TL;DR

As some of you know I have been in the process of a few things recently. I recently stepped down as GM of my guild, No Vacancy so I could talk some time to concentrate on my personal life. During the between my announcement and the time I had planned to sit down a few things happened which altered the way I approached things. 1)No one offered or even seemed interested in becoming the leader of No Vacancy (in fact the officers first comments was that NV was dead and none of them wanted the responsibility) and 2)I was offered a position to help form a new guild on another server.

Over the course of the process some of the choices I made were poor and thus caused some problems with people who apparently relied on me much more than they showed previously. During the week and a half after my announcement I suffered much ridicule and backstabbing from people who felt that I should be not making the decision to step down. In the end, I decided that I disliked the attitudes and treatment on Drenden so I took up the offer to help with the new guild. As soon as the new guild started recruiting members from No Vacancy made level 1 trolls to flame me and this new guild. So rather than defend myself in one spot, I'll do it globally for the world to see. The following is my response:

(the following is An opinion)( although the readers should check into facts on their own)

Apparently On the dresden server No Vacancy Guild You done wrong has quite the different story. Due to your poor leadership skills, (and not the best players in that guild) You decided to slink out with a few buddy buddies to come to Khadgar to and preach holier than thou with a inflated ego of your own.
We don't need that kinda crap here, so why dont you just wear your pants for awhile here and make some good freinds instead of this ego slink trip. What you did to your old guild to get your self geared and slink off saying you will be gone for the weekend, then commin here and putting on airs about how good you are just wasted 25 bucks.

No Vacancy died because of two things, lack of people who wanted to show up to raids and lack of officer support to help the guild succeed. When we were struggling with DPS on previous bosses the officers solution was to replace everyone who was doing poorly. My solution was to train who we already had to get better and to make sure we had the buffs and debuffs we had at all times (IE - snares up for mage dps increase). Towards the end of No Vacancy the officers and I had split to a point where they would run their own raids which started 15 minutes prior to my scheduled raids or just invite friends instead of going through the previously agreed upon recruitment process. When it came to the point that we realized we needed to rebuild no one (including myself) was interested in putting the extra time in to rebuild all over again. We had done it many times previously and by the time this one came around we were burnt out from it.

Do I feel that I am "holier than thou"? Not at all, but the people who started Concedo Nulli were tired of gearing up people just so they could progress further with someone else as soon as they got geared while we were stuck behind trying to progress again. We wanted to be with like-minded people who wanted to progress as much as we did and had the loyalty to the guild as a whole to do so. The people who chose to join us were in fact some of the better players in No Vacancy and are people who would spend hours on end learning a fight regardless of cost. They are the ones who are willing to lose some of their own DPS just to increase the raids as a whole and so forth. There are plenty of people like that and there are more like that that stayed behind on Drenden. The choice to move servers was made because there are not enough players like that left on Drenden.

As far as getting myself geared. I ran No Vacancy as GM for two years, from tier 4 through now. If it was all a scheme to get myself gear then I sure put in a lot of time for one minor goal. Our DKP system did not favor anyone and I sure wasn't on the top of the DKP list for a majority of LK even though I attended all but 3 raids in 2009. I also didn't say I was going to be gone for the weekend, I said I was going to concentrate more on my real life situation. In fact, here is the direct quote from what I said on the NV website:

Due to circumstances in my personal life as well as recent events in-game I have decided to step down as leader of No Vacancy. I feel that I am not in the same place as a player as the guild is moving towards and I do not want to hinder its progression. I feel like now is a good time for me to step down as my personal life and game life are intersecting.

No Vacancy has got the leaders in place to be able to continue on without me and already has begun to. Since 3.1 has come out I have not been in guild first kills for the first time since our existence. I say this not because I am bitter but because it proves the point that the guild does not need me to survive.

I am also not leaving immediately. I am announcing this so that decisions can be made allowing a smooth transition. I will remain GM for at least a week and continue raiding with everyone in the mean-time. During that time the guild needs to decide who will be my successor, upon which time i will give them leadership of the guild. If the guild feels that my remaining in the guild is hindering in the process then I will leave at any time and give temporary leadership to one of the officers. I want to make sure that this guild survives in my absence. I may be the founder and leader of the guild but it is a group of members who are all like minded and working together, not something of just my own making.

I immensely enjoy being a GM and No Vacancy has been the most progressed and best guild I have ever been in in my 9 years of being a guild leader. I will miss the ins and outs of it but it is for the best for me right now. I hope that the future brings great things for No Vacancy and I look forward to following its progression.

A couple of days later after realizing that no one was interested in taking up the leadership of No Vacancy I posted the following:

It has become apparent that there is no one who wishes to keep No Vacancy running as a raiding guild when I leave on Thursday.

With that in mind No Vacancy is formally shutting down operations as a raiding guild as of Tuesday morning. The current 10 man run that was started last week will try to continue on Monday night but there will be no more official raiding nights or times from here out.

Elite Alliance has offered a merger of our members into theirs. This has been facilitated by Tockety and Rallys so get in touch with them if you are interested in joining their guild.

Former member, Zakarum has started up a new guild and is probably also looking for members. Former member, Muffinbuffer, is starting a guild on another server soon and is also someone else you can talk with.

Anguish (Formerly Arctic Wrath) is looking for Holy Priests, Resto Shammys, Ret Pallys, Shadow Priests, and Elemental Shammys for their raid team. You can fill out an application at www.anguish.dkpsystem.com

Insurrection is looking for a tank (either prot pally or DK) and 1-2 healers. Applications can be filled out at http://www.insurrection-guild.com

Juggernaut group 15 is looking for S Priest, Warlocks, Mages, Hunters, and Holy Pallys. Application can be found at http://juggernaut-guild.guildlaunch.com/

Now is a great time to get into a guild as progression in Ulduar is new and Drenden is overall behind a majority of the other 241 US servers. Some of the people in NV guild were ranked top of their respective class in gear so most of you should not have any trouble finding your way into a decent guild on this server.

I am bummed that NV is done but I know that all good things must come to an end and everyone will find their way and land on their feet. Good luck on wherever you end up and I hope that you get to meet the goals that you want for yourself. The opportunities are endless and maybe one day we will find a former NV member in the top US/World guilds. It was a pleasure and an honor to be the GM of this fine guild for so long. I enjoyed all of it and would do it again if I had the chance.

As you can see I offered people many choices to move on and tried to facilitate that for them as much as I could. They were even given the choice to talk with Muffinbuffer, the leader of the current guild that transfered to Khadgar that I decided to join up with. So it is not like I left the guild hanging, I tried my best to help them succeed in my absence. I also did not have the final say in who was going to be invited to join or not, as I do not currently lead Concedo Nulli. I gave my suggestions and those suggestions were taken into account by the other members of the transfer team. I do not know specifically who of al the suggestions were asked or not.

Then he gutted the guild bank while none of the officers were on, auctioned off the contents, and distributed the proceeds among the "active members" of the guild.

Note that I am not saying that he stole the guild bank's contents, he didn't. But he did use his power as GM to gut the guild bank, thus making things difficult for those who wanted to keep the guild going.

Yes, this is true the guild bank was sold off and the proceeds split to all members who had been active with the guild in the previous two weeks and still remained in the guild. 23 people got portions of a 38,787 gold guild bank based off of time in guild. This process was done in the middle of the night (which is when I play the most) but it was begun with other officer knowledge and support. I started doing it at the time an officer was on but didn't finish up until that officer had logged off. This was decided upon after the realization that No Vacancy was not going to remain a raiding guild. It was not done for malicious reasons as suggested.

In retrospect I realize that my decision to finally transfer and not make that transparent has caused a lot of hurt among players who expected me to blindly lead them continuously. I had initially decided to just help from afar in choosing a server and a name and etc but the malicious comments I got from current and former NV members made me hate the server so much that I left it. So while I agree that I didn't always do the correct thing in my departing, I feel that 1)it's a game and 2)it's a game. Regardless if I was retiring, transferring, decreasing my play time, etc the same outcome would have happened. The players that I worked with before would have considered me out of their respective e-lives either way. So while I may have made a few poor choices along the way I always treated the members in the guild with respect and tried to help them out as much as possible. I would hope that they would show the same courtesy to me and the guild I am part of now.

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A Bad Judgement Call

Many of you are familiar with my DKP posts from a few months back. In one I talked about the typical "pitfalls" that inherently come with them. I have also written about the use of DKP systems to help with policy enforcement. Well not too long ago we ran into an issue in No Vacancy involving a combination of these.

We were working on Sartharion with three drakes up and were having issues with people frequently failing at fire walls and void zones. We had tried as many things as we could think of to get people to pay more attention and fix their mistakes, but nothing seemed to work. So one night I announced that each failure would bring a 50 DKP deduction. It seemed to work as our failure rate decreased dramatically. So we continued with the same policy on subsequent nights of attempts.

However, the policy which worked the first night worked adversely the next. It wasn't that people started failing more, it was the fact that people decided they didn't want to raid anymore. During this night we had people who failed frequently just up and leave the raid. When asked why their reply was simple "I don't want to lose any more DKP." We even had a particularly loot greedy person leave the guild that night.

In the end, we re-evaluated the policy and completely agreed it was unfair. Even though the top DKP earners in the guild had over 1,000 DKP the average was in the 400's. We refunded all DKP and put in a lower penalty.

The moral of this particular story is to approach your penalty and bonus policies in a more methodical way. I randomly chose the 50 DKP as we were starting. More than likely I got the idea out of my head because I watch too much Onyxia Wipe Animation playbacks. But we never sat down and pre-planned it. We didn't think about how it would effect overall performance, just how it was effecting current performance.

This mistake was a costly one for our guild too and it was all my fault. We have not gotten S3D down yet and now we have attendance issues for Ulduar. We lost one member through it and there are a few others who haven't been on as frequently since it (although part of that is because we have let too many people in the guild who aren't used to real progression and really are just in it for the gear farming).

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To Re-roll Or Not To Re-roll?

I was listening to The Instance (best WoW podcast currently out there IMO) today and they were talking about how a lot of people are not playing mages anymore. They had people respond from a previous episode as to why that may be the case and a lot of the responses were that mages weren't competitive DPS anymore and they have been been dumbed down to being a portal/table slave. While my mage is still 70 (he's been an alt since day 1) so I can't say much I have to disagree with that assessment. Our mages are consistently in the top 5 almost every fight (ok maybe that's the other classes faults but still) but this isn't actually the argument that I am getting at (I'm not a mage blog nor do have enough knowledge about them to converse about it). What I am interested in is the fact that all these people rerolled from their mages to other classes to the point that mages are now in shortage.

A while back my guild, No Vacancy, was in dire need of priests and our server had a huge lack of healers in general. I have heard that many servers have the same issues with tanks. It seems that this epidemic has a very circular pattern. Back in BC on Drenden Shammy's were so rare that people would recruit a fresh 70 in all greens to raid just so they had one for their guild (not to mention that Sunwell pretty much needed them so it was almost forced on us). But now in NV we have a plethora of healers (including priests) with at least one healer app (and one more interested). In fact our issue now is that we have a need for a tank (sorta) where before we had too many.

How does a guild maintain what they need, while not over-recruiting and having people on standby all the time?

I can't say that I have a 100% foolproof solution for that. People leave guilds for various reasons but particularly they leave because either 1) they don't get into enough raids or 2) they want better progression that isn't happening. Not every guild can be the top successful progression guild on the server that achieves everything. Even those guilds have people leave over time to other guilds on other servers that are just that much more progressive (albeit probably slightly less often than the "mid-level" guilds). Our attempt at solution is to sub more often if we have more than 25 in one night. In Naxxramas we ask who needs anything from a given wing and ask who does not. Those who do get in, those who don't sub out. For the bosses (such as Malygos) where virtually everyone needs an item the higher ranking people get in while the initiates and general members sub out. While this doesn't work all the time to keep people, it keeps our turnover rate not too terribly high. Very few people leave because of not being able to raid.

My point is that for those who enjoy playing their class/spec but find it under-appreciated or for those having a hard time recruiting a specific class/spec because it's ill played, hold on because everything comes full circle sooner or later. It usually doesn't take very long before Blizzard changes a class to be really wanted or for players to re-roll because they didn't like their previous class. Also, server transfers are always an option. There are always guilds looking for every class/spec and vice versa.

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Using the Achievements System to Your Advantage

Since I've gotten on the topic of achievements the last week or so lets tie it into guild leadership. How can you make the achievement system work for your advantage as a guild leader?

The one thing I have talked about the least when it comes to guild leadership is recruitment. That is because previously our recruitment standards were pretty low and loosely based and I really wasn't very good at recruitment because of it. However we have revamped our whole system (I'll post on that later) and we now use more tools for recruiting. The best thing that the achievement system has given us is the fact that we can look up everyones achievements on their armory profile, which has great uses for recruiting.

For instance, when I am looking at a new recruits application I pull up their armory profile and check on their achievements. Here is a list of the things I personally find important to look at for our guilds needs:

- When did they hit 80? Are they new to the level or have they been at it for a while?
- How many achievement points do they have? If they have a low amount for the level it means they are probably a reroll character or even a newer 80. Having a lot of achievement points doesn't necessarily disprove this but it does show how much the person cares about their specific character (any character under 1k would definitely be a warning flag).
- Has the person earned the Superior Achievement? Epic? Or are they wanting to join so you can gear them up without them putting any time into their own character before raiding?
- What rank of Emblems of Heroism has the person got to? The more the better. It means they actually took the time to run heroics and 10 mans to at least go for what they thought they needed for their character. Someone with a low amount of this rank probably doesn't have the right intentions.
- Do they have any Emblems of Valor? How many? This shows they at least pugged VoA a few times and have been in a 25 man situation. This leads to the more important things for my recruiting.
- What 5 man heroic, 10 man, and 25 man achievements have they completed? Have they completed all of Naxxramas in at least 10 man mode? Safety Dance? etc? No Vacancy is at the point now that we aren't going to teach people how to raid these fights. Knowing even the basics of these fights is a good sign. But why the 5 mans? It goes with some of the above. How much a person has put into their character.

These are, of course, the way I look at things and only part of what I use for recruitment. A PvP guild has their own sections to look at as does any other type of guild. Previously our only way to look at a recruit was via their reputations and their gear. The achievement system lets us see a little more information about a person and how they feel about their character. It gives you that extra tool to recruit someone who is going to fit with your guild a little better.

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No Vacancy in 2D

This week was a huge up and down week for my guild, No Vacancy. For the ups, our 10 man achievement team finished 9 achievements in one raid lockout period ending Monday. Our big achievement for the week was that the 25 man team finally got Twilight Duo on a very impressive 3 attempt night on Wednesday. We also were able to get a video of it too which was great. It's a raw video with no cool music or anything but it's pretty decent view. We asked people to do videos of some of our boss attempts on these so we could figure out what our mistakes were and where we could fix them, which luckily led to us capturing a win as well. You can catch the video and our screenshots on our main page.

On the down side the raids fell apart on Thursday night. We cleared everything up until Kel'Thuzad and then took over an hour working on him. We ended up having to finish the night without killing him (this guy has been on easy farm for weeks now) so that was a pretty demoralizing end to a raid week. Then, our 10 man achievement team couldn't 8 man Gluth nor make any headway on our Twilight Duo.

Overall it was a good raid week but the ending really put a bad taste in the mouth that we can't cleanse until our next raid on Monday.

We are also trying to recruit a few more priests as well as a warlock and a cat druid. If you are interested feel free to fill out an application at our website. There are some other classes we are looking to fill as well so if you are looking for a new guild and want to raid or know someone who is then check us out.

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PTR, No Vacancy, and a new Fun Run!

As most of you know patch 3.1 is now out on the public test realms (PTR) as of sometime this past weekend. I am well behind the 8-ball on posting anything PTR related as all the major blog's and fan-sites have already had their say, so I have no intentions of beating dead horses. I will try to post based on newer things that I find out and specifically guild leader and raid leading related items.

However, No Vacancy and I are bringing in at the very least a 10 man team to learn a little more about Ulduar. We would love to bring it up to a 25 man team but from the sounds of it a majority of our own 25 man team can not make it due to either not wanting to or lack of hard drive space (the PTR is 13-16gig of space). With that in mind, if you are not coming over with your guild and you would like to join us in Ulduar we would be happy to have you. We plan on raiding either from 12am-3am on weekdays or evenings on weekends (or both). I am Kreeoni on the PTR and No Vacancy is the guild name. Anyone in the guild has invite ability and if I am not busy otherwise if you message me on Twitter I can hop over and toss an invite.

And speaking of other events, the next Fun Run will be held March 7th at 6pm EST. This time, however, it will be a PvP event. Make sure to get your Death Knight up to 58 and no higher than level 60. You will be competing against other Death Knights of the group. I would like to get at least 25 people to attend this event this time so invite your friends, pvp partners, etc. This event will once again be held Horde side on The Scryers server. There is already a guild set up that you can join, just whisper any member of the guild or grab me on Twitter. More details next week as we get closer (don't want to ruin the surprise).

Things I've noticed so far on the PTR:
- My Traveling Tundra Mammoth expensive 20k mount now does not let me discharge my vendors so that I can carry passengers making it less desireable. Boo!
- While Dual Spec is cool in that it doesn't need a reagent anymore it does rob you of all your mana every time you use it.
- Not only can you swim under water on a mount, you can mount up under water too. Although the mounts still move at swim speed.

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Christmas in Six?

Well the show is up and running and everything is looking good. I came back on Monday to a lot of heartening comments on my last blog post and I'd like to say thank you to all of you who did comment. On Monday night we raided and halfway through I got up to get some more tea (I got a cold because of that stupid sleet nonsense) and I came back and the whole guild keyed up in Vent and sang Happy Birthday to me. It was a cacophony of sound but it was really kind of cool, definitely one of the best things that happened this weekend in relation to my birthday.

We got some new members over the weekend too which filled some major holes (like Death Knight of which we had none) so that was great. We're still looking for a good priest or two to heal for our Obsidian Sanctum extra drake attempts. We finally realized last night that the lack of just that one healer is causing us to not get the second drake down even after we smoke Tenebron and his whelps.

So apparently there is some new blog chain letter type thing going on which I think started on this post at Voodoo Adventures. I got tagged by Stompalina over at the Rawrcast website. So I don't have a 6th folder in my screenshots file. I do have multiple computers running Warcraft but I decided to just stick with my primary one because the others have no real collection of screenshots.

Here you see a Christmas card which I started to create. I think this was 2007's Christmas but it could have been 2008 (doubtful because I haven't cleaned out my screenshot folder in a very very long time). The druid (on the right) is myself. On the left is Huo, which is the main on my second account (which has since been deactivated). The cat is a representation of my own cat, Cooper. So Merry Christmas everyone!

Now I am supposed to pick 6 other bloggers to continue this challenge. As this went around this past weekend I fear that of all the blogs that i actively follow most of them have already been tagged. So if you already got this "chain" post then oh well. My 6 people are as follows:

Anea at Holy Discipline (Bah, too late)
Kathoid at Druid Kitty (Oh yeah! Zero for two)
Everyone at WoW Insider (doesn't look like they posted one yet)
My Mom at Sweetie Sweeps (Well she doesn't play WoW but I bet she could post a picture from her picture folders instead [much like the original poster])
Matticus from World of Matticus (Because he hasn't done it yet, although his fellow bloggers have)
If you blog, then I pick you! (Because I wimped out and couldn't find any other that haven't already done it)

I need to run to raid now but tomorrow I'll mention a little about my presence on the PTR and invite you all to come join us, as well as some info on ideas for the next "Fun Run" coming up soon.

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It's not me, it's you!

As I'm sure you all agree, my attempt at a Valentine's Day post was horrendous. So much so that Matticus, the one who prompted the WoW bloggers to do some V-day posts, didn't even mention that he read it (and I don't blame him). So I was in the shower today and I came up with a great idea that I figured I'd share to show that I am not the most pathetic blogger on the face of the WoW universe. Those looking for a Fun Run post stay tuned, still collecting images but hope to have one out by tomorrow at the latest.

Sometimes along the way you get a guildy that just defiles the meaning of being a guildy. They are greedy, rude, annoying, or any other amazingly awesome trait that one would want in their guild. Sometimes they are the best player that you have though. So what do you do?

Get rid of them. The one thing that I would say is my "motto" for guild leading is that "No one is so important that they are not replaceable". Now I know that motto sounds like I am, in fact, the jerk in the guild but take a look at this example in No Vacancy's past to understand.


Recently, we had a healer who went missing for three weeks straight and then as sudden as he disappeared he came back with no word. We aren't the type of guild that cares too much about such things because well personal life is personal life and unless it effects the guild we stay out of it. This guy comes back and instead of being quiet he starts telling us how to run things, whispering me that a particular tank shouldn't be tanking because he didn't like the spec (apparently all DK's MUST be Frost in his eye's), and generally just being rude. He was a vanilla WoW raider, of which our guild has little of, and he felt like since he raided this content years ago that regardless of our current progression we should listen to his every word. Mind you, since he had disappeared we have gotten progression of at least 5 new bosses with that DK specced the way he was and running things the way we have always run them.

Finally at the end of the night it came down to a point where loot was being passed out on an item he wanted to bid on. Now in No Vacancy we have a system where if you don't show up to a certain amount of raids over an amount of time you get demoted to initiate and have to work your way back up (unless there is a real reason[like vacation, accident, baby, etc] that you let us know about). Initiate's can not bid on gear unless it rots and then it is opened up to initiates and offsets at the same time. 

So this guy started bidding as if he was a member and long story short he was extremely unhappy that since he was a healer that he wasn't getting special consideration in regards to bidding. Although the item ended up rotting and he got to bid and win on it anyways this apparently was a slap in the face to him. He then proceeded to whisper me and threaten me ("You are seriously going to go there?" he says) in which I quoted our rules and the fact that regardless of who anyone was no one gets special treatment. He didn't like that and so left some rude comment in guild chat and gquit. There were a few "huh's?" from those guildies not in raid at the time and then a long discussion in vent over it.

One of our guildies asked some members of other guilds that he was friends with what they thought and a few came back with that we should have given him a special treatment because he was a healer.

Now generally I would have been more receptive to his predicament if he hadn't been 1)rude in vent during the raiding process inciting multiple whispers as to what he was doing here and 2)he hadn't been so combative off the bat about his demotion (and maybe calmly explained why he disappeared for three weeks as a reason to get re-promoted). As it was, I was pretty unwilling to back down that he was just not as important as he felt he was, especially since we had gotten multiple bosses down without him in the weeks he was gone.

Now I know that, at least for our server, there is a great healer shortage but no matter how in need a guild is for a specific class it is not worth the headache caused by someone who feels they are more important than the rest of the team. Especially when you are playing a class in which your fellow healers consist of an officer in the same class that performs better.

What would you have done? How can you back up an attitude versus a class (whether well played or not)?

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Wasting Time or Getting Gear?

Brandon mentioned in a comment to the Enforcing Raid Rules post back a week or so ago that DKP systems slow things down and are pointless to use in smaller raids. At what point do DKP systems go past their usability and become a burden?

Through the history of No Vacancy we've gone through many loot systems for this very reason. We actually started with a council loot system but the constant bickering and favoritism perceptions led us to adopt a system which has less decision making. This helped make those headaches of a council loot system subside.

Karazhan was actually the place that caused all of the issues and the reason we spent so much time developing a system that was as fair to everyone as possible. We decided not to implement this until we were raiding tier 5 and instead of applying it to Kara retroactively we kept kara as loot council. Our reasoning was that many things were being sharded by then so it really wasn't worth the effort to add that. In fact, all of Tier 4 content remained the same (until the Dragonspine Trophy went to a rogue with a green and after that it became part of the new system).

While loot council worked well at the last stages of Karazhan, the headaches that happened when Kara was important to us as a guild made us completely abolish the system in Lich King. We did slightly alter our DKP system (lower minimum bids) a little bit in 10 mans so that people would be more willing to take an offset piece rather than have it rot, but we have seen things for as much as the 25 man gear. So while this gear is needed gear to get to the next level Naxx will be on a DKP system.

Now I will admit things do slow down a bit with a DKP system, but if run correctly it;s not much slower than even the in-game roll system. Most gear systems are not fast, at least if you want to give the loot out fairly, and loot is one of those things that will always slow a raid down. The looter is the only person who can't move on to the next set of trash immediately so really it doesn't matter how long the bidding process goes because you can be well on your way to the next boss (or in some cases just taking a much needed respite).

However, No Vacancy 10 mans tend to be more like 13-15 mans so there is a bit of subbing (we have enough to run two groups but not three complete groups atm). I think as the weeks go by and we quickly pass up the need for 10 man Naxx items at all it will be back to the original Kara system quick. But Ulduar 10m will be back on DKP and so forth.

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Questions can be answered

Now that I have given a virtual encyclopedia of how DKP systems work I will let you decide how to form your own. As I mentioned yesterday I did overlook some DKP systems. Aside from the Suicide Kings system there are also systems which give separate points for each class as well as an overall system (to fight collusion) and any other system in between. I felt that these systems were to fringe to really go into detail about (and I didn't want to promote any one system), but if you are looking for something different and sometimes more complicated check those systems out.

I will, however finally answer Darrens question and tell the details of No Vacancy's DKP system. NV's system has changed over the time we've existed, primarily because we have attempted to fix or avoid the pitfalls. Like may systems our largest issue has been inflation.

Currently we run a zero-sum DKP system with an hourly bonus. For every hour that a member raids they receive 5 DKP and each item which is won is zero-summed back into the raid. Out bid system is auction style with a minimum bid of 25 DKP (no maximum). The bidding process is open, meaning both the bid amount and the person's name is displayed to the guild upon bidding. All users DKP are only visible to the officers but each individual member is able to find out their DKP via our in-game DKP program. We will tell everyone who is atop the DKP list but we will not tell anyone another person DKP total. Initiates earn DKP through their process but are not allowed to bid on gear unless it rots in which case we'll put it back up for bid for offsets and initiates.

In tier 5 we started our system with a fixed price system (basing prices off of item level) but too many items rotted and inflation became our enemy (curse you T5 badge gear!!). During tier 6 we switched to the current system. Inflation is less of a problem but because of some collusion issues we have some members significantly higher than everyone else. Because of this we are thinking about institutinga DKP rot or cap.

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Happy New Year to all!

Today is the day for endless making of promisses to break, top 10 lists of last years accomplishments, and huge hangovers. I am usually one to not stick with traditions but I'm on a 5 hour bus trip to NYC so what the hell, I have time.

Hmm.. well let's start with the handover. Ok well since I'm actually writing this on the 31st and entering it on the blog tomorrow I have none. But you never know.(Update: I was so tired last night that I drank hardly anything, oh well, next year I guess.)

Ok, Top 10 list. Hmm.. can't do a Top 10 Kree's Blog post cause well that would be all of them. I wonder where this tradition started anyways, it always makes me think of the movie High Fidelity (at least it had something memorable in it considering how bad a movie it was).

Oh I got it! Two top 10 lists(I have way too much time on my hands right now). First, top 10 people on the bus(with the wheels that go round and round):

1)The bus driver - So far been driving about 25 miles or so and have stopped twice("at least we can enjoy the snowy scenery in every city from Boston to NYC.")
2 & 3) The guys sitting in the row next to me - tourist from France is my guess. They do like chocolate though.
4 & 5)The ladies in that seat over there - they brougth McD's breakfast platter thing.. Yuck but I want some eggs!!!
6)The girl accross from me - reading a bleh girly magazine and spent the first 10 minutes talking loudly about her son and Peter Pan.
7)Another girl accross from me - Cute and quiet, with nice long brown hair. Bonus - she laughed at my snowy scenery joke :)
8)The Asian girl behind me - she looks all peaceful-like sleeping there.
9)ME! - What a handsome devil.
10)NO ONE!!! - Because I lucked out and got a seat by myself! I hate crowded seating arrangements!

Ok, the second( and more pertinent) top 10 list. Top 10 No Vacancy sayings(Warning: This list may not be appropriate for all audiences).

1)Squircle - Our most overused(and annoying) saying. During raids I something say the wrong mark for a next in line kill order. This was my attempt at correcting myself as it happened(Square, oh wait, there is a circle[icon I rarely like to use]).

2)Smoon - Same deal except I use moon as our primary sheep target. Bad day I guess.

3)Man Butter - I wasn't there at the time but this involves one of our hunters, a mistype, and an odd guild chat conversation. The missing a(in mana) spawned a guild craze resulting in PVP teams, alt guilds, and general fun. The hunter finally embraced his mistype by naming his Death Knight alt this phrase(albeit translated into Swedish or something).

4)"That's what she said" - Spme say this way popularized by The Officer. Those in NV know it was us.

5)"Her voice is so dreamy" - Our resident creepy old guy made this comment about a guildy at the beginning of last year. Of course I can't let him forget it!

6)Nips - Perverts! Nips in this case are creamy, hard candies that are oh so yummy. I got the guild addicted to them and eventually our raider rank got this title.

7)Pop a fat one - When we were first raiding Burning Crusade content we had a lot of tobacco chewers in the guild. For some reason we always ended up getting bosses down after these guys put in a fresh wad. Eventually this pertained to Nips too.

8)"Don't worry, I just Naaru'd myself" - The deadpan announcement from one of our tanks during a boss attempt(my guess is we were wiping but I forget that part). Quite possibly the funniest line said all year(delivery and all).

9)"No Vacancy is recruiting all classes 75+ for our 25 man raid team. PST to Kreeoni for more info!" - What?! It's true, well if you're not a DK or a Bear tank. And I'm sure Drenden's trade channel finds this almost as popular as "Heals don't crit" or Warglaive of Azzinoth.

10)TL;DR(Too Long; Didn't Read) - Usually the replies to any of my forum posts.

Bonus - "Poooling" - Coming from the same aforementioned tank. It became the battle cry of all our Leeroy's when starting our pulls.

You know, that was actually fun to write. I'll have to do it again sometime. I know I can think of a handful more(most probably involve my bear butt though I'm sure).

Now comes the part where I make huge resolutions that I probbaly won't keep:

1)Weight Loss - I plan to lose a couple of hundred pounds so I am a lean swiping machine. Shooting for around 600lbs, 800 doesn't look good on me.

2)Dye my fur white - I'm goin polar!!

3)Make lots of money blogging so I can ride the train instead of the bus.

4)Recruit 3 priests for NV.

5)Have NV break into the top 5 on the server.

6)Post more than once a month.

7)Start my marketing campaign for walking tours of Darnassus(it's a steal at 200$ a person!!)

Wow, that is by far my largest post ever! Update, the bus broke down so we changed to a new one and I lost my self only seating arragments :(. Still snowing and we're already running at least 2 hours late.

Happy New Years to all!

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Reflecting On An Era

Well today is the final day of Burning Crusade with the release of Wrath of the Lich King at midnight tonight so I figured it only fair to blog about it.

I can't compare BC to the original WoW as I came into the game just after BC came out. I did come from being a GM in Everquest so I could compare to that but EQ was a first generation MMORPG so it's just not like comparing apples to apples.

Anyways I am happy that I decided to try WoW after retiring from Everquest. It didn't take long until i was hooked on it. I knew from the start that I wanted to tank(because i was a caster in EQ) and after talking with friends that played I knew that a druid was the way I wanted to go(of course at the time BC was new so they didn't know how tough it would be on me to tank as a druid but hey). It took me a little while to level to 70 simply because I was working out of town for the whole of the summer I was trying to level. Once I hit 70 though I knew I wanted to raid(well I knew I wanted to raid when I started).

Because of the nature of EQ(a new expansion every 6 months and 72 man raids) I was in a guild that was always behind the 8 ball as far as progression goes. I decided that this time around I just wanted to be a follower and get into those guilds that were on the cusp of progression. Boy did that not happen. Drenden, my server, didn't even have a guild at that level. Our highest guild killed Illidan around 2.4 and killed KJ after 3.0. Sure, I was able to raid but things weren't happening at the pace I had hoped for.

So I ended up(through a random sequence of events) taking matters into my own hands and against my previous wishes I ended up being GM of a guild. At the time we were all noobs who had done some Kara and started Gruuls. Once No Vacancy turned into a raiding guild we got Gruul down within a week and moved on from there. Sure, we were a guild that was behind the 8 ball but our hopes were to catch up to everyone as fast as possible and we set a goal of killing Illidan before the expansion. That was January, meaning we had a lot of work ahead of us.

Fast forward to today. Illidan did not die. We came close. So close in fact that last night we planned for an extended raid in BT to clear everything so tonight we could work on him. Blizzard killed our last chance. Am I unhappy, sure. But it's not at my guild. I am proud of No Vacancy for sticking it through to get to this point. We had a very uphill battle to get to this point in progression and at least we can say we got to this point. In the end we got ourselves up to top 10 guild on the server and a pretty good reputation. And we did it without the help of others. We had a policy to not bring in pugs and we learned each and every fight as it came to us. No one ran us through the fights or did it for us. We did it the (albeit nerfed) hard way and succeeded.

Now we are starting anew. The only time we'll be behind is because of ourselves. We can finally be right up there competing with the top guilds on the server. I am looking forward to being the GM of a guild that is not behind everyone else but is leading the way in stride with everyone else.

So BC taught me how to raid and how to lead a guild better. Lich King will do more of the same but BC gave me the basis for which to build on. I love being a GM and from the looks of it I am going to love being it even more in the future.

What were your memories from The Burning Crusade? Name your three best and three worst memories from it. Mine are:

Best:

1)Taking NV from Kara noobs to end-game raiders
2)Gaining a ton of friends in the process(and even meeting up with them at various events)
3)Learning how to be a better leader through my guild and my officers

Worst:

1)Coming up just short of our goals
2)Letting myself get burnt out from time to time
3)Zombies! I hated those fracking zombies! I actually had to use my Teleport:Moonglade most of the time.

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WoW: The Guild Bank

One of the best tools in World of Warcraft is the guild bank. This lets you transfer items to your guildies without you having to be around. It gives you the opportunity to pool everyones resources together to help accomplish your goals, whatever they may be.

As with every function of the guild it is important that your guild mates know how the bank operates. Since the guild bank is fairly straightforward and everyone has their own ideas of how it should operate I'll just explain No Vacancy's guild bank.

Over the months NV has built up a good amount of resources, primarily from one our raid rules that states that all BOE items obtained in raids belong to the guild bank. Most of these items are sold in the auction house and guild members are given a discount of 50% on the majority of items. All proceeds go automatically back in the guild bank. This has afforded us enough cash to purchase all bank slots(although a few slots were donated by guild members in our infancy), pay for all tank repair(will explain more in a later post), and provide a plethora of free or discounted items to guildies.

Bank Tabs:

Tab 1 (Raid Stuff): This tab has traditionally only been accessible by myself. When we first started the guild this tab was filled with all my personal herbs(as NV's former function was an alt/banker guild). As we started and it became unfeasible to keep for myself it turned into what it is now, which is the place we put our most expensive raid lots(epic gems, hearts of darkness, etc). We kept it to limited by the officers to minimize our losses if we were hacked(and we were eventually, at which time it was locked down to only accessible by myself). Now that all our officers have an authenticator it has become accessible by the officers again. Of course there are no high priced items in the game right now (but there will be with WOTLK) so it is a pretty empty tab.

Tab 2 (Food and Potions): This tab has always been a free for all tab containing our most worthless(AH wise) items. People deposit and withdraw whatever they want(until I do a mass cleaning and destroy all the grays some joker clogs the tab up with).

Tab 3 (Currently Inscriptions): This tab has changed a lot. It used to be another free for all tab but that was consolidated into Tab 2 when we needed a place to store the shadow resist set materials. Recently is has changed to a tab full of inscriptions, now that we are done with needing shadow sets.

Tab 4 (Deposit Only): This tab has been an officer only tab from the time we bought it. It contains our lesser priced consumables and items such as gems, potion injectors, primals, and enchanting mats. All items in this tab are items guildies pay 1/2 market price for. It used to be solely a tab for people to put all their donations in but keeping a whole tab empty save for the few donations a day we get(if that) became impractical so we gave it a second use.

Tab 5 (Raid Tools): At one point in our raiding we decided to provide our full time raid members free lesser expendables(everything but mana/health pots and flasks). Each Monday we would restock it for the raid week. Only our full time raiders have access to this tab. it was being abused at one point(you really need a stack of agility elixirs to run heroic ramparts on weekends?!?!) so it gets locked at the end of the raid week and reopened at the beginning. It is a limited withdrawal(3) tab as well.

Tab 6 (Herbs and Flasks): When we first bought this tab it was because we had more than enough gold to, s we did it just because. I initially filled it with cookies and milk ad made it only accessible by myself but that didn't go over well so eventually we turned it into a tab filled with herbs to make our free raid elixirs. This tab is accessible by officers only and guildies can purchase the herbs and flasks(and the other trade-skill items which have ended up in this tab) for half market price.

Hopefully that is a good overview of how our bank generally operates. Maybe it gives you and idea of how you might want to operate your own. Do you operate your completely different of have an extremely different idea about how the bank(or just a tab within it) should operate? I'd love to hear your ideas.

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Wow Patch 3.0: Here comes the Spoils

Miss me? Meh it was only one day, sorry. Just got a little busy with the patch and life and I guess my whole lets post ahead of time and maybe I'll be ok on the other side. one more day of it and I woulda been fine, o well.

So anyways, todays post is less than amazing(at least for some of you). Todays post is gloating(sorta).

No Vacancy took 3.0 and ran with it!

Now that the patch is here we are able to quickly, and without much resistance, get through lots of new bosses. Sure, it doesn't hold the same place in our hearts as whooping all those bosses before 3.0 did, but is sure is tons of fun and we get to see the new content.

Each of our newest boss kills from tonights raid(yes, three new ones in one night) are as follows:

Gurtagg Bloodboil

Reliquary of Souls

Mother Shahraz

Our ultimate goal was to kill Illidan before the expansion, we should be able to do that and maybe even get a few things in Sunwell down. Grats to No Vacancy!

Want to join NV for WOTLK(or even now)? App to us. All classes are currently open for WOTLK and you may even be able to see our current raid bosses as we farm them!

How about you? What did your guild do now that patch 3.0 is out?  Prince? Netherspite? Kara cleared in 20 minutes? Rage? Illy? KJ? I'd love to hear your accomplishments.

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Shameless Plug

Yes that's right, it's my blog and well I can't think of anything to write this morning so shameless recruitment plug!!

No Vacancy is recruiting for current T6 raiding as well as future WOTLK raiding.

Who we are:

NV is an Alliance guild on the PVE server of Drenden led by yours truly, the one and only Kreeoni. We are a progression raiding guild currently 4/5 in Mount Hyjal and 4/9 in Black Temple. Our goal is to kill Illidan before WOTLK comes out.

Who we are looking for:

We welcome all people to apply but we do follow a basic gear requirement(see below). However, with the upcoming patch changes we will be able to take lesser geared people into the content. Even if you do not meet the current gear requirements feel free to apply. Our feeling is that skill gear so we are more than happy to help gear up people who have a high knowledge of their class

The gear requirements and availabilities:

We use Be.imba.hu to look at your gear so the below requirements are based off those scores. Again, if you are below the requirements I urge you to still apply. Certain class/specs we do not currently run with but will open up after the patch/expansion hits.

Druid (Feral Tank) - Closed - 250+
Druid (Feral Cat) - Full-time Standby - 200+

Druid (Resto) - Open] - 200+
Druid (Balance) - Closed - 200+

Hunter (BM) - Closed - 230+
Hunter (MM) - Closed - 230+
Hunter (Survival) - Open - 200+

Mage(any spec) - Open - 210+

Paladin (Holy) - Open - 200+
Paladin (Prot) - Full-time Standby - 210+
Paladin (Ret) - Closed - 230+

Priest (Shadow) - Open - 200+
Priest (Holy) - Open - 200+
Priest (Disc) - Closed - 230+

Rogue (Any Spec) - Full-time Standby - 210+

Shaman (Resto) - Open - 200+
Shaman (Elemental) - Open - 200+
Shaman (Enhancement) - Open - 200+

Warlock (Any Spec) - Open - 210+

Warrior (Prot) - Full-time Standby - 200+
Warrior (Fury) - Closed - 200+
Warrior (Arms) - Closed - 230+

What about WOTLK?:

We are recruiting all class/specs at any gear level for any player level 60+. We will not be able to provide you with definite leveling help until after level 70 at which you will be leveling with our current 70 population. This is a great opportunity to get into a raiding guild before the raiding starts happening and to be in on all of the guild's first kills. We are not a leveling/family guild so the expectation is that you are planning on raiding with us once you hit 80. We are looking for people who will reach 80 relatively expediently

How to apply:

- You can contact any officer of No Vacancy via an in-game whisper.

- You can post an application on No Vacancy's website at novacancy.guildlaunch.com or - You can reply to this post and an officer will contact you.

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No Vacancy caps a great week

As you know, I am the GM of No Vacancy.  We just capped a great week and I figured I'd give them some credit to it here on the blog.

Last Monday we got our first kill of Azgalor, on Thursday we got our first kill of Teron Gorefiend.

Also, I got my mage alt, Slashbaa up to level 70 finally, starting of the level with a 106 be.imba score!  Oh yeah and I respecced to resto for the first time ever(actually it's the first respec since level 40 when I screwed up a talent point) and healed Kara.  Was a lot of fun to change things up for once and I didn't suck too much, only did about 1/3 of the healing of the other healer but she happens to be our top resto druid and she cheated(not sure how but I knew she did).

New topic tomorrow, not sure what it's going to be on but it will be new.  I guess I should start delving a little into the patch and expansion pretty soon here so maybe that.  I've been holding back because it keeps changing too much. Always open to ideas, what do YOU want to hear about?

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A little about me

So after some debating and some feedback from my guild members I've decided to let my readers know more about me and my guild.  The focus will not be on the guild itself in this blog but at least you know a little more about my successes and failures with a little more detail.

So hi!  I am Kreeoni, a Night Elf Feral Druid on the Drenden server.

I am the guild leader of the guild .  No Vacancy was originally formed to house a few of mine and my friends alts because we were tired of getting random invites to guilds we didn't want to be on every time we entered a major city.  However, after a lot of bad mergers with other guilds on my main I ended up inviting people to join NV as a temporary guild.  I figured we already had a bank tab and such so while we figured out what we were going to do we wouldn't be bothered and we could stick together.  Within a few days that turned out to be that we were going to keep what we were and raid.  So we rapidly went down the way of a progression guild and somehow I ended up being the one that led us.  It really wasn't what was planned but in the end it worked out for us.  We climbed to be ranked 12 server wide and 8th Ally at the end of BC. In LK we decided to not participate in the ranking system on our server because they were maintaining it poorly (Full pug credit for boss kills, 10 man credit for 25's, etc).

I didn't start playing WoW until after the server was up but Drenden went live in early January 2007, the day before the Burning Crusade was released.  At the beginning a majority of the server was transfers from other servers, meaning most guilds at the top have gotten the benefit of a head start in the progression.  90% of my guild consists of people who started after the expansion or who were not serious raiders before the expansion. 95% of my guild, including myself, has not seen any of the content that we are currently working on.  We are the only top 10 guild on the server that does not have leaders who have done the content leading them through it.

Any other info about No Vacancy can be found here.

Any other Drenden info can be found on the WoW Drenden forums here.

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