Unnamed Podcast: Episode #2 - "Tangental"

This week we talk about "Starting a raiding guild from scratch", an extension of our conversation last week, and "How we run our guild banks". We also spend a good deal of time at the beginning of the podcast about ourselves so that you, the listener, can get to know us better.

After learning some things from episode #1 we've made some improvements to our recording. As always, we would love to hear from you any feedback, be it positive or negative. We will be moving to a new website as well as getting the podcast up on Itunes for the next episode. The new website will allow us to use an audio RSS feed as well. Be sure to enter the podcast naming contest for your chance to win a spectral prize (courtesy of Sweeties Sweeps.com).

Enjoy!

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=00cf10fa5f6e70865a3d773badf21430e04e75f6e8ebb871

Show Links

None this week

E-mail your comments, suggestions, or snide remarks to Kreeoni(at)gmail(dot)cot or contact him on Twitter!

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Unnamed Podcast: Episode #1 - PuG's, Heroes, and Imba's

In this inaugural episode of the Unnamed Podcast you meet our hosts, Kreeoni and David Eagle. This week our topics are "Dealing with PuG's within raids" and "What is our criteria for selecting raid members?".

Bear with us as we get things up and running. We are not on I-tunes yet, so you have to do the harder work of downloading and importing to your I-tunes library. Let us know what you think. We are happy to listen to any feedback that you can give us. Send your feedback to Kreeoni(at)gmail(dot)com or cdeagle(at)gmail(dot)com.

And without further Adieu, enjoy:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/zwtjmznnmwu/Unnamed Podcast 001.mp3

Show Links

Suicide Kings Loot System - http://www.wowwiki.com/Suicide_Kings
Kree's DKP system - http://kreeoni.blogspot.com/2009/01/questions-can-be-answered.html

WoW Heroes - www.wow-heroes.com
Be Imba - be.imba.hu

Help us find a name and you could win a cool prize: Either an old juggling ball with some funky stuff on it or a yet to be named cooler item (more info on prize this week). E-mail your suggestions to Kreeoni(at)gmail(dot)cot or contact him on Twitter!

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Worth Our Time?

Last week I had that interview for the Massively.com article and one thing I said which seemed to have a bit of a negative response was:

Our first question is, "What is your overall raid-experience?" In some cases, it's also fine if you haven't completed all end-game content, we care more about if you experienced it. We can then gauge where they are in relation to the rest of the guild - It lets me figure out how much to the guild will need to teach them and if that is worth our time.

The flak coming from my last words in the sentence ("Worth our time"). Now I don't feel like I need to defend myself, but it really does make a good point as to what we as guild leaders face. As leaders we need to fulfill the needs of the guild, and in doing so we must think of everyone who is involved, especially the current members.

My comment comes from the simple fact that both I and the person applying are not the only ones in the world. It's as simple as that, but people take it as me meaning a holier than thou meaning. In fact, when you are recruiting for your guild, regardless of what type of guild you may be you are constantly thinking whether or not this person is someone who is "worth the guilds time."

Let me put it this way. Let's say you have a guild of all level 40's who are enjoying their time leveling together and doing the quests and dungeons applicable to your level so you can progress to the next level and so forth. Now let's say you have a level 15 apply to your guild. Sure, you may not have any requirements for the guild but you realize that no one else in your guild is at that low level. At that point you realize that there is no real reason for that person to be in the guild.

My example is pretty basic and there are many different factors that could be involved such as it being a friend of someone or an alt of a highly experienced fast leveler or whatever. But think about this. Possibly you are a person who only gets a few hours a week to play. Is it worth your time to help that person catch up to you or is your time better spent working with your already close leveled guildies in which your time not only helps them but is reciprocated.

Now put this into a larger context where I come from. In end-game raiding you have different levels. Tier 4 leads into Tier 5 and so forth. Having someone who has little experience raiding in general along with no gear from the earlier tiers is like having that lower level person join up while the rest of the guild is at your level.

Sure many guilds have a general member rank in which a person is in your guild but is working themselves into meeting your raiding requirements but in reality these people are better off in a guild which mirrors their own experiences and needs. So when I say "worth our time" I really am talking about both the guilds needs as well as the applicants. It would be selfish of me to accept an applicant who doesn't meet our requirements and either 1) require them to get up to par on their own or 2)always put them on standby when they could be running full time with another guild. And it would be equally selfish of them to require the guild to gear them up to meet the guilds needs or suffer by putting in a lower geared person and essentially dragging them through the instances so that they could finally help the guild progress.

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Kree on Massively

Recently I have been working with My Game Mug on their development of a recruitment site called WoW Headhunter. I haven't really talked much about it as of yet as it is still in Beta and not quite up to a standard that I think is ready for me to delve into yet.

Well last week their Director of Community Relations interviewed me for a post which appeared yesterday on Massively.com. He interviewed both myself and Matt from World of Matticus about what we look for when people apply to our guilds. The whole article is an obvious plug for their site but there are some great points that both Matt and I came up with that are worth looking at.

Looking at the posts current comments there is a lot of negative feedback, but keep in mind the only two people interviewed were people from end-game raiding guilds so there is limited feedback there. This site does cater to all different styles of guilds, whether endgame or beginner.

The folks over at My Game Mug are making a big push to get their site out and known to everyone and I do suggest looking into it, but keep in mind it is just not fully ready yet. It's like when Lich King came out 3 months too early and we spent all our time hoping we could get a boss down before log disconnected half the raid and then getting bored with the overly easy content after it was finally fixed. In other words, take it with a grain of salt. Once this site is up and running with its final patch in place it will be a pretty decent recruiting tool. However, currently a guild leader can't even recruit from it. Only people looking for a guild can search for one.

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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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