43. Blizzard's Second Mistake

Concept Art for Thaddius
Copyright © Activision/Blizzard

Raiding Under Duress

I was wound up like a Warp-Spring Coil.

We had been making a concerted effort to wrap up Heroic: Glory of the Raider before the patch obliterated any remaining opportunity. The entire raiding landscape had changed, and we were now accustomed to the changes Blizzard had implemented. In days gone past, we would spend weeks and weeks on a single boss, practicing a mechanic, wiping, running back, repeating the process. All of that was gone. Now, an entire instance could be cleared in an evening. And, unlike many of the despondent players who felt raiding was now a lost cause, we had deciphered the subtext to establish purpose -- it was no longer about clearing an instance, but about the way in which you cleared it. Do it normally, and you impress no one. You get in, you see the content, you get out...end of story. Do it under extreme conditions, however, and the prestige of achievements, mounts, and titles will rain down on you, restoring the glory you once attained in Vanilla or TBC. So it was written by Blizzard, this would be the way in which raiding could be delivered to both the casual and the hardcore. We got the message, loud and clear. We embraced it.

But while the "new way" was a realistic solution to reducing the difficulty curve of raids, while at the same time retaining a degree of challenge and accomplishment associated with raiding, Blizzard's implementation fell short on this initial pass. In order to achieve this aforementioned glory, a shopping list of meta achievements had been provided to us. Scratching each one off the list meant we were closer to cooking up the final masterpiece; each item pushing our team to play harder, more disciplined, more efficiently. These meta achievements would combine like an 80's Transformer to form a mega ultra-achievement, which would devastate any who would challenge our ability.

But the recipe wasn't entirely accurate. There were a few rogue ingredients on that shopping list.

In an attempt to provide us with a finite list of meta achievements to challenge our raid team, Blizzard asked us to break our raid team apart. The goal was to test our mettle under duress -- could we pull it off with less DPS and less heals? While their intent was clear and execution was straightforward, these achievements had the side-effect of reducing our time on The Immortal, an achievement we'd need all 25 players present for. Neither of these obstacles would've been a huge concern, except for the fact that that Blizzard also decided to implement a hard deadline on Heroic: Glory of the Raider, stripping it (and its rewards) from even being attempted once 3.1 launched. To add insult to injury, this achievement would be a test that was realistic in theory, but unrealistic in practice, as it wouldn't take into consideration failures of a technical nature: computer lock-ups, server instances becoming unavailable, internet provider latency, and bugs in various boss mechanics.

Most importantly, The Immortal had severe social impact on the player that failed it. Humans make mistakes.  While each player has his or her own accountability to consider for, the ramifications of failure were dire. I took a small amount of pride in the fact that Descendants of Draenor strove to raise the bar in how we treated one another, but under the stress of continual mistakes week after week on something so subject to chance, even we were not immune to losing our tempers and pointing fingers. In a game that was equally dependent upon skill as it was on social interaction, it amazed me that the ramifications of Blizzard's design seemed to not consider for social impact. It was as if they assumed all guilds worked together in complete harmony, patting each other on the back after stumbling, cheering each other up after every failed attempt, every mistake.

Blizzard had an incredible amount of insight into the big picture of the game, so why did they seem to have no insight into the big picture of how people interact while playing it?

Concept Art for Thaddius
Copyright © Activision/Blizzard

The Late Buff

It happened during Thaddius.

I wish I could tell you that it was a blur. That memories were hazy. They were neither. I remember with vivid, painful clarity the events that unfolded that evening, the night I was responsible for botching The Immortal. Hours earlier I had updated an add-on, DoTimer, which I watched for buffs and debuffs. It apparently didn't matter that Deadly Boss Mods blasted a gigantic alert across the middle of the screen, telling me that polarities had changed -- I was hyper focused on my DoTimer buff / debuff window. I'd even go so far as to say I was tunnel visioning onto that debuff window. And for reasons that escape me, DoTimer chose to handle debuffs differently that evening -- and the blame rested solely on my shoulders. In a moment of confusion, when the debuff didn't show up in the exact place on my screen I expected it to, I panicked. All other extraneous data had been long since tuned out. It didn't matter that there was a Deadly Boss Mod alert blaring away, flashing the warning that I had gained a new polarity and needed to shift my position.

Oh, I figured it out on my own...about a half-second too late.

The mixed polarities lept from me to my group, killing a caster in the process. I yelled out into Vent in frustration and anger, "It was late! It was a late buff!!"

In that instant, I'd sealed my fate. My quote would be chiseled into the plaque at the base of my toon's statuette, a trophy to follow me and my great accomplishments for as long as we raided together. Bosses whose names we'd not yet learned would kill me with great pleasure, and I would die from making a split-second decision too late. And each and every time I fell over dead, I would be sure to hear a round of laughter after a player repeated back to me that fateful quote.

"Ah, Hanzo. Don't worry about it. It was a late one!"

This was my reward for attempting to push my raid team to perform at their peak and be proud of what they accomplished together. It had nothing to do with them. It had everything to do with me.

Mature assists members of Descendants of Draenor
with the completion of "Subtraction" (10-Man),
Naxxramas

Getting a Spanking

When Blizzard sits down and designs their game, they possess a level of knowledge and insight into the mechanics of the game far beyond that of a player; the evidence is all around us: on forum posts, at BlizzCon Q & A sessions, even on public blog rants. Players complain about misunderstood mechanics and bizarre design decisions, which ultimately translate to how they feel they're not being treated fairly. A player will never possess this level of insight. They'll only have their own observations and DPS simulations to guide them; a narrow pinhole casting a miniature shadow onto the landscape. This shadow fades further when fueled by a player's own emotions and how the game makes them feel. When they win, they feel great -- losing (unsurprisingly) has the opposite effect.

But what separates the wheat from the chaff is how a player deals with loss. Today, it's common just to jump on the forums and spew opinion as fact to justify why a player feels unfairly treated. Real gamers, however, don't put up with losses. They push another quarter into the machine and go again. They don't give up, they don't make excuses, they just keep going until they win. Practice makes perfect, after all. Blizzard should know this, because they are gamers themselves; they make the kind of game they would want to play. So, they should know that nothing frustrates a gamer more than taking the controller away, like a parent punishing a child for being on "the Nintendo" too long. Removing the achievement was a leather belt across the bare ass that Blizzard had no business delivering.

The design of The Immortal was rife with problems. Technical failures aside, the approach of an all-or-nothing raid execution was short-sighted on Blizzard's part. Randomness exists in games; Blizzard knows this and they also know that statistics dictate random events will generate streaks over time. Just as a guild complains they are seeing the same loot over and over, so too, can a guild be the victim of streaks of bad luck in boss mechanics and execution. Judging a raid team on their "luck with a streak of random shit", the achievement itself isn't a measure of raid skill at all, but rather, how lucky a raid team is with that week's  roll of the dice. Misinterpreting what the achievement was qualifying and insisting that it remain a meta for Glory, and then removing our ability to continue to plug away at it...was Blizzard's Second Mistake. And, like their first mistake, they never repeated this again.

Could we have done it, given a bit more time? Perhaps. We had a number of players execute the 10-man equivalent, The Undying (myself included), but the degree of randomness was reduced -- as are many raid mechanics when lowered to 10-man quality. Bosses don't have as much health, don't hit as hard, fights don't last as long -- ultimately, there is less time to die.

Do I feel an achievement like The Immortal belongs in World of Warcraft? Oh, absolutely! Raiders need things to strive for, to achieve, badges to wear as they march down the streets of their respective home city. But should it be representative of a set of 25-Man raiding achievements, all of which are a reflection on the cohesiveness of the team?

No.

The Immortal stands alone, apart from the metas which comprise a "Glory" achievement, reflecting a player's capacity to get a good roll of the dice one week. A week in which no single player in their raid suffers no server instance crashes, has no add-on changes to adjust to, experiences no internet outages, has no cat jump onto their keyboard, or has to raid the night they're sick with the stomach flu, turning away from a heal just long enough to blow chunks into a bucket sitting beneath their keyboard tray.

In theory, players should never have any technical problems or experience any random events of chance that a split-second error in judgement ends in the failure of their entire team.

In reality...people die.

42. Blowing The Immortal

"4DK" by Xia Jie (jiejie)

Embracing the Motto

Word began to leak out that 3.1 was targeted for the beginning of April. One achievement remained in order to claim Heroic: Glory of the Raider -- The Immortal. It posed a challenge unlike any we'd faced thus far, one that didn't involve any special mechanics on an individual boss. Instead, it assessed the entire team's survivability for the duration of the raid.

Defeat every boss in Naxxramas on a single raid lock without allowing a single player to die.

The Immortal levied a brutal tax on raiding guilds. At first glance, it seemed like the perfect way to qualify the synergy of a raid team. If you were truly the best-of-the-best, executing a full clear without losing a player should be par for the course. Raiding in Wrath had already significantly reduced the difficulty curve which made the viability of this achievement even more realistic. There was no excuse not to step up to the plate. Even the achievement's name itself mirrored the exact definition of our guild motto, coined by Ater in those early days back in Molten Core:

"If We Don't Die, We Win."

We owed it to ourselves to embrace the motto we strove to represent. Surveying Deathwing-US's landscape revealed that our progress was now tied with Enigma and Shadow Templars; Unbridled Apathy was also missing The Immortal, but lacked Malygos-in-6-minutes as well. We dug our heels in and got to work.

Initial attempts at The Immortal during the first few weeks were messy, no doubt due to having a reduced number of healers -- an unfortunate side-effect of the impetuous "less-than-21-players-present" metas. Zeliek's holy fire bouncing between too many individuals wrecked players as they collapsed onto him too quickly, heals unable to catch up. Reducing healing also didn't help when our raiders weren't mindful of their positioning during Kel'thuzad; a single mana bomb would take a group of clustered players out at once, or drop them so low that attempting to recover was a fruitless endeavor. When we weren't dealing with a lack of heals, buggy game mechanics offered us another excuse to fail by. On one particularly positive evening, Sapphiron's frost breath annihilated three players at once, all of whom were "protected" by Ice Blocks. It was clear that The Immortal shared an unfortunate design trait with certain bosses in our past where the fate of the team rested solely on an individual team member's shoulders; a design I've never been particularly fond of. And, as it had in our past, animosity was once again stirring among the team. Frustration would lead to finger-pointing, and our ugly side began to burst through the skin.

Reducing Resentment

Trends began to form, drawing intricate patterns of repeat offenders. One of my newest Elites, Bheer, a tried-and-true raider since the days of Vanilla, was now 0/2 having died both weeks and negating the achievement. He wasn't the only Elite offender. Ekasra and Omaric both died to Sapphiron, as did Cheeseus, the very same rogue I was grooming in preparation for raid lead, come 3.1. Officers weren't exempt from mistakes either. Dalans himself succumbed to Maexxna one night. In the hope of sculpting our raiding environment into a work of art, The Immortal was making our raiders look like a shapeless lump of clay.

To quell opportunities for resentment to brew among the team, we kept an open and honest discussion flowing on the forums, reiterating that players take accountability for their actions. I hammered the message home again and again: it's OK to make mistakes, just don't repeat them. The raid team flocked to the forum thread discussing The Immortal and examined their combat logs until they had nailed the exact cause of death. Each individual fight was broken down and examined to a degree of granularity I hadn't yet witnessed in my guild. They were discussing the min/maxxing down to individual talent point adjustments, theorycrafting health flasks vs. AP flasks, the difference of a plus-or-minus 1 healer, even adjusting glyphs between fights. They were tackling this challenge head-on like true gamers would. While the Battle.net forums ranted to Ghostcrawler about the unfairness of the Proto-Drakes being removed, my progression team had their attention turned inwards, the end goal in sight. It wasn't about making excuses, it was about finding any and every way possible to make the achievement happen.

One trick we employed early to increase our chances involved a little-known tidbit with Instructor Razuvious. We had already tailored our night to start with Razuvious for a specific reason: Of the four bosses we could potentially start Naxxramas off with, he posed the greatest risk of killing someone. But if things started poorly, we could call for a wipe on Razuvious, force everyone out of the instance, break up the raid, and then re-invite and re-enter which had the effect of resetting the instance. It was gimmicky, but as Blain had taught us years ago, in order to succeed we had to leverage all the tools available to us.

Facepalms

On week three, with 1% of health left on Razuvious, he broke free from our Priest's mind control, turned, and one-shot Cheeseus...the boss falling over dead as soon as the rogue hit the ground.

I remember staring at the screen in silence. An entire week, flushed in a split-second. Only fifteen minutes had passed since we had started the raid. The rage built up inside me enough to snap a keyboard in two. Not that it mattered, but that same evening, another Elite suffered a death during Thaddius, due to a computer lockup. It was bad enough that we had to demonstrate surgical precision to execute The Immortal, but now we had to deal with technical failures to which their was no adequate solution. If an idiot player can't figure out how to not die, you can bench them. But what do you do when you have a star performer die because their game locked up?

Nothing. You can do absolutely nothing.

By week four, we were done our less-than-21-players churn, built back to full strength. No more blaming a lack of heals. Time to get shit done. Everyone present was wide awake and aware that time was running out. We knew what we had to do; now, it was simply a matter of doing it. The raid evening started out reasonably well, executing Razuvious, then immediately shifting back to the Spider Wing. Our newest strategy: push The Four Horsemen to the beginning of night 2, so that everyone would be wide awake for it -- we'd suffered too many deaths on Zeliek from not being alert. As a result of this strategy, we were clearing Spider Wing on night 1. After defeating Anub'Rekhan, we moved into position to get set up for Grand Widow Faerlina. As we sat eating and buffing, Vent quieted down and the raid team started to focus in on the goal.

Don't die.

Win.

Suddenly, a lone tree-form began blissfully shuffling forward, a wide grin cut into its bark from ear-branch to ear-branch. It was headed directly for the Grand Widow.

"Oh, fuck!" someone yelled out in Vent, "Quick! Get heals on Lix!"

Too late.

A single chop from Faerlina's sword twisted the tiny tree into a pile of kindling at her feet. Hearing a rush of kids playing behind her, Lix had hopped up from her computer and closed her door to prevent distractions, inadvertently bumping her move-forward key in the process. Sitting back down only moments later, her heart sank as she saw her Druid laying dead in Faerlina's room, the raid already engaged with the boss...barking out strategy with a tone of disgust and disappointment.

By week five, the wind in our sails was slowly sweeping away. Unbridled Apathy had wrapped up The Immortal, sealing off any last opportunity to make a name for ourselves on the server during this first tier of Wrath raiding. Meanwhile, it was still business as usual as I struggled to find ways to keep the raiders focused and on task. Just get it done. Stop fucking up and making stupid mistakes. Now even I had problems keeping a positive mind and an objective outlook on the raid. I had been putting all of my energy into keeping the raiders calm, but there was nobody to reassure me in the process. My own anger and frustration got the best of me and wore me out. Those failed raid nights left me exhausted, as if I'd chopped a cord of tree-form wood myself. In the face of repeated adversity, we continued to lose steam and my patience wore thin...

...which is probably why I blew The Immortal that week.

41. Killing the Flautists

Mature and crew knock out the
10-Man version of "The Twilight Zone",
Obsidian Sanctum

Theory vs. Reality

Eleven minutes after Ghostcrawler announced to the audience that his favorite pastimes included long walks on the beach, drinking Gin, and nerfing Paladins, a gamer addressed the panel of developers seated at the front of the auditorium. To her, the question was a legitimate concern; in her eyes, the design made made no sense and seemed illogical when scrutinized.

"It seems like some classes have to take PvP talents in order to reach the 31 point talent. Was this intentional? And if so...why?"

I picked up on her indignant tone and continued to listen, flanked by several members of Descendants of Draenor to my left and right. I knew where this was headed, but was intrigued by how Blizzard would respond.

Ion Hazzikostas leaned towards the mic and asked in return, "Can you give us an example of what you would consider a PvP talent?"

She stumbled a moment, flipping through the multitude of talent pages in her head, trying to zero in on an example worthy of this complaint.

"Shamans. The talent, I believe, that lets them take less...magic damage?"

Ion was quick to respond, "True, but isn't that useful in PvE? Essentially, if you aren't tanking, all the damage that you take...whether it be in a 5-man dungeon or in a raid...is going to be magic damage." He expounded on this by digging deep into Blizzard's changing philosophy of choice vs. "false" choice of talent specs in the next expansion, but the gamer was unsatisfied with this answer, and pushed Ion further.

"But as a caster, in some of those cases, you really shouldn't be getting hit anyway. There are the area-of-effects that are constantly going on, but in some cases, there's really no reason for you to be getting hit."

I leaned over to Goldenrod and whispered, "What, you've never made a mistake before?" He smiled back in agreement. Who was she trying to convince? Blizzard...or herself?

Ion's response summed up my thoughts exactly, "In an ideal world, none of these things would be needed. In an ideal world, an ability like combat rez wouldn't be needed, because people wouldn't be dying. In reality...people die."

We joined in the applause as Ion's message hit home. The raiding community in World of Warcraft was especially tuned to the nuances of reality when setting foot in Azeroth; we'd had everything but the kitchen sink thrown at us, damage wise. We'd suffered fire damage from Ragnaros, Shadow Flames from Nefarian, damage from pools of lava, void zones, arcane explosions, bombs, even weapons without owners took a chunk of our health away. Taking damage was a fact of life in raiding, and to us, there was no need to stand in line at BlizzCon and burn a question about survivability prerequisites. The game was like that by design.

Yet questions of this nature are repeatedly posed by the community, each more suspiciously naive that the previous. They cement the notion that there are a massive amount of players in the community that are missing something.

Mature and crew knock out the 10-Man
version of "A Poke in the Eye",
The Eye of Eternity

The Big Picture

Blizzard has a window into the game that you and I will never see. Behind closed doors, they are able to extract data, analyze patterns, see trends rise and fall, and use this criteria to make thoughtful decisions about their changes moving forward. They have made mistakes in the past, but have been a reasonably noble company in admitting when they are wrong, and not repeating those mistakes...far more than many other equitable companies in the game industry. One of their first big mistakes they made -- the implementation of PvP and PvE rewards using the exact same visuals (during TBC) was never repeated again, nor was the brutally complex mechanics of a raid at entry-level, such as with the case with the original Magtheridon. We knew it was a logistical nightmare to co-ordinate, and this would've been fine for late-game. At entry level, however, it was an artificial road-block that was a bit heavy-handed. Blizzard acknowledged this, and the mistake was never repeated.

The WoW player base, however, seemed to be growing in the general direction of "complain first, solve later" as their approach in dealing with a part of the game they couldn't understand. This concept is foreign to a seasoned gamer. We thrill in the hunt, to figure the puzzle out on our own. Whether this trend in the community grew out of sheer volume (the player base had ballooned up to 11 million players worldwide, having been closer to 7 million during The Burning Crusade), or as a result of Ghostcrawler and his fellow blue posters becoming more responsive on the forums, I can't say for certain. But I knew I had a limited view into the Matrix, and the answer would reveal itself if I put forth the effort. Players often see WoW through their own jaded lenses, reflecting back the narrow picture of a world where things don't go their way.

They lack the big picture. And it fuels their rage.

So while the masses of players continued to stomp their feet when things didn't go their way, I opted to err on the side of giving Blizzard the benefit of the doubt when I came across a bewildering design decision. True, I've been a gamer my entire life, so I have a pretty good handle on what I think is fun. And thanks to my career, I like to think I understand the complexities of software development, granting me perspective into the long hours it takes to produce even the most basic game mechanics that players take for granted. But I'm still just a gamer. I'm not a professional game designer. I keep that in the back of my mind when a  particular piece of the game puzzles me, doesn't seem to make sense, doesn't seem to be balanced or fair. It's what gives me pause before I rush out and jump on the forums, claiming Blizzard is just a bunch of asshats. Instead, I take a step back and wonder,

What part of the picture don’t I have?

Mature continues to whore up achievements,
raising 15 reputations to Exalted,
Icecrown

Benched On Purpose

The first round of achievements Blizzard delivered to us at the start of Wrath were fantastic. They got our raiding juices flowing and challenged us to push it to the limit. The Twilight Zone was an especially great way to let us crank up the difficulty, based on our team makeup and level of commitment. If you wanted to jump straight into 3-drakes, Godspeed. For us, baby steps were our bread and butter, so it made more sense for us to twist the dials a little bit at a time. The beauty of the design was how each achievement tested us in each area. Buried beneath the clever puns and in-jokes in their titles lay quantifiers that validated your skill as a raid team. Can you figure out a way to inflate DPS beyond what your team's gear allows? How well can your team communicate and coordinate? Is your team disciplined enough to make excellent time? If your team ignored a mechanic that would otherwise make the boss unkillable, could you still do it? There were a wide variety of achievements Blizzard gave us to test the 25-Man Progression team's competency; we gladly stepped up and showed them we could do it.

When we whittled the majority of the meta-achievements away, I began to see a strange trend emerge. Among those achievements that remained, there lacked a certain focus around the accomplishments of the team. In fact, one might go so far as to say those raiding achievements appeared to test how well a team didn't work together. Subtraction, The Dedicated Few, and A Poke in the Eye all required us to bring no more than 20 players to the instance. At first, I explained away their odd requirements as an exercise in competency under duress. Less players meant less DPS, less heals. Enrage timers would be tighter. Mana pools would be thinned. Each contributor would have to min/max to a much greater degree. Per my modus operandi, I sided with Blizzard and justified the design of the achievements. Putting a tiny bit of thought into Blizzard’s intent granted me the satisfaction of believing I understood their design.

Persuading the team of that intent was a different story entirely.

The raiders were less than enthusiastic about sitting on the bench in order to accomplish these achievements. I made it clear: these metas were a minor inconvenience, yet very necessary for the ultimate goal of achieving Heroic: Glory of the Raider. Everyone would be given an opportunity to churn through so that we all could claim it in our toons. I did my best to convince them, but as I continued to deal with the drama of players being uncomfortable sitting out, I began to question who I was trying to convince...the raiders, or myself?

Even though we were a guild whose ideals dictated that a team was a sum greater than its parts, I was still only months into the reboot of the guild. The past still lingered, and individual insecurities managed to squeeze out of the raiders' pores once we revealed the raider rotations for first shot at these metas.

"Why do I have to wait until week three?", they'd ask me in private.

God. Does it matter? We’re all going to get it done. But to them...it mattered. Self-doubt lingered in my avoidance in addressing their concern. Maybe they weren't as valuable as they originally thought. Maybe the clarity of my new rank system, denoting Raiders as general purpose, and Elite as star-performers wasn't as transparent as intended. Maybe after building up their self-esteem and making them believe they were better than they gave themselves credit for...these rotations spoke the cruel truth to them.

...or maybe they were reading too much into it.

I was annoyed. For Blizzard to ask us to chop our team up in order to prove they were capable was blatantly contradictory. I'd assembled a complete orchestra of players to perform, and was then instructed to kill the entire flute section, while the audience still expected a symphony. Quantifying a raid team's skill under duress could have been accomplished a number of ways: increasing the boss's health, inflating the boss's damage, hitting our healers with a raid-wide debuff that inhibited their heals...the list goes on. And in typical Blizzard fashion, they would acknowledge that this design was faulty -- that they had rushed into giving us this first round of achievements without the proper foresight. Blizzard never again asked us to leave players behind in order to accomplish great raiding feats of strength.

For the time being, however, the damage was done. In order to churn a reduced number of raiders through the instances so that everyone could claim Heroic: Glory of the Raider, we lost valuable weeks working on what would come to epitomize a fundamental lack of insight into achievement design -- an achievement that had great aspirations, yet very dire ramifications in its reckless implementation:

The Immortal.

40. The First Elites

Newcomer Abrinis joins a handful of his guildmates
in Zul'Gurub (20-Man) during Vanilla

Homogenization

There's not much you can get wrong in a glass of milk. As a kid, you poured it on your cereal; perhaps later on in life, you drank it for the reported calcium benefits. Wherever you went in life, if they didn't have your drink of choice, at least you knew what you were getting if you asked for milk. The various brands of milk differ more in label than they do in flavor. Grab a gallon off the shelf at the grocery store -- any brand and all -- and you’re pretty much guaranteed the same taste and texture. Milk is milk, what else can you say about it? So when it comes time to reach for the jug, the only thing that really separates one from another is brand loyalty. You stick with the brand you know because you've always bought it; second-guessing your decisions only adds anxiety to a normal, consistent life. But milk is only consistent because of homogenization, a process that prevents the cream separating from the skim. The cream is special. People see it as a luxury; milk in your coffee is plain, but cream...that's a taste reserved for those who appreciate the finer things in life.

Throughout Vanilla and The Burning Crusade, our raid team was not unlike a glass of milk.

The players that were poured into our raid team were a mixture of all different talents and styles, of varying degrees in skill and play. But without a system to incentivize players, to excel and be acknowledged for that excellence, we sat on the shelf of our server's grocery store and stagnated. We appeared no different than the brand any other guild sold. Creating a hierarchical structure of ranks in DoD served two purposes. One: it gave the individual players in my raiding roster an opportunity to rise to the top, rewarding them with pellets as they continued to pound the lever. Equally important, it allowed me to skim that cream off the top and place it on Deathwing-US's shelf for sale. If my hunch played out, that cream of my raiding roster would turn the heads of those wandering the grocery store aisle of guilds, looking for that richness in flavor that was presently absent in their lives...and raiding careers.

My job was to make sure the centrifuge spun as fast as possible, and skim the cream as soon as it surfaced.

An early shot of Jungard, along with the 25-Man
 Progression Team, after the defeat of Anetheron,
Hyjal Summit, Caverns of Time

Predictions and Surprises

We often attracted two types of raiding recruits to Descendants of Draenor. The first bucket of players were battle-worn and exhausted; ex-hardcore raiders who prided themselves on server-firsts in Sunwell and Naxxramas (40-Man), but for one reason or another, couldn't maintain that lifestyle anymore. Perhaps their hardcore raiding days were during College, but with degree in hand, it was time to knuckle down and punch the 9-to-5. Perhaps it was more appropriate to game into all hours of the night when your significant other was simply the “boyfriend” -- but now that he was the "husband", it was time to get some priorities straight. Maybe the only thing that changed was the addition of a kid to the picture...perhaps it was none of these things. It may very well have simply been a conscious decision to strike a better balance in life. Whatever the case may be, I was not there to judge, but to simply welcome in. I'd offer an alternative to the abusive demands of hardcore raiding, and guarantee seeing some progression. Cheeseus was a good example of this type of a recruit. He had a taste for cream and was uninterested in the peasantry of milk.

The other type of recruit we attracted was that of a player who felt constrained by their current conditions. The kind of player that felt they could be so much more, but were surrounded by excuse-makers: Facerollers clinging to pathetic justifications for their incompetence like a broken-record.

It's a challenge to strive for greatness when you are surrounded by mediocrity.

Guilds comprised of trolls seemed bent on perpetrating the notion that because World of Warcraft was "just a game", it was OK be a moron. While those guilds were busy starting and ending every sentence with "lol", our prospective recruits were alt-tabbed and hitting the virtual pavement, researching their class and boss mechanics -- trying to squeeze that last bit of DPS out. But with no one to act as a mentor, to guide them through the twisted raiding path of right and wrong, their own motivation to excel only got them so far. They needed a new lesson in raiding. We'd be the ones to step to the front of the class for them.

The first Elite promotions went to individuals that fell into this latter category. Abrinis and Jungard were a pair of Warriors that had become a staple in our raiding roster for many months. Abrinis, first recruited by Annihilation when he oversaw the Warriors, had an affinity for sports and would often be spotted discussing Basketball scores with Ben and Neps in guild chat. He was otherwise quiet, but also prolific with his alts, ever eager to help out a 5-man or a quest, and he'd have an alt specific to the role you needed to have filled. When it came time to raid, however, it was down to brass tacks on his Undead Warrior. Abrinis consistently topped the meters with Fury DPS, and I could always expect to see him signed up for next week's raid. It came as no surprise that when a fresh face known as Jungard entered the scene near the start of our Hyjal work in TBC, Abrinis took him under wing and trained him up to be equally effective wielding two weapons. The pair soon grew to challenge each other come raid night; a battle to see which Warrior could claim dominance on the meters. Pushing each other to rise to the top produced the pleasant side-effect of consistently high melee DPS. Their efforts were well-deserving of the Elite title.

The next Elite promotion was a surprise: Ekasra, the bullied Shaman from TBC who took my place when I retired Kerulak to raid as a Shadow Priest. Ekasra had struggled to find a place in DoD throughout TBC, and the weight on his shoulders was heavy. Not only did he have to fill the shoes of the guild leader who had come out of the 40-Man healing core from Vanilla, he struggled to gain any respect from his peers. Ekasra's raiding mistakes were exacerbated by his tendency to ebb the bullies on in return, rather than ignore them. Ekasra approached me at the start of Wrath, still wanting to demonstrate his value and be accepted by the team, asking for my advice. I was blunt: shelf the Shaman; you're intrinsically wired for a different role. Look at what appeals to you in a different raiding department, and then embrace it. He took my advice, and in the wake of Ekasra came Nestonia the Warlock. Nestonia not only wrecked the damage meters, he dominated them, even giving the Warlock officer Eacavissi a run for his money. Coincidentally, he whined a little less, joked a little more, and before I knew it, he had officers recommending him for promotion -- officers that, during TBC, wouldn't even speak his name. For him to be among the first Elite promotions was a proud moment.

A random Shaman in WoW,
boasting the default keybindings (1-9,0, -, =)

Wax On, Wax Off

The fourth and final promotion to Elite that I issued out in my first round was another surprise. He was a player I've not mentioned too much thus far, but had also been with DoD since TBC -- a Restoration Shaman by the name of Mcflurrie. Originally named Deathflurry, he joined progression at the same time we suffered overabundance of players whose name began with the word "Death". To reduce the confusion of raid calls in Ventrilo, he opted to change his name, a pretty good indicator of someone willing to do whatever it took to improve. What makes Mcflurrie’s story inspiring was his hunger to grow, and how the most seemingly obvious roadblocks are often right in front of our faces.

Mcflurrie's issue was healing effectiveness and survivability. He felt like he couldn't push his play any further, but still suffered from "playing with blinders" -- a common affliction among healers too focused on their whack-a-mole addon, and not focused enough on the environmental damage blanketing them in flames. One evening following a Serpentshrine Cavern raid, he pulled me into a private vent channel.

"I just feel like I'm not as mobile as I could be. And when I get moving, I can't heal really well, or end up dying."

"Playing with blinders?", I asked rhetorically.

"...Yeah."

"Take a screenshot of your UI and send it to me."

Moments passed, then came the ding of my email alerting me of a new message. I pulled up his screen and began examining where he placed his healing mods, his unit frames, what his field-of-view was like.

And then, I noticed them.

The action bars held all of a player's abilities, lined up in a horizontal row along the bottom of the screen. In each bar, twelve divots. Resting in each divot, a square icon that represented the spell that would cast when clicked or having its key binding pressed. But most importantly, in the upper-right corner of each icon, a tiny white symbol...either or a number, letter, or punctuation mark...that represented the key binding assigned to the spell. All at once, his problem was as crystal clear as the waters of a Moonwell.

"How are your keys set up?"

I knew the answer, but wanted him to say it.

"Oh, well...I’m just using the default layout."

"So, you're hitting the numbers keys along the top for healing? 1, 2, 3...etc...all along the top of the keyboard?"

"Yep, that works pretty well for me."

"Can you reach all your spells while you move? Or do you have to lift your hand up off the keyboard to reach the spell you want."

Silence followed.

"Try running forward right now, and while you continue to run forward, I want you to cast a Greater Healing Wave without lifting your left-hand up off the keyboard."

A little more silence followed that. Then,

"I...I can't. I have to lift my hand up."

"We're going to change that. Right now."

I spelled it all out for Mcflurrie, that painful truth that he was crippling his abilities by forcing himself to awkwardly look away from the screen, lift his hand off the keyboard to reach for a spell...ugh. I had flashbacks of Battleguard Sartura and the day I changed my karate stance. I told Mcflurrie it was going to be painful to re-learn from scratch. It was. Like me, it took a few weeks to re-program, to be able to react to the demands thrust upon a healer. But he got it. He sweated through the re-programming, and was soon  reaching for spells and moving at the same time, instinctively. His play improved, and this introduction to key binding customization pushed him even further to explore mouse-over macros -- something that wasn't available to me in Vanilla. Eventually he was shooting me tells mid-raid, "“I can't believe how much easier this is!" The rest, they say, is history. His reward for that tremendous growth: Mcflurrie became our fourth Elite, closing out the first batch of promotions.

--

The cream was now on the shelf. Potentials buyers were out there...but would they bite? The careful, meticulous restructuring of my guild's ranks produced a team unlike any I had before -- one comprised of both casual raiders that were motivated to play like professionals, and hardcore elites, the backbone that would drive progression week-to-week. Finally, I felt like I had nailed the perfect balance of player willing to work together to accomplish great things.

It’s unfortunate, then, that in order to demonstrate our ability to work together as a team, Blizzard forced us to stick a fork directly into it.

39. Cream

"WoW - Malygos", by Wynahiros

Wringing Out the Sponge

We had no idea when 3.1 would hit. Blizzard was very good at keeping release dates hush-hush, for fear of the community flying into a rage when a date was missed. All we knew was that time was running out, and when it had, Heroic: Glory of the Raider would no longer be attainable; the coveted Black Proto-Drake would be removed as a reward, forever left as a symbol of its rarity and the skill of the player whom rode on its back. By this point, no Horde guild on Deathwing-US had completed Heroic: Glory of the Raider. Depraved and Enigma were tied with three remaining: You Don’t Have an Eternity, Gonna Go When the Volcano Blows, and The Immortal. When all was said and done, seventeen meta-achievements needed completion.

Wrapping up The Twilight Zone brought our running total to ten. The work we had done prior to 3-Drake was inconsequential compared to what lay ahead, however. First on that list was killing Patchwerk in under 3 minutes, which we managed to complete the very same day we executed Shocking!, ensuring that no two players crossed a positive and negative charge on Thaddius. The next raid weekend was You Don't Have an Eternity, which forced us to kill Malygos in under 6 minutes -- we barely pulled this off by the skin of our teeth. We employed every trick we could think of to wring the DPS sponge dry. The secret? Forcibly stacking Malygos’ powers sparks for a multiplicative damage buff. My role in this was wielding the Death Knight's ability to pull an enemy (be it monster or power spark) to my location. Once "death gripped" to our feet, melee would blow the spark up, stand in the magical residue left behind, and gain arcane infused attacks. We stacked the buff onto all of our DPS, depleting the azure dragon's health at an increased rate, and were able to make the six-minute mark.

During the day, I'd discuss the state of the raiding situation with Cheeseus, having been newly promoted to the rank of Avatar. Since joining DoD, his affinity toward raiding with precision was common knowledge. What wasn't as well known was that he'd approached me with an offer: assume Raid Leadership and be the single voice that guides the 25-Man progression team to greater prestige. He was only a few months into his guild membership; officership seemed premature. Via Avatar, however, he could give us commentary on raid management, proving his worth to the others. Our weekdays were a combination of chats surrounding achievement order and priority, upcoming Elite promotions, and the state of raid progression on Deathwing-US, as other guilds closed in on Heroic: Glory of the Raider. The task before me was this: Wring every ounce of efficiency out of the team like a sponge being crushed in a vice. I'd do this by making our goals crystal clear, foster raiding discourse on our forums (as we'd done with The Twilight Zone), and pour the concrete into our raiding foundation by acknowledging the shining stars of DoD: Awarding the first Elite ranks.

It was report card time.

The Straight A Student

The Elite rank was a brand new concept I implemented at the start of Wrath of the Lich King. I took the name from a guild I'd long admired for their professional-quality approach to raiding and a commitment to sharing thoughtful, intelligent discussion surrounding raid mechanics. A hardcore raiding guild had the luxury of demanding everyone be committed to a fixed (and often overzealous) schedule, expecting everyone be present for multiple nights throughout the week. Descendants of Draenor did not have that luxury. We needed to make allowances for all types of schedules and levels of commitment. I accomplished this by creating the Raider rank, which clearly defined a baseline set of expectations that a guildy needed to meet in order to be considered for a rotation. This would ensure players wouldn't walk into The Eye of Eternity wearing unenchanted green gear with empty sockets. The downside to the Raider rank was that by not asking a player to commit to a schedule, I couldn't grant them a guaranteed spot in each raid. Minimal commitment equals minimal reward, after all. For many players, the Raider ranked worked well for them. They could come and go as they pleased, and understood that not all raids they signed up for would be given to them -- they were fine with the trade-offs.

But for those who wanted more, Elite beckoned them.

In contrast to Raider, Elite had high expectations. I wanted you to make me believe that raid progression was your priority. With the Raider rank already acquired, you needed to prove you could meet Elite-quality scheduling commitments, signing-up (and showing up) for each of the two raid nights a week -- for a solid month -- without fail. Raiders were free to cancel their raid sign-ups, as RL (“real-life”) dictated their schedules, but if you wanted Elite, I didn't want to see any cancellations. I also didn't want any Elite players that held real-life commitments that involved a unpredictable, fluctuating schedule. If you were deployed to Iraq to serve our country, I’d be proud to call you a fellow guild member...but your deployment would cripple our progression team. Everyone's priorities had to be weighed fairly, and for Elite, I needed the highest level of commitment to the raid that a player could provide. The mistakes of cattledriving throughout TBC would not be repeated.

Once the prerequisites to Elite had been hit, the next step was to assess your proficiency in a number of categories:

• Activity on Forums
• Contributions to the Guild Vault
• Guild Spirit
• Attitude
• Gear Pride
• PvE Performance

From A to F, I'd go down the list and make an assessment of your contributions to Descendants of Draenor. Were you providing thoughtful, meaningful discussion to our boards? Did you give us much as you took from our guild vault? Were you proud of the guild you called home, and acted with our ideals on a regular basis? Were you a positive, driving force behind the raid team, preaching our goals which prioritized progression over loot? And when loot did come your way, did you take pride in keeping it enchanted and gemmed, tweaked to its maximum potential? And, above all, did you walk-the-walk, and demonstrate excellence in our raids? A raider might strive to top damage or healing meters, but an Elite would know there's much more to consider for: awareness, survivability, team preservation (decursing, contributing to adds, etc.). Did you make these your focus, rather than brag about being #1 in Recount?

Score poorly, and you'd be sent back to refine your efforts. Bring home straight As, however, and you'd guarantee yourself a set of proud parents who would shower you with gifts.

Wemetanye shows off his Azure Drake,
outside of The Eye of Eternity,
Coldarra

Elitist Perks 

In my opinion, the kickbacks to earning Elite were well worth the effort. The re-structured guild vault, now categorized by herbs for raiding flasks, material components for enchants, glyphs, stat-specific food buffs, and uncut gems, would now boast increased withdrawal access for your convenience. Furthermore, we'd extend a bit of trust your way, allowing you into the vault tabs where you yourself could take raw components and craft them into the aforementioned raiding materials.

Act like an adult, and I would treat you like one. 

The Guild Vault would also now pay for your repairs; a slick way of taking the edge off your raiding budget. We'd take this a step further, and subsidize your talent respecs as well, easing these monetary demands on your dedication to wiping repeatedly as we learned new bosses. On our forums, you'd become a moderator, gaining the fringe benefits associated with curating our guild commentary. But above all this fluff, these nice-to-haves that certainly would raise the eyebrow of an enticed player, the most important perk came in the form of a raid rotation priority. The players who were focused on raid progression above all else did so because of a core need they wished to satisfy: to be present at all raids.

Earn Elite, and I'd chisel your weekly raid rotation into stone.

All of these perks gave our players the ability to contribute how they wanted, Raiders contributing a little, Elites contributing a lot. By doing so, I defined a clear hierarchy in the guild ranks which differentiated between varying degrees of contribution. I think this is often misunderstood by critics who feel everyone should be treated equally. Let me be perfectly clear: I treated everyone in Descendants of Draenor equally -- I equally rewarded each player's contribution to the guild which matched their level of involvement. If I had rewarded both Raiders and Elites -- essentially, different levels of effort -- with the same perks, the opposite would be true -- I would not be treating everyone equally. Rewarding different levels of effort the same leads to animosity and dissent, jackhammers drilling away at my raiding foundation.

In running the numbers on our first qualifying Elites, a few were not surprising, one definitely raised an eyebrow.

And one completely caught me off-guard.

38. The Next Raid Leader

The 25-Man Progression team hovers
near Alexstrasza after defeating Malygos in
The Eye of Eternity

Cheesy Conversations

I thrived on predictability, and the morning ritual fell into just such a rhythm. I’d leave the house around 6:45am with my son and daughter packed into the car, heading four-and-a-half miles south toward 6th and Clermont. I opted to go by way of Monaco Parkway, as Colorado Boulevard was often thick with congestion. After the kids were hugged and left at their school, I looped back to Monaco, and drove another eleven miles, doing an easy 55mph through residential areas. The stresses of I-25 were bypassed in this process, and it gave me time to think. I’d arrive at the office, get settled in with a cup of coffee, begin reviewing work E-mails for the day. Keen on multitasking, I’d fire up Chrome (having only been released as a new browser a few months prior), and load up MMO-Champion.com, the Descendants of Draenor forums, our raid sign-up site (powered by phpRaider). And to wrap up the morning ritual, I’d fire up my IM client, Pidgin, which allowed me to keep connected to a number of networks at once, in this case, a combination of ICQ, MSN, Yahoo! and Google chat. As soon Pidgin loaded, the morning ritual was officially complete, as the ‘pang’ of the first instant message arrived:

9:07 AM Cheeseus: Morning.
me: Morning
Cheeseus: What a fucking weekend, eh
me: Yeah, that was bizarre. We just barely squeeked out Maly6

Cheeseus and I had fallen into a regular pattern of communication. Separated by a distance of about 1,700 miles, I in the Rocky Mountains where John Denver made his home, and he in the cold north of Canada where I spent the first 20 years of my life, we worked. While I built web applications designed for oncologists to stay atop their accreditation, Cheeseus would prepare intricate, isometric schematics of gigantic oil rigs which construction teams would read and fabricate. Our lines of work fell into two vastly different areas, but both required us to apply our expertise so that people could consume without confusion. Physicians are widely known as a type of user that struggles with technology (ironically), any unfriendly forms or error messages will frustrate them and turn them away. I worked with my team to tread carefully through this minefield and make our website as easy to traverse as possible. Likewise, technical clients wanting to construct a massive derricks pepper their blueprints with extraneous and often confusing detail, lacking knowledge of standards. Cheeseus similarly worked with his team to unclutter these details, stripping away ambiguous terminology, refining the blueprint until it was up to his company’s high standards: easy to read, easy to follow, easy to build.

Two vastly different career paths, yet we were both tasked with making other people’s jobs easier, preventing confusion and reducing mistakes.

Day-to-day, Cheeseus and I conversed. Since he and Sixfold had joined the guild a few months earlier, we had developed a very good working/gaming relationship. By day, we chatted about what was going on in our lives, how work was treating us, and what news had leaked out about our shared gaming interest. By night, I death-gripped Malygos’ power sparks to the raid’s feet while Cheeseus eviscerated them, turning the Aspect’s own power against him, slicing and dicing with arcane-laced weapons. The unique rhythm he and I maintained from day-to-evening led to a proliferation of chats. In the past, I was only able to count two that regularly spoke to me outside of the game: Ekasra the Shaman and Wyse the Mage. The volume of conversations Cheeseus and I engaged in very quickly surpassed those two combined.

The 25-Man Progression team is
captured in Kel'Thuzad's chambers,
Naxxramas

A Council of One

Our early discussions centered mostly around him getting acquainted with the feel of the guild, and sharing his observations with me about the previous night’s raid. But as the weeks turned to months, we dove much deeper into each other’s psyche. He had an affinity for logic puzzles and games, and applied this love of math into his theorycrafting. We spent several months just debating the marginal increases or decreases in DPS by tweaking Hit and Expertise values. We even went so far as to put together a makeshift calculator that would examine a player on the Armory, extract their stats, and begin going through pseudo-combat loops, letting us play with hit and expertise values to see how marginally the damage fluctuated. But, a topic that we continued to touch on, time and again, was the topic of loot distribution systems:

11:41 AM Cheeseus: More to the point, how do you feel about needing to "bid against others" for similar loot? I'm still uncertain as to my opinion on the matter, and it just seems like it may do more harm than not, so the opinion of someone who's experienced it for longer, such as yourself, would be great.yourself, on
11:42 AM me: Can you give me a more concrete example?
11:46 AM Cheeseus: Just in general your system isn't quite like the others I've experienced. In my first guild Omen it was /ra open bidding, which was a nightmare, followed by a set price, each boss is worth X dkp whisper in bid system, which obviously favored vets. My last guild was a set price, diminished dkp after... 5-10 kills system, which overall seems like the best system I've yet to encounter. I've also helped my friends make a "suicide" system for their guild, and that seems to go well , though I do see the downfalls of it. I'm just wondering your opinion on your system.
11:47 AM me: /ra is garbage. Rewards nobody but people that are lucky. Should be self-explanatory how I feel about that.
Our 1st system was fixed-priced zero-sum.
It was an administrative nightmare.

We discussed the merits of "randoming" loot, of fixed price systems, and of get-to-the-back-of-the-line “Suicide Kings” style systems, and I was dissatisfied with most of them. When I pried deeper, Cheeseus revealed his favorite system: Loot Council:

2:13 PM Cheeseus: I've always been a fan of the idea of a loot council, because I'm rather pro communism ideology, but it's too easily corrupt/not impartial.
me: I'll never go loot council so you can scrap that idea now.
2:14 PM it will only take one day of me to be pissed off at some fuckface to deny them an upgrade and the system will have fallen apart
Cheeseus: Oh, I know. It would never work, just as communism would never work in the real world, but if you look at it on paper, isn't it an excellent idea?
me: yes it is excellent
if it were 24 of my close friends i would do it in a heartbeat
but that's simply not an option
Cheeseus: It's things like that that make me sad with humanity
2:15 PM me: Aye. 

Cheeseus was a staunch supporter of Loot Council, because his experiences with it worked well for his raiding teams in the past. These players were tight-knit, hardcore, wrecking The Sunwell Plateau multiple nights per week. Hardcore guilds benefit from loot council because they churn very few people through their roster, leadership typically has a very good handle on who the contributors are and where they fall in line. Loot Council works for two types of guilds. The first type is Dictatorship which is easy to administrate (“If you don’t like it, get out”) and players obey because they value their place in a hardcore roster and the prestige they gain from it. The second type of guild it works for is a guild of close-knit friends, people who know each other by name, and are possibly friends in real-life...

People who have to face each other and the consequences of their actions the day after loot distribution becomes corrupt.

I staunchly opposed this distribution method and although he favored it himself, Cheeseus agreed with me on the reasoning: Loot Council is too easily corrupted. It only takes one bad day for the loot distributor to be pissed off at a player, to bias his judgement just enough to issue loot out to someone else unfairly. DKP is a pure numbers-based system, directly representing a player’s contribution to raid progress as a whole.

You don’t issue rewards by how you feel, you issue them by the measurement of accomplished goals.

These conversations involving the mathing out of character stats, of the ethics surrounding loot, and our analytical approach to closing gaps in our raiding efficiency invoked a feeling of deja vu whenever we’d engage in such chatter. As the weeks carried on, Cheeseus grew to remind me more and more of someone I’d had these conversations with before.

He reminded me of Blain.

Cheeseus shows off his Twilight Drake,
alongside the 25-Man Progression team,
Wyrmrest Temple

The Plan 

I came to see this correlation between him and my now defunct Raid Leader of three years with increasing clarity. Like Blain, he expressed little interest or empathy toward the “plight” of the casual player, but where Blain’s perceived “assholiness” came from a core ideology of speaking the unvarnished truth, Cheeseus’s inability to mediate drama was more rooted in apathy. The reasoning was moot. I never expected Blain to handle such issues, and wouldn’t expect that of Cheeseus either. Blain had a passion for pushing the boundaries of what a player could do, smashing their preconceived notions which only served to limit them. Like him, Cheeseus felt our raid team could be so much more. We were disconnected, and lacked a central leader to follow:

12:05 PM Cheeseus: My strength has been, and always will be raiding. When I raid I want to spend minimal time on trivial things, and to (quickly) overcome new encounters. Though theorycrafting, out of game resources, and my knowledge of WoW I formulate effective manners of overcoming new content. Regardless of my position in the guild, I’m liable to do such.
What DoD needs to succeed (more) is one voice to follow. Discussion of strats with a collaboration of different people works well, as demonstrated by our 3D discussions, but when in raid we need one person to call the shots and to adapt the plan(s) as needed to obtain success.

His intentions were clear: Cheeseus felt he could fill that role of raid leader. He had already proven he could walk-the-walk, performing weekly in our raids, and demonstrating the expertise we needed in a leader. He’d solve those problems that plagued us; we’d have better focus, clearer calls, less ambiguity surrounding battle rezzes, less confusion around Bloodlust. But, a promotion to Raid Leader this early in his DoD career was a conundrum I had to put serious thought into. Promoting too early might generate animosity among those continuing to climb the ladder to Elite. I learned my lesson long ago about double standards and wanted to avoid them at all costs.

But I could start with Avatar. 

Avatar had fringe benefits. It would give him an opportunity to flex his raid leadership muscle in officer chat, adding his observations to the collective pool. And to the guild, he would be recognized simply as another new contributor to the guild who was going above and beyond the call of duty. Meanwhile, I was free to continue to twist the administrative dials as we headed for 3.1, rearranging our leadership structure to support Role Officers. Once 3.1 arrived, along with a fresh tier of raid content, I’d be in the best position possible to etch these structural changes into stone. At that point, the path for Cheeseus to be promoted to our next official raid leader would be unobstructed. It made sense and it was still by-the-book. So, Cheeseus became the next earner of the Avatar rank. And it came not a moment too soon.

Five days before Cheeseus earned Avatar, Blizzard made an announcement about the forthcoming 3.1 patch: Heroic: Glory of the Raider would lose its Black Proto-Drake award. The clock was now ticking, and the 25-Man Progression team needed every bit of leadership it could muster.

37. Meritocracy

Mature, assisted by the guild, finishes off "For The Horde"

The Missing Piece

The team wasn't quite whole.

Naxxramas, The Eye of Eternity and Obsidian Sanctum were being gutted on a weekly basis. The adrenaline shot of a new expansion was still flowing viscerally through our veins. The re-envisioned raiding approach Blizzard was trying with Wrath allowed the team to tear the instances apart faster than a noob dying in the fire. DKP was being collected, and the loot distribution grew larger each week. And, we had a healthy mix of old and new faces stepping into Necropolis each week with us. Conversations in vent were positive; one might go so far as to say they were enjoying themselves. Death Knights added a unique and interesting set of mechanics to our progression; I was having the time of my life playing the role of a Tank. Wrath was fun, and we were having fun raiding together.

But we weren't quite whole.

The officer pool was cooperatively leading raids week-to-week; a combination of myself, Dalans, and various officers that remained. It was working, but I attribute our early wins to the severe lack of difficulty in the entry-level raids. It was easy to lead-by-committee when the margin of error was high. There were notable deficiencies in this model of leading raids. Messages get mixed. Communication isn’t as precise as it could be. We would be ratcheting into Patchwerk, quickly approaching his final 30%, waiting for that call for Bloodlust...and the call wouldn't come out.

“Should we BL?”

Awkward silence, followed by an irritated Dalans responding, “Yeah, just do it.”, wondering why raiders just couldn't think for themselves for a change. It had nothing to do with being a proactive thinker. It had everything to do with the norms we had become accustomed to for four years, conditioned by a Rogue named Blain to stay silent, focused on task, and not do anything impulsive, but instead, to follow directives. Players with a propensity to make their own judgement calls on-the-fly often proved to us in the past that they had no idea what they were doing. Furthermore, it undermined authority. This served up a double helping of fail salad; players would feed off this behavior and begin to contribute their own bad judgments  systematically pissing off the raid leader and contributing to his own burnout. The good news is that Blain whipped these boys and girls into shape, training them to only respond to the pavlovian bell of his voice.

That bad news is that in the absence of that voice, players executed raids on auto-pilot, almost as oblivious to the fine details of the raid as the mindless scourge whom they were slaughtering.

The lack of a central voice bothered me. It wasn't terrible now, but I feared it would soon grow like a cancer if left alone. Leaving things alone was how I had handled many issues in Vanilla and TBC because they were uncomfortable or I was unsure of my own leadership capabilities. This time around, however, I wasn't leaving anything alone. This time I had a plan, and I had baked that plan directly into the guild’s ranks.

Mature earns "Dressed for the Occasion" while
chatting with Mcflurrie

Quest of the Avatar

Part of the revised game plan for DoD was to begin acknowledging guildies for their exceptional contributions to the guild. Rewarding players built upon the foundation I attempted to reboot at the start of the second expansion. I realized that DoD was always going to be comprised of a mixed bag of faces, from those that logged in once a week, just to say “Hi” and check their auctions, all the way to the other extreme, tenaciously tweaking their characters for ultimate efficiency. I introduced the “Avatar” rank as a way to allow a guildy's peers put in a good word for one another, to be recognized for the efforts and to remind them that they played a vital role in the guild, no matter how small their contribution may be. This list of opportunities to demonstrate goodness was infinite, and so I was eager to see how players would take this challenge on. The initial results were impressive, but at the same time, made it very clear I needed to put much greater thought into Avatar’s ramifications. 

My guildies had a tendency to surprise me.

First on that list was Mcflurrie, an older player in the guild, who had been raiding with us since The Burning Crusade. Mcflurrie had performed a random act of kindness; after hearing that another player was struggling to find good upgrades as the result of some combinations of bad luck in drops, and low DKP, Mcflurrie offered his own DKP pool up to the player to bid on the item, which was as good as a purchase. It was extraordinarily generous (as raiders typically hoarded their DKP worse than gold), and although I felt it was a shining example of the kind of behavior I wanted to see in players, it also set a nasty precedent for players to collude with one another down-the-road. I awarded Mcflurrie Avatar for his generosity, and then amended the loot rules so that players could not spend DKP on each other. Letting players gift loot to each other bode ominously. I wanted it avoided at all costs.

Next on the list was Shimerice the Paladin, who opted to donate to the guild’s Ventrilo hosting fund, something that had rested solely on my shoulders since Ater handed the server over upon his exit from WoW. This generosity helped a lot, as many players had come and gone without making any effort to contribute to my costs, which included the Vent server, domain name registration, and web hosting -- all straight out of my pocket. There was a bit of a concern about awarding Avatar to players who provided monetary support to the guild; the act tended to weave back and forth across the ethical bridge without firmly landing on one side. I didn't want players to feel like they could buy their way into the rank, but at the same time, wanted to acknowledge them for helping out the guild. Again, as with the Mcflurrie situation, I let rank award go out, and then reminded players that they would be unable to “buy” their way into the role. This would become especially important when the first Elites were promoted, and my 1st round bidding rule became active.

The ethics involving a player “buying” their way into a role that would guarantee them a shot at loot before anyone else had no ethical ambiguity to it -- it was wrong. And when players offered to donate in the future, they got the hint. Bheer proved this when he offered to pay for a registered account at WoW Web Stats, which is what we used to analyze our performance at the time. He paid the for the account, and respectfully declined any Avatar award or promotion, and I humbly thanked him for his support. Other players would continue to contribute in this fashion without gaining notoriety, and I was thankful that the “hint” had taken, and that contributions were greatly appreciated.

Mature completes his one-billionth Alterac Valley,
earning him "Hero of the Frostwolf Clan"

Taking the Spotlight

On the surface, Avatar was meant to provide acknowledgement to players of all shapes and sizes, of all degrees and measures of contribution. I wanted it to be clear to DoD that you didn't have to be a raider to earn the title of Avatar; there were many ways that casual players could be identified by their peers for random acts of kindness. To this end, Avatar met that need, and many different styles of player earned a shot at sitting high up in the DoD leadership court, hanging out in officer chat. This was the publicly announced reasoning behind the Avatar rank, to foster camaraderie among the players and return us to our "family friendly" roots. But, I had a nefarious hidden agenda behind the Avatar rank, one I kept close to the chest: players that both raided in Progression and earned Avatar were going to be closely scrutinized for a promotion to Elite. It would grow to become one of those “unspoken rules” like those in Hollywood, where the Oscar for best Director was almost a guarantee that their movie would go on to win Best Picture. It wasn't a 100% given...but you were going to see a pattern.

Following Shim’s award, Arterea the Priest and Omaric the Warrior were next on the list to earn Avatar. Both were continuing to be positive, friendly, well-respected members of the DoD community. And both were proving themselves to be extremely talented behind the raiding wheel, consistently excelling in each respective department, and not hesitating to share their knowledge so that others would learn and grow as well. And, it was not long after those two that Kelden the Shaman earned Avatar, proving that he was consistently pushing his ability to heal to absolute maximum. It dawned on me during Kelden's Avatar award-ship that he had applied to DoD not once, but twice; the first time he had been turned away as his application was for that of a Rogue. We were heavy on melee and had no room for him, yet he persisted, and applied a second time as a healer, which got his foot in the door. Now he was proving he could play the role we needed, and continued to deliver exceptional healing as we scratched achievements off the to-do list.

In the back of my mind, I already had plans for all three. Art and Omaric would going to be seeing Elite very quickly, and I had been starting to weigh heavily the concept of switching leadership from Class Officers to Role Officers. We were already short in multiple departments, from a class officer perspective, and it made more sense in the days for 40-Man raiding. In fact, you were crazy if you weren't delegating management of each class to an individual person when 40+ players needed to be coordinated. Those days were long behind us, and many classes lacked an officer now. Pondering Role Officers made sense, gave us more focus, and kept the raid team more closely knit. If I were to make the change, Kelden was first on my list to promote to Healing Officer. For the most part, I kept the majority of these thoughts to myself, sharing them only occasionally with Dalans. He was on board and enthusiastic. Dalans had long held we suffered from too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen syndrome, so the prospect of downsizing most certainly gave him the kind of twisted satisfaction felt when the executioner approaches the chopping block.

With regular Avatar rewards being doled out, and the picture of Elites and Role Officer promotions growing clearer each day, I was confident that a Raid Leader voice would soon make itself known to me. The moment it did, I’d pounce. I had my own gut instincts on where this voice would come from, but running a guild can’t come from intuition alone. My leadership days of leaving things alone to self-mend were well behind me. Thanks to Avatar, players were pushed out of the line of conformity into a spotlight where they could be recognized. Spotlights have a way of showing you who has potential to fill that role.

Unsurprisingly, the voice ended up being exactly who I predicted.