Matticus

Matticus is the founder of World of Matticus, a World of Warcraft blog.

Is Applying to Multiple Guilds a Sin?

by

750936_52062459

Found this intriguing question on Twitter today that was directed to me. I’ll try to paraphrase it as best as I can.

”Is there anything wrong with players applying to multiple guilds?”

From my perspective, no. The way I see it, if I’m a guildless player who is looking to get involved with a raiding guild somewhere, I’d take the shotgun approach. I won’t get into why such a player should or shouldn’t apply to this type of guild. Let’s assume that I’ve done my homework and have answered the self-help questionnaire on the type or guild I want to be a part of. For example, I want to be in a raiding guild that’s just started Ulduar and is utilizing a DKP system that happens to only raid on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays from a period between 6 PM – 12 AM.

Let’s say I hit the jackpot and there happens to be four guilds that fit the criteria.

From the applicant perspective

Why not? I want to raid. It doesn’t matter to me which guild I get into as they’re all pretty much the same. I’m flexible with my hours. I can raid from 7 – 11 PM for example. The time frame I listed above is the window that I am willing to commit myself to raiding. By applying to 4 different guilds, I get to maximize my chances. The odds are higher that at least one of them could use the role that I play.

From the guild perspective

It’s nice and flattering to hear from a player that they’ve looked only at your guild and want to be a part of it. They didn’t even consider any other option. What if the applicant doesn’t fit or if you don’t have room? It’s nice to know that the player has some other plans to fallback on. It kills me whenever I turn down a player sometimes. Some of them genuinely deserve good guilds to be a part of and wish to contribute to raids. Sometimes there’s just no space.

I’ve seen guilds who adopt this attitude that their guild is awesome. In fact, it is so damn awesome they can’t fathom why anyone who has applied to their guild also applied to other guilds. Clearly it’s an insult to such guilds. When a guild gets wind that an applicant also applied elsewhere, they just shoot them down. On one hand, it makes the process a little easier for the app as it does weed down the number of remaining guilds.

Cover your ass

When I applied to post secondary schools, I applied to no less than 3 institutions. Why? because I knew there was a very real chance that I would get rejected. It’s the same mentality when applying for jobs. Apply to many as you can and see who wants you. Then from there, you take the best possible offer.

There’s nothing wrong with the business sense. Don’t try and pull the loyalty card here either. The guild hasn’t accepted the applicant yet. There’s no incentive for them to be that loyal so early. When a player of outstanding calibre happens to apply (let’s say a player with Immortal or Champion of Ulduar or something), it’s up to the guild to change gears and sell themselves. The guild has to essentially put up a neon sign that says “JOIN US!” Ultimately, the decision is always going to belong to the applicant whether they accept or otherwise. If a guild truly wants that player, they’ll start talking and eventually extend an invite. If not, the guild will pass and one of the other guilds might consider the player.

It sure as heck saves a lot of time, too. Lots of guilds have response rates varying from hours to days to even weeks. If I were planning to raid, I’d apply to all the guilds at once. However, if there was one organization that I’d want to join, I’d make it known to them that they were my first pick. Would other guilds feel slighted? Well, probably. But if they needed the extra set of hands, they’d overlook that. If they didn’t, then the applicant would get turned down anyway regardless. It’s certainly faster than applying to one guild, waiting for a response, getting rejected, and then repeating it with a different guild over and over.

Applying to multiple guilds allows players to gauge the level of interest a guild has in their services. There’s nothing ethically wrong with that.

Image courtesy of woodsy

Where Have I Been?

by

I owe you guys an explanation. Normally, I don’t believe in the “Sorry guys, life owned me” type blog posts that offer insight as to why a blogger hasn’t been writing as much. With that in mind, I’m not going to apologize. Instead, what I will try to do is paint on a blank canvas exactly what’s been going on with me recently.

Once upon a time, I read that writing could be viewed as a therapeutic process. It can serve as a valve or an outlet to express everything you want to say. Apparently. I’ve never tried it. Wouldn’t know, you know?

Summer is the time of year that raiding guilds dread. Not many organizations are able to last past it. Not many GMs are willing to put in the time and work to re-energize their guilds when their players just don’t feel like playing. There isn’t much the boss can do about it other than go shopping. About 5 or so guilds that were more progressed then my guild on my server had collapsed internally due to a myriad of reasons all relating to cancelled raids and so forth.

The first raid I had to cancel was one last week. There was simply too many holes on the roster and there was no way our bench depth extended that far. I understood and accepted this and opted to give the crew a day of rest instead in preparation for the next instance tier that will debut (very soon, I might add, especially at the rate of background patching).

Ulduar’s been out for approximately four months. Players at the upper end of the curve are either bored or are getting bored.

 bored-curve

Naturally, the image is a clearly gross exaggeration. Don’t take it seriously. Although this does remind me to clean the dust off a post I had been meaning to write many months ago on the perceived Raiding Curve and explore it in more detail.

It’s very difficult to shoot for hard mode level content when your varsity players are slowly dropping out one by one. Although its easy to continue to draft players and recruit them, not every pick is going to turn out to be a stud. It’s a challenging decision to make to go after the hardest bosses in the game with players who may not have the gear to adequately face the challenge.

Guild management: It accelerates the aging process!

On to the personal side of things. It’s a little rather demoralizing. I’m currently undergoing what I consider a mid-academic life crisis.

Allow me to explain.

One of my assignments for this online class I’m taking (and the last as I clearly do not have the discipline to participate in an distance education course) is to visit court and write a paper about what I observe. So during my field trip, I observed two cases. One was about a street racing incident, and the other was about a hydroponics incident in some guy’s basement.

It’s an eye opening experience. Enough for me to give pause and consider a career change. I mean in the first case, I watched a bus driver get grilled about how the height of his driver’s seat could affect his vision. Naturally, the defense attacked his memory and credibility. Poor guy. The hydroponics case had a lawyer dispute the admissibility of evidence after it had already been admitted and allowed.

And that’s when it hit me. Is this something I want to get involved with? No, not really. I wouldn’t be able to handle it. It wasn’t until two years ago that I decided to start this blog. In the time since then, I’ve never really realized how much I enjoyed writing. Only recently did it occur to me that it could lead to something more and be a viable career path.

But I don’t know what to do right now. I’ve already committed so much into my current major in terms of time and finances. When I first started it, I really liked what I was learning. Now I just don’t seem to care about it as much. I’m so tired of school. I’ve never taken a semester off since I graduated from high school.

Going to end off this post with a link to an interview I did a few days ago and a brief question. Realized I haven’t published it here yet.

Have you ever experienced burnout in WoW? If so, how have you dealt with that?

No, I’ve never truly experienced burnout in WoW. Not at the point where I felt like I had to uninstall the game. I’ve been playing the game since Vanilla. I think Zul’Gurub had just been released. I’ve maintained a steady pace. How I’ve managed to avoid burnout is a mystery even to me. You’d think a player who has done so much and has played so often would get sick of everything and just step back for a while.

You know, I think I partially credit that to my blog. I’ve always wanted to maintain a high level of quality and production on my blog. And no matter what anyone else says, it’s hard to write about something you’re not interested in. You have to keep some hours invested in the game to come up with fresh content and material. I had no desire to be one of those fly by night blogs where I’d post strong for a while and then disappear forever. It was my goal to try and become a regular resource and voice. In order to do that, you just have to keep playing.

I watched the Ugly Truth the other day. I thought it was a fairly funny movie. I wonder if I can pull off a series similar to that about WoW.

“Death Knights: They will kick your ass before you can even respond. And that’s the ugly truth!”

Maybe not.

Goblins and Worgen – Neutral Faction (or a Third?)

by

We’ve got the Alliance and we’ve got the Horde. Recent information from the latest PTR suggests that there may be two additional races that we’ll be able to play. Granted there isn’t a whole lot of solid stuff out there about this. The entire premise is based off the simple fact that new Halloween masks are being added.

It feels like a red herring. Or a decoy.

But all the same, I can’t help but wonder. I’m trying to remember as much of the history and lore as I can from way back in vanilla. The Alliance first saw signs of the Worgen in Duskwood. Someone summoned them. They’re supposedly from a different planet or plane of existence (not Azeroth). Was it Arugal that summoned it first? Or was it that Night Elf chick with the Scythe (Can’t remember the name, I know someone who reads will know more)?

Then we have the Goblins. Very mercenary. Counterparts to the Gnomes in terms of engineering and ingenuity. They remind me of the Ferengi from Star Trek. Already thought of an interesting racial for them.

Obtain 0.5% additional gold from all sources

Daresay it fits the theme quite well. I don’t quite see these guys as a one side or the other deal. I don’t see the Goblins teaming up with the Alliance or with the Horde. I’m not sure if there’s enough lore or background on the Worgen to determine which side they’d join either. One theory I’ve read is that the Greymane wall wasn’t enough to contain the plague (or some sort of mutational virus). Gilneas is now infested with Worgen as a result. Gilneas wasn’t exactly friendly to the Alliance either. Come to think of it, I don’t recall them ever joining the Alliance. Their King said they’d fight it out on their own without getting involved with the other Alliance nations.

Which then leads me to wonder that if these two races are indeed a part of the next expansion, I suspect the players who roll these races may get a chance to choose which side they wish to join at a certain time or level. Or they could simply not join at all and remain their own faction. So a Goblin Priest (which just sounds really damn unlikely) could join either Horde or Alliance or fly solo. Maybe a player can choose to be neutral the lifespan. Another idea is that these two races could switch allegiances – at will. Now that’d be an interesting twist to add to the game. We know Blizzard’s planning on introducing faction changes anyway.

Some crazy stuff here. It’s all a bunch of speculation. All from the fact that new Halloween masks were introduced. It could be nothing, it could be something.

Blizzcon approaches. We’ll see if this means anything.

Orbit-uary Post Mortem

by

Well, the crew and I managed to spend a solid 150 minutes on handling four towers tonight. It was nothing more than a simple continuation of last week’s three tower attempts (but slightly longer).

Yeah it’s been nerfed slightly. But on the raid kill satisfaction scale, I’d probably set it at 7.5 out of 10. It felt good though, for sure.

This is the third hard mode/meta achievement related boss we’ve accomplished since we killed Yogg. Last week, we managed to take down Heartbreaker on Heroic which allowed us to leapfrog ahead of several guilds. Good for top 20 on an extremely competitive PvE progression server (WoW Progress ranks the server as 7th in the US).

The Strategy

We utilized this strategy detailed on Tankspot. This involved having 2 launch teams consisting of 3 players each. It was practiced extensively on the week before with only 3 towers up. Last night was when we’d put it to the test. Despite having a slightly different launch team, overall I was really happy with the outcome. I think we only suffered a handful of deaths at the end but we managed to get the kill all the same. Working on flawlessness can come later.

The main hurdles that we had to focus on is coordination. Specifically:

  • Fire launch team
  • Retrieve launch team
  • Load second launch team
  • Fire second launch team

It took us around four successful shutdowns before we took him out. A great thing to do before the encounter is to spend a minute or two seeding the entire area with Pyrite. Blast those suckers down as they come in.

Anyways, the main problem we had for the majority of the evening was retrieving our launch teams intact. Our bikes had difficulty pinpointing where they were on the ground and which demolisher to bring the teams back to.

After a variety of tactics, assists were automatically handed out to everyone. This allowed them to mark themselves.

The launching demolishers were assigned three marks. The launch teams were also assigned three marks. Every time a player was launched, they would designate themselves.

Let’s say we had a Demolisher launching Bruno and Broseph. The Demolisher would be marked with a star. If Bruno was about to be launched, he’d tag him self with a square when he landed. This way, he can coordinate with the chopper that picks him up (square to star). Just as Bruno is about to be delivered, Broseph who is manning the guns on the Demolisher would then load himself in allowing Bruno to jump into the gunnery position of the Demo. Once Broseph gets launched, he’d tag himself with the square.

The other launch teams did the same thing and the overall efficiency increased. Sometimes it’s difficult to pinpoint Gnomes on the ground. That’s when the lucky charms come in handy. A script and macro that Amava figured out helped immensely. Try these:

Here is the macro that all the Launch Team members need for FL.

/script SetRaidTarget("target", n)

Where "target" is a toon name in quotes, and n is:
1. Yellow 4-point Star
2. Orange Circle
3. Purple Diamond
4. Green Triangle
5. White Crescent Moon
6. Blue Square
7. Red "X" Cross
8. White Skull

example:

 

/script SetRaidTarget("Matticus", 8)

This will put a skull on Matt’s head.

All in all, a fairly fun encounter. Excellent work by all the players involved and those that were here for previous attempts but could not make it.

The Northrend Beasts Encounter

by

Here’s a video of the fight courtesy of WoWRaid (and Irae). Check out the different abilities and the loot table.

European players get a treat as they got to check out an encounter on the EU PTR (unannounced I might add).

This appears to be one of the first encounters you’ll find entering raid aspect of the coliseum. The sequence here is that it’s 3 sets of mobs that come in one after the other. A Hunter provides the video perspective here (and wow, I’ve never seen those kinds of numbers before but then again, I’ve never played a Hunter). It looks to be an encounter that’ll take a little under 9 minutes or so give or take.

Gormok

Seems like a straightforward tank and spank. I noticed the Hunter had to switch fire periodically. Looked like he was targeting members of the raid and trying to shoot something off. That’s some serious precision right there.

Acidmaw and Dreadscale

These damned Storm Peaks snakes again. I thought I had seen the last of them in the cavern when I was getting all the Oil and stuff out of there. Figures they’d be back again.

Icehowl

The first thing I noticed about his abilities is that he does a ~70000 damage headbutt followed by a stun. Oi vey.

Looks like you’ll be engaging all of these bosses one after the other with little to no reprieve. I can’t wait!