3.51. Uncoiling the Snake

"Oh the sleepless nights",
A thread in the DoD officer forums that draws
attention to a flaw in the guild's loot system

If I Had No Loot

The officer forums erupted; it was Sir Klocker. "Oh the sleepless nights" bore the title of the thread. Once again, a misunderstanding had left people with hurt feelings, mixed messages, and ultimately they were confused about the acquisition of gear. Was I upset or not? Was he supposed to bid on Band of the Traitor King or not? Most importantly, why wasn't "use your best judgement" and "lead by example" enough of a guide? I took great pains to tie up any loose ends that could be misinterpreted by both the moral and the malicious, yet confusion lingered. Sir Klocker wasn't an isolated incident; more and more guildies found themselves confused by the seemingly straightforward system I laid out upon our arrival in Northrend. Ambiguity persisted because of a specific game mechanic I hadn't considered for.

It's hard to give deep consideration to what effect a particular game mechanic will have on a guild's loot system...

...when the mechanic doesn't exist yet.

---

Not so long ago, the problem was completely different. Raids were chock full of stingy Scrooge McDucks sitting on astronomical piles of DKP, preparing for an item that might never drop. The raid wasn't getting any stronger as a result. Valuable upgrades were being tossed to the side or dusted. These marginal upgrades (often called sidegrades) weren't as luscious as some of those big name pieces. Misguided arguments driven by personal lust and greed made those incredibly magnificent weapons and shields drive my raid's intent. Raiding for loot rather than progression itself caused the self-absorbed to rise to surface, and Blain wiped those off with a single stroke. Those who remained got a new lesson: better gear may augment your stats, but isn't the reason why you fail.

That's completely on you, buddy.

So the raiders learned the hard lesson about their failings, a slow, painful process of introspection and eventual epiphany. By exploring strategy, discussing mechanics, sharing new addons they'd discovered...they all gained new insight, and their reason to raid grew crystal clear. At last, they no longer blamed loot for their failures. If I noticed them falling back into their old ways, I repeated my rule of thumb: Plan to never see the item you want -- make the best use of the upgrades available to you. And to stymie the loot paradox from coiling back upon itself, Blain stopped it dead in its tracks by setting a definitive cutoff point. Once we'd killed Boss X a few times, we were moving on to more treacherous territory...whether players had Askhandi or not. Players didn't have time to bitch and whine about missing upgrades, because before they opened their mouths, we were already retiring MC for BWL, BWL for AQ40, and AQ40 for Naxxramas. Without a channel to complain about lacking gear, they remained focused on progression which produced (surprise, surprise): lots and lots of boss kills.

...along with a hefty amount of loot, besides.

That was a raiding era of a different day. Blain had long since retired from raid leadership. Several followed in his footsteps, ultimately leading us to Omaric and Bretthew. The druid and the paladin were no less passionate about progression and excitement of killing bosses in raids. They just felt we had more to do before we rushed into the biggest challenges. Why bash our heads against an insanely difficult heroic Anub'arak when tier 10 was a mere few weeks away? With an encroaching iLevel of 264 from the 25-Man version of Icecrown, they rationalized that our time was better spent continuing to plug holes in the gear gaps for many of our non-Elite folk.

But when those aforementioned lesser-geared folks didn't get an opportunity to loot, a gaping hole in my rules manifested. The snake was looking for its tail.

Main vs. Off

Dual Specialization became an everyday luxury that brought with it problems of its own. Though during the raiding era of TBC and earlier it was much more difficult to find a player with multiple able bodied characters that were raid-ready, handling the distribution of loot was as simple as adding a new character to the DKP pool. Hip deep in Wrath content, loot distribution became a tad more muddied, especially with my Elite 1st round bidding rules looped into the mix.

By now, most players in the roster held a deep seated motivation to loot anything and everything for upgrades along the path to victory. These motivations stemmed from the new order set forth by Blain many moons ago. The new variable in the mix was the off-spec. Now carrying a second talent set (which was often deployed mid-raid), players had a need to build an entirely new set of gear. Realizing this, but without giving the off-spec a great deal of attention, the officers and I defaulted to telling players "stick to the 5 DKP minimum bid" when scooping up items for the off-spec. It was important to keep the already complex loot rules from spiraling out of control. By encouraging players to bid on (or near) the minimum, off-spec looting should have kept their gearing strategy from standing in the way of someone's main spec.

That was the theory, at least.

The first of us to notice the flaw in practice were ones with small amounts of DKP; I fell into this bucket. Players who took my mantra to its extreme would shoot their entire load on items that didn't necessarily warrant such a high investment. Shrewd players (particularly tanks) were in a superb bidding spot: there was usually never more than one or two other players in the raid bidding against them. They hit the books and did the research ahead of the raid. They knew who they were going up against for specific items, they reviewed the DKP website which cataloged every player's earnings, and measured their bids thoughtfully and conservatively.

I was not one of these players.

Even with the knowledge I'd only be going up against one or two other tanks, I continued to bid high on items I most assuredly felt I would never see again, and my DKP pool emptied out quickly. It was at that point I began to see key pieces for my tanking set going to players that weren't tanks. This infuriated me, but what could I do? My DKP bidding pool was expunged, hovering slightly below the minimum 5 DKP bid. So when these items were issued out to players who weren't planning to use them, I directed my passive aggressive anger toward them, rather than acknowledge the flaw in the guild's rules.

...which is why Sir Klocker, and many others like him, remained confused about our system.

"Stormrage (he's a pony again)"
Artwork by 0Riane0

Brony! Broni! Broné!

With the advent of alts taking filler spots in the main 25-Man progression raid, the problem only worsened. Descendants of Draenor soon had a new generation of Lyticvirus-style players: folks nerdy enough to level up multiple alts and bring them to raids. I was fine with this. New alts, coupled with dual specializations, granted my raid rotations an unheralded level of flexibility. On nights of dire need, to be able to point to a player at random and tell them, "bench the caster and bring me your tank" was like a dream come true for a casual/hardcore raiding guild leader. I could, at last, bend and flow with the tides of the roster lineup changes -- it was a feature exponentially more valuable than any option to extend a raid lock Blizzard tossed my way. But with the alts filling spots in progression, the snake continued to search for its tail and my problems only compounded.

Any guildy that wished to provide alternate services quickly rose to prominence. One such player was my newest assignment to lead the Alt-25, Mangetsu. Fresh from his recent promotion to Avatar, Mangetsu's warlock weaved fel energies like a tapestry, ripping bosses in half with insane DPS. When it came time to flip over to the Alt-25, Mangetsu carried out his leadership duties via his death knight Amalgam. So when the night rolled around that Bretthew texted me that he had an emergency computer hardware problem, I looked to option Amalgam as a replacment. It would work -- we were bursting with new ranged DPS, many of whom wished for upgrades in Ulduar, and Mangetsu was already top-of-the-line in hybrid tier 8 & 9. It was the most logical choice, and Mang happily flipped to Amalgam, helping tank our way through the nightly clear in yet another stress-free evening of raid work.

That is, until we sliced open Ignis the Furnace Master's gut and Heart of Iron poured out.

Luck had not been on our side with this tanking trinket in the past. The first time it dropped, Omaric was able to pick it up...only to switch to Ikey months later, leaving it to collect dust on his former main. The only other time it graced our presence was that diabolical week in August '09, the one that left me stranded in Williston, North Dakota while Bretthew and Omaric attended BlizzCon. All three of us missed our shot, and it went to the paladin Shimerice, who almost exclusively played holy. In her hands, the Heart of Iron would most likely never see the light of day.

As Neps finished taking bids for it, many of us felt like we knew it would go to Omaric. He had been waiting patiently since June to reacquire the trinket for Ikey bear. The bids wrapped up and Neps announced the winner: Amalgam, Mangetsu's alt. Omaric had always bid far more conservatively than I, knowing he only needed to go up against Bretthew for such items. On this particular evening, the possibility of losing Heart of Iron to an alt hadn't even crossed his mind.

That gamble was to his detriment.

Mangetsu was humble and thankful for the win, none the wiser to Omaric's loss, much like Sir Klocker had been when "stealing away" a tanking ring from me. But these were the rules! My rules! They allowed for this behavior and even encouraged it! It was a perfectly acceptable bid, fully within the regulations of our flawed loot system. The snake had indeed been uncoiled and the result was a looting mentality which was now far too broad. The rule that applied to mains was shortsighted when applied to alts.

The trinket was sent over to Amalgam, and players quietly shared their disgust with me behind the curtains of whispered tells. Bheer summed it up succinctly in a crushing whisper; my heart sank as I read it, because it confirmed my failure to solve this issue in our new loot rules:

"If you had implemented main spec vs. off spec bidding, this never would've happened."

---

As the night tapered off, I caught a glimpse of Blain logging in; he had been back for several weeks now. His face appeared for the first time in many months during our completion of Firefighter culminating in a shower of Ironbound proto-drakes. It was good to have my old friend back in action as I expected his time away from the game had re-energized him. We could use that energy in Icecrown Citadel, now mere weeks away. I shot him a playful tell,

"I thought you were supposed to be getting a life? The outdoors are highly overrated."

There was no response. He either wasn't amused or something had his attention. I popped open the guild roster, scrolled to his name and examined his location in the world. He was in an arena...unsurprisingly. In WoW terminology, it was the same as having a giant "OCCUPIED - DO NOT DISTURB" hanging around the player's neck. I steered the Time Lost Proto-Drake across Icecrown in search of the last few rares left for Frostbitten, and after a few minutes, a response finally arrived. As was his nature, he did away with the small talk and got straight to the point:

"Why aren't we working on the heroic Tournament achievements?"

I sighed. He wasn't going to like my answer.

2.18. Decay

Hanzo's alt Uld digs into Bael Modan with Neurcrotic,
The Barrens

The Weight of the World

I woke up screaming.

It was 2:00 a.m., and my jaw ached as if I had been struck by a drunken biker. The pain from an impacted wisdom tooth seeped through the barrier separating the woken from the asleep. Although video games had been my life for the better part of thirty-six years, I rarely had dreams of them. This night was different. Concerns had been weighing heavily on my mind. The exit of Kadrok. A roster of players unable to stay out of the fire. My responsibility to play a restoration druid while the owner was away; my own shaman collecting cobwebs in the process. Feelings of guilt about our lack of progression. My wanting Ekasra to excel, to be accepted by his peers, only to see him continually ridiculed while he played at a sub-par level. Ater becoming more focused at work, putting extra hours in on projects I wasn't involved with, spending less time in-game, less time mentoring me in management and leadership. And now, a new threat loomed: players were starting to check-out.

I dragged myself out of bed and went downstairs to the computer room. I needed painkillers, the best I could hope for was a handful of Advil to keep me going until the Dentist's office opened. I wasn't going back to sleep with my jaw ablaze in agony, so I sat down at the keyboard, logged on, and began leveling my rogue Uld in Hellfire Penninsula. In solitude, mindlessly jumping through the hoops that Thrallmar sent my way, I couldn't escape the problems of the guild. My mind continued to dart back to them. We'd defeated The Lurker Below weeks before and had yet to secure another kill. Of course, any sort of work on any other bosses was laughable at best. Initial attempts on Hydross the Unstable had been complete and total failures. The threat wipe between transitions was so incredibly touchy that even the slightest bit of aggro at the wrong time meant Ater would lose his grip on the Corrupted Water Elemental. Ekasra struggled here, and managed to drop his totems at the wrong time, causing a double set of Water Elemental minions to spawn. The attempt was a wash.

I flew Uld over to Zeth'gor, trying to keep my mind occupied, keep it from drifting back to the pain in the recesses of my jaw. The guild's problems continued to be my dental relief. When Breginna returned from her work project, resuming control of her druid, I hopped back onto Kerulak to try to show Ekasra the ropes as best I could, keeping close tabs on those transitions and being mindful of threat. Yet we stagnated on Hydross and lost whatever temporary gusto was present during The Lurker's defeat. Once again, we were wiping to farmed content. Volitar became a no-show, absent from the signups and missing-in-action come raid time. The load then fell back onto Ater's shoulders, who remained silent in Vent as he carried the weight of a failing raid while his work piled up at the office. And like the pain in my jaw, I could do nothing. Just sit back and watch the tower crumbling.

A player swooped down out of the sky to mine some ore near Uld and I glanced up the guild tag; the pain resonated deeper into my head, throbbing and aching.

Pretty Pink Pwnies.

PPP prepares for an Illidan kill, boasting
various ex-DoD members in their roster,
Black Temple

Management By Fear

The furthest progressed Horde raiding guild on Deathwing-US was Pretty Pink Pwnies. They raided twice as long as us each week (4 nights, minimum), and destroyed us in terms of progression. They had a colorful roster of players who wouldn't think twice about tossing some racial slurs your way. Led by a blowhard named Bru, they were difficult to keep up with. I never had the luxury of speaking to him myself, but whenever I asked for people's opinions, players lavished him with praise:

"He's a genius."

"Superb raid leader."

"Doesn't take a lot of shit."

"I've heard the guy make people cry in Vent."

"Only speaks in a steady stream of curses and insults."

Bru was famously recorded tearing a guild member to pieces during an Archimonde attempt -- a boss we wouldn't see for months. I listened to this clip and was astounded. All I could think of was how am I losing players to this guy?

My aversion to such disgusting treatment of people was entirely the reason I had folks like Ater in place, preferring kindness over abuse. Ater knew how to call people out while keeping the belittling in check. Derogatory name-calling had no place in our guild. That was, after all, one of our selling points in Descendants of Draenor: a tiny bit of humanity, as opposed to the standard guilds where the underlying rule was "If you fuck up, you're out."

But all the touchy-feely mutual respect we preached in our ideals did nothing to prevent DoD from hemorrhaging players to guilds like Pretty Pink Pwnie. I stood in the dark, unaware of what motivated them, what drove them to blindly follow a person that was devoid of any real people skills. Annihilation shared his opinions with me on this bizarre tendency of human nature.

"He's not a bad guy, Kerulak. Bru's actually cool, once you get to know him. His management technique just happens to be different than what you're used to."

"How can you say that? I mean, the guy has made people cry in raids. That is some stellar people management!"

"Some people need that. People flock to what gives them a sense of comfort. A sense of being part of a family. He runs it like a business, but that isn't what everyone strives for."

"Yeah, but a boss doesn't yell at people and make them cry like babies. What's the point of being such a d-bag to your people?"

"Every leader is a d-bag to someone down the chain. Doesn't matter how nice you are. Someone is eventually going to think you're a tyrant. Bru's just cut-to-the-chase and gotten it over with early. Result? He can focus on what he does best: Get a raid going and get shit done."

I didn't like Anni's answer. He was touching on something deep in the recesses of the human psyche, but I remained doubtful. There had to be more to this condition that simply "they feel like they belong". Would I get to meat of this mystery?

Eventually.

Elephantine examines Xplotos of Depraved, getting a
first glimpse at what raid rewards lay in Molten Core,
Orgrimmar

Own Up

I couldn't waste time worrying about other guild's management techniques, no matter how much of the douchebag quota they fulfilled. Like the impacted wisdom tooth, I continued to ignore problems until they reared their head, out of fear and ignorance. If I ignored them, someone else might take over and handle them on my behalf. That may have worked to a degree in Vanilla when my guild was bursting with officers and people-friendly role models; folks with natural leadership qualities. But I didn't know the first thing about dealing with people, about encouraging or motivating them. I didn't want to have to manage by fear, but my passive, family-friendly way wasn't working. And the longer I sat on my heels, the faster my guild would float to the surface, belly up.

Sooner or later, I had to take control. I had to own up to my responsibility in leading the guild, as opposed to taking a passive approach on the sidelines. Continuing in this manner would lead me down a path destined for failure. Members chose their own path, used their own interpretations of my unwritten rules to excuse inappropriate behavior toward one another -- and their laziness upon setting foot in our raids. The order of execution was as follows: Find out why our guild wasn't taking raids seriously enough -- find out the root cause of their myriad of excuses. Find a way to get a hold of the stagnation of our progression, flatten the slump, and get us focused again on a schedule that would lead us to Illidan.

The most important tasks on my to-do list was to put a stop to the endless "woe-is-me" perception of the brutality in these raids. Guilds like Depraved and Pretty Pink Pwnies didn't boast successful raid histories because they were experts at whining and complaining. Yes, raiding was hard, but not impossible It only felt that way because we weren't exploring every option, weren't looking at the minutia that we once held as gospel: those tiny bits of theorycrafting that would reveal great secrets in performance gains. These fine details should have been the focus of our research in the off-hours, like a change in keybindings or adherence to the 5-second rule. Utilizing all available tools is what turned the tables on bosses previously immune to our many charms. There had to be an explanation to the practically nil margin of error that we continually faced. What was the secret? What was the thing that we were missing that would turn our weekly raids from depressing 1% wipes to consistent executions?

---

I glanced up from my monitor, noting that the sun was starting to rise. Thank God. In a few short hours, the Dentist's office would be open, and I could at last get some relief for the pain. In my half-asleep, semi-distracted state, I failed to notice an Alliance Shadow Priest close the distance on me. The priest sent out a bolt of dark blue energy and proceeded to melt Uld's face off into the dirt, finishing her health bar off with dark tendrils swooping downward into her skull.

Shadow Priest, I thought to myself. What I wouldn't give for a few more of those in the roster.