for doing things you would do anyway), you now need to consider how much of your personal wealth to invest in rewards that come from the guild.

This makes the job of a guild master simpler, to be sure.  How were you to decide who had earned the right to use guild currency to purchase a guild-specific mount?  What about guild hoppers?  Sure, if they left the guild the item would return to the guild bank, but as the purchased item, not the guild currency used to purchase it.  What if nobody else wanted the item?

By making everything use gold, Blizzard makes daily quests the primary source of advancement at level 85, just as it was in Wrath.  This doesn’t help the gold selling problem (gold sellers couldn’t sell you guild currency), and it gives a boost to anyone who goes into Cataclysm with a large gold stockpile.  I suppose the upside is that the news comes early enough that anyone who doesn’t have 25k gold or more can easily make that between now and Cataclysm.

Added: Guild Perks

Guild Perks will be awarded every time a guild levels up.  No details as to what these perks will be were part of the press release, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of the previously-announced talents make a re-appearance.  Perhaps at guild level 10 you’ll just start getting more gold from monsters.  Fair enough, but as I mentioned above the specialization from guild to guild is gone.

Added: Guild Rewards

Guild Rewards are the items that used to be purchased with guild currency – things like mounts, tabards and heirlooms.  You will unlock them by completing guild achievements.  We finally have some numbers as to how many members of a raid have to be from the same guild for these to count: 7/10 or 20/25.  At least that lets guilds PUG a few when required without losing the benefit of a guild achievement.

I can easily see certain PvE achievements unlocking the ability to get certain mounts.  Hopefully these won’t replace the mounts that are rewarded for completing all the hard modes of a dungeon, as once an achievement is awarded to the guild anyone can purchase the reward, even if everyone who participated in the achievement leaves.  It’s also not clear whether said mounts are considered to be heirlooms (and thus revert back to the guild bank if you leave the guild).

Guild mounts will have the guild’s emblem on them, but you purchase them with gold that you earned on your own, not with currency that your guild leadership gave you.  So if you leave, are you giving up the money you paid for the mount?  Will you get the gold back?  Or will the space for the emblem just go blank, as a guild tabard does when you’re not guilded?

Hopefully the guild mounts will only be special in that they have the emblem, and otherwise be mounts that you can source on your own.  If they are unique or desirable in ways other than showing guild pride, I see the potential for abuse where guilds offer invites for a set amount of gold, letting someone purchase an unlocked mount before kicking them.

I’m less clear on what kind of achievement will unlock guild heirlooms.  Perhaps you need to have 5 people hit the max level in a given profession to unlock heirlooms of that armor class?

Added: Guild Reputation

When asked for my wishlist of Cataclysm features, “grinding more rep” was not very high on the list.  Yet that’s what we’ve been given in the form of guild reputation.  The best guild rewards will require exalted rep with your guild.  This may be the protection required to avoid the abuse I predicted above – you can’t just join and buy an amazing mount, you need to be active in the guild for long enough to get the reputation to buy it.

If this reputation is passive, then it won’t be a problem – you’ll get rep with the guild by doing the things you do anyway (as guild experience / currency was previously).  If they implement it like the Wrath Champion Tabard system, where you have to do heroics while wearing your guild tabard to get more rep, then it becomes a grind you have to complete in addition to the new PvE factions you need to grind for rewards.

Added: Split Your Raid ID

These last two features are quite nice, and will give more flexibility to raid leaders.  I mentioned in a previous article that if you started your raid week with 25 people but didn’t have enough show up to continue on the second or third night, you could switch to a 10 person raid without having to create a new raid ID.  The obvious problem is that if you had 18/25 show up, what do you do with the extra 8 people?

Now, you’ll be able to split the 25 person raid ID into two 10 person raid IDs.  Presumably you’ll have to choose who goes in which raid, or at least who becomes the leader of the new 10 person raid.  I’m guessing that everyone will then lose their 25 person ID and will have to zone in behind the original or new leader to get locked to the cloned 10 person ID.

This is a one-way decision though – if you split on raid night 2 and then have everyone show up for raid night 3, you can’t combine the two 10 person raids into a single 25 person raid.  The guilds who get the most benefit out of this will be those who lose people because their members don’t like wipes, not those who have low turnout because of real-life commitments.  If your have good turnout Thursday, lousy turnout Saturday because everyone’s out having a real life, then good turnout Sunday, this feature isn’t really going to help you.  You may wish to re-think your raid schedule with this change in mind if this is what’s holding you back today.

Added: Switching Raid IDs

This sounds neat, but I see a huge potential for abuse.  The idea is that you can switch from one Raid ID to another, so long as it keeps you the same in progression or makes you fall back.  For example, you can go from a 9/12 cleared raid to a 7/12 cleared raid, but not to a 10/12 clear.

This will be a huge boost if you find that your chosen 10 person teams aren’t balanced properly.  It will also give you more flexibility if some members needs loot from early bosses and you have someone to take their place in your progression raid.

What worries me is that there is no mention of limiting how often you can do this.  The cap on valor points will make clearing everything you can, then hopping to a new raid and doing it all over again less rewarding, but you will still be eligible for the loot the boss drops, right?  So if you need something off the first or second boss, guilds could choose to clear those over and over again for loot, even though they’d cap out their valor points fairly quickly.

This suggests that the cap on valor points might be lower than I had originally predicted.  I suggested that you’d get the same valor points for doing two raids a week without any daily heroics, or one raid per week plus a few daily heroics (but not every day).  No raids and every daily heroic might get you to 70% of the valor point cap.

What happens when they have a new gated instance?  Back when ICC first opened, if you’d had the choice to run the first four bosses every day until the first gate opened with a cap on the number of Emblems of Frost you would have picked up, would you have done so?  Right now you get 24 EoF for doing ICC-10 on normal.   When only the first wing was available, you could get 8 EoF.  If the valor point cap is static, then it seems like re-doing earlier content over and over again is more rewarding than doing a heroic every day.

Let’s go hypothetical and say that valor points will cap at 30 per week, which more or less matches my predictions above.  Would you rather do the first wing of ICC three times, or do the first wing of ICC plus ToC-10 plus the weekly and a couple of daily heroics?  I fear that guilds will think the former option makes more sense, which puts us right back at the problem with ToC – you could do the same fights four times each week, and many guilds felt compelled to do so, much to the chagrin of their members.

Final Thoughts

When I first read about the guild changes in Cataclysm, I was impressed.  That there had been very little information about those changes since should have been a warning that they were too ambitious.  The raid ID changes are nice, but I have to think that those would have happened even if guild talents and currency had not been dropped.  The direct replacements – perks, rewards and achievements are not a proper replacement.

Yes, there will still be an incentive to remain with your guild to avoid having to re-grind reputation, but amongst the gentry guilds where the available rewards will be more-or-less the same, anyone willing to put in the grind time will find the decision to jump guilds only slightly less simple than it is today.

What do you think?

Related posts:

• Ghostcrawler Expands on Recent Cataclysm Changes
• Primordial Trophies and Orbs, Oh My!
• Rent A Tux

Again, here’s the original post and a quick summary:

• there will only be two “emblem currencies” for PvE: hero points (for easy content) and valor points (for harder content)
• the way in which these are awarded aligns with the current Emblem of Triumph and Emblem of Frost
• PvP will also have two currencies: honor (for battlegrounds) and conquest (for arenas)
• there will be a cap on the number of high-grade points you can get each week (separate caps for valor and conquest I assume)
• when a new tier of content comes out, all your higher-grade points get swapped 1:1 for the lower-grade points
• there will be a way to convert the low-grade PvE points for low-grade PvP and vice versa, though at a less than 1:1 ratio
• there are no plans to allow high-grade point swaps or low-to-high swaps

Some of this is just a terminology switch from what we know today.  Yes, there might still be items available for Emblems of Heroism, Valor and Conquest, but since you can’t earn them, only people who were away from the game prior to a new content patch (and thus have a stockpile) spend these.  Everyone else just grumbles through the process of swapping Triumph to Conquest to Valor to Heroism in order to buy their raw epic gems and heirloom items.

What I find interesting (especially in the context of the announcement yesterday about raid lockouts) is that Blizzard seems to be pushing players to play less each week while maintaining a compelling reason to keep your subscription going.

We first heard about this when the Path of the Titans was announced at Blizzcon.  The term then was “gated, not grindy”.  The cap on valor and conquest points means that if you do two raid dungeons and the daily heroic every day in a week, you’ll probably hit the cap.  As such, you will now be able to choose to run two raids and no dailies, one raid and a few dailies, or no raids and the daily every day while still earning a similar number of valor points.  I suspect that the last option won’t be quite on par – something like 70% of the cap feels about right.

So you’re no longer going to be pushed to do every raid you can to get emblems, and so long as you’re doing one raid, you probably won’t get the full benefit of running the daily every day in addition.  But you’re not going to drop your subscription, because the whole thing resets once a week.  Where you might be able to play 6 days out of the week and get quantifiable benefit every day today, you might get the maximum quantifiable benefit in 3 days in Cataclysm.

So what do you do with the rest of your time?  Play another character is one option – perhaps we’ll see more guilds where people have two mains rather than just one.  You could also play something else – perhaps giving people time to play Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 is part of this strategy.

The changes to raid scheduling and guild size that I mentioned yesterday need to be considered in the context of this announcement as well.  I’m going to try to do some case studies of made-up guilds of varying sizes and player participation levels (i.e. a 25 person guild with a full bench, a 10 person guild who often only get 8 people signed up, etc.) to feel out what all of these changes mean.

Look for that in the next couple of days.

Until Next Time

Related posts:

• Abusing the Armory
• I’m Quitting If They Don’t Fix Paladins
• The Noble Wendigo

Here’s the original post, but in brief:

• you can only have one lockout per instance per week, regardless of raid size or difficulty
• 10 and 25 person encounters will be tuned to be as close as possible in difficulty
• 10 and 25 normal will drop the exact same items
• 10 and 25 heroic encounters will drop the exact same items
• 25 person raids will drop more loot – more items, more emblems and more gold
• the same items will be on the normal and heroic loot tables – the heroic items will just have better stats
• we will see multiple smaller raids at each tier level rather than one longer raid.  This will be much like The Burning Crusade tier 5 raids, where both TK: The Eye and Serpentshrine Cavern were the same difficulty level and dropped the same item level of loot
• gating of content will remain, but it won’t be as harsh as “defeat the entire instance on normal first”
• limited attempts are out, except for very exclusive content like Algalon
• entry level raids will assume that you’ve geared up in 5-man heroics first

This has profound implications for guilds and guild leaders.

The Good

No longer will you feel compelled to run both 10 and 25 person content in order to gear up quickly.

No longer will 25 person guilds steamroll through 10 person content before the 10-person strict guilds have a chance to gear up.

No longer will you have to cancel a 25 person raid because only 18 people showed up – you can continue on 10 person mode.  Similarly, as your 10 person guild grows to 25 people, you can run the larger size raid when you can get enough people without sacrificing overall progression.

The Bad

Your raiders will be giving their one and only raid lockout to the guild.  The days of saying “your 25 person ID is ours, but your 10 person ID is yours to PUG as you wish” are over.  When you raid current content, you’re doing it with your guild only.  You’ll only be PUGing older content that your guild is no longer doing.

What We’ve Learned

Blizzard stated that they want to make guilds even more important in Cataclysm.  This is a huge move in that direction, but they’ve done it by reducing the opportunities you have to do things outside of the guild.  Personally, I’m all for that – I’ve never liked the idea of having to mix it up with people I don’t know just to stay competitive when I raid with the people I do know.  Nor do I like the idea of running the same content on different raid sizes.

Over the course of WoW, Blizzard has tried both extremes and everything in between.  From vanilla’s 40 person one difficulty to TBC’s fixed size instances to Trial of the Crusader’s four independent lockouts, nobody can claim that Blizzard doesn’t have a good pool of data on which to make these kinds of decisions.  Certainly the community hasn’t been silent about their likes and dislikes of each of the systems.

Loot

As a proponent of the 10-person strict raid format, I welcome the homogenization of loot tables.  Finally I can raid with a close group of trusted players without feeling like I am disadvantaging myself versus others when the next tier of content comes out.

I love the idea of loot being associated with a boss – regardless of whether that boss was killed on 10 normal or 25 heroic.  The days of being able to spot a peacock outside the bank of a capital city are over (and the people who preened about were never very mature in my eyes anyway).  Gearscore, for all of it’s failings is not likely to go away (at least not without breaking character inspection completely), so those people who insist on running it will still be able to tell the difference between two players decked out in gear from different difficulty levels.

Unanswered Questions

Just how much more loot will 25 person raids drop?  There’s a quote in the announcement:

25-player versions will drop a higher quantity of loot per player (items, but also badges, and even gold), making it a more efficient route if you’re able to gather the people

which suggests that 25 will be worth more than double a 10 person raid – but will that be more than double the items, or just emblems?

Right now we see two items from 10 person and three from 25, which means that two 10 person raids is more lucrative than one 25 person raid, or at least they would be if the item level different didn’t exist.  Once that gap closes, will we see two and five items dropping from bosses respectively?

And what about the difficulty of 10 vs 25?  10 person allows for less mistakes, because a single player dying early robs you of proportionately more dps or healing than losing one person in 25 person.  Cataclysm also promises more movement-based fights (if the talent previews are any indication), so how will fights like Kel’Thuzad or Firefighter change?

Will environmental and AoE attacks change based upon the raid size?  After all, its easier to stay spread out on 10 person given the same size room.  Perhaps chaining effects will jump a shorter distance on 25 person raids to compensate.

Already people on the official forums are saying “this is the end of 25 mans”.  I don’t think so – if you’re willing and able to herd 2.5 times as many people, then you should be compensated in kind for doing so.  Or (and this may be the key point) there needs to be a disincentive to running two 10 person raids instead.  My money’s on the latter.

Much More To Consider

There’s much more to think about in this announcement, but I wanted to get a post out quickly with initial reactions.  I’ll follow up with a more in-depth analysis about what leadership need to think about – a lot of your policies are going to need re-work to adapt to this change.

Until Next Time

Related posts:

• PUGs and Loot
• I’m Quitting If They Don’t Fix Paladins
• Loot Collusion in Raids after 3.2

• once you miss a publishing deadline, it’s really easy to just get caught up and miss the next few as well
• Gravity was right on two points – the “How to Win Friends and Influence Guildies” series wasn’t a good idea
• I’m burnt out on WoW
• Publishing two articles when you’re burnt out on the source material is not sustainable

I’ve hardly been playing WoW at all since I got back from vacation.  When I do, I farm materials and clear out my bank mule in preparation for Cataclysm.  I don’t do dungeon runs much.

I’m really jealous of the class-based bloggers out there who have a relative flood of information to write about since the class previews came out.  I doubt we’ll see the same kind of information dump related to the new guild features – it will all come from the beta (though part of me fears that the features won’t be enabled in early beta builds).

I had seriously considered wrapping things up with the blog, rather than continue to churn out forced articles.  A few people convinced me that that was a bad idea.  Once the Cataclysm beta starts, I do think I’ll get a second wind (especially if I’m in it and not getting everything second hand from news sites).  Until then, I’m making a few changes to Cold Comfort:

• I’m scrapping the HWTFAIG series.  It was just a filler to keep up with an unrealistic publishing schedule.  Gravity will be pleased to note that I did buy the Seven Habits book, and while I agree that it’s better material, I have no plans to write an article series based on it.
• I’m doing away with the Mon-Thu posting schedule.  When I have something that I can write a quality article about, I’ll post it.  I hope to get back to the kind of articles I was doing a few months ago, up around the 1500-2000 word mark rather than these piddly 600 word jobs I’ve been sending out recently.  If that only happens once every 10 days, so be it.  Quality over quantity.

Thank you again for the support in the comments, and I hope you’re all enjoying the class news and what I expect will be a few waves of ever more detailed analysis by all of the WoW blogging community who specialize in those topics.

Until Next Time (which now seems apt – perhaps I just should have been saying “Until Thursday” all this time?)

Cheers

Here’s the synopsis: female gamer joins a guild with a friend.  She doesn’t like to talk on voice chat, preferring that other players assume she is male.  The friend transfers servers, leaving her as the only female in a 10-person raiding guild.  The GM starts showing an interest in her, asking personal questions, promoting her to officer rank to have “private chats”, and inviting her to visit him for vacation.  She is now faced with the decision to leave a guild that she likes or deal with inappropriate attention from her GM.

I don’t tend to write much about personal relationships because each situation is unique.  I don’t want to disparage the idea of real-life relationships that start in-game, as I have seen it work on one or two occasions.  I’ve also seen it crash and burn, doing damage to the guild and others in the process.

This story has multiple warning flags, and there’s a lesson for both parties to take away.  I’m going to be painting with a wide brush here, so take this as my opinion only.

First, I hate to see situations (in game or out) where someone is forced to hide or suppress some aspect of who they are for fear of confrontation or reprisal.  Outside of the game, those fears may be rational – there may be serious repercussions to expressing yourself.  In-game, we shouldn’t have to deal with the same.

Second, male players (and especially those in guild leadership) need to realize that every unattached female isn’t playing WoW in order to start a relationship.  Really, some people play just to play.  It’s a rare lasting relationship that begins in a fantasy world.

Sadly, the best way to address the situation is (as many respondents to the OP stated) for the female gamer to speak up and be clear with her GM that she’s not interested in him, and that his actions are making her uncomfortable.  Essentially, she has to do exactly what she was trying to avoid – all because someone things that WoW is where he’s going to meet the love of his life.  The only other options are to quit the guild and possibly server transfer.

Wanting to avoid conflict is natural.  I don’t think anyone genuinely enjoys conflict, save for the bullies who use it knowing that most people will back down from them.  Wanting to hide behind the anonymity of your avatar should be every player’s right.  It’s not an excuse to act like a complete ass just because nobody can tie your actions down to a person, but if you choose not to expose any details about your personal life, you should be able to.

Unfortunately, there seems to be this hard-coded behaviour in males when they encounter a female gamer who is meek or timid, or just gives the impression of being so by not interacting like one of the guys.  Some will act as protector, while others will see you as weak and something to be exploited.  This is completely unfair, and for someone in a position of authority to take advantage of it speaks volumes against their character.

Male gamers don’t have this problem – they can choose to be loud and boisterous or completely silent, and they don’t seem (in my experience) to suffer any ill effects.  People don’t think less of them.  It seems that when a guy says “my microphone doesn’t work”, people believe them.

I may be assuming too much, and I may have the female perspective completely wrong here.  Most of the female gamers I know well are of the loud and boisterous variety, or if they’re not they know how to smack the children back into their place if they get out of line.

How do you deal with situations like this?  Does it make you as angry as it does me?  How do we as guild leaders promote an environment where this doesn’t happen, or where there are direct and immediate consequences for those who step over the line?  How else could the female gamer deal with this situation?

Until Next Time

Related posts:

• Become Genuinely Interested in Other People
• When Do You Throw in the Towel with Guildies?
• Stuck Up Officers

I am probably one of a few people who can remember having to save up to purchase a tabard pattern for their guild.  Unless you ran a leveling guild in the days of Vanilla, the idea of not having a spare 10 gold among your members may seem preposterous, but it did happen.  We were noobs in our 20s and 30s.  The idea of spending 90 gold on our level 40 mount had us hoarding every copper we earned.  Getting donations to spend 10 gold on some fancy piece of cloth?  Forget it.

The thing is, that was five years ago.  It was right around that time that having a tabard ceased to be a differentiator.

I have never been presented with the choice of two equal guilds and broken a tie based upon what their tabard looked like.

SO WHY DO PEOPLE STILL ADVERTISE THEIR GUILDS AS HAVING A “COOL” TABARD?

Yet I digress.

I’ve started to think about effective ways to recruit, as recruiting season will soon be upon us.  If you’re an established guild, you may not have to actively recruit.  Just putting the message out to your members that you are in need of a few people may encourage applicants who know you have a history.

But what if you’re just starting out?  Do you advertise in trade chat?  On forums?  Do you use the worldofraids recruitment tool?  Will you use the simplified “looking for guild” interface that will be part of Cataclysm?

How do you make yourself stand out?  If you’re part of the middle 80% of guilds who are basically identical with different raid nights, how do you entice someone to look deeper than your guild name?  Once you start looking at guilds in more depth, the differences start to distinguish them.  This one has policies more in line with what you like, that one does profit sharing from the guild bank, and the other has a goal of clearing all the hard modes before Cataclysm.  But until you can get someone over to your website, or at least to read your forum recruitment post, you’re just another name and maybe a subject line.

Not so long ago I was trying to get Cold Comfort the guild up and running.  I tried the witty approach to recruitment.  I did advertise in the LookingForGuild channel, and not as often but sometimes in Trade.  I thought my tagline would pique interest and let me spark up more in depth conversations with prospective players.

Cold Comfort: All Guilds Suck, We Suck Less.

It was brilliant.  And it failed utterly.  In retrospect, it was obvious that it would.  The people who hang around in Trade regularly aren’t known for their analysis and subtlety.  Anyone who could read between the lines and see the joke might have been interested, but most people just thought I was insulting their guild and saying that mine was better.

So I toned it down a bit.  “Cold Comfort: Raiding Doesn’t Have To Suck”.

[W From Someguy]: raiding doesn't suck you noob.  I bet you've never raided in your life.

Or something like that.  He probably used less vowels.  And a few phonemes that I wasn’t aware were in the english language.

Ok, so maybe using “suck” wasn’t the best idea.  So I dropped that and went for a basic message – we’re a new raiding guild, we use EP/GP and we’re recruiting for a 3 night raid schedule.

And I got nothing.  Without something to distinguish me, I just faded into the noise that is city-wide chat.  The same thing happened on my realm forums, though someone was nice enough to explain that I was probably shooting over people’s heads with my joke.

I’ve haven’t tried to recruit since, but more due to real life commitments that wouldn’t let me be the leader I want to be than for fear that I’d get no responses.

So tell me: if you’ve done the trade channel / forum grind to start up a new guild, what advice would you give?  Did you abandon all pretense of interviewing people, firing invites to anyone who whispered you?  And for those of you with established guilds, did you ever find that your reputation was not enough to fill empty spots when you found your roster lacking?

Until Next Time

Image from zazzle.com (you can buy one if you want)

Related posts:

• Major Guild Improvements Dropped from Cataclysm
• Cataclysm: Reforging Your Link to your Guild

If you’re reading the original book alongside, this corresponds to Part 2, Chapter 3: “If You Don’t Do This, You Are Headed for Trouble”

Remember That a Person’s Name is to that Person the Sweetest Sound in any Language.^[1]

The examples in this chapter of how people interact when someone remembers their name aren’t directly applicable to WoW. After all, the name is right there beside whatever the person said, save for voice chat (which we’ll get into later).

The principle however is very applicable.  Remembering someones name isn’t hard, but remembering the associations and when to use someones name is.  I’d like to give four simple things you can do to bring the sweet sound of someones name to the people you play with.

#1

Don’t mangle names.  I realize that some people may create character names that just don’t roll off the tongue.  You’ll encounter the same situation in real life.  When you do, make an effort to pronounce it the way the person controlling the character does.  If you can’t even attempt a pronunciation, ask them to say it for you.

If it’s still hard, don’t fall into the fallacy of telling yourself “it’s just a made up name for a made up character in a made up world”.  You don’t know what stock someone puts into their characters.  Not everyone shares their real name in game, so their character name may be (to them) their sole identity when interacting with guildmates.  To dismiss someone else’s identity because you can’t be bothered to put in a little effort to learn and remember the proper pronunciation.

#2

Use names, not roles.  I’m not sure quite why, but in recent months it seems the trend has been to refer to someone by their role or class name in heroics.  For the four and a half years prior, everyone seemed to use other people’s names, shortening them to three or four characters when necessary.

Today, it’s “tank this” and “priest that”.  Personally, I hate it.  I am the person behind my character, not the role or class I play.

When raiding, you’ll often hear the names of specific tanks or healers called out.  Especially in a 25 person guild, it’s all too easy for the DPS to just get lumped into one big group, save for people who may have a specific job to perform like kiting or interrupting.  It’s not feasible to call out everyone every raid, but try to mention people by name, even if the role they perform seems interchangeable.

#3

Respect people’s name choices.  I remember one guild I was in where it took three months for the guild leader to stop calling me by the name of my alt.  He’d met me while I was playing my priest, but continued to use that name even after I switched to the MT role on Karatheya.

This is a perfectly natural thing to do, if sometimes confusing for others to follow.  You tend to tie your mental representation of people in-game to the character you first met them on.  So long as this is the character they consider their “main” identity (which may or may not be their “main” character), that’s fine.

If there’s a disconnect and someone asks to be called by a specific name, try to respect that choice.  Continually forgetting whose alt belongs to who and addressing the alt of a long-time member as if they were someone new subtley says “you’re not important enough for me to remember who you are”.  Forget that the real reason may be “I just have a bad memory” – you’re concerned about the perception here.

#4

Voice chat is a wonderful thing, but it brings a whole new challenge to remember names.  Repetition is key here – just try to put in the effort rather than dismissing it.  To not put in the effort sends the same subtle negative message as above.

There are perfectly legitimate ways to cheat here.  If you have certain keyboards with LCD displays (Logitech’s G-series do this, as may others) Ventrilo can tell you who is talking on that display.  Ventrilo also has a built-in overlay which is not enabled by default.  Prior to the release of Ventrilo 3, there was a  third-party program to do the same thing that was much less intrusive, but I’m not sure if it still works with 3.x.  Those of you who use Teamspeak or Murmur, perhaps you can suggest ways of getting the same effect in those voice clients.

Remembering someone’s name when they don’t expect you to, or getting their name right when you’ve been mangling it for weeks may seem like a small thing to you, but you never know how much it may mean to someone else.

Next thursday, we’ll cover chapter 3: “An Easy Way to Become a Good Conversationalist”.

This article is part of the series “How To Win /friends and Influence /guildies”. See the introduction for more.

^{[1] Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People. (1936), pp.87}

Related posts:

• How to Win /friends and Influence /guildies
• Gear Grinding
• Battle.Net Nerdrage Part 1

I can’t seem to peg reader response to my articles.  The ones I’m most proud of get no comments, and the rushed ones get a conversation rolling within hours of going up.

A friend tells me that those rushed articles expose my human side.  When I explain (in my best Lich King / Dr. Claw voice^[1]) that I have no human side, she just glares at me (like Smiling, this also works virtually) and calls me a dork.

So, let’s try another open question about fixing things and see if her theory holds.

Let’s say that you have the power to change one annoying thing about being a guild leader. You wish it, and it’s changed forever. Again, it could be mechanical or social (and possibly, though not likely contractual).

What’s that one thing that you have to deal with as a leader that gets under your skin? It could be something that happens occasionally that sets you off, or a daily chore that you smile your way through because you know it’s what the guild needs from you.

Me? Convincing people to stick it out when recruitment leaves us unable to raid for a week. I’d love to be in a strict 10 person guild, but experience has taught me that the threshold between having not enough, just enough and too many people is too thin. As little as three people can be the difference between raiding and canceling.

If any two members are linked (such that one would leave if the other did), this becomes even harder. One person leaves for whatever reason. Their friend bails too. Now you find yourself unable to raid, and people get antsy. As a guild leader, I take the long view. Members often don’t. After one or two weeks of called raids, it’s not uncommon for people to start heading to greener pastures, and then your recruiting job becomes even harder.

So I’d wish for my members to take the long view as well. To understand that building a solid raid team with such tight thresholds is always going to go through periods of instability. The only way to even out these periods is to have so many people on the roster that you’re constantly sitting people, which can snowball into it’s own set of problems.

So that’s my wish. How about you?

[1] Seriously, try saying “I charge you now with the cleansing of Zul’Drak, Drakuru” then “I’ll get you next time, Gadget, next time!”. I can’t tell mine apart.

Related posts:

• Remember People’s Names
• [LFG] [Foobar:70] LF any Level 70 Raid
• Reboot

Articles (some of them shorter than normal I’ll grant) are queued up to be posted on the normal days, but I won’t have Internet access to respond to comments.

Enjoy, and I’ll try to respond upon my return.

Related posts:

• A Few Changes
• 75k Gold in Three Months
• Unwanted Attention