Kree's World of Warcraft Guild Leader Blog: Guild Policies

Showing posts with label Guild Policies. Show all posts

Monday, September 14, 2009

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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Friday, April 24, 2009

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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Monday, February 16, 2009

Dual Spec's and Guild Policies

Danshir over at The MMO Experience posed a question about the future of Dual Speccing and how guilds will handle it. This was a topic I was planning on talking about a little closer to their inception but I have seen a lot of talk about it lately and figure maybe now is a good time to get people thinking about what they should be doing in the future.

Now Dual Spec's have not even been officially confirmed to be coming out at any specific time (although it is suggested to be in 3.1) and the details have not been solidified but people can guess as to what they are going to be and what they will do to effect guilds.

The best inception of this ability is that it will be a cheap way for guilds to be able to raid without limitations of who shows up. They wont have to ask people to pay high respec costs for one night so that the guild can raid. This will also let you have a smaller overall raid force as people can spec to something useful for a given fight rather than sit outside waiting to be used. Single tank fights will be better for other tanks to participate in because they can quickly spec to healing or dps without having to leave the raid zone.

But this brings the problem that Danshir mentioned, the need for multiple gear sets and how loot should be handled. Now from what I gather from his post he deals with a need vs greed simple rolling loot system without much frills or rules.

Now I don't feel that this is a bad system and works for many guilds, most of the end-game raiding guilds run with a loot system that is a little more detailed. A lot of guilds have a main set need, off set greed sort of rule. I would say that the only change that most guilds will have is that a person needs to claim a main set and a primary off set. The main set would get the primary roll against others, then the primary offset would roll against other primary off sets, followed by other offsets, alts, initiates, etc.

Guilds that don't already have a policy that addresses a main set versus off set and lets both main sets and off sets to roll against each other will not have dual speccing cause any more issues that aren't already there. Guilds that already have a policy in that vein have a good building block to stack a dual speccing policy on. There will be a few guilds that add special more complicated rules (like special treatment for offsets like healing and dps for tanks that will use them more frequently, etc) but in general not much will change except for the details.

Dual Specs are quite a ways off and there is plenty of time for gear to get into the hands of those that want the offset gear, but it is a good time to start discussing possible solutions to a problem that could come up with the inception of these Dual Specs.