Historically speaking, most of the players I’ve picked up in the past had two out of the three attributes. Rare is the player who manages to possess all three. Recruiting seems to be at an all time low according to a few GMs I’ve spoken to (10 man and 25 man, Horde and Alliance). It’s as if the majority of players just want to see the content, regardless of what difficulty level it is (meaning the path of least resistance gets selected the most or the LFR tool). It seems like the applicants I see seem to exhibit 2 out of the 3 traits.
Skilled
Manages to bring the pain (or the healing). We’re talking on a consistent basis. I often find myself wondering about the players who (over a 2 month period) go from the bottom to the top back to the bottom again.
Of course, no one wants the player who has a really hard time hitting that Hour of Twilight button and ends up burning all 3 Battle Res skills allotted. The ability to pick up what the rules and requirements for each encounter is a big plus (as is the ability to do it fast).
High attendance
Willingness to reschedule most events in their lives around raiding is an advantage. I’m not that much of a tyrant though.
Wedding? Sure.
Exam? Yeah, you better go study for it.
House on fire? Go.
But if you’re missing out on a raid to catch the series finale of American Idol, I can tell you’re just not into it. Or if a new game came out and you’re signing out of raid when I can see on Steam that you’re clearly playing Skyrim. That tells me where your priorities are and it’s clearly not with WoW.
Drama free
Perhaps drama free might not be the best choice of words to use. When I mean drama free, I’m not referring to guild splitting dramatic incidents. I’m talking about the little things that can get under people’s skins eventually leading to guild splitting incidents.
How difficult does a person need to be?
There’s been times I’ve tried to compromise on issues to reach the best approach for everyone involved. In other cases, a single course of action was settled upon because that’s what the leaders wanted to do, period. I really hate working with players who argue for the simple sake of arguing. I can tell you it takes away my efforts and focus on the next item I want to resolve. Pick your battles carefully. Otherwise the GM might exercise their right to throw you out because you keep causing problems and end up being more of a liability instead of an asset.
Now going back to the original question, if you were restricted to two selections, which two would you pick?
Forgot to add. Would pick Skilled and Drama Free. I’d try to pick up as many of them as I could and set up rotating shifts or something.
Skilled and drama free would be the two most desirable attributes. But low attendance typically causes drama in and of itself, because:
a) It causes gear deficiency, which leads to slow progress.
b) Rewarding people with low attendance causes annoyance in people with high attendance.
c) You have to re-teach a fight to new people for each boss.
Of course, I am speaking in terms of what is desirable for a hardcore raid. If I was running a casual raid, then high attendance is a non-issue.
B is probably the biggest annoyance there is.
I don’t see how B can be an issue if you have a good lootsystem in place. Attendance should be taken into account, easy as that.
Doesn’t matter, Sinuviel. The people with a higher attendance will get X%. The people with lower attendance will get Y%, where X > Y. But sometimes people still get annoyed if Y > 0.
Which is why I picked drama free over attendance. Ideally, you pick all three, and there’s no issue whatsoever. But reality doesn’t always work out that way.
I would choose skilled and attendance. Geez it is so hard to pick just 2! This is for progression raiding I guess because if we are doing fun or farm stuff it would be drama free and skilled. It’s difficult at the moment trying to get people to turn up to raid and getting the annoying ones to shut up is easier than getting people to turn up.
I LOVE this interpretation of the triple constraint. Well done!
Personally, I’d take Drama Free and either of the two.
Skill: if you give people a chance, you’d be surprised by what they can accomplish. If Drama Free is already a choice, chances are “Skill” is simply lack of experience. I’d rather be the one to provide that experience and train a raider properly than have them learn bad habits through PUGs (which in turn, brings Drama to the table).
Attendance: I would rather (and have) worked around a player’s attendance constraints. In the long term, it builds loyalty and in some cases, an opt-in bench (I can use nights when my attendance people are out to get some skill people experience).
Of course, I am not running progression. However, if the price for having drama-free, fun raids is the lack of being in the top 10, or 20, on my server, I’m okay with that. And so is my raid team – since we haven’t broken stride since SWTOR came out, and our Mage finally got to his 2nd Firelands phase for his Legendary, and we’re regularly poking at BH, FL, DS and LFR.
There is something else that rides along with the lack of Drama Free – and that’s having to rebuild teams when Drama happens, and IIRC, trying to rebuild isn’t as easy as it used to be any more. The raiders who are staying are staying because we’re having fun. Which is what the game is about.
Note: Keep in mind I’m not saying Progression Raiding isn’t fun – it is fun for some. Drama is NOT fun though, no matter what your level of raiding. Some of my raiders are “retired” hardcores who simply don’t want to deal with the drama and are willing to go at a slightly slower pace in order to have drama-free raids.
It’s true. Skill could be due to lack of experience. Players with lose game skill have an opportunity to flourish and improve. However, what I’ve found is that the skill cap varies from one person to the next. Sometimes their skill cap just isn’t good enough for the content your raid group is working on.
I think those three points each exist on a spectrum, 1 being “worst evar” and 10 being “omg amazing.” if you’ve got, say, 20 points to distribute, I’d go with 5/7/8 – average skill, solid attendance, good um drama-freeness?
I’ve also found that good attendance doesn’t necessarily mean attends every raid. Consistently making Wednesday but being unavailable on Thursday is *way* better than sometimes missing one, sometimes the other.
I’d say consistency is huge in general. Knowing what you can expect from somebody on all those metrics makes working with them easier.
Very true. Knowing a player can’t make a certain time or day is better than finding out at the last minute. At least you can always plan around hockey or volleyball practice. In the long run though, it’s better off to just cut or let the player go in search of a guild that can better suit their scheduling.
#1 has to be Low Drama, nothing kills everyone’s fun quicker, and makes officers dread logging on.
If I can only pick one other it would be Attendance.
People who “will be there” for the long hall.
If we have “good attitude” and presents we can work on skill. But you cant train “good attitude” if its lacking
Great topic, love it. Very difficult to choose two.
In my experience, this is a suitable model when you’re not chasing heroic progression. When you’re pushing for progression, you need all 3. Heroic modes pre-nerf are not forgiving in lack of skill, hours of wiping can lead to serious frustration that can cause serious guild drama, and consistency in the players you’re bringing (attendance) is the difference between success or failure (4 hours wiping with group X and then the next day having to go through the same for even 2 or 3 different people can really set a raid back).
With that said, a guild who isn’t chasing serious pre-nerf heroic progression can definitely sacrifice one of these.
For me and my guild, we want to see strength in all 3, though we do ‘sacrifice’ in the attendance side of things. We do this on a very limited and specific basis, however, in that we have 2 guys who can only make 2 of our 3 raid days. They can ALWAYS make their 2 days, though, so we work around that and it works for the guild as a whole quite well. With that said, couldn’t agree with you more if someone is just outright dicking around and we’ve booted people for not showing up because they decided to bail on us to go have drinks after work or “lost track of time” while playing another game.
I enjoy raiding, so as long as it is drama free and regular my friends and I will have fun. We do have someone that takes some time to “get there”, but I would rather be having fun with friends and suffer the occasional frustration, than not be having any fun at all.
I think sometimes these sorts of discussions confuse having fun doing an activity with winning. Yes it is fun to down bosses in raids, but shouldn’t that just add to the fun of raiding with 9 or 24 other people with whom you are having fun with just by trying to down bosses?
Think of say PvP, in an ideal world you will win about half the time when playing equally as skilled players. Why isn’t the act of PvPing a reward or fun in its own right? Why do you have to win to have fun? Seems to me then that 50% of the time playing PvP is then just not fun, so why do it?
Because everyone has sliding scales of “funness”. While having a 50% win ratio may satisfy some players, I know I would never be satisfied with just winning 50%. I’m a fairly competitive person. I wouldn’t be okay with only winning 50% of the time because I’m always going to be looking for ways to suck less with the end goal of winning 55% of my games, to 60% to 70% and so on. This ties back to that post I wrote the other week about chasing that “high”. Many players get that feeling of satisfaction after completing an objective (killing a boss, having a certain win ratio, etc).
And it’s funny because the reason I don’t PvP is that I know I don’t have the time, the gear set or the skill to adequately compete at a level that I would find personally fulfilling ^^.
It’s fun when wipes are due to people learning about the process and the different boss abilities and so forth. It’s NOT fun when it’s the same person who has failed to learn it after being directly exposed 10+ times. Then it’s just irritating and an ultimate waste of time because you (as a player) know you’re hitting everything correctly and yet you’re not achieving your goal because it’s completely outside your control as to why you’re not succeeding (someone else sucking).