4.57. Mortal Insects

Paragon's 10 vs 25 comparison analysis on Firelands
(Source: paragon.fi)

The Horse's Mouth

An IM window popped up on my desktop. It was from Jungard, "Are we resetting next week?"

"No reason not to. We're mowing through it."

At times, it felt like my perspective was skewed. What was easy and what wasn't? DoD buckled down and ripped Firelands apart, leading us to the final confrontation with Ragnaros on week four. I felt certain we'd have it the next raid weekend. But, where did we fit within the grand scheme of raiders? Had we disciplined ourselves to such a degree that we now approached the hardcore end of the spectrum? Perhaps the content was actually harder than we perceived it to be.

A frame of reference would've have been nice.

"Any objections to taking a core group of folks in tonight to try to wrap it up?"

Jungard wanted to take advantage of one of the 10/25 lock mechanics introduced in Cataclysm. A partially cleared 25-Man lock could be downsized to a 10-Man lock.

"I don't have a problem with it. If Blain and the others are good with it, go ahead. Just...y'know," I cautioned, "try to take people from the 25, eh?"

"Oh, I only plan on taking from the 25."

"Did you see the post that Paragon made?" I shot him the link.

"When'd they make this?"

"Late last night. Break down of the difficulty between 10 and 25."

"I thought there was no difference?"

"Your sarcasm isn't lost on me, Young-gard."

The European-based Paragon was a relatively new world first guild to the raiding scene. They made a name for themselves by being the first guild to down the Lich King in Heroic 25-Man, a major upset to those predicting older, more seasoned guilds like Vodka and Ensidia would maintain the house odds. And Ensidia would have, if it hadn't been for the "clever use of game mechanics".

In Cataclysm, Paragon beat Method to the full clear of Blackwing Descent, Bastion of Twilight, and Throne of the Four Winds. Now, they'd done it again. Paragon was the first guild to complete a full clear of Heroic: Firelands -- in the same amount of time it had taken us to almost clear Normal.

In short, there was no better guild than Paragon to provide an educated, thoughtful analysis on raid difficulty.

"Huh," Jungard commented aloud as he read through Paragon's article, "interesting...they say the first four bosses are pretty much the same. I'd have to agree with that."

"Keep reading."

"Baleroc...first noticeable difference. Oh, wow..." He was getting to the good part, "...huge gap in difficulty between 10 and 25 on Majordomo."

"They claim he's 8-mannable. That’s awful."

Jungard chuckled quietly, "I liked the comment about how the Sons of Flame are 'made of paper' in 10-Man."

"In the end, they basically say the 10-Man tuning has more room for error. You can pay less attention to your roster, make more mistakes, but still have the necessary DPS and Heals to power through."

"That's ironic, considering that's exactly what the 10-Man guilds claim is the reason why their version is more difficult."

Funny how we end up learning the most from people who have nothing to teach.

"Ragnaros"
Artwork by UnidColor

Full Circle

Across the charred, rocky wastes, over the burning bridge, and through the circular carpeted courtyard, the 25-Man progression team made their way up the staircase and into the heart of Sulfuron Spire. Before us lay a narrow corridor, lined with fiery, rune-adorned columns. A sea of lava stretched out on either side of us, onward and down, past the retaining walls that eventually came to an end. A massive throne room was exposed beyond. The 'corridor' was nothing more than another bridge -- one thin platform keeping us from burning alive.

After defeating Lava Wielders that pummeled us with more fiery attacks, we moved out of the corridor and down across yet another bridge. This platform, while still decorated with the familiar fiery runes highlighting the internal decor, was even narrower, more precarious, and lacked a banister. Our safety was of little concern to the lord of this realm.

We inched our way across this bridge, dispatching miniature versions of Magmaw as they emerged from the molten depths on either side. The raiders cut the fireworms down, sending their carcasses flailing and spasming back down into the boiling magma.

Familiar eyes watched us the entire time. That same face, a jack-o-lantern pulled from the inferno of Hell, eyes empty and burning, a gaping jaw pulled wide into a devilish grin. The wall of living flame clutched a familiar weapon in his right hand, idling in a defensive animation, as if waiting to squash invading insects. And, as years before, his torso remained submerged, behind the low, dull rumbling sound of fiery tornadoes, intertwined and amplified by the acoustics of the expansive throne room. Those eyes watched us as we worked our way to him, the fires of a million volcanoes, seeking revenge.

Time (and several expansions of Blizzard expertise) granted Ragnaros greater fidelity. His blackened armor had more depth and majesty; the runes adorning its edges glowed brighter and were more distinguished. And his legendary mace -- perhaps the most recognizable weapon in World of Warcraft to both casuals and hardcores alike -- the titanic spiked hammer, now pulsated with a bright orange plasma which warped and distorted its edges. Sulfuras, the Extinguished Hand, burned with such colossal intensity that it felt as if a permanent imprint would be left in my monitor, like the shadowy screens of arcade machines long past their final play.

The moment was thick with nostalgia, and I paused to reflect. The exact moment DoD transformed from "just a group of WoW players" to an official raiding guild is perhaps a matter of contention. Former members might point to the first day we coordinated 40 players in unison, to begin pulling trash in Molten Core. Others might claim the death of Lucifron as an adequate measure of a guild's evolution. Still others might offer up our first kill of Onyxia, challenging the notion that the dragon's mechanics were far more complex than her strategy read on paper, and anyone claiming she was easy to kill hadn't even set foot in her lair.

For my money, the moment Ragnaros fell was always the defining moment. We overcame the odds of an entire instance, slowly working our way through each boss, while simultaneously grinding out the farming and crafting of fire resistance gear necessary to withstand each molten blow. I don't dismiss Onyxia as one of our first truly great challenges, but it was when Ragnaros fell that all lingering doubt washed away. Onyxia gave us the means to believe in ourselves and that we were capable of being a raiding guild. Ragnaros confirmed it.

I glanced around the room at the twenty-four players standing next to me in throne room, deep in the bowels of Sulfuron Spire, far away from our initial meeting, deep below Blackrock Mountain. I identified only one player from DoD's 40-man lineup from our kill in February of 2006.

It wasn't Turtleman, arguably the one of the longest running members of DoD - he hadn't been present for our first Ragnaros kill.

It wasn't Gunsmokeco or his brother Deathonwings; both had accrued years of tenure in DoD, but neither got to see Ragnaros' defeat by our hand.

You might guess Blain, but he would join us only a few months later, as we struggled to break ground in Blackwing Lair.

It was Klocker. The longest running player in the history of DoD, to that point. We each brought new classes to the table today; he, a paladin, and I, a death knight. But, we would always share a spiritual connection, a bond through our respective original mains - shamans. Side-by-side, our chain heals leapt across a mess of names -- names now nearly forgotten, blurred by time.

[To: Klockerr] Congratulations

[From: Klockerr] For?

[To: Klockerr] Being the last remaining member of DoD present for both kills of Ragnaros

[From: Klockerr] OMG

The 25-Man progression team prepares
for their first pull of Ragnaros,
Firelands

Ragnaros II: Ow, That's #%$! Hot

Ragnaros was split into three phases, sandwiched between two transitions, not unlike his Molten Core incarnation. It began as a traditional tank-and-spank. Blain and Amatsu traded off punitive stacks of fire vulnerability which ate away at their resistance. As the roster pummeled the Elemental Lord of Fire, Ragnaros smashed Sulfuras down onto the platform, sending tri-directional waves of lava outward. Anyone caught in the waves would take massive damage and be thrust backwards toward the entryway.

New to his arsenal was the magma trap, tossed out to random players throughout phase one. These traps were visible on the platform; once armed, the 25-man raid was directed to stay clear of these traps...mostly. Left unchecked, the platform would soon grow overwhelmed with traps. So, we had to selectively trigger them, clearing only what was necessary to execute our strategy.

The traps, like Staghelm's phase switch, ultimately rested in our hands. We had to decide what was too much or too little, with thresholds varying widely across the casual-to-hardcore spectrum. Live dangerously: be more aggressive, bring min/maxxed dps and heals, and trust that your roster is extremely self-aware...and you might be able to leave the platform with many traps.

Might.

Or, opt for containment: take a more cautious approach, measure DPS, prioritize payer safety by clearing more traps from the platform and leave enough time to heal those who sacrifice themselves in the trap's explosion -- and the run the risk of a wipe as the fight drags on.

Phase one struck a balance that could appeal to both casuals and hardcores, but I suspect the ingenuity of this design went largely underappreciated.

At 70% health, Ragnaros took a final swing of Sulfuras, burying the head of the spiked mace into the platform and disappearing beneath the lava's surface. Across the entirety of the platform, his familiar Sons of Flame spawned, all slowly moving towards the mace. If any of the fire elementals reached Sulfuras, a supernova of flame would expand out from the massive weapon, striking (and in many cases, killing) all members of the raid.

Allowing a Son of Flame to break our defense, therefore, was not an option. Every stun, slow and snare we could apply had to be leveraged, and DPS had to be distributed evenly so that no one fire elemental gained an advantage. During set up, Blain and Jungard worked together to examine the raid, splitting groups up accordingly by fanning them out in a crescent shape around Sulfuras' intended point of impact.

"Phase two positions, just like we rehearsed. Keep the middle open."

I glanced up from my position to see a Boomkin, frozen in position, directly in the middle of the platform.

Blackangus' voice was clear in Ventrilo. "Yeah, uh...I think I'm disconnecting."

4.50. Relatively Difficult

Mature and co. pull out a clutch kill of Heroic Hakkar,
Zul'Gurub

Cruel Irony

The lay of the land hadn't changed much. Trails snaked through the brush in familiar patterns. Large creeping voodoo masks and totems peered out from behind hunched over trees and epiphytic ferns.

"This is a lot easier than I remember it."

Both Zul'Gurub and Zul'Aman got a face-lift at the end of April (via Patch 4.1). Exploring the changes hadn't ranked highly on my list of priorities. A month later, we were teetering at the precipice of Patch 4.2, and I couldn't shake the feeling we'd been shortchanged. DoD had run out of time. The 25-Man progression team had missed its quota.

"Yeah, remember when 10s were hard?"

"10s were never hard."

I compared our current predicament to the freshest tier in my mind: the last one, the end of Wrath. Icecrown Citadel: all heroics completed, save The Lich King himself. 11/12. A respectable 92%. Tier 11, by contrast, had not gone nearly as well. Five full months of raiding yielded 4/6 in Blackwing Descent, 1/6 in Bastion of Twilight, and 0/2 in Throne of the Four Winds. Fourteen heroic bosses, and we hadn't even hit 50%.

That wasn't the most embarrassing part. The 25-Man still had two unfinished normal encounters.

Unable to complete normal modes? Way to scrub things up. 

I shuddered, thinking of the effect it would have on the guild, its members, and its morale. 

If you can't hack a normal mode, why are you even here?

"Not the ones you grew up on, skippy. I don't mean 'Ulduar' hard, I mean 'Karazhan' hard."

"Ulduar wasn't hard."

"My point exactly."

The tier 11 normal modes were a stark contrast to the the cakewalk handed us in Wrath. Cataclysm's top-heavy design forced raiders to digest the complexity of each encounter at the onset. A barrage of mechanics were force fed down our collective throats. And while the truly old school veterans of WoW reveled in the return to glory days, those lacking a pre-WotLK perspective were unprepared for their egos to withstand that much damage.

I dare say they were coddled.

The realities of raiding in Cataclysm slapped them silly. Like clockwork, indignance followed, precipitating the demise of an increasing number of 25-Man guilds throughout those first five months. Even DoD hadn't been saved from this outcome. But in a cruel twist, the 10s did not flourish as I suspected they might, and for a reason I did not see coming. Blizzard's struggle to maintain parity between the difficulty of both 10- and 25-Man raids produced something far more disruptive to their community.

Mature and co. maintain tight positioning as
they defeat Daakara, earning "Ring Out",
Zul'Aman

Perception vs. Reality

Gamers demanded that WoW return to its former, more challenging glory, as it was in the days of pre-Wrath. Blizzard responded in kind, and the resulting raids of tier 11 were decidedly tougher. And, since the men in the high castle mandated that Cataclysm's raid design be such that both 10s and 25s provide an equal experience, Blizzard took great pains to ensure that same "front-loaded difficulty" design was present in both the 10 and the 25.

Any raider you speak to that's worth their weight will tell you that an encounter's margin of error is inversely proportional to the difficulty. As the challenge increases, your chances of recovering from mistakes decreases. 25s have the numbers on their side (so the naysayers claim), and it is of this skewed reality that was borne the sentiment that "25s have it easy, the 10s are the real challenge." They claimed we straight up had more opportunities to recover from a failure than a 10-Man raid.

Honestly, I can't disagree with that sentiment. We absolutely did have more opportunities to recover from emergencies than 10-Man raids, and it absolutely was a major factor the community used to differentiate the 10 from the 25. But raiding is complex; it literally involves thousands of variables that combine to paint a complete picture of what is easy and what is hard. "That we had more people to recover from an emergency" alone is not enough to declare the 10s the winner in the which is more difficult? contest.

But it was enough for the majority. So they did.

The widest cross-section of raiders, those holier-than-thou ego maniacs that were fresh off the slaying of the Lich King, were now hitting brick walls after giving their former 25-Man guilds the middle finger. Rather than stick with the tried and true strategy of practice makes perfect, they opted to take the easy way out: re-assemble as a 10-Man guild, and target the smaller, "easier" versions for equitable loot. After all, that's exactly how it worked for them in the previous expansion.

But these new 10-Man raids were more difficult than they imagined. At least, at the onset, anyway. The normal 10s of Cataclysm were eating WotLK raiders for lunch. And, being the lackluster players that they were -- already good at finding excuses as to why they shouldn't have to participate in a 25-man -- were equally good at blaming everyone but their own laziness for their own 10-Man's downfall. The vast majority of them quit raiding, and in some cases, walked away from WoW altogether.

And reader, we're not even at the cruel twist part yet.

For those elite few raiders who remained in their 10-Man guilds, carrying the hardcore torch, channeling the tenets of effort and skill, when those guilds punched through the normal modes...well, that is when the tables truly turned on guilds like DoD. Because when those same players stepped into 10-Man heroic raids, they enjoyed a decidedly easier time than the 25-Man guilds -- ironically, for exactly the same reason whiners claimed the 25s had it easier.

Remember the Cataclysm raid design: front-load the difficulty in the normal mode. Force players to learn 85-90% of the mechanics, right out of the gate. We saw it. We lived it. Heroic: Magmaw, Heroic: Chimaeron, Heroic: Atramedes, and so on, and so on. The shift from normal to heroic only ever involved slight adjustments to the original design. It meant we only had to practice and refine small bits, added in to the mix. Things could certainly go wrong in Heroics (and when we failed, we failed spectacularly), but over time, those weakest links in the raid, those outliers -- they'd get it.

Which meant the faster you could identify the weakest links and fix them, the sooner you could close out a heroic kill.

And, by comparison, how many weak links do you think a 10-Man raid would have, in comparison to a 25-Man?

The defense rests, your honor.

Everything is Awesome Relative

To the layperson, raiding looked exactly the same as it had in Wrath. 10-Man raids were being completed much faster than 25-Man raids. The difference between the two, however, was subtle, and only the hardcore nerds could be counted on to take a magnifying glass to these nuances.

Raids were more difficult, period. When distilled down into two different sizes that were meant to equal one another, 25-Man (normal modes) ended up being easier than 10-Man. And since the 10s made up the majority, this was the most vocal group dominating forums with their complaints. The echo chamber only grew larger.

Meanwhile, attention to actual raid progress was measured only by those who had punched through normals, and were enjoying healthy success in heroics. These were the most dedicated, most skilled players...that simply chose the 10-Man as their preference of raid size. For these elite players, just as it was in Wrath, their execution of content came noticeably quicker than it did to their 25-Man brethren. Because these 10-Man heroics were also tuned to be as close in difficulty to their 25-Man heroic counterparts, there was far less complexity for them to have to refine, shifting from normal to heroic. The 10-Man argument went both ways. Yes, we 25s had more opportunities to recover from emergencies, but conversely, the 10s had less loose ends to tie up when mastering a heroic strategy.

The verdict, then, read as follows: From easiest to most difficult, it was 25-Man normals, followed by 10-Man normals, then 10-Man heroics, and finally, the 25-Man heroics. Yet the community remained eternally locked in conflict over which size was easier, passionately defending their "preferential size" while failing to acknowledge the nuances of how a normal vs. heroic ended up manifesting in Cataclysm's front-loaded design.

Sadly, neither the community nor Blizzard would paint clarity around these nuances. And why would either of them choose to vilify themselves?

The vast majority of the community (read: the most vocal, via the forums, blogs, etc.) overwhelmingly claimed 10s were harder (referring, of course, to the normals). To state the opposite would be admitting they were wrong, that it was they themselves who sucked at raiding -- not something gamers would readily admit. Blaming others for their own injustices is something gamers have become quite adept at.

And as for Blizzard, whose design vision for Cataclysm mandated they aim for equality in the difficulty of both 10s and 25s...to admit the opposite would be to go against their "commitment to quality", an edict their designers live and die by. "We promised the WoW community an equal experience to 10s and 25s, and by the GODS we are going to stick to that path...even if we're still actually sort of turning dials, and iterating over certain choices...WE'RE ON THE PATH!"

That's what's most important, right? That the intent is to deliver?

Blizzard has a good track record of admitting defeat and back-pedaling, but only when there is nothing left to try, nothing left to tweak, no final recourse. There was still plenty of time left in Cataclysm to try new things.

Plenty of time left...for Blizzard.

4.36. Hypocritic Oath

Mature assists Bonechatters, Turtleman and
Volitar (Toadie) in wrapping up "It's Frost Damage!",
Deadmines

The Cut-Off Point

Herp Derp was no longer a team, a fact dictated by Blizzard long before I had any say in the matter. To resolve conflict, I erred on the side of skeptical optimism; hoped for the best but planned for the worst. I liked Riskers, and believed he was capable of making the right decision. I also knew that the psychological drain of people management took finesse. He deserved the benefit of the doubt. But when it came time to declare an officially sanctioned team, Blizzard called that shot, and left me no choice but to circle back and plug holes I’d left open in DoD's code of conduct. It sucked. It had to be done.

Herp Derp definitely met my criteria that called for a named roster, an advertised schedule, and had an official Tactician leading the group.

"Leading"

But thanks to Falnerashe's abrupt exit, the roster was now a 7/3 split. And while DoD held the majority share in that team, it wasn't enough for World of Warcraft. Achievements required 8 of the 10 players present to be part of a single guild. The moment Fal parted ways with DoD, the Herp Derp clan went from an officially sanctioned 10-Man team to little more than a random group of guild members helping a handful of non-guildies.

"Helping"

Riskers wasn't making it a huge priority to solve the issue; as the responsible party, I expected a much quicker turnaround. But I didn’t expect miracles. The likelihood of Riskers being able to convince Drecca, Ben and Fal to return to the guild seemed exponentially monumental. And it's probably the reason he made no headway. I made it clear to Riskers that he wasn't expected to move mountains, only to the solve the problem at hand. Get them back, or replace them...whatever works.

It wasn't happening.

What was happening was their regularly scheduled raids, because boss killing and loot grabbing took precedence over mediating melodrama. I didn't blame him for not wanting to sink his teeth into a task most players would avoid faster than an LFD group dumping out of The Oculus. But Riskers' indecision was infecting the guild with dissent. It was a growing audit trail of absent leadership, lumped in with moments like his defense of Ben when the guild attacked.

"Attacked"

The window of opportunity to make a decision narrowed, but I could do little else for Riskers. It was his team, his responsibility to make the call. All I could do was ensure that DoD was prepared for the fallout, leaving little-to-no room for excuses when everything blew up in Herp Derp's face. DoD was the priority, not a random group of players that were proving to me that guild integrity was far less important than a 10-Man Heroic Cho'gall.

"10-Man Heroic". LOL. Stop it. You're killing me.

Mature, Bonechatters, Turtleman, Volitar and Dewgyd
race to Vanessa Van Cleef in under 5 minutes,
Deadmines

Guild Plumbing

Tacticians were the conduit between their team and the guild. In exchange for their administration efforts, I hiked up their access to the guild vault, so they could distribute repair gold and provide raiding flasks/food to their team. To cement DoD's commitment to the 10s, I gave them an additional perk: BoEs procured by the 25-Man progression team would go to the vault, offered up to Tacticians on a first come, first serve basis. The hope was that it might help take the edge off whatever difficulty their teams were experiencing. Primarily, this perk intended to narrow the raid qualification gap for new recruits, or to stave off the often streaky, horrific luck of Blizzard's RNG. Plugging the 10-Mans into the DoD framework in this way not only allowed me to hold a named individual responsible for their team's actions, it provided a clear means of rewarding teams that played by our rules....and if not, it was a valve I could easily shut off, until their options dried up.

It wasn't until I reached for the valve that I noticed the gaping hole in the pipe.

10-Man teams shouldn't need a legal declaration, their definition is baked directly into the title: if you have 10 people, you have a 10-Man team. Some teams have more, choosing to sit a bench just like the 25-Man progression team did. As WoW interest flares and subsides, a 10-Man team may find itself short a head or two, as well. If a Tactician is actively recruiting, however, absenteeism is justifiable. But if there is no forward movement on recruitment attempts, intentionally or otherwise, a 10-Man team can't be called what it isn't.

I didn't think I would have to go to such lengths. Then again, I also didn't conceive of a hypothetical future in which several guildies would defy our rules, and the person in charge would not make a swift decision. Had someone in, say, Bovie's team, or Jungard's team, or Joredin's team did something equally foolish, I was reasonably confident violaters would receive a swift kick in the ass to shape up or ship out.

...but I also never suspected Riskers would be the type of person to drag their heels. And in that moment, I realized I was making an assumption that any of them would act as quickly.

Yet you were intimately familiar with the ‘psychological drain of people management’. Nice work setting expectations.

What I was left with was a Tactician, seemingly incapable (or uninterested) in mediating, yet kept all the perks flowing back into his team while it remained in a pseudo-stasis, not recruiting, not replacing, but still raiding, using guild repairs and flasks, and wasting achievement after achievement due to their 7/3 split.

To light the fire under Riskers, I amended the requirements of Tactician to enforce the completeness of their respective 10-Man roster. It had to have 10 people, minimum, which qualified them for guild achievements. And if not at 10, they had to be actively recruiting, and I needed to see the evidence of it: posts on their team page, and working with me to recruit the necessary people for the role. Riskers had to have an officially sanctioned 10-Man team in order to keep his rank and to keep those perks flowing back into the team.

Once updated, I politely reminded him of my initial two week window, and encouraged him to be more aggressive in his approach to solving the problem. A few days later, a fourth Herp Derp member, Phame, left DoD. And every day Riskers said nothing to me, I felt awful. I liked him.

But I didn't like who he stood for.

As Sir Klocker begins 25-Man invites, Mature, Onionscoop,
Beefysupryme and Lix barely pull off "Headed South" in time,
Lost City of the Tol'vir

A Compromising Position

As March’s weeks bled into April, I continued to recruit, discarding nearly every applicant that arrived in my inbox. I was convinced that my then-age requirement of 23 was liberal enough to keep reasonable amount of new faces flowing into the guild, but it simply the wasn't the case. Email after email went to the trash, as 16, 17 and 18 year olds continued to submit applications, ignoring the first rule I laid out at the top of our application page. Occasionally, I would hit paydirt. Finally! An applicant able to comprehend my restrictions!

...only to find out the player was into heavy recreational drug use -- a habit that doesn't play nicely with reliability.

The masochist in me wasn't ready to take guild leadership to a new level of pain. Back to the drawing board I went, reviewing underage apps, then discarding them. Eventually, I backed down from my age requirement. For a temporary amount of time, I pitched a "guild promotion" to allow normally excluded applicants to be referred to DoD. If it was a decent app, they came in on solid footing, and were sponsored by a veteran, I agreed to waive the age requirement. We saw a few new faces during this period, but it would take time to determine if there was any value among these kiddies. Besides, there were more immediate hurdles I needed to vault.

Both the underage newbies and our existing legitimate apps had trouble climbing the DoD ladder. The steps were as easy as I could make them. You started as a Recruit with limited access to our forums. It was just enough to introduce yourself, but not enough to inadvertently say the wrong thing in the wrong place, wasting the time of the forum moderators while simultaneously making you look foolish. 

Over time, you worked your way into the system until you qualified for Guildy, which is when the raiding forums became available (in read-only mode). If you were interested in pursuing a raid spot, you didn't need to ask questions or harass players for more info -- everything was laid out in a set of crystal clear steps. Fill out your profile on the raid tool, make sure you log out wearing your best gear so leadership can verify the fundamentals: ilvl, gems, enchants, spec. 

After Raider qualification, you could sign up, were rotated in, and the game was afoot: you proved to us you were ready for the long haul. If you chose, you could push up into Samurai, gaining even more spots, being exposed more forums. Eventually, you were looped in to the Samurai peer review process, participating in a committee with personal investment in shaping who they played with, week to week.

This was simply all too much to handle.

They didn't know what to read, or where to go to find the right info, or why they couldn't create a raiding profile in our signup sheet. When they were made Guildy, they didn't know why they were unable to ask questions in the raider forum, and the concept of rotations eluded them -- even though it was painstakingly detailed in our guild policies and procedures. My gut told me they just needed to read, to use some of that elbow grease to get the brass ring. But as their inability lingered on, I suspected the answer was more dire: they read it...and legitimately did not understand a thing I asked of them.

This new generation of recruit wasn't one that plagued us in Wrath or earlier; inductees were pointed to DoD's steps-to-raiding, and players figured it out. And because of the limited bench, I couldn't waste time circling back, pointing and re-pointing and re-re-pointing to the same instructions over and over until it was jackhammered into their skull. The roster lacked faces. So, I did what I expected most guild leaders would do in a signup crisis...

I backpedaled.

New recruits to DoD were fast tracked into raiding, rather than forcing them to go through the motions. It required excessive micromanagement to ensure each and every one of them knew what was expected of them. In Wrath, if they didn't read the rules, didn't understand what I asked of them...they simply didn't get in. It forced players to re-evaluate their comprehension of DoD policy, and they either improved or withered away. With the roster sitting at 24-25 heads (barely) each week, there was no room to play games. I either accelerated the promotion rate so they could join the 25-Man, or there would be no 25-Man.

There is nothing quite like the feeling of drawing lines through your own hand-crafted rules; a signed confession of a hypocrite.

No, I did not envy Riskers' position, faced with a team that was actively betraying his own beliefs, yet simultaneously aware of his own participation in it. I did not envy him, but I understood his hesitance. And I felt awful for him. And for his end game.

4.25. Twenty-Five Morsels on the Menu

"The Triumph of Evil",
Artwork by Keisinger

Damage Control

I wanted to be mad, but my schedule didn't allow for it. I would've been perfectly happy wallowing in pent up frustration at Bheer's bombshell, falling back into old ways, holding grudges and punching keyboards in frustration. Circumstances, however, dictated that I focus my rage into solving the problem. So behind a false grin of clenched teeth, I moved to assess what damage the roster took as a result of being in the blast radius.

At first glance, practically nothing changed; the situation was only slightly different from when he left me high-and-dry midway through Tournament of Champions. Bheer was but one enhancement shaman out of the 25-Man roster. His then replacement, Hellspectral, was now a full-time frost death knight of the core raid team: former Elite, and fiercely dedicated to progression, his improved icy talons / 10% weapon speed bonus was a permanent fixture. Thanks to the rework of hunters, every raid buff in the game could be brought via a pet -- this comprised the contingency plan. Realistically, all we missed was the warm body. The safety net provided by a "reliable" long-term vet was gone, and anybody I chose to put in that spot would be a wild card. It wasn't uncommon to raid with 24 players for the next few weeks.

There was more at play that simply Bheer's absence from the roster. In their announcement, Bheer made it clear that he was to join Drecca's 10-Man team, which also meant Drecca was forsaking 25 as well. True, he offered himself as a back-up, but you can't plan around "maybes". I had to assume he would never be available, and rebuild the roster to that end. Anything less would put progression in jeopardy.

It sucked.

It sucked because Drecca had been such an incredible asset to the 25 when he joined DoD. Few raiders could slip into an intact team so seamlessly, taking up responsibilities and demonstrating skills one would expect of a long-term, committed raider. The chances of it happening again were slim-to-none.

I immediately ramped up recruitment in search of long-term tanks. Soot was one possibility; Falnerashe's "hubby" Teras was another, by way of his paladin alt Horateus. I pushed both to gear up and sign up. But before recruiting any more tanks, I had to have a heart-to-heart with Insayno.

---

"The situation has, shall we say, had a bit of a wrench thrown in to it."

"Oh yeah?" Insayno answered me over vent. I could hear the rapid clicking of keys in the background ...a telltale indication of PvP.

"Without the tanks, we have no progression. That should be pretty self-explanatory."

"Agreed."

"In any other circumstance, I'd have back-ups. And I am working on that. But I'm speaking to you about this right now because of its importance. I want to make sure you understand how this affects the raid team and the guild."

"Ok…"

I downshifted. "Are you enjoying the tanking stuff so far?"

"Yeah, it's pretty solid right now. I like it. Still jealous of the prot warror's AoE stun, but it's still workable." He spoke of Shockwave, an ability I didn't pay much attention to...an ability I would soon come to despise. I continued.

"I'd appreciate it if you could continue in this capacity, for as long as humanly possible. Right now, you and I are all that the 25-Man team has for 100% reliable tanks. All the rest are wild cards."

"Yeah, my schedule is wide-open right now, so I'm happy to help. For as long as it takes."

"Thank you. I'll do everything I can to solidify new long-term tanks for our spots. Maybe we can get a little deeps in now and again, eh?"

Insayno's tone became official, "Sounds like a plan, Hanzo. I shall sign up for all raids until I hear otherwise." The faint sound effect of Icy Touch landing on his target could be heard before his mic shut off.

Fight the good fight, Insayno. Don’t let me down.

The 25-Man progression team spots a
familiar friend waiting for them,
Blackwing Descent

Healer Heart Attack

Week two put us face to face with a new foe. By the end of the first night, Magmaw, Omnotron Defense, Maloriak and Atramedes were all eating dirt, a huge improvement from the previous weekend. This freed us to dedicate Sunday entirely to Chimaeron, a hydra that would push the healers to their very limits.

Chimaeron's gimmick was Finkle Einhorn and his "Bile-o-Tron", a silly bot that wandered the room, dousing players with a protective spray. The mixture prevented anyone above 10k HP from dying -- instead, those covered in the gunk were reduced to a solitary hit-point when Chimaeron struck. This unnerving style of damage forced the healers to rethink their traditional strategy of keeping the raid topped off; any heals above 10k translated into overheals, and was a fast track to an empty mana pool.

The raid had to maintain precise positioning during the fight. Caustic Slime would hit four people at random, bouncing to other players that were too close. Those afflicted would suffer damage handicaps along with their health spiking to 1 HP. A randomly positioned raid increased the healing stress, spiking more players down to 1 HP, and crippled our ability to make the enrage timer. Chimaeron was a solid gear check with benefits.

Massacre was the worst. In a single blast, the hydra reduced the entire raid to 1 HP, the extreme amount of damage even enough to throw the Bile-o-Tron offline. Lacking the protective cover of Finkle's Mixture, all players were susceptible to instant death...10k or otherwise. Our saving grace was the hydra's heads feuding with one another. We collapsed into a group and the healers blanketed the raid with as many AoE heals as possible, all the while poison bombs of Caustic Slime pummeling the raid in the process. Any heal helped at this point; players were even burning bandages on themselves, a tactic not seen since as far back as Naj'entus.

Massacre didn't always knock the Bile-o-Tron offline, however, so every single player had to be alert and ready to move into a clump if necessary. Gone were the days of an encounter following an explicit pattern of A, then B...A, then B...A, then B. Any PvP troll who trashed PvE as a mindless endeavor of learning a pattern and following it would've been eaten alive by Chimaeron. Many were.

A race to the finish kicked off when Chimaeron neared 20% -- again, a trigger not entirely set in stone. The entire raid receiving a debuff reducing our healing received by 99%. At this point, healers shut down completely, joining the DPS in a race to burn him down before he ate every living thing in the room. Not only did it involve blowing every cooldown that remained, but it forced us to start calling out the "next victim". Chimaeron used our threat meter as menu. One by one, top players in threat would retreat to the furthest corner of the room, delaying Chimaeron's feast, gaining the raid precious seconds of DPS. A kill would most certainly not be clean...if we could pull it off.

Mature glances at Al'akir from a safe distance,
Throne of the Four Winds

Juggling 101

Much of the encounter rested on the healers. Self-discipline and calm nerves were essential to keeping the raid alive. Blain and Jungard worked out very specific positions for people to stand, but resuming those positions after a Feud collapse often put people in the wrong spots. As for surviving Double Attack, the traditional Main Tank/Off-Tank setup had to be tweaked.

The first tank began by allowing Break to stack; consider this player the MT. By the second stack, healers certainly felt the strain. Between the 2nd and 3rd stack of Break is when Double Attack could really mess a tank up...and this is when the second tank, our OT for the purposes of this description, would taunt. It was in that split second that the OT would eat the Double Attack, saving the MT from being one-shot. Seconds later, the MT would take Chimaeron back and prepare for the third break.

At three stacks, the MT and OT switched roles.

Now, the OT, which had just eaten a Double Attack moments earlier, was now stacking Break, allowing the former MT a chance to let their stacks drop...hoping and praying that a Double Attack didn't come in before their stacks dropped. If one did (and it happened here and there), the OT would hopefully have cooldowns from the healing crew to keep him alive. Since I preferred avoidance tanking, I played the OT.

For the most part, the challenge came in the transition to phase three. The difference between the two tanks surviving an extra few seconds at the start of the 20%, vs. dying instantly was huge. Every second counted during the final 20% burn. Panic ensued, top melee often got over zealous, stayed in too long, lost track of their place in threat, and were eaten alive. The amount of 3%, 2%, and 1% wipes were painful. Chimaeron plowed through morale like a jackhammer.

But we persevered.

Chimaeron flopped over, lifeless, at the top of the third hour, after pushing nearly sixteen attempts. Wherever possible, I opted to give the raid an early dismissal, especially in the wake of a great accomplishment, but Blain rode the momentum. One hour in Blain's mind was plenty of time to investigate our next challenges, so we took that final hour to examine both the Nefarian encounter and set foot into Throne of the Four Winds, an instance that housed Ragnaros' wind-fueled partner in crime: Al'akir.

---

My nerves wavered amid the state of the roster. On one computer monitor, Mature procc'd achievements for completing quests in all the zones. On the other monitor sat WoWLemmings, as I scoured for tanks, looking for a long term replacement for the core...an Ater, a Dalans, a Drecca...anything. Page after page returned nothing. Nobody cared for the fine art of tanking.

Meanwhile, home life vied for control of my attention. I readily gave it. Jul continued to recover from her knee and neck surgeries, leaving me to run the show -- dinners, lunches, laundries, homework, school projects, bills. I saw it as a chance to make up for lost time, for those initial years that WoW usurped all my time, stole me away from my wife and kids. It was a chance to make amends, and I took it. But at the end of each day, I was spent. I had a new appreciation for single parents, and wasn't so quick to condemn my mother on some of her own decisions. It didn't excuse her choices, but it helped explain them.

I took consolation in work. For three years, it remained a reassuring monolith of stability in an otherwise haphazard existence. I was respected at the office, given authority there. It changed me. At the start, I was excited about technology but shrouded in self-doubt about my ability to produce anything of any value. By the end of this third year, I not only discovered a confidence I never knew existed, I was compelled to strive for quality and results...something I could take pride in. Just a little bit of effort was all it took, a little thoughtfulness, care and concern towards a helpful tool you put in someone else's hands, something they rely on to do their own job. I gave a shit about the people I worked for and with, and wanted those tools to reflect our commitment to quality and detail. The side-effect: I was quick to condemn those who didn't put in similar effort. To anyone claiming it "paid the bills" made me nauseous.

The months of December 2010 and January 2011 were particularly exciting at the office, as news of an impending buyout was spreading. Exciting, yes, but it also filled me with a sense of unease. A potentially stable, empowering job was now in a state of flux. I thrived on stability, and my experience with such mergers in the past left a lot to be desired. I remained optimistic, but prepared for the worst.

Good thing, too...

4.1. The Beginning of the End

Part IV: Cataclysm

"Great countries have fallen under less tyrannical rule than what you impose upon this guild."

World of Warcraft login screen,
during the Cataclysm ('11-'12) era,
Copyright © 2012 Blizzard Entertainment

We Meet Again

Doubt.

It's you again, old friend. That infection of the mind I just can't seem to shake. Battle scars from our former meetings are extensive. Whenever the biggest risks come to the table, when I have the most to lose, the marks are a reminder that I fought and won. You knocked at the door when I decided which guilds to assimilate and which to ignore. You had Graulm and Ater on a first-name basis at a time when it wasn't especially clear where my loyalties should lie. I remember you being clingy when it was time to shift out of AQ40 and into Naxxramas, leaving the bug-ridden instance unfinished.

You were out of sight for a bit, back when I thought I was untouchable. You got your little jabs in when I lost folks in Karazhan, when we took weeks on Magtheridon, when we wiped an embarrassing amount of times on The Lurker Below. I have to hand it to you, you've got spunk. You're like every man's personal forum troll and hater rolled up into a convenient little package. When my main tank and mentor left the game, there you were, with your sympathies that reeked of "told-you-so".

You were practically my copy-editor when it came time to rewrite the guild rules, my own personal YouTube commenter. Every word I typed was a joke to you, and you were certain to point a finger and laugh when I left loopholes for people to exploit, shirking morals in their illustrious rise to power.

You're tenacious -- if but a bit predictable. Didn't see you come out to congratulate us on all the bosses we dropped, and you certainly weren't there to pat us on the back as we took on the competition without losing players. See, that's the tricky thing about you. You don't really like to show your face when you're on the losing end of a debate, when you've been proven wrong. You linger, hovering over my shoulders when I know I'm about to make a decision I'll regret. But when that decision turns out beautifully, you're nowhere to be seen. How convenient that must be. You take off when things don't go your way; I can practically set my watch to it. Which begs the question: why are we squaring off again today?

The end of Wrath is only a few months away, and we've cleared nearly every boss in both normal and heroic mode. My guild is made up of some of the best played, best geared folks on Deathwing-US. Everywhere I turn, I see the Descendants of Draenor guild tag, so many well-known and accomplished folks on the server. They're already deep into the planning stages for Cataclysm's raid content. From all angles, we've nailed it, chief. And so, old friend, this is the part that confuses me, because under any other circumstance, you'd be as far away from this success as possible. Under what guise do you feel you still have authority over me?

I couldn't shake the feeling I had seen this all before.

A comparison of hit combo values between
 Street Fighter Alpha 2 (above) and Marvel vs. Capcom 2

No Scrubs

"Daaaaamn, you just got royally fucked up!"

"Another? That quarter yours?"

"Bullshit. And yes, I am going again. This fuckin' stick is busted."

The kid next to me dropped another coin into Street Fighter Alpha. The joystick movements hadn't changed much through the iterations. Ken had pretty much always been Ken, right from the first quarter sunk into Street Fighter II. Since then, Capcom rode the gravy train to success, rolling out sequel after sequel. Street Fighter II: Champion Edition let us choose the same character for hot Chun-Li on Chun-Li action, Super Street Fighter II added four new characters. Trip Hawkins made a horribly expensive console that I wouldn't have dreamed of purchasing, had it not been for Super Street Fighter II Turbo. Which led us to this prequel in the franchise, taking place before the events of the game that originally hooked me. I dug Alpha, and was particularly fond of the alpha-parry system, turning an opponent's attack into a block-counterattack in a swift 1-2 punch. With it, I could be on the offensive, even when on the defensive.

Hadoukens and Shoryukens glided out smoothly, muscle memory from years of performing the quarter-circle and zig-zag motions mapped to their respective abilities. I held the joystick with the tips of my fingers, believing it to give me a slight edge in precision. "Underhanded" was another popular style: the hand is turned upside down, nestling the joystick between middle and ring fingers. It was easy to size a player up that chose either grip: they knew their shit.

My opponent backed into the corner, nervous, waiting to see if I'd unleash another barrage. I snuck a glance without moving my head, trying to get a read on whether he was about to leap forward: the subtle nervous shake in a player's hand before his next move. The move that gives him away. He gripped the joystick with a fist, as if to pound a nail into a board. His movements were jerky, panicked, and he looked to tear the stick right out of the casing at one point.

Scrub.

He made his move, telegraphing the Titanic in the process. As he leapt, I caught him with another Shoryuken. He hopped off his back just in time to get a foot in the face, which I chained into several jabs, a low sweep, and a final Hadouken, sending him flying backwards through the air in slow motion. The screen read "5 Hit Combo Finish".

"Thanks a lot," he said, as if to imply we were taking turns trading wins -- a common tactic to make your quarters last longer. Quarters among friends. I didn't know this guy, or his pal...the one who spoke next.

"What's the highest combo you've ever got?"

"Ah, Christ, no idea. 11, 12 maybe? I can't even remember the last time I got into the double digits. The timing is insane." I was good, but not that good.

The guy I beat puffed out his chest, "I nail 30 hit combos all the time in MvC." I glanced over my shoulder at the Marvel vs. Capcom 2 machine. MvC took the SF franchise in a drastically different direction. Playing off the licensing behemoth of Marvel Comics, Capcom facilitated a tournament of infamous faces from their games, pitting them against super heroes I'd known since childhood. Matchups like Venom vs. Mega-Man, Spider-Man vs. Captain Commando, and Zangief vs. The Incredible Hulk were now a reality. The collective star power was unparalleled in MvC, and it drove some mad lineups to the arcade. For a time, at least. Players soon got wise to the gimmicks.

From the moment a seasoned SF player cast their eyes on the four buttons, something was amiss. Every SF game in the franchise delivered the standard six-button layout... but not MvC 2. Technically there were six, but two "assist" buttons masqueraded under the familiar layout. What was once a tried and true system, was now ever so slightly watered down. There was more.

The game diverged from its Street Fighter brethren in its over-the-top combos system. Basic joystick movements coupled with button presses yielded instant double-digit combos. Chaining these abilities together, then, caused ridiculous numbers to spin up. The average player rocked out with these Hyper Combos. A seasoned SF vet knew better.

MvC gave you the illusion you were doing better than you actually were. Comparing a 30 hit combo in MvC to SF was ludicrous, unless you scaled it appropriately: ratios varied from 1:8, to upwards of 1:30 in the most bizarre cases. Was the game less fun as a result? On the contrary, MvC was an absolute blast in terms of entertainment. It was easily the most stylish one at the party, and had plenty to go around.

Ah, but the substance...

You came to expect certain things from the SF franchise: Ken's red, tattered gi, Chun-Li's hair done up into two buns...and scoring a combo in the double digits took practice, patience, and timing. The numbers lied to you. With MvC, anybody could hit the double digits, and those who gloated were the least qualified to understand why it didn't matter.

"MvC is way easier than Alpha....game's insane!" one of them spoke, trying to sell me on the adrenalin. My eyes darted to the kid and his proclamation, then back to the MvC 2 cabinet. It stood alone, ignored. Yeah. 'Crazy fun'...that's why everyone is knocking down its door to play. On its release day, MvC had a lineup of kids walling me off from the machine. The jig was up.

I turned back to Alpha, the announcer's voice barely audible against the backdrop of relics that lined the room.

The 25-Man progression team takes a photo
on the back of their respective mammoths,
Ruby Sanctum

Identifying With Neither

I sat, staring at the monitor, not knowing what to type, not knowing what approach to take. The document title stared back: Descendants of Draenor - Changes in 4.0. The cursor blinked on the plain white screen. I was at a loss. What's your strategy, chief? How exactly do you plan on getting people to stay? I didn't know. No matter the angle I framed each possible solution, a logical solution failed to present itself. Antisocial players submerged in mediocrity would have no incentive to grow. Not with the back door left wide open by our friends in high places.

A week earlier, screenshots of the 25-Man raiders floating above Dalaran on their Frostbrood Vanquishers went live on the forums, signaling our last great accomplishment in Wrath. Plenty of time remained on the clock, if we so chose to eek out Heroic Lich King, but people wanted their gear, wanted to finish off their Tier 10 four-piece bonuses. Some would want breaks, gone for the summer months. And they'd earned it. Pushing Heroic Lich King ran the risk of burning players out, discouraging them from returning. Better to give them a breather now so that they could come back refreshed later, ready to pound the virtual pavement. If a tactic had the remote possibility of regenerating stamina in the roster, I had to employ it. We'd need every last drop.

From the moment it was made public, Blizzard's announcement of merging the 10-Man and 25-Man raids into a unified lock never left my mind. I carried the baggage to and from work, and played WoW like a zombie, contemplating possibilities. Each time I thought I had it, nope...that simply won't do. The back door is wide open. After the propaganda of the Blizzard PR machine settled like so much dust, one fact remained perfectly clear: once a guildy made a choice to run a 10-Man each week, they'd be systematically locked out of contributing to the 25. It didn't help that both sizes now shared the same loot tables, but Blizzard even went so far as to claim that the difficulty would remain the same between both sizes. It was an absurd claim. Most preposterous of all: Blizzard claimed to be returning a level of difficulty more in line with The Burning Crusade. It didn't take a genius to determine how this would play out.

1. WoW would become brutally difficult.
2. 7.5 of the 12 million WoW players, groomed on the Wrath content, would very quickly get a wake-up call -- having never known the way things were.
3. They would do the napkin math in their head, and leave the 25s behind, joining the far more digestible (in theory) 10-Man content.
4. Without a healthy pool to pluck from, the 25s would collapse.

Players...guildies...would choose the path of least resistance. No offense, old-school raiders, this was a simple reduction of risk. How could I convince them otherwise? Players owed the guild nothing.

They owed me nothing.

Sure, some people might stay. I wasn't happy with 'might'. Lessons learned from Vanilla and TBC proved to me that reliability wasn't built on good intentions. You had to provide structure, rules, and a system that acknowledged and rewarded players for their contributions in order for them to make the right choice. All the structure in the world didn't account for this new threat. Part of being in the DoD team meant you were never done learning, you were willing to grow, improve, seek new ways to be a better player, a better person. What if at the end of the day, all you wanted was some phat lewts and to not have to deal with people? To not have to be told you need to shape up. Your heals need work. Your DPS is at the bottom of the charts. You're dying in the fire too much.

You're failing. Fix it.

So, given the option of taking criticism or not taking criticism, how could one hope to keep this Mediocrity Swim Team pushing for the gold? The casuals would flock together, frolicking across the land without a care in the world, while the hardcore, 5-day-a-week raiding crowd would demand excruciatingly skillful guilds as their base of operations. Where did that leave us? As I stared at the empty screen, unable to type anything, unable to even begin to guess at what the answer might be, an upsetting reality set in...

For the first time in my career as a guild leader, it wasn't doubt in myself that I feared stood in the way of our success...it was doubt in Blizzard.

3.71. The Edge Case

Si Team (with help from Sixfold) ends The
Lich King's reign in 10-Man mode, earning
"Fall of the Lich King (10 Player)",
Icecrown Citadel

Fifty Shades of Red

The Lich King struck Mature with Frostmourne, and the pale blood elf reeled from the blow. Will of the Necropolis proc'd, granting Sixfold a window to load up another round of HoTs. Blain called out a warning: prepare to move. We'd survived the Val'kyr dragging players off the edge to be dropped to their death by racing to the center of the platform; moments later, our safe zone became a death trap as The Lich King blasted us with Remorseless Winter. Exhausted, I commanded my digital death knight to pull freshly ripped Raging Spirits toward me before they dealt fatal blows to players less armored. Blain called for cooldowns to ensure a clean transition into the final phase, and it was upon us.

Sir Klocker and I balanced the weight of Frostmourne between our respective toons, trading at the application of Soul Reaper. The six remaining damage dealers unleashed hell into Arthas, his blows softened by bubbles of protective energy twisting outward from Neps' Hammer of Ancient Kings. Arthas' health slowly diminished, until at last, a final blast from his icy hands annihilated us in a single shot.

"Aw. Game over, everyone. Pack up your shit."

Klocker did his best impression of The Price is Right's fail-horn. The raid continued to joke and congratulate each other, as if nothing had happened. For such a clean execution, the raid was surprisingly chipper about this wipe.

The "wipe" was only an illusion.

Like clockwork, Fordring broke free, smashed Frostmourne and released King Terenas II who mass resurrected the 10 of us, and we gave Arthas what for. "Fall of the Lich King (10 Player)" flashed up on our screens, as Si Team officially wrapped their clear of Icecrown Citadel.

"Thank you to Eh Team for loaning us Sixfold today," I typed into guild chat. The formality was merely a show of respect to any guild members present and paying attention to the scrolling green words in the lower-left. In actuality, Eh Team was filling spots of their own as needed, following Crasian's second exit and Bulwinkul's vacation still in progress. As a good guild does, we worked to help each other fill spots as needed, a weekly ritual that grew out of our mutual needs as a result of the expansion nearing its end-of-life. It'd been a long time since any 10-Man team had been charged with poaching from one another. But before I could officially stick a fork in this particular issue, the dead horse would be flogged one final time.

---

When Sir Klocker returned to the officer pool, his first order of business was to bring to light issues that had been bothering him for some time. First on his list was a re-addressing of the loot situation, a path I had already begun to tread down. A dialogue unfurled, and I'd done some initial investigation into potential solutions for the next expansion. They needed polish, but at least ideas were flowing with enough inertia that I could douse folks like Cheeseus and Blain with them, gaining feedback and refining. Shortly after the loot conversation kicked off, Klocker pushed for the next item he felt was important.

There came an open discussion among the officer core to re-investigate the possibility of promoting Ben to Elite. Both he and Neps felt strongly that Ben had more than proven himself in the heat of battle, pointing out that his drunken tirades in Ventrilo had diminished significantly since the early days. Out in the field, Ben was far more than what the "Raider" rank asked of him, dominating meters and prioritizing the 25-Man progression raid's schedule over all else. Sir Klocker argued that it "didn't seem right" that Ben remain relegated to Raider. Had he not proven himself consistent and reliable for a long enough period of time? I couldn't argue with the sentiment. If anything, I was the most directly affected by Ben's increasing accountability. His willingness to improve translated into a much lighter load on my plate. It would be a shame to forget that he'd grown from a player that that lived by his own rules and schedule...to the type of raider that would text me multiple times before a raid:

"Hey man, I’m gonna be five minutes late, hold my spot!"

"I'm just turning the corner now, I’m almost there!"

"Man, I'll be at the computer in like one minute!"

Better too much communication than not enough.

But as much as I wanted to give him the promotion, to give him that positive reinforcement for a job well done, something held me back from converting him into an Elite. As much improvement as Ben had demonstrated, the red flags still flew in my face...and my inner voice spoke. You will regret this decision. People don't change. Think it through. But he had changed! Why was this situation so unique, why was it any different than any other player I'd dealt with? It was entirely possible that those red flags Ben had flown in my face warranted a second look. After all, I'd come to the realization that not all people issues were black and white, but rather a million different shades of gray. Perhaps those flags weren't all as blood red as I imagined them to be.

The Halo Effect

I decided long ago that Ben was worth the effort, and wouldn't let it go. I let the officer core know I had something in the works to address the edge case -- this amorphous zone Ben floated between. Overqualified for a Raider, yet still unable to fulfill the prerequisites demanded of an Elite, Ben was something else entirely. I was committed to finding a way to acknowledge Ben's efforts, both in the short term and in the long. Quite a few players wondered why I even bothered putting effort into Ben; they had already written him off as immature, annoying, and not worth their time. Ironically, this was exactly the reason I bothered...because I hadn't made up my mind. Most perplexing was that every time I felt like I was about to come to a conclusion...I couldn't.

My hesitancy was more than likely a result of those earliest memories I formed of Ben; nights in which his perceptions of game mechanics filled our raid channel. His confidence walked the fine line between expertise and arrogance, dipping back and forth with just enough inconsistency to leave me guessing. Was it actual insight? Or an inflated ego borne out of PvP dominance -- an affliction plaguing more players than just Ben. Unfortunately, I lumped my judgments together: that "Halo" effect that causes us to focus in on one attribute, then apply it across the board when assessing the complete package.

Folks like Dalans weren't so easily convinced in observance of ego-fueled claims, "He'll never be a raider."

"Who? Ben?"

"He just spewed a bunch of nonsense about threat and aggro."

I'd fall into the trap, throwing in my own judgments, "How did we ever make it without the guy? Tell Ben that's why we never made any progress in The Burning Crusade. Oh, wait a second, WE TOTALLY DID!"

"Yeah, that won't work on Ben, he'll just laugh it off."

"It's all a big joke to him, isn't it?" I added, "Just like his life."

I had a lot to learn about judging character back then. Fortunately, I had people to guide me down the right path. People I previously thought incapable of caring about personnel issues. People like Blain, "His life is nothing to joke about."

"Why are you defending him?"

"His knowledge of the game has nothing to do with his knowledge of life."

My original read of Blain was no better than that of Ben's, in hindsight. Just because Blain's style was less communicative than Ater's didn't mean he lacked the ability to understand people. And as for Ben, he was still growing up in the guild, gaining life lessons at a completely different rate than the rest of us. Ego aside, his actions demonstrated he knew what he was doing, even if he couldn't articulate it. Just as he would learn this over time, I would also learn over time about how the halo effect had a grip on me, and how it would take calm objectivity and rational thinking to keep from falling into that trap. It meant not jumping to conclusions, especially after Ben had progressed so far.

Ben and Fred stand guard while Mature defeats
any challengers that stand in the way of the
"Gurubashi Arena Grand Master" achievement,
Stranglethorn Vale

Inner Demons

Learning to listen to my gut was one of the most difficult obstacles to overcome. Time and again I struggled with those "hunches", that inner voice that screamed out warnings, that I was one step away from making a huge mistake. I justified ignoring it with my inexperience, contending that "my gut" wasn't a hard-and-fast rule I could point to when defining the expectations of the guild. If great leaders disagree on the many ways you can effectively manage people, one belief system that seems to be shared by nearly all: trust your instincts. If something doesn't feel right, don't do it. This formed the basis for my entire Red Flags post, and subsequent integration into our standard operating procedure. If you do or say something that rubs me the wrong way, it's going to hurt your chances in moving up. To clarify, I offered a multitude of examples, and felt strongly it would paint a clear picture for the guild moving forward.

Yet whenever the situation involved Ben, I questioned my gut the most, wrestling with an inner dialogue to understand why Ben continued to fall into limbo. People don’t change. But they can if they want to! Do you really think he wants to? Actions speak volumes. His actions have spoken, he's absent again tonight, off to "buy diapers"...something he should have done well before raid time. True, but he is taking care of his kid! Kids come before a video game! It's only an excuse for not planning ahead. People make mistakes. Think of how many times he's offered help to guildies, training Bulwinkul on Boomkin, helping stand guard while a Guild Leader that sucks at PvP wraps up a PvP achievement. His heart is in the right place, he just needs to practice his planning and communication...these are things that are fixable.

The problem was that my gut pointed out all the things that should be cause for concern, but it was still up to me to decide what was a simple mistake that could be fixed, and what was the result of having no heart in the first place.

---

"I guess Si Team run is cancelled this week!" Blain shot over a whisper. He seemed more irritated than normal.

"What's going on?"

"Yeah, Ben went and got himself locked to an Eh Team run this week."

This is a surprise? Grumbling and disgusted tones followed as I joined into Vent to listen.

"Should've known this was gonna happen. Hooray for Ben!"

"Hold up, let's not jump to conclusions here, let me talk to him." I alt-tabbed to the Vent server, scanning the groups, and finding Ben's name nestled in the "Eh Team" room. I yanked him out and into the officer channel.

"So what's the deal, here?"

He rolled right into it, as if he'd prepared for this exact moment, "Ok, so, I thought that Blain had told us that the Si Team run was cancelled this week. So, when Eh Team was asking for a filler, I offered up. Blain wasn't even online at the time."

"So you had no opportunity to check with Blain to confirm this?"

"Nah, I mean, I don't have access to those officer notes, so I don't know what his phone number is."

"But more importantly, you didn't think to check with anyone online that could get you his number?"

"That's what I'm saying, I didn't think I needed to because I thought that Blain had already called it off!"

Standard miscommunication. No actual ill-intent.

"Alright, we'll see what we can do to maybe get a fill from somewhere else, but you do realize this puts us in an awkward position, right? Eh Team being what it is, and all."

"I swear, Hanzo...totally didn't think this would be an issue."

"I think it's probably best you let Blain and the rest of the team know this was a mistake on your part, an apology would probably work wonders to help fix this. And in the future, you have got to touch base with Blain first. Before doing anything that would lock you to Eh Team's run."

I heard the clicking of keys as Ben opened up the mic to speak, but was interrupted by a wave of trash begging for his Mind Sear. "Yep, got it. I will totally tell them."

There was no need to vilify Ben over this issue. This was a Red Flag that didn't need to reset expectations -- it was merely a speed bump on the road to getting Ben where I needed him to be. I kept my gut at bay, and hopped back into Si Team's vent channel, "Simple mistake. It's really not a big deal, just a miscommunication."

"Oh, yeah, no, I wasn't really upset. I was just pointing out how amusing it was," Blain answered.

So much context lost over whispers and tells, I thought. Some things really need to be said face-to-face, or at the very least, over Vent.

3.37. The Illusion of Truth

Early art for one of several patent applications for
a moving staircase, a.k.a. the "Escalator"

Committing Genericide

Convenience is a dastardly foe. In 1950, it fooled a company (as it had the rest of humanity) into changing the perception of its own greatest invention, a blindside which ultimately cost them one of the most important trademarks of the 21st century.

An inventor named Charles Seeberger began working for the Otis Elevator Company at the turn of the century. Thanks to his careful purchase of several unrealized patents bearing a similarity to his newest invention, Charles was able to not only provide his employer with a world-changing machine, Otis itself would retain any and all legal control of the trademarked named. Charles consulted a Latin lexicon and devised a term which loosely described a thing as "a means of traversing from" -- it was to be pronounced "es-CAL-a-tor", much like He-Man's arch nemesis. Thus, the diagonally moving staircase was born, and the Otis-brand Escalator would stand to represent the very best quality in all diagonally moving staircases.

Capitalism being what it was, a number of competitors soon arose from the woodwork, providing their own diagonally moving staircases. But since Otis held a tight trademark on the brand name "Escalator", none of those competitors could legally call their inventions by the same name. They were forced to use impressive terms like "motorstairs", "electric stairways" and what is quite possibly the most exciting of the bunch, "moving stairs". But over the course of the next several decades, the psychology of man produced a very interesting behavior -- one that would eventually cause Otis to defend itself before a judge.

Motor-driven stairs grew to become a luxury that the entire world enjoyed, yet another mark of humankind advancing towards a technological future. They appeared everywhere, in shopping centers, office complexes, the lobbies of high-class apartments -- any place a person wanted a little extra convenience in their life when getting to point B, if it were several floors higher than point A. And Otis gladly met that demand, servicing any and all who required traversal-by-mechanical-means. It wasn't long before the Escalator-brand moving staircase appeared at every turn. Or did they?

There really was no way for the layman to point to a diagonally moving staircase and say, "Ah, an Otis-Brand Escalator! I'd recognize that name anywhere!" They all looked the same and performed the same function. There were no tell-tale clues that gave it away, no identifying logo or unique look that distinguished it from any other. Humankind was in bliss, enjoying their Coke or Pepsi while riding a -- oh, what's that thing called again? The diagonally moving motorized staircase? Ah, right, an escalator! By contrast, people knew which beverage they were drinking, which flavor they were emotionally attached to. They harbored no similar emotional attachment to a mechanized set of stairs. To them, all motorized stairs were escalators. The word itself was as convenient as the invention! The use of the Otis's brand-name became so ingrained into everyday life that by the same time the Pepsi-Cola company was trying to sell itself to the Coca-Cola company, the word "escalate" had become a part of everyday speech. Even the word itself had morphed, taking on a new pronunciation, "ES-ca-lay-tor", something much closer to the word we recognize and use today.

Midway through the 20th century, the Haughton Elevator Company had had enough. Having grown tired of their irreverent pseudonyms for what was clearly now a generic term, Haughton took Otis to court in an attempt to reverse the "Escalator" trademark. By freeing the term from Otis' legal stranglehold, any and all motorized staircase manufacturers could use the word "escalator" much as the public had being doing for years. The courtroom was heated as legal counsel produced pages of trademark copy written by Seeberger decades before his death. Yet upon scrutiny, inconsistencies emerged. Much of the text focused on "Otis-brand" this, and "Otis-brand" that, and Seeberger's own writing mixed the use of 'Escalator' and 'escalator' in various passages, skewing the brand name's validity as a proper noun. The defense pounced. In the March 1946 issue of Architectural Forum, inconsistencies in how the company referred to its brand continued bleed onto the page. Defense pointed to an advertisement, paid for by Otis and written by Otis, which contained the following fate-sealing verbiage:

"To thousands of building owners and managers, the Otis trademark means the utmost in safe, efficient economical elevator and escalator operation."

The last nail of the coffin was hammered in. The presiding judge had no choice but to rule in favor of Haughton, citing that Otis had not only been unable to defend the use of the word as a brand-specific name, they were guilty themselves of genercizing the word. Their brand had grown so convenient, so common to everyday life that its total lack of identifiable traits led humanity to unanimously agree upon their own false expertise. The hive mind collectively agreed on a term that was convenient, made sense, and was true...to them. The convenience of the word was so overwhelming, it even fooled the company that trademarked it in the beginning, as they unconsciously referred to their own invention in err. And in the aftermath of the fateful court case, the term 'escalator' fell into the public domain, but humankind was none the wiser. They continued to use the word as they always had. Or at least, it seemed to us we always had.

The "Raid Difficulty" option, added in Patch 3.2, allows
raids of both 10- and 25-Man sizes to toggle between the
easy and difficult modes on a per-boss basis.

Calling a Raid a "Raid"

When a brand name falls into generic everyday use, it is referred to as genericide. You don't cover your cuts with a medicated adhesive strip, you use a Band-Aid®. You don't make an 8 1/2" x 11" photocopy of that TPS report, you Xerox® it. Do you clean your ear out with a high-quality cotton swab? Or do you use a Q-Tip®? You don't mean to degrade these brands on purpose, it's a part of who we are, looking for convenience and shortcuts in what we do and how we speak. If done with enough frequency, the product we use takes on the meaning of that which we choose to call it. We do this when external identifying factors are diminished, blending into a cloud of indistinguishables. A Pepsi® may taste similar to a Coke® but the logos painted across the aluminum cans are completely dissimilar. Ask any Apple fan boy why you should choose an iPod® over a Zune®, and you'll be blasted with a checklist of significant differences in functionality, display, and even the "feel" of the device in your hands. If these easily identifiable traits aren't available to us, our minds turn to what we deem relevant, focusing instead on the obvious or what moves us: a color, a logo, a taste that we enjoy, a raid boss that caused our adrenaline to pump. When we focus on that repeatedly, it becomes familiar, and deep within the mind familiarity breeds "truthiness". Psychologists refer to this effect as The Illusion of Truth, and it's what makes bullied employees feel useless and complacent, and what compels the entire world to carry on believing a set of motorized stairs is an escalator, never realizing nor caring that they are using the wrong terminology.

At the release of Patch 3.2 - Call of the Crusade, World of Warcraft underwent a number of improvements and refinements, as patches typically do. Among the many new features that landed on our plate was a function that raiders of all shapes and sizes would come to use on a regular basis. Nestled deep within the user interface hid a new option that allowed the raid leader to toggle the difficulty of the next boss. Right-clicking a user frame produced a pop-up dialog, with four menu options: Raid Difficulty: 10-Man, 25-Man, 10-Man (Heroic), and 25-Man (Heroic). Switching the difficulty was as simple as the touch of a button. No longer would raiders have to suffer the indignance of working their way towards a invisible benchmark, say...having the DPS necessary to destroy XT-002's heart or defeating Hodir before he destroyed his cache at the three minute mark. There were no more qualifiers, no more vetting a raid's capacity to do quality work. With a single click, a raid could begin the process of smashing their head against a wall in heroic mode. Many raiders that weren't capable of handling difficult content did as such. And the more players who failed miserably at this difficult content, the more players there were to complain on the Blizzard forums about how life wasn't fair.

It gets better.

In order to make room for this new UI option in our raid frames, terminology needed to be adjusted. Up until this point, the word "heroic" was already in-use: a prefix that differentiated raid achievements by the size of the group involved. A 10-Man effort into "Arachnophobia" was very different than that of a 25-Man effort. To the untrained eye, the obvious physical attributes were the most noticeable: trash was more severe in a 25-Man, more health on bosses, and mechanics were less forgiving. Nerds being what we are, math is often the first go-to, so it made logical sense that beating a twenty-minute timer in a 10-Man raid appeared less challenging than in a 25-Man. But not everyone loves math as much as a nerd, so more convenient physical attributes were honed in on. The "heroic" label prefixed on each golden banner satisfied this requirement. In 3.2, however, this would no longer fly. The "heroic" label was now being used to indicate the difficulty setting of a boss, regardless of raid size. The term could no longer exist in both contexts without creating confusion, since 10s had the option of a "heroic" mode, just like the 25s. What to do?

To clear up this confusion, Blizzard stripped the "heroic" label off of the 25-Man achievements, and suffixed each achievement with its appropriate raid size instead. What was once "Heroic: Arachnophobia" was now "Arachnophobia (25-Man)", sitting parallel to "Arachnophobia (10-Man)". A perfectly logical, simple change that very clearly conveyed to WoW players exactly which achievement was which.

And thus began the slow growth of convenience tentacles into our subconscious, injecting us with their seed of genericization.

Quick! Which one of these achievements was the more
difficult of the two? (hover over image for the answer)

Erosion

Try to think of something "heroic". Perhaps you read the word and instantly think of firefighters rescuing children from a burning building, soldiers storming a beach, or Russel Crowe fighting off a handful of combatants in a sandy arena. The word invokes an emotional response in our brain because we associate it with great prestige, an accomplishment of noteworthy effort. We can point to Batman knocking out a villain and very easily identify which is the "heroic" of the two comic book characters. Well, the layperson might. But corner a comic book nerd and you'll produce an hour long discussion about the varying definitions of good and evil, darkness and light, and when Batman may even make unheroic decisions, making you wish you'd never brought the subject up. The nerdy comic book experts, it would seem, possess a sort of unhealthy obsession to the specifics...but they are no different than a machinist who happens to know the finely tuned differences between an Otis-brand escalator, and those of a competitor.

Hardcore World of Warcraft players share this tendency.

To many of us, labels on bright golden achievement bars that flash up on a screen are fluff; extraneous information that we don't pay a lot of attention to. What matters the most to us are the numbers, and our own experiences. And, as long as we had been raiding content in World of Warcraft, the size ultimately played a huge factor in gauging how difficult the content was. During Vanilla, 40s (near the end) were exceptionally challenging, and in The Burning Crusade, the few 10s weren't nearly as tough as the main stretch of 25-Man content. As we carried on into Wrath, we continued to see the very same things...from our perspective. The toughest content we reserved for the end of the week, but during the rest of the week, we cleared 10-Man content with ease. We did so simply because it was there, and we could supplement our gear with its lesser rewards. Each week, we would measure our performance against other 25-Man guilds to see how far along we were. And like clockwork, we would also see that each week, the 10-Man achievements were consistently completed long before the 25-Man ones -- just one more piece of evidence that painted the 10s as inconsequential.

But, that's not what the masses saw.

Thanks to the growing ubiquity of raiding in Wrath, a much larger group of players had entered the picture. Many of these players didn't share our unhealthy obsession with the fine details of raiding differences, nor did they care to. They were a different breed of player, focused primarily on what was convenient and familiar to them. Black Temple, Ahn'Qiraj, raids of great challenge still fresh in our minds bore no great burden to this next generation of raiders; they entered WoW raiding with no baggage. There was no "before" to the "after" to compare to; for them, the size of the raid was merely a reflection of their personal choice, something they clung to as fiercely as their most cherished class. They believed it. So by the time 3.2 had changed the way raids were labelled, the masses were already well on their way to considering both sizes of raids as equal, not as normal and heroic -- easy and difficult -- as they once were. What was truly bizarre to us was that amid these claims, Blizzard not only didn't clarify the differences in difficulty when called upon, they joined the masses in their shared assessment. Yes, raids are equal in difficulty! The size is merely a reflection of personal preference, not one of challenge! Even in the face of the data that said otherwise, the company that had (re)invented raiding spoke as though they were caught up in their own illusion.

It remained to be seen whether or not the illusion would become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

---

"How was your trip to BlizzCon?" I shot an IM over to Cheeseus, "was it a blast or what?"

"Yeah, it was a good time," he replied, "I assume you saw the announcement about the next legendary?"

"No, what is it?"

"Shadowmourne. You're gonna wanna have a look."

Upon seeing the name in front of me, I did what any WoW player would do: I Googled® it.