2.42. Wise Decisions

Descendants of Draenor defeats Gurtogg Bloodboil,
Black Temple

Wyse

It was about this time that a new mage named Wyse joined Descendants of Draenor. She was fresh out of the guild Hoax. They were not progressing well in raid content and Wyse looked to step up her game. I was aggressively assimilating players from guilds that were buckling from the weight of failed progression, and it was through mutual friends of these collapsing guilds that she learned of us. She, like many raiders during that era, were looking to get an Illidan kill by any means possible. The lack of solid mages in DoD remained a constant sore spot in my guild, so I gladly welcomed her in and set her up for raid rotations.

To my surprise, Wyse began sending me IMs throughout the day, often catching me during work hours. I never kept my contact information from the guild, and actually had a small following of guildies listed in Pidgin. They rarely contacted me. Usually, it was to send over a funny link or ask about a specific raid rotation. Otherwise, IM remained silent. Only one player consistently contacted me via IM: Ekasra, the shaman acting as Kerulak's replacement. Ekasra and I chatted in short bursts throughout the week. He fired off questions on how to deal with certain social situations and I'd give him my honest feedback. He'd thank me and go off to apply what he learned. That was the hope. The relationship was much like that of a student and teacher, and less of that which came between peers. We'd rarely chat away for hours about nothing, all conversations were short and to-the-point. So it was quite different getting IMs from a guildy who wanted to have long conversations about anything and everything.

Wyse was full of focus and energy about raiding. Almost immediately, she dug her heels in on Gurtogg Bloodboil, the next boss in line to taste cold steel. My mage officer, Goldenrod, expressed initial surprise at her performance. We were accustomed to picking up sub-par players from failed guilds, so it was a breath of fresh air to see a stranger join the roster and instantly put mediocrity to bed. from day one. With Wyse, it wasn't just about raw damage, though. For the first time ever, I saw a mage proactively decursing the raid without being asked -- an affliction that continued to plague the mages already present. In fact, everything about Wyse seemed to break the mold of what we were used to seeing in Descendants of Draenor. Of the few gals we had the luxury of adding to the roster, she was uninhibited and chatty in vent. Having a female player actively engage in digital conversation was something we simply didn't see a lot of; most gals remained reserved, and responded to our digital voices with transcription in raid chat. I implored the raid team to communicate and, more often than not, my female raiders would refrain from speaking. Wyse never had this issue. In nearly every way, she presented herself with a dedication I longed to see in many others that made up the roster.

After the fall of Gurtogg Bloodboil on June 1st, 2008, she was back IMing me the very next day. Where are those DPS charts? How'd I measure up against Goldy, Dandrak, Turtleman? What's the schedule for the next raid? Here's my progress on shadow resistance gear for Mother Shahraz! I was overwhelmed. Sometimes it felt like I could count the number of players that were this passionate about the guild's progression on one hand. To have someone brand new to the guild be this excited about completing Black Temple, well...I was humbled and thankful. Thankful that she hit the ground running, that her initial numbers were impressive on the meters, and that she was genuinely thrilled to be a part of us.

Descendants of Draenor defeats Mother Shahraz,
Black Temple

Mage Tanking

As the next boss loomed, my administrative duties increased. I was fine with it; it kept my mind occupied and off of recent events that had the tendency to depress me. I walked the roster, player by player, examining their progress on shadow resistance gear, marshaling my report over to Blain for his approval. Not only did I have to deal with the luxury of keying requirements for players, I now fielded the burden of vetting their viability for Mother Shahraz. The next boss in Black Temple would stick us in a blender and hit frappé if our shadow resistance was anything shy of 365. In order to keep progress moving forward at a reasonable pace while maximizing our opportunity to gear the bench, Blain made the decision to start splitting the Friday and Sunday raids into A-Team/B-Team runs. Much like our strategy at the end of Vanilla, this tactic allowed us to take the undergeared to Mount Hyjal on Friday, using them to springboard the more experienced, geared group ahead into Black Temple. Double teaming content would, in theory, give progression more time to work on the latter bosses: Mother Shahraz, The Illidari Council, and eventually, Illidan the Betrayer himself. The potential for Blain's decision to cause drama was wildly apparently: who belonged on which team?

It was clear after speaking with Blain and Goldenrod that Wyse needed to be included in A-Team. She proved herself in only a few short weeks in the guild, meeting all the needs of a core progression raider that could contribute to the defeat of Illidan. Thus, rotations were adjusted. Wyse quickly found herself rotated out of Mount Hyjal and into Black Temple, which she initially expressed concern around, making note of the less skilled folks taking her spot. Once I made it clear to her that she was needed for the bleeding edge group driving progression, her concerns melted away. She continued to deliver competitive DPS, and was soon pushing even the mage officer himself down the meters. By June 22nd, several weeks after Gurtogg's demise, Mother Shahraz collapsed on the steps of her stage. From a purely analytical standpoint, Wyse had achieved the number one spot among our mages, dominating both damage done and curses cleansed.

It was clear by this point that Wyse would be essential to what lay ahead. The Illidari Council was a unique encounter in which four bosses worked together, sharing the same health pool. Via a combination of abilities, they would keep an entire 25-man raid busy with monitoring stuns, heals, interrupts, positioning, and so on. Execution required exceptional control and communication. The Council's AoE effects alone pushed our spatial awareness to new extremes, a combination of Blizzard, Consecration, and Flamestrike forcing players to be forever on the move. Blain's strategy called for one of the four Council members, High Nethermancer Zerevor, to be range-tanked by a mage -- a very common strategy at the time. This would be Wyse's opportunity to shine, and she proudly stepped up to this role of responsibility, delivering results as expected. She was IMing me daily with her latest research, providing criticisms on mage specs for the tank, their positioning, the fine details of how to perform the initial pull, and how to best handle emergencies. Again, I was impressed at her capacity to take on this increased load, while still delivering top performance.

The problem with rising to the top is that it becomes much easier for others to make note of your flaws.

Descendants of Draenor defeats The Illidari Council,
Black Temple

Micromanagement

Because Wyse talked to me on almost a daily basis, I had insight into her personality and quirks that others did not. She was a younger and more passionate gamer, layered on top of all the complexities the female gender bestows upon us. Her mannerisms, her nuances, her likes and dislikes, and what affected her emotionally by the world were all bits of trivia I learned along the way. Much of the guild was not privy to these fine characteristics; their exposure to Wyse was limited to their observations of her in-game. Therein lies the dilemma. Relying on World of Warcraft as a medium to interact with one another in a social setting disallows for the capacity to gain cues from body language. This restriction is further exacerbated by a loss of tone, if one choose to remain completely out of Ventrilo. And while Wyse was active in VoIP during raid, it wasn't always the case outside of the schedule. What remained was plain text on the screen, devoid of context. Good-natured ribbing between friends comes across as cold criticism. Sarcasm delivers as genuine. And hyperbole paints the picture of a person sorely out-of-touch with reality. In short, the text arriving on screen lacks a human component that is vital to humans understanding one another.

Some humans, as it turns out, don't possess the insight to extrapolate true intent. Conversations shouldn't involve homework.

First on the "do-not-care" list was Dalans. Having a low tolerance for bullshit was his credo, and he was one of the first to start expressing distaste at Wyse. Although he appreciated her performance in raids, he disliked Wyse's tone regarding people constantly needing to improve, a tone that came across as "I'm awesome, why aren't the rest of you?" Poorly chosen words in the heat of the moment often meant the difference between an inspiring comment, and a condescending one. Dalans also grew annoyed at Wyse's exceedingly verbose add-ons, spaming the raid channel with excessive information about players lacking buffs, standing in fire, requiring a decurse, and so on. Bombarding the raid with alerts caused a new behavior to emerge: players began to silently /ignore the offenders...which they conveniently forgot to roll back once the raid was over. You can imagine the effect this would have on the unsuspecting player during off-raid hours. Wyse would ask a question in guild chat, and get little-to-no response. In terms of working together as a team, this was far from it. We lacked an official stance on add-ons, beyond my simple lobbying for raiders to use whatever they felt necessary. It never once dawned on me that add-ons could become oppressive and detrimental to our progress.

Other officers expressed a similar sentiment to me. Both the mage officer, Goldenrod, and my healing officer, Breginna, conveyed to me that Wyse was an outstanding player, but desperately needed  to work on toning down her criticism of others -- an act that was especially hard to swallow coming from a brand new guildy. Players would take one look at her "suggestions" and think the same thing. Who the hell is this person to tell me how to play? I've been here for years. For Wyse, it wasn't criticism; she was mentoring, trying to offer assistance and help those around her. I understood from our daily IMs that she wanted nothing more than for the team to succeed, but lacked the diplomacy skills necessary to convey this without offending people. It was not unlike Blain's own abrasiveness regarding honesty about a player's skill level. The difference, of course, is that the raid team had no choice but to obey when Blain dropped the hammer: He was the raid leader and they were obligated to follow his direction. As for Wyse, no such obligation existed. Animosity grew between the players and Wyse, which created a complex juxtaposition of concerns: how do I deal with a star performer that the guild is growing to loathe?

Managing Wyse would turn out to be a much greater challenge than I initially assumed.

2.41. The Not-Knowing

"Shadowmoon Valley"
Artwork by SulaMoon

Waiting For Ater

When I was fourteen years old, I woke up one day and my best friend was gone. Not gone in the sense of some tragic accident that took his life, spiraling my childhood into a vortex of despair and anguish. This was worse. You see, if my best friend had died, at least I would know the ending -- I'd have some closure about the situation. A rare disease, a fatal car accident, whatever it happened to be, I could put my finger on it and say there. That's the reason I no longer see him, no longer hear from him. He's dead. End of discussion. In my case, however, my friend hadn't died. Things just stopped. No more phone calls, no more plans to bike down to the Mini-Golf to get in a few hours of Street Fighter II. No more plans to hit a movie or just plain hang out together. Nothing.

One day, it just stopped.

Why this was worse than losing a friend to death should be obvious, but if it isn't, here's the secret: It's the not-knowing. The unanswered questions. The whys. The what-did-I-do-wrongs. At least in death, you can reflect back and remember how it was. The last time you saw their face, or heard them speak. At least you'd have a sense of where things stood in that last encounter. You were friends, friends for life. Nothing could separate you, short of that thin fabric that kept your heart pumping, your chest breathing, and your ability to pick up the phone to chat. But when your best friend goes about his business as if nothing had ever changed, going to the same places, seeing the same movies, heading to the same video arcade -- all without you -- a darkness quickly moves in. Your brain struggles to make sense of this new alternate universe that has cut you out of the picture. Some have the capacity to move on to new friends quickly, shrugging off such radical changes as if they were no big deal; their brain gets it. Change. People grow apart, find different instances, have different opinions, seek out new adventures. Their brains find a solution, plug it in, and it allows them to carry on with the rest of their day. Others wrestle with the not-knowing for weeks, trying to maintain order and live their lives as it haunts them. Sometimes weeks...sometimes months.

My brain grappled with it for years.

I needed a reason, I needed to know why things had ended abruptly. More than anything, I wanted to know if it was something I had done, something I may have broken that could be fixed. Then, the pieces would fall back into place, and we could once again resume our friendship, as if nothing had changed. Change was unsettling and caused me great concern -- I didn't like it. I didn't feel like I had control over it. Stability is what I desperately wanted in its place, to be able to count on the same things, rely on the same people. To be able to count on someone to be there for me, to back me up, to support my decisions and actions and choices. They'd validate me, ensuring I was on the right path. Without that validation, I had no path. Suddenly, the path grew up around me, and I was lost in a forest, with no direction, purpose, or guide to ensure me that I was on the right track.

All I needed was some closure. Some sense of how close or far I was to the mark. Weeks went by as I logged into WoW, watching, waiting for Ater to return, to tell me he was settled in at work, and at last had a wide-open schedule. He'd say he was ready to jump back into Black Temple, ready to step up to Illidan and bring an end to The Betrayer.

The log in never came.

Eventually, my brain shut down the waiting part. The denial part. The not-knowing part. Temporarily disabled, until further notice. For now, something had to be done about the gaping hole that was left in the guild, in the roster...and in me.

"Essence of Suffering"
Artwork by Tom Baxa
Copyright © 2008
 Blizzard Entertainment / Upper Deck

The Fog

Shutting down left me numb to events unfolding around me. At work, sales managers berated me for my inappropriate estimates, and I just took it, while I stared into my laptop screen. Waiting for them to just shut their mouths. To walk away, leave me alone, let me code in peace. There was no point in fighting back, resisting them. They were wrong, but I was in no position to counter their arguments. What good would it do? So they berated. And I took it. And when they finally left me alone in my corner of the office, mindlessly churning out websites for people who barely knew how to use a website in the first place, I'd glance up and across the desk, looking for the place where Ater and I sat across from one another, months earlier. Him sharing new discoveries and troubleshooting problems with me. Talking about the guild, and how we were going to knock out the next few bosses.

Gone.

---

The numbness bled into my in-game persona as well. Blain's disapproval of less-than-stellar play slowly grew in power and magnitude during those weeks. He became hyper-critical of players that had long since performed at a sub-par level, and grew tired of the constant excuse factory. Returning to Reliquary of Souls, he ridiculed another rogue, Azraella, for the player's mishandling of interrupts in the rotation. You had one job. Kick the Spirit Shock. That's it. And in my semi-conscious state, rather than recommend he chill out, give these guys a break -- I latched on to this emotion as well as it filled the void 

Anger is an easy crutch to fall back on, especially when you have a career of breaking keyboards.

I was equally punitive towards players lacking focus, yet Blain took the blame for this mistreatment -- and he was not alone in his disgust. Eventually, players started to refer to him as "Blain the Tyrant", a badge he wore with great pride. It was a running joke among the 25-Man progression team, how the tyrant would command and ridicule in order to maintain progression, and others like Dalans, with a propensity to favor anger over compassion, jumped into that boat of ridicule with us and sailed to sea. In-game, I lost my temper, pointed fingers, reminded players that the days of failing were behind us, and if they didn't shape up, they would ship out. They would claim Blain was bullying them, demanding that they reach a level of skill simply unattainable. I'd fire back seething responses:

"Oh, so you'd prefer to go back to the way it was, pre-Blain? Wiping to The Lurker Below for weeks at a time? Like a complete failure of a raiding guild? How about you stop sucking, instead?"

Everything was so black-and-white.

When the raids ended for the evening, I wouldn't log out. I would just wander around Outland, performing mindless tasks, completing quests of no value. I flip over to my Rogue alt, and fly her over Hellfire Penninsula. In doing so, the memory of waking up in the middle of night with searing tooth pain stabbed me...and I remember calling Ater the next day after the tooth was pulled, hopped up on pain meds, yelling in to the phone, "Yeah, you can tell everybody at the office that I'm not coming in today! I'M ON DRUGS, MAN!" And Ater laughing.

There was the void again. Without something to fill it, my sentimental brain began bleeding back towards him. His presence. His absence.

Zanjina kneels beside the fallen Shade of Akama,
Black Temple

Promotional Distractions

In order to keep myself distracted, I tried to focus in on the tasks that were right in front of my face, the ones that needed immediate attention. I needed a number two, to fill the gap left by Ater. Blain was disinterested, and was already dropping hints that, come expansion, he would be ready to retire from raid leadership for good. Coming back in the middle of TBC had turned our progression team around, but had left him broken and worn down with weekly barrages from the excuse factory. I asked him to keep his exit on the down-low for the time being, to which he obliged. At this close stage of wrapping up Black Temple, coupled with the loss of Ater, I didn't want to take any more chances at gouging out what little morale was currently intact amongst the raid team. So, Blain had his marching orders. Continue to push us to Illidan. Keep the deadline in sight. Keep us marching.

Without Blain as an option for promotion, I began to survey the field of officership. I needed someone with a strong backbone, who shared my disgust of poor play, and was equally unwilling to let it slide. Someone who didn't put up with a lot of shit, and whom I could entrust to enforce my rules while I was offline. This approach, I felt, would stymie any possible excuse the raiders may give to go AWOL as we neared the final stretch. Based off this criteria, all signs pointed to Dalans, a fiercely dedicated member of the guild, and steadfast raider since as far back as Ater. Dalans had taken charge of the druids and kept them in shape for many moons. His no-nonsense style of dealing with whiners and complainers suited my expectations of the role. My current state-of-mind shared this zero-tolerance policy towards mediocrity with Dalans, and there was nobody around to disprove that line of thinking. He proudly took up the charge, and ran with his usual iron fist.

What remained was a spot for warrior officer, as Ater had been wearing multiple hats at the end of his tenure. The warrior most applicable for this position was Kurst, a raider stretching even further back than Ater, Dalans or Blain. Kurst's unyielding devotion to the guild, and consistent place among the raid progression team was most certainly enough criteria to warrant promotion to officership. He may have had a tendency here or there to make a mistake, but hey...who didn't, by this point? We were all human, we made mistakes every day! Maybe it was time to cut Kurst a little slack and give him a promotion that he rightfully earned. Yeah! Kurst for Warrior Officer! It's now official and done. You have any warrior problems, you take it to him, he's the expert now. Just get it out of my hair. Get warriors out of my hair. Get everything that has to do with warriors away from me right now.

Deal with it. Please.

---

I'd hoped that a player would come along and solve all those problems, someone that could magically snap their fingers, and make all the difficulties melt away. What I got, instead, was a mage that would push my people management skills to new extremes, granting me the perspective I needed to re-evaluate what it was to be in charge, and how to handle leadership without guidance.

2.39. The Different Guild

"Archimonde the Defiler"
Artwork by Jim Nelson

Archimonde Anxiety

I have reason to believe that Xanax was invented as a result of the Archimonde encounter.

Since Blain's return to leading in full force, we saw a tremendous turnaround in raid progression. Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep were systematically blown apart, and the first boss in Mount Hyjal, Rage Winterchill, was one-shot with zero preparation. Bosses that followed -- Anetheron, Kaz'rogal and Azgalor -- were all pushing up daisies. To ensure our continued momentum, Blain switched gears and diverted us to Black Temple. High Warlord Naj'entus was our first victory there, and I earned my five minutes of fame dominating the damage meters during our execution of Supremus. But our rocket thrust was now in jeopardy. Blain was comfortable with the amount of people now in possession of their PvP trinkets, which meant it was time to return to Hyjal Summit, and wrap up the only outstanding obstacle:

Archimonde.

I dreaded the return to Hyjal Summit because after stripping Archimonde of all his bluish tint, his ret-conned Eredar lore, his pixels and sound effects and 3D model animations...I knew exactly what he was: A zero margin-of-error linchpin encounter. Linchpins like this caused anxiety to nearly strangle me, ever since Magtheridon fell to DoD's raiders a year earlier. Our strengths would be diminished, while our weaknesses would float to the top. Team jell was now much lower in importance on the totem pole. In its place stood the "personal accountability" obelisk of doom, wherein each player had to take their survivability into their own hands -- or ensure the death of all of us.

No carrying.

No covering for one another.

No room to excuse lag or timing or your add-ons or your slow-ass computer.

Everybody performs...or everybody dies.

As with linchpins before this, the typical tactics of a guild leader weren't an option. Continued failure couldn't result in kicking these players to the curb, bringing in another round to replace them. We had invested heavily in our 25-Man Progression team by this point, many of whom were well-geared -- starting from scratch because a certain person who "didn't get it" wasn't going to work. I had to be proactively correcting the roster's issues, not be a victim to it. Rather than wait for someone to complain that they used their Tears of the Goddess, but "lag got them", I went to the roster ahead of time, spoke to each player individually, and got a rundown of their Internet provider, general stability, problems they'd experienced with latency in the past. I even went so far as to check which players were using a wireless router, many of whom were none the wiser on its detrimental effects to real-time streaming online games.

In today's age, where Netflix usage is commonplace and every third house has an XBox 360 playing Call of Duty online, this may not seem like such a big deal. In 2008, however, working on Archimonde via a wireless router would sign our death warrant. Packet loss was an inevitability on hardware in those days. Even with players that claimed to have never experienced a router problem in their life, I still politely insisted that they cut over to a hard wire. It would only take one player death for this to end poorly. One lag spike, one moment of wireless latency that would bring it all crashing down. Each vocalist in my choir had to be pitch-perfect. The potential for any one single player to be the cause for a wipe left me perpetually wound up, a constantly bouncing ball of nerves. My mind begged for release but would gain no such relief from prescription meds.

"Legend of Mount Hyjal"
Artwork by Trent Kaniuga

Twilight of the Gods

April 13th, 2008, was an otherwise ordinary Sunday. Discussion on the guild forums circulated around various topics: whether or not win-trading was taking place in arenas, a link to a "Teron Gorefiend" simulator available on the web, and a group of players leaving MySpace for a new site that was gaining popularity identified only as "Facebook". Chief among the posts, however, was a discussion title "Archie", including videos and references to the Elitists Jerks forums. DoD actively engaged in discussion and assessed valid strategies. Of primary importance was the acquisition of PvP trinkets: our backup plan to break Archimonde's fearbomb...if you had the good fortune to be heading uncontrollably towards Doomfire. The healthy debate of strategy, what would work, what we should try, how we should solve problems on-the-fly was impressive.

They were aligned. Constant, consistent success.

---

As we huddled near some Night Elf architecture, buffing, flasking, and eating food, Blain gave us the 411.

"We can do this tonight."

Inside my brain, confidence was at war with skepticism. My inner realist kept picking away at me. Archimonde was a brick-wall boss, a linchpin with no room for error, a verifiable guild-killer. Every failure would be the result of a single man or woman fucking up, ruining the chance for the rest of us. Handled incorrectly, this would cause bitterness to impregnate the team. Animosity would incubate, eventually blooming into hatred and disgust. An undeniable stench of meh would fill the room. Left alone, it would infect the team and devour us from the inside out. Signups would fall off. Players would stop talking to one another, replaced by sarcasm and cheap shots.

"Oh, great. Him again. Thanks for ruining our raid night on Archimonde YET AGAIN. I love having my time wasted."

Eventually, the guild would collapse as its insides were eaten out. The risk was very real, the question was, would my guild be ready to rise above that?

In a final act of encouragement, Ater wrapped up the strategy by reiterating the guild motto he coined many moons ago -- one whose meaning was more relevant now than ever, due to Archimonde's Soul Charges:

"If we don't die...we win."

Descendants of Draenor defeats Archimonde,
Hyjal Summit

Famous Last Pull

The first few attempts allowed us to get a feel for timing on fears and Doomfire calls. Most important was the first-hand experience on the air blast, and at what part of the arc was most appropriate to use Tears of the Goddess. Too soon, and the buff would wear out before the player landed. Too late, and they'd become a fine red paste across the green plains at the Hyjal Summit. Misjudging either way produced the same result: falling to one's death, or "cratering". Each death allowed Archimonde to generate a Soul Charge, which he would then burn on us and wipe the raid.

While players adjusted to the timing of air burst and perfected use of their Tears, Blain observed the position of the groups. He spread us into the four prongs of a fork, with the tanks and melee at the base, and continued to refine this placement as the hours ticked away. Ater kept communication flowing back to the raid, alerting us of air bursts, and with each attempt he improved his own positioning, avoiding the air burst himself.

As expected, the mechanics were unforgiving. Doomfire wreaked havoc on us, especially during fear-bombs. Players cratered as they struggled to match their timing with their latency. The chain reaction of player-death-to-raid-wipe was alarming...and blunt. My fear was realized. One simple mistake was all it took. As soon as a player died, Archimonde's Soul Charge took out massive groups of players until it was a wipe. By the fourth and final hour, we completed a total of twenty-two pulls, and not one attempt had whittled the boss's health down below 50%.

"Last pull", Blain announced in Vent.

We arrived at the tail end of the raid. I did not want us to leave with ours tucked between our legs.

---

Ater's infamous countdown in Vent began, thus signaling the start of our twenty-third and final attempt of the night. I moved into position along my fork prong and began to light the giant Eredar up with Vampiric Touch and Shadow Word: Pain. A bluish beam of shadowy energy followed my DoTs, flaying Archimonde's mind. Doomfire etched its way across the plains without remorse, seeking targets to ignite; I side-stepped the fire and continued my shadowy barrage. Images of Battle.net forum posts began to flash in the back of my mind:

"DoD fails at raiding, disbands. LOL"

"Zanjina an embarrassment to Deathwing-US. Worst player on server."

I snapped out of it and refreshed Vampiric Touch to keep the mana flowing back to my group. Ater held Archimonde tightly in position, calculating small, surgical shifts to avoid air bursts. A tremor totem hit the ground, and moments later, Archimonde dropped a fear-bomb. Melee shifted for half-a-second in terror, then instantly returned to their duties...the tremor totem mitigating the bomb. My chat window lit up in bright purple as Melkezadek's' macro spammed me.

[W From] Melkezadek: FEAR WARD Cast: You're next!!!!

I moved towards Cyrant, hit him with a Fear Ward, and and spammed my own macro.

[W To] Neps: FEAR WARD NOW ON CYRANT...YOU ARE NEXT OMGWTFBBQ!!!!!!

Calm. 

Focus.

The air burst struck me and I was flung in to the air.

Hold.

Hold.

I reached the apex of the arc.

......Now.

I spammed Tears of the Goddess and drifted back down to the grass, rushing back into position. Cyrant dropped his tremor totem, moments before another fear-bomb, safe with my Ward shielding him from the chaos.

"Ater's air bursted."

"The warlock's are cut off from Doomfire."

Blain called out to Eacavissi, warning him of the impending fear bomb. A handful players along the ranged forks began running in random directions as panic and tension continued to smash its fist at the door.

"STRAIGHT. BACK." Blain reminded everyone. Running in a zig-zag pattern would only make Doomfire more vicious as it snaked its way toward targets. Staying in a straight line was the only way to keep it at bay, running along the length of the fire, rather than towards the tip. The fear-bomb hit; melee and tanks remained safe and in control.

"Oh, sweet Tremor." Blain said with relief.

I dropped from Shadowform and began putting whatever minuscule heals I could on the the players eating Doomfire. Houla dropped dangerously low, his health-bar a tiny green sliver on my screen. One more tick of damage would end him...along with this final attempt. I slapped on a renew and continued to look for players that needed help.

Suddenly, Blain called out. The moment of truth had arrived.

"OK, Bloodlust in 3, 2, 1...Go Bloodlust. GO. All out."

"Even healers. DoTs..." called Neps.

"Everybody DPS, there is no healing" added Breginna.

Lightning bolts flashed around the great Eredar, and the sky faded to red as night elf wisps bore down on him. Every raider blew every cooldown they had, all DPS, all working together, all alive....

At last, one single blinding explosion erupted in a shower of arcane energy, and Archimonde's battered armor lay at our feet. I couldn't believe it. Other players in the raid joined me in disbelief.

"...four fucking hours??" asked Dalans, as if to say how is this even possible?

Disbelief hung suspended while reality slowly set in. One of the most difficult bosses in The Burning Crusade, killed in only one night of work. Visions of the weeks we wasted on Gruul and Magtheridon, making the same mistakes over and over, were quickly blurring over. We had become so used to the same failures, the same excuses, that it was hard to digest what an accomplishment this truly was. Our crutch had been the profound claim that we took anyone to raids; that we felt everyone deserved a shot at end-game content. That mission statement wasn't wrong, but simply incomplete. We had failed with an incomplete vision for so long that an accomplishment like this seemed unreal.

But it was very real.

"Setting players' expectations of what our unified goals were" had finally taken hold of this group of players. Keeping people accountable, disallowing them from making excuses for failures, proactively solving problems before they manifested...it was like a different world. A different game.

A different guild.

2.37. Sacrificial Lambs

"Whiplash"
Artwork by Phroilan Gardner

Alcoholic Muppets

The eighth wave of the undead scourge had arrived, fueled by the power of the burning legion. Our raid broke apart into groups, swiftly executing their appropriate assignments, slicing into abominations, unleashing barrages of arcane and nature and fire into banshees and crypt fiends and fel stalkers. Behind us, Thrall stood diligently at the base of an orcish town hall. Next to him, the body of an enormous yellow doomguard still lay face down in the dirt. Ater called out to prepare everyone for positioning as the pit lord made his appearance. The previous bosses had been trivial by comparison, but Azgalor would not be so easy. His strategy would require discipline, timing and coordination. If we could pull it off, the guild would see their first tier 6 tokens in the form of gloves. In order to make that happen, some of us were going to have to die.

Azgalor waddled in to the area with all the grace of a drunken Snuffleupagus. Immediately, Ater took hold of the demon and swung him to face Thrall, pulling him back to the orc town hall as fast as possible. We stayed our hand as threat was touchy during the pickup, especially with Ater less focused on threat, and more on pulling Azgalor into a raid-ready position. Random attacks and side-steps, backpedals and hopping turns; all the gimmicks an embattled warrior tank pulled from their repertoire just to keep Azgalor facing him long enough to settle in for the fight. The tiny tauren warrior raced to position him next to the warchief of the horde; his arrival was our signal to ramp up our damage. Azgalor's frontal cleave was unforgiving, so melee held back, waiting for that signal. Any players chomping at the bit to unleash hell into Azgalor's side would meet a cruel and tragic fate before the encounter even started.

The fight was no less forgiving than the pull. Combining the atrocity of Howl of Azgalor and Rain of Fire produced a painful symphony of terror and death. The Howl was a silence the pit lord spammed against players in close proximity. Players unable to stay out to the maximum range for their spells would be caught in the silence and shut down -- particularly troublesome if you were main tank healing. Meanwhile, Rain of Fire would shower down onto unsuspecting players, not only doing fire damage to those who stood dumbfounded in the burning precipitation, but continuing to tick off health as the result of an applied DoT. Players unable to mitigate the fire damage would eat, at the very least, about 6000 HP of damage, so it was vital to stay dry and reduce the stress on the healers whom were already stretched thin by constant movement and impending Howls.

Descendants of Draenor defeats Azgalor,
Hyjal Summit

Taking One for the Team

The gimmick came in how Azgalor's soft enrage was invoked. Throughout the fight, he would curse people with Doom. After about twenty seconds, they would die and spawn a doomguard, a miniature Kaz'rogal that would need to be picked up by an off-tank and killed. The process of this slow attrition would ultimately do the raid in if it were unable to kill the pit lord in time. In order to mitigate the loss of these players, the warlocks were assigned soul stone duty. Those marked for death would be given a second chance at life through Eacavissi's fel energies, so Blain would keep close tabs on which players were the most valuable, ensuring no soul stone would go to waste. It cut to the bone when your time ran out on Doom, and Blain remained silent when the warlocks called out, "Should I soulstone him?" It wasn't personal. Going into each attempt, all players needed to accept their place and prepare to sacrifice themselves for the good of the raid. But there were clearly some players contributing more than others and a pecking order inevitably shone through when the warlocks called out your name for impending soulstone, only to be greeted with silence.

Rejection can be a painful thing.

On the evening of March 16th, 2008, Azgalor finally met his match. Four weeks in Hyjal produced four boss deaths, the raid continuing to march to the rhythm of Blain's drum. But his self-fulfilled prophecy now stared us in the face: the path was clear to Archimonde yet the raid was ill-prepared to handle Doomfire, a great majority of the players lacking their pvp trinkets.

Blain spoke into Vent, "Head to Black Temple."

---

The raid coalesced at a gap in the wall, draenei masonry ripped apart haphazardly, stones and wood strewn in a pile. Someone clearly wanted inside the temple and, with the enormous front gates guarded by a legion of nathrezim, decided to make their own entrance. The raiders squeezed in through the makeshift door, re-buffed, and began to pull the trash: a mix of Vashj's left-over naga elite guard, enforced by corrupted water elementals varying in size and scope. The waterlogged basement of the draenei temple provided a convenient entry way into the illidari training grounds, a wide-open area full of fel orcs and doomguards that patrolled the area. We gained entrance to these grounds via breached sewage pipes, but before that happened, we'd have to get past our first obstacle: High Warlord Naj'entus.

The beast was a naga anomaly, one mutated far beyond anything we had witnessed before. Although he bore the same general half-humanoid, half-serpentine form that was a familiar trademark of all naga, his face was something else entirely. Gone was the traditional humanoid facial features -- the familiar eyes, nose and mouth that was the naga's last tie to their former night elf lives. In their place was a chitinous bone shell crowned by an evil maw of dagger-like teeth drawn below. In his right arm he wielded a large conk shell shaped like a spike, ready to impale any player who dared breach the temple's walls in search of Illidan.

Descendants of Draenor defeats High Warlord Naj'entus,
Black Temple

Wearing Multiple Hats

Blain set us up in pairs, encircling the boss. The buddy system would be the key to taking out this mutated naga. Throughout the fight, Naj'entus would thrust his spine into unsuspecting players, rendering the character immobile. It would be up to their "buddy" to quickly withdraw this spine, the act of which both freeing the target, and granting the savior a Naj'entus Spine to be used when the boss protected himself with a Tidal Shield. Those raiders with a spine would pop the bubble, interrupting the boss's regenerative aura -- a tactic Naj'entus used to draw the fight out further. The catch? Bursting the bubble had an explosive impact on the raid, reducing everyone to 5% of their health. The focus, therefore, was to keep the main tanks alive following the burst. With the healers hyper focused on keeping the main tank alive, followed by each other, the rest of us had to take survivability into our own hands. Like certain bosses before him, Naj'entus opened my eyes to the two types of players that lingered within our ranks: those who were willing to do whatever it took for the good of the guild, and those who loved to make excuses.

It was amusing to see the differences in mentality. There were those who had taken the initiative to max out their first aid, bandaging frantically once Naj'entus had his bubble popped. And then, there were others who clung to their age-old biases on the separation of role and responsibility...many of whom fell over dead shortly after the bubble burst. Many casters who poured all of their waking hours into doing damage still believed it was the healers' responsibility alone to keep them alive. But as the complexity of these encounters grew more sinister with each new set of mechanics, the wearing of multiple hats became more important. By this point in The Burning Crusade, it was clear that we were no longer living in a specialist world where one player only performed one job well. A review of our non-standard tank requirements was one of the first real indicators. The Twin Emperors, Razuvious, Maulgar, Leotheras the Blind -- a smattering of bosses that needed tanks draped in cloth or leather. And with bosses like Naj'entus demanding non-healers to heal themselves, how many more hints did we need?

In order for our raids to be effective enough to compete with hardcore raiding guilds that doubled our schedule, we were going to have to become generalists: players with a wide berth of knowledge of game mechanics. Casters that could tank, tanks that could heal, damage dealers that dispelled instead of just pouring mindless pyroblast after pyroblast into a boss.

I was beginning to see the guild differently.

Months earlier, when we were struggling on Gruul and Mag, I was angered and annoyed that Blizzard was asking us to play different roles, forcing players to do things they weren't good at, roles they weren't particularly accustomed to. But in a team environment, one may need to wear multiple hats, in order to ensure gaps could be filled, to test the team's strength and diversity; its ability to adapt under pressure. In order for the greater good, a little bit of sacrifice is in order. I knew this fact more than anyone, barely clinging to life as a result of Zanjina's pathetic health pool. I swallowed whatever pride I had playing Kerulak, and knew what needed to be done. And when that Tidal Shield burst, I clicked my Netherweave Bandage and got right back into the fight, until Naj'entus collapsed in a splash of sewage water...

...and then took note of those folks lying dead beside him, victims of having never bothered with first aid.

2.35. Time Travel

The entrance to Hyjal Summit in present day Azeroth
blocked by an impenetrable gate (Vanilla/TBC era),
Darkwhisper Gorge, Winterspring

Mind Control for Fun and Profit

Fueled by the back-to-back deaths of Kael'thas Sunstrider and Rage Winterchill, the progression raiders seared with electricity upon returning to the Caverns of Time. Hyjal Summit boasted a uniquely different design when compared to raids of the past. Rather than moving from trash pack to trash pack, weaving through corridors and dungeon halls to discover what boss awaited us, Hyjal was a re-creation of the final level of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, the RTS which would seed an eventual MMO. In that final mission of the RTS, "Twilight of the Gods", players wielded the combined forces of the orcs, the humans, and the night elves, combining the might of their armies against wave after wave of undead minions, backed by the power of the Burning Legion. A series of doomguards would appear at various intervals, signaling a major milestone that needed to be overcome.

Those doomguard would serve as our boss progression through this instance.

As it was in the original RTS mission, waves of undead scourge, backed by the nathrezim, would come to us. Our tanks grabbed a hold of them while we burned them down, awaiting each successive onslaught. To some, this was a fresh new way to approach raid content. To others -- like Dalans -- it was a nightmare of repetitive tedium. If we happened to make a wrong move on the boss, setting off a chain of events that led to our wipe, we'd have to restart the eight waves of mobs. Every boss wipe guaranteed eight new waves of trash. As a result, raiders had more of a vested interest in putting in additional effort. Nobody wanted to redo trash. The challenge was in teaching players to keep their opinions about the trash to themselves. It benefited no one to complain, and only served to chip away at the integrity of the roster. So, I reminded folks to keep quiet and focus on delivering boss kills, which I felt was a much more prudent strategy to combat complaints and burnout.

I continued to find my own place as a contributor during these later months in TBC, struggling for placement on the damage meters. Thankfully, The Battle for Mount Hyjal gave me another opportunity to shine. Nestled among the many waves of banshees, ghouls, infernals, gargoyles, and frost wyrms were human units named Shadowy Necromancers. These casters, draped in blood-red cloth, could be mind-controlled by a priest, thereby revealing their secret ability: Unholy Frenzy. This 100% attack speed buff could then be cast on players whom benefited greatly from said spell. Since my own damage continued to struggle among the many well-played folks in our roster, I took on the responsibility of mind-controlling, buffing players like Blain, Jungard, and Abrinis, whose melee damage shot through the roof as a result. They sawed through waves of undead flesh with a greater proficiency than I could ever hope to attain. Buffing others was a less glorious role than climbing the damage meters, but it helped me regain a sense of tangible contribution. Over time, I grew more likely to believe I was of value to progression, rather than remain the Achilles heel of it.

After Rage Winterchill came Anetheron, a dreadlord that summoned infernals to pummel the raid while a Carrion Swarm enveloped us, reducing the effectiveness of our healers. It was vitally important that Anetheron be faced away from the raid because of his heal-dampening locusts; healing efficiency needed to remain at 100%. Meanwhile, Anetheron's strikes leeched health, so Blain took on the role of applying wound poison to the boss. Two could play at the nerf-healing game. Meanwhile, a fire-resist tank would position himself near Jaina Proudmoore, in preparation for Anetheron's inferno. After three seconds, a fiery infernal plummeted to the ground, striking everyone in an area with AoE damage. The infernal needed to be picked up before it began one-shotting players, and a focused DPS group had to burn that rock creature of greenish fire down as fast possible. Dragging the infernal to Jaina caused her to join in the fight, which was a helpful trick to widen the margin of error.

Only one weekend of work was all it took.

Anetheron outstretched his arms in agony and dissipated in a puff of smoke, his armor crashing to the ground. We were now 2/5 in Hyjal, with only two weekends of raids in -- and time was still left on the clock to leave the humans behind, and move up to join the orcs in their defense of the world tree.

Descendants of Draenor defeats Anetheron,
Hyjal Summit

Clutch

Kaz'rogal proceeded Anetheron, providing only a moderate challenge. Aside from a nasty cleave that could one-shot unsuspecting melee (as damage was shared among all targets), and the occasional warstomp which stunned players in close proximity, Kaz'rogal had a truly evil trick up his demonic sleeve in store for the casters. He placed a debuff, a "Mark of Kaz'rogal" on unsuspecting players. This debuff would drain mana from the target like a siphon. If the player was unable to keep their mana pool afloat during this time, they would become a mana bomb and detonate, taking out nearby players in the process. So, while he was technically a linchpin of sorts (as any one caster could take out the entire raid), the margin of error could be mitigated by shadow resistance gear and mana potions.

Kaz'rogal joined Rage Winterchill and Broodlord Lashlayer as one of the few bosses we were able to one-shot on our very first pull of the boss, an inconsequential challenge upon reflection. A few weeks later -- when a number of poorly positioned casters, empty of mana, carved gigantic chunks out of the living -- was when the challenge began to reveal itself. And when it appeared that the attempt would be a wipe, as a skeletal crew of several tanks, a few melee, and only one healer remained, the situation looked grim. Our minds turned to the approaching wipe with contempt and disgust, preparing for the monotony of having to clear another eight waves of trash. I rested my head down on the desk, waiting to hear when it was safe to release and run back.

And then, something brilliant happened.

The lone healer, who just happened to be a healing officer and a druid, decided to take matters in to her owns hands. Breginna bolted towards the tanks, and shifted into Bear Form, standing next to them to diminish the impact of Kaz'rogal's cleave. Someone in Vent yelled out "Go Breginna!" and I glanced back up at the screen.

What the...

The casters and healers were dead, so the Mark of Kaz'rogal held no more weight. From here on out, it was tanks and melee, albeit a pitiful few. But there hopped Breginna in bear form, waiting for the cleave to come in, eating it, and gaining tiny bits of health by burning rage into Frenzied Regeneration. It was a genius move. By being in bear form, her mana pool was non-existant, yet she was still able to keep herself alive in those remaining few moments while melee laid into the doomguard with every last bit of vigor in their virtual veins. People in Vent began chanting to Breginna, the volume escalated to that of an entire crowd cheering on their team, as the seconds clicked off to the end of the game. Breginna said nothing, continuing to hop in Bear Form, tanking Kaz'rogal, eating cleaves, burning rage for heals, while the last few rogues and warriors drove their blades into the boss's ankles.

Kaz'rogal, looking as stunned as I at this clutch turnaround, collapsed dead at Thrall's feet. Cheers filled Vent as the bear druid stood up and did a dance. I stared wide-eyed at the screen. Breginna had saved the day.

Descendants of Draenor defeats Kaz'rogal,
Hyjal Summit

The 180

Rocraw was in a funk.

Normally, the orc warrior that held the line at the head of the raid was a constant beam of positive energy that the raid had come to rely on. His positive attitude, humility surrounding his class, and dedication to his fellow guild-members established him as a recognizable face in the roster -- one we'd all come to rely on over these many months. Regardless of whether we were struggling or enjoying success, Rocraw was a consistent, solid member of the team...and a loyal friend. So to see his attitude suddenly spiral downwards was disconcerting. Once laughing and joking with us in Vent, he grew quiet and found little amusement in the day-to-day chatter. He grew clumsy behind the wheel inside raid instances, made more mistakes, lost control of adds with greater frequency. For all intents and purposes, Rocraw seemed to be vacant, mentally checked-out and lost in a confusion of his own troubling thoughts.

I should have seen it coming; the path of breadcrumbs he left me any hippie with a talking dog could have followed. But as with other events in my guild that I let slip through the cracks, I failed to pay attention to each individual shard of the mosaic. Each exercise in guild leadership was the act of dumping all the puzzle pieces out on the table. It was as though a lunatic was challenging me with mad ravings: all the thousand pieces must be placed together correctly in order to see the final picture. One by one, you rotate and flip them, you plug them together until the picture matches the box, then wipe your hands and move on. Yet, when you are putting the puzzle together, the individual pieces make little sense. A fragmented beam of light here, a shrub there. You become frustrated, trying to jam pieces together, thinking they fit when they don't, because you lack the image of that final picture. So what do you do? Go back to the box cover. Review the big picture. Ensure you're on the right track. Rinse. Repeat.

As it was with many of the decisions I made during The Burning Crusade, I left the puzzle box cover face-down, never referring to it, unable to grasp the impact each piece had on the entire picture. Until it was too late.

It had something to do with her.

2.34. The Lemmings Are Marching...

Descendants of Draenor defeats Rage Winterchill,
Hyjal Summit

Rage Winterchill

My heart was racing. I frantically scanned the landscape for anything that could kill me, but wasn't certain exactly what to look for. Twenty-four players were in the instance with me and seventeen of them were dead. My eyes darted down to the damage meters. I took a deep breath, trying to remain calm, keeping my DoT rotation as maximized as possible. Being unprepared was unsettling. Our attention had been a laser for the last five weeks, burning a focused beam of light squarely through Kael'thas Sunstrider and his council. The encounter's nightmarish complexity of tactics and coordination dominated our thoughts and invaded our dreams. With all of our energy poured into his defeat, we spent little time on anything beyond his lifeless body...yet he lay dead at our feet only an hour earlier. In any other case, this would be cause for celebration and an early night off.

Blain was uninterested in ending the raid early.

We still had a long road ahead. Two full tiers of content were now crushed under our boots, leaving us to tread the final path through tier 6. And there was a deadline to keep.

The enormous skeletal necromancer continued to lose health, while Blain kept the raid calm -- kept me calm. Panic was not an option, regardless of your level of preparedness. Be calm. Focused. Do your job. Stop calling things out. Winterchill's health melted away while I hopped out of Death and Decay, my PvP trinket granting me the ability to break out of his ice-block. A few moments later, the lich burst apart in a flash of light.

We had one-shot Rage Winterchill, the first boss of tier 6 content. The last time we had one-shot a boss on the first pull was Broodlord Lashlayer, third boss of Blackwing Lair. Vanilla. Two years earlier. I was beginning to think that the new raid mentality was sinking in. The guild's expectations of fun were starting to align with ours. Constant, consistent success. And for the first time in months, I felt like Illidan was once again squarely in our sights. Our confidence remained intact.

---

This surge of confidence catapulted me back into examining the issues that plagued the guild. Long had I been a slave to the roster, with its constant fluctuations and myriad of faces giving me varying degrees of commitment. Step one was already behind me: set expectations clearly and concisely, so there was no room to misinterpret who we needed each night in raids. In order to shift the power the roster had over me, I needed to grow the pool further, riding on the steam of our recent completion of tier 5. If I could find away to recruit more efficiently, more effectively -- I might be able to put a stop the never-ending excuse factory:

"I don't want to raid anymore."

"Sorry, I'm grounded."

"I don't want to bring my rogue, I want to change my main to a shaman."

"Oh, I thought the raid was cancelled?"

"Man, Nip/Tuck is on!"

It amazed me how a guild like Elitist Jerks could pull it off for an entire expansion (or longer) with a fixed roster -- how do you compel a player to show any sense of loyalty and dedication to the guild? I remained baffled, spending far too much time in-game trying to keep the roster from falling apart. Our new schedule demanded that we raid every Friday and Sunday without excuse. I needed to ensure that Descendants of Draenor held good on that promise. So recruitment continued. I spent hours sifting through useless Battle.net forum posts, cluttered with other guilds begging for new players; leaders in the same boat I was in. Trying to find a single player looking for a new guild was almost entirely a wasted effort, as the reams of forum topics were nothing but officers cast into the same leaky boat as I.

An item from the game Unweb,
written by Hanzo

Gimme The Cache

I needed to come up with a new recruitment strategy, something that would save me hours of sifting through Battle.net forums looking for "that one priest" or "that one druid" that could potentially close the door on the excuse factory for good. I had been toying with the idea of writing a parser in CFML that would scan the Battle.net recruitment forums for users, trying to pick out only what we wanted: players looking for a guild. This automated process could save me hours of recruitment time as it tossed aside the miscellaneous posts of other guilds sharing my pain. But there was a concern with my approach.

Fetching web pages, parsing their HTML, and performing very specific business logic on the content seemed too expensive for CFML to handle. I attempted on-the-fly parsing once before in a web-based game I called "Unweb". Inspired by Diablo II, Unweb let you type in a URL which was converted into a "monster" that you would go on to slay for items and gold. It was a pretty fun exercise to explore application development and allowed me to grow as a programmer.

In practice, however, my architecture was short-sighted. Unlike a typical website driven by static pages of unchanging content, Unweb needed to create content dynamically on each and every page click. To further complicate this, a key step in the process -- the act of reaching out to a specific URL and parsing its content -- was what we in the industry refer to as a blocking call: a part of program execution that must pause and wait for a completion flag before continuing. This pause varies in time because the data is somewhere else, and can only run as fast as the slowest result.

Confused? Let me give you an example of how horrible this particular decision would've played out if it were in WoW. Pretend for a moment that all of the character data for your toon doesn't sit natively in the WoW game client, but rather exists in its entirety in only one place: the WoW armory on the Battle.net website. So while you are playing the game and decide you want to open your character panel to review your stats, the entire game locks up the minute you press the "C" button, as the game client pauses to fetch info from the website. Can you imagine how frustrating this would be if it were the case in real life? Constant pauses and lock-ups, just to look at your character info?

This is what was happening behind the scenes in Unweb, each and every time someone tried to play the game.

The strain of many hundreds of concurrent users playing Unweb caused the webserver to hang while blocking calls waited for URLs to return website results. Alas, this design was the oversight of an amateur developer attempting a large-scale game which didn't lend itself well to HTTP. My lack of experience afforded me no strategies to mitigate its poor performance. The flawed design of Unweb essentially turned what was supposed to be a fun web-based game into a inadvertent load testing tool; the more players that piled on, the quicker the web server buckled.

With the Battle.net forum parser idea in the back of my head, but lacking a real strategy to solve the performance issue, I turned to the one person I knew that could offer me new insight: Ater.

---

"Cache the results", he said to me, biting into a sandwich. Luggage was piled up behind his kitchen table, as he prepared for his upcoming move to Illinois.

"What?" I replied. His simplicity often overwhelmed me.

"You're thinking about it the wrong way." Ater elaborated, "You're approaching this like you've got a search interface, and when you enter in a URL, it's going to go out to Blizzard's forums and parse them live. Right when you click the submit button."

I never told Ater about Unweb, but In that one sentence, he successfully described Unweb's architecture, thereby pointing out the flaw in my original design.

"The search interface will hit a cache, not Blizzard's live forums. You schedule a task for the parser and it'll run in the background, on some fixed interval. Y'know, say every thirty minutes. It'll scan the forums on its own, collect up the data, dump it in the cache...a local database on your server. Then your search interface queries the cache. Simple."

Everything was just so damn simple to Ater. Simple, and one-hundred percent correct. In his succinct explanation, he re-designed my idea and solved the problems I experienced with Unweb. Now, it was not just a CFML-based forum parser, it was a fully-fledged spidering engine.

A screenshot of WoW Lemmings, a guild
recruitment tool, written by Hanzo

Rebuild Your Guild

I went to work immediately, implementing Ater's suggestions. That entire weekend was spent coming up with the initial architecture of the spider. It would run in three passes. The first pass would scan Blizzard's guild recruitment forums, looking for posts, slurp them up, and dump them into a database. On the second pass, the engine would follow the URLs to those forum posts from the database, extracting the bodies of the actual post itself. This is where the meat was: where a player would talk about themselves, what server they were on, what class they played, and where they hoped to find a new guild they could call home. It was the third and final pass where the spider would analyze the content in the forum post, scoring it on such things as: Can I determine a class (ie. Priest, Hunter, Rogue), a server (ie. US-Deathwing), a server type (ie. PvP, PvE). Additionally, was there an armory link provided? Could I use it to process the player's gear? The more information that was provided, the better the score. This scored database of parsed data became what Ater called the "cache" -- a collection of pruned posts comprising only players looking for guilds and nothing else.

I slapped on a web-based interface to allow users to search the cache, and released the new website into the wild, watching the cache grow. Every thirty minutes, another set of players would show up:

"Priest LF new Guild"

"4/5 Hyjal Resto Shaman LFG"

"Tankadin looking for raiding guild"

It was working. Not only was it incredibly cool, but I actually started seeing people I wanted to contact immediately...just while testing the app! The days of wading through hundreds of forum posts were fast becoming a distant memory. Now all the players needing a guild would come directly to me, through a simple search interface. Towards my web site they headed, single file, awaiting their fate. They hoped to be saved, to be plucked from their death march and placed into a new raiding home. It was in that instant that I came up with the name of my new guild recruitment tool:

WoW Lemmings.

A place where guild leaders and recruitment officers could go to find the masses of lost players seeking a new home. A place to rebuild your guild.

On February 13th, 2008, after briefly discussing the tool with Gurgthock, I announced WoW Lemmings on the Elitist Jerks forums, hoping to solicit feedback. Initial response was extremely positive; I received numerous suggestions and tweaks that I used to improve the app further, including the ability to scan other forums outside of Battle.net: MMO-Champion, Wowhead...anywhere recruitment forums resided. WoW Lemmings served (and continues to serve) me, as well as countless other guild leaders, shaving significant time off our recruitment hours. Thanks to this tool, I was able to once again get a handle on recruitment without it dominating all my waking hours. Slowly, eventually, I grew the roster back to a healthy pool of progression raiders (and fillers). And like so many times before, I again had Ater to thank. His simple insight into changing my approach toward the app's architecture turned it from a doomed load-testing tool, to one of the most stable and self-reliant systems I've ever assembled.

2.33. Controlling Power

"The Eye of Tempest Keep"
Artwork by Sandara

Baby Steps

Guildies constantly offered to help in any way possible, especially those who weren't consistent raiders (but wanted to be). In many cases, they couldn't bring what I needed to the table -- they either didn't have the right class, or their character wasn't geared or keyed for Tempest Keep. It made for complicated and stressful raid rotations. Even gearing alts wasn't much of an option at that point; the entire process had to be repeated from scratch, taking into account raid upgrades from content we no longer farmed. If you hadn't worked your way through tier 4, it was too late catch up by the time we looked into eyes of Kael'thas. My tanks dwindled with Ater's fluctuating schedule and the loss of Bretthew to a hacker. I gobbled up what players I could, pointed them to the forum thread that differentiated Veterans from Raiders, and shoved them into The Eye.

While Bretthew may not have had access to his fully geared tank, he desperately sought to repair any damage to the roster that was left in the wake of the hacker. After exploring options, he managed to secure a deal with another member, Kedavra, who possessed a geared Elemental Shaman. Kedavra loved raiding but couldn't commit to the hours we demanded, so he offered his account up to Bretthew as a loaner. It wasn't a tank, but it was a raid rotation filled with someone I could trust, rather than a stranger or new recruit plucked fresh out of trade chat.

Blain began the arduous process of explaining the five-phase fight in bite-sized chunks, the only way we could digest it without forgetting crucial facts. Once again, we faced a council not unlike Maulgar or Karathress. I did my best to keep my mouth shut, but if I could let the raiders know at some point that any progress was significant, I made sure to do so. I channeled Richard Dreyfus' character from the movie What About Bob?, I repeated baby steps over and over to the raid team.

Any progress is progress.

Baby steps. 

Baby steps.

The Most Difficult Encounter

Adapting to phase one came quickly, giving us a solid handle on phase two by the end of the first weekend. We took our time, kept things steady and focused, with the immediate goal of securing a clean pass through all four of Kael's advisors. Mistakes happened, but spirits remained positive. I reminded everyone it was OK to make mistakes, just not repeat them. There were random one-shots from Thaladred and the occasional death during a fear bomb from Sanguinar, but it was Capernian's Arcane Burst which caught most of the raid off guard. Positioning was tight, and needed to be adjusted at a moment's notice. Those less spatially aware were often trapped in this explosion, which was especially challenging for those afflicted with her Conflagration. All it took was a single person to be in the wrong position at the wrong time, and a chain reaction of events toppled every player in the raid. At times, the progression team was convinced that Capernian was bugged, never working exactly the same way each attempt. But, as was typical in that era, Blizzard remained quiet about raid encounters, bugged or otherwise, so we muscled through it.

In week two, we had to improve our DPS during phase two in order to see more of the encounter. This phase involved fighting ghostly legendary weapons, and we were aiming for a very specific kill-order. We could consistently make it through the Netherstrand Longbow, the Staff of Disintegration and the Cosmic Infuser. But, we were falling behind on Phaseshift Bulwark, Warp Slicer, Infinity Blade and Devastation. Some of the raiders were losing their focus, becoming confused, and needed loud calls in Vent to direct them to each appropriate weapon. Macros also helped them switch targets to shave a few seconds off this delay. The raiders were very active on the forums, discussing their strategy, refining their individual tactics. It was encouraging to see a combined effort to defeat the encounter.

Week three saw further complications. I was hoping to be well into phase four by this point, but the "slim pickings" I'd expressed to Ater were rearing up. New people had to be chosen, some with less experience, and some whose priorities lay elsewhere. The inexperienced folks grated on Blain, who grew tired of re-explaining the same tactics over and over. As for the players who claimed to have to leave early because their "girlfriend just got home" or that they needed to "get caught up on Nip/Tick", they wore my patience thin. Frustration eventually got the better of both Blain and I, simultaneously meeting our death at the hands of Thaladred. Blain kept his anger in check; I wasn't as reserved. My temper flared, filling Vent with obscenities and the loud crack of desks being punched.

Hysterics aside, week three concluded with a glimmer of hope as we saw our first transition to phase four. Kael'thas Sunstrider himself charged into battle, disintegrating the raid with his Pyroblast. Validation! The baby steps were working. Slowly. Inch by painful inch. And there was more good news, as week three marked the first time our raid transitioned completely into phase four with all legendary weapons defeated. If we pushed hard enough, I thought, we might actually get him the following week.

Week four's raid nights would fall on January 25th and 27th of 2008, which meant the following weekend -- February 3rd -- would take a healthy cross-section of raiders out of commission. Why? Super Bowl XLII. Fantastic. The great American past time of congregating with friends, consuming large amounts of snacks and beer while cheering on your favorite team.

The Super Bowl meant about as much to me as slaying Onyxia meant to John Elway.

I didn't care about Football. All I cared about was keeping my raiders focused on Kael'thas, and any amount of down time spent watching and/or being pissed off at "the game" was a risk that detracted from our goal. In all of our time spent in World of Warcraft, this was the most difficult encounter we had ever faced.

We had one week to wrap up Kael'thas Sunstrider.

Descendants of Draenor defeats Kael'thas Sunstrider,
The Eye

Insomnia

Sunday, January 27th boasted our best performance yet. Ater had freed up his job search schedule, and was able to lend his steel to the weekend work. That little edge he gave us pushed us over, transitioning into phase five for the first time -- the final part of the encounter. I remember the evening's attempts being gut-wrenchingly close; a kill was in sight. But being caught up in the excitement of our first phase five, we lost track of players that were mind-controlled. As my raiders turned their blades against one another, Kael managed to fire off an uninterrupted Pyroblast and kill the tank, converting the attempt to a painful wipe. Everyone had come so far, making tiny bits of progress each week, but reality sank in. I was not going to have a raid the following week, thanks to the NFL.

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The raid was cancelled the following week. The 25-Man progression team took the day off and watched the historic upset of the New York Giants defeating the New England Patriots 17-14. All I could think about was Kael'thas Sunstrider. Was this one canceled weekend going to send us into a nosedive? The uphill climb had been so grueling, chiseling piece by piece off with a rock hammer. The time-off might be too much for the raid team; they were already exhausted from four solid weeks of Kael'thas practice, sans boss kill. 

The bad dreams returned.

Players coming and going from the guild, spinning through a turnstyle. I feared us becoming a "stepping-stone" guild: where players came to make a name for themselves, only to be plucked by a hardcore guild later when it came time for the real deal. What choice did I have? I had no control. If players were leaving the guild or happened to forget their Kael'thas strategy or simply wanted to watch Nip/Tuck or decided to start harassing Ekasra again...I was at their whim. They acted, I reacted. 

The roster controlled me, not the other way around.

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It was on the evening of that fifth weekend of work, February 10th, 2008, that our raid team was finally able to put all the pieces of the puzzle together. Not since our kills of Ragnaros, Nefarian and Maexxna in Vanilla had we experienced such an adrenaline rush achieving final victory. Even Lady Vashj a few months earlier felt less of an accomplishment than this. I will forever remember it as one of the most significant raid achievements that Descendants of Draenor ever pulled off. And they did, one baby step at a time.

As we stood together for our screenshot, I wondered if one day I would be able to get the guild into a state where I was in control, tired of bending to the whim of the roster. I was tired of losing sleep.

"We're not done", Blain piped up in Vent, "everyone head to Mount Hyjal."