Guild Topics

Can’t live with them and you can’t live without them. Guild topics for your perusing.

A Tale of Magery

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Last time I wrote something, we were 3/10 Mythic in Nighthold. Now we’re 3/9 Mythic in Tomb of Sargeras. Sisters is giving us a hard time but the worst boss is often seasonal. In fact, I’d wager most guilds have had to deal with it at some point or other.

I call it the summer raiding boss.

We’ve experienced some roster turnover the last few weeks with players going on a hiatus due to burnout or just getting bored of the game. For the first time in forever, we actually have slots open for melee. Usually those spots were hard to get into. Alas, we don’t have a guild front end so if you’re interested, drop me a line on Twitter or go through our profile on WoW Progress.

Mages

Most players my age (oh my god, I’m almost 30) have read Harry Potter at some point. I maintain the belief that just about every guild has that one “Defense Against the Dark Arts” class. For whatever reason, that guild has a hard time retaining anyone playing that class (or spec) longer than a few weeks. In our case, it happens to be Mages. We just can’t get Mages to stick at all regardless of their class.

Allow me regale you with a tale of one of our recent Mages.

Let’s call him HelmsDeeps. He came in and trialed with us on Tuesday, which was our standard Heroic clear night. Nothing outstanding there. Wednesday is an optional night that was mostly just to knock out normals and try and complete anyone’s missing 4 piece sets or get lucky on the titanforging. We usually loot master these to maximize and direct pieces to anyone still missing their bonuses. Mind you, most of the raid group is already sporting Heroic quality tier (915s) and a few with Mythics (930).

After many spike eruptions from the floor, bowling ball launches, and that sort, Goroth is cleared. As we’re distributing loot (and by distributing, I mean mostly disenchanting), HelmsDeeps pipes up wondering why everything is being master looted and if that continues to be the case, he wants to drop out for a chance at the tier helm from Demonic Inquisition and joining a pickup group with personal loot enabled. Our officers gently explain that master looting is how we’ve always handled these nights to allow for targeted loot. Guess that wasn’t acceptable to HelmsDeeps and he subsequently dropped raid and then dropped guild. He lasted about a day.

The rest of us shrugged and moved on. Clearly he had a different loot and guild philosophy or that he didn’t comprehend the group that he was raiding with had players who literally did not need a 900 tier helm on the Vanquisher token.

Then again, he might’ve been on to something. After killing Demonic Inquisition, we ended up with two Protector tokens and a Conqueror token. Technically, he made the correct play. But if one of those had been a Vanq, it would’ve gone to him.

Part of me is glad that this was addressed early on. No telling what sort of loot issues might’ve arisen later had he stayed. For a player to part ways with a guild like that early on in a trial period is actually good for both the player and the guild with neither wasting the other’s time. As much as I’m bewildered by the move, at the same time, I can respect how swiftly the player realized that the environment wasn’t a good fit for their ideals.

Anyway, we still have a Mage. Hoping he lasts. The odds don’t look good right now, sadly.

Archimonde 2.0

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I remember the first time my old guild breached the Mount Hyjal raid back in Burning Crusade. It was breathtaking to play that iconic mission finale of Warcraft 3 from an MMO perspective. Instead of being the base commander, I was in a position where I had to repel the attacks as a character. We faced hundreds of wipes during the period working on Archimonde. Every time, we started our initial position on that little rocky outcropping facing west where Archie was. We lost a ridiculous amount of time because players would sometimes forget to get their tears. I’m glad that tears aren’t a thing this time around.

We ran into an issue last week with Archimonde that had nothing to do with the encounter itself. Last week was the first time players could kill Gorefiend and complete the quest to jump the instance. I joined a pug earlier in the day just to get the quest completed so that when raid time rolled around, we could skip ahead and start on Iskar. That part worked and we secured our first Mannoroth kill that night. We made a fun pull on Archimonde since we only had but a few minutes left.

The problem occurred the next night. We were hyped to enter the instance and put in some serious work on him again but there was no portal to Archimonde. There was a portal to Mannoroth but nothing leading us there. A ticket was opened to Blizzard’s support teams but no resolution was made until the next day (which meant spending Wednesday night on heroic content instead). Thankfully, whatever they did worked and we were able to pull Archimonde on Thursday night. Managed to see phase 3 a few times though (under 40%) so it was quite a productive night. If only we weren’t locked out earlier in the week, we might’ve even seen a kill. Our primary strategy involves stacking and slowly working our way around the room to control the fires.

Never thought I’d ever have to contend with Doomfires again.

Now the next question is to figure out how many players to send in those portals on that last phase there.

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Recruiting Tiers

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Not to be confused with recruiting tears (which sounds common for many guilds out there right now).

At present, we’re 11/13 normal and 5/13 heroic. I did manage to find a skilled pug on the weekend to get the normal Manneroth kill and the heroic Gorefiend kill just to get my quest going. Difficult getting consistent progression with three healers and a rotating fourth every raid night.

The creation of multiple tiers of raiding is great for the game, no doubt. Players and guilds can pick and choose the difficulty they want to progress and see the rest of the game at. This has a natural side effect of trickling down to the recruiting side of things.

During Burning Crusade, guilds could be bracketed and organized into completed content. If you were attuned to Serpentshrine Cavern or Black Temple, you were highly sought after largely because guilds didn’t have to go through that effort of going through that process for you.

In Wrath, the raiding scene split to those who wanted the tighter knit feel of a 10 player group or those who craved the 25 player scene (and it was divided further more into those who were okay with just doing normal and those who wanted heroic content).

Fast forward to present day, the selections have opened up to mythic raiders, heroic players, and normal players. In Burning Crusade, there were no raiding filters in place since you either wanted to raid or you didn’t. There’s so much choice that exists now.

Even as I’m cruising through the recruiting forums, I’ve started automatically sorting through players in my head. That 705 Mistweaver shaman that’s cleared 10/10 Mythic Blackrock during the first two months? Probably going to want something more than I can offer. I won’t waste their time or my time so I’d pass on making a pitch. What about that 660 Holy paladin? Sounds like they finished Heroic Highmaul but their guild wasn’t able to get down Heroic Blackhand in time. Sounds like an investment project since they’d need additional gear to get up to where we are (and survive the unavoidables). Is it worth making the pitch? Can they help us now?

Objectively speaking, it’s best to just cast a wide open net or take the shotgun approach. If I keep throwing crap against the wall, something will stick, right? Or at least, that’s what my University TA told me during exam prep. Even so, I can’t help but mentally filter and sort out players between those who are the right fit and those I’d pass on because I have a good idea my guild would get passed over.

Things were so much easier back then.

 

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What’s Going on with Mythic?

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Indulge me in this observation.

It appears that a number of prominent guilds are starting to buckle and implode. These were once strong, proud guilds who had achieved success last tier during Siege of Orgrimmar. I can’t say for sure what the cause of breakups are, but it’s happening across the board.

Starting to wonder now if we’re walking in with too high expectations of ourselves and then getting hit with a huge dose of reality. Maybe it’s deliberate though since they want Blackrock Foundry to last a while before the next tier (which if history is any indication will be around during the summer or early fall).

Can’t even begin to surmise what’s going on here.

Is the extra difficulty level of Mythic simply too much?

Is it just due to the roster absences?

People getting tired and putting too much pressure on themselves?

I had a thought yesterday. All mythic guilds now were strong, heroic guilds last tier. But it does not appear that all heroic guilds can cut it as a mythic guild this tier.

We started the expansion strong with 27 players. Thank goodness for flex modes, because I feel lucky if I can even get 20 now. Trying to recruit and pickup raiders for a  guild seems insanely tough (and I still think transferring off might do the job).

Allow me to highlight two factors:

  • Too much competition: I’m not referring to other guilds. I’m referring to other difficulties. Between raid finder, normal, and heroic, players can now find the guild that’s raiding at the right pace and difficulty for them.
  • Too much accessibility: The group finder has been a huge blessing and a curse.

Take this nugget of logic below:

“Why bother going through an application and interview process in joining a guild when I can just take a few seconds to browse around on Group Finder or Open Raid and join a group at will?”

– Random Mage, 2015

Years ago, guilds were the only game in town if you wanted to defeat Arthas or tackle raids. No group finder meant if you wanted your moneys worth in the game, you had to join a guild. The only way to get picked up by a guild is by going through their process. The only way to stay in the guild is to not lose your edge and die to every third void zone on the ground. You had to be sharp, you had to be productive, and you had to be skilled otherwise you wouldn’t be able to see content.

The last bit above there ties into something else about individual performance. If you aren’t as skilled or astute with your character, there’s a raid difficulty just for you. During the old expansions, it was play and perform at X level or else don’t raid. Now it’s, why play at X level when I can play at Z level with reduced stress and pressure and still see the same bosses anyway?

Random Mage might be on to something there.

Maybe they’re the smart one. Because you’ve got GMs like me who are wracking their brain and desperately looking for ways to find and retain talent. Other GMs are closing up shop due to lack of resources, time, effort, interest, and so forth.

Take a look at this list:

  • Summit (6/7 Mythic, ceased raiding 1/27)
  • The Horsemen (US 25th during Siege of Orgrimmar for Heroic Garrosh, ceased competitive raiding during December)
  • Blood Runs Cold (6/7 Mythic in Highmaul, ceased raiding in January)
  • Vanlyfe (6/7 Mythic, ceased raiding in January)
  • Victory or Whatever (US 38th, 25 man, ceased raiding)

Admittedly a small sample size, but I’m sure they’re not the only ones that had high hopes and aspirations. But for whatever reason, they’ve stopped raiding. Maybe expectations or other life factors interfered here. Who knows? But something’s definitely going on here.

For the purposes of raiding, guilds are meaningless and may not mean anything significant in finding success in raids because you can still do the same thing via Group Finder.

Someone pointed me over to Stoove’s blog post on Mythic raiding and how it has impacted a 10 man scaling up. Mythic took the difficulties of heroic raids and amplified the difficulty immensely.

It might be time to take a hard look at the mirror and realistically figure out what kind of guild we really are.

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How Guilds Make 800k Gold Selling Boss Kills

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The news that cross-realms are allowing players to raid on other servers on both normal and heroic mode is a god-send! Players are no longer restricted to paying server transfer fees in order to raid. Cross-faction raiding isn’t going to be a thing anytime soon (and I doubt it ever will), but at least players can now raid across servers. This is a great way for a prospective player to “try” a new raiding guild before they commit to transferring. It’s great for guilds like mine to help fill out a raid in case we’re short players by using a service like Open Raid.

Another benefit? You can start selling guild runs and kills. It’s also known as “guild boosting”.

There’s a market out there for players who want the normal mode achievement. There’s players who want the gear that your guild has been routinely sharding week after week. People might scoff and laugh, but there’s always going to be a buyer. People want the loot, the achievements, and the mounts but aren’t necessarily able to commit the time required to a proper raiding guild. Just keep in mind that gold and loot still can’t be traded on non-connected realms so they’d have to transfer a character with gold plus the items that are the rough equivalent to the price negotiated upon. I’ve seen some players willing to transfer an alt and then boosting their main.

Want to make it even easier? Make sure the alt is the GM of their own guild. Last I checked, guild bank transfer limits were at 1 million gold. The character needs to meet the requirements though.

How does one go about it?

I’d strongly suggest doing this with a 25 man raiding team. I imagine it’s significantly harder to carry a person on 10.

Step 1: Discuss it with your guild

I’m using the word “discuss” in a loose term. It should be pretty easy to sell your guild on the idea. Remind them that that funds coming in are going to guild repairs and to the next expansion (recipes, crafting materials, enchants, etc). Will your participating raid members obtain a small cut? If you’ve already made that decision to sell runs, let the guild know. Any dissenters can be silenced with sound reasoning. If they still disagree, well that’s ultimately up to you to decide. No one has to participate if they don’t want to.

We’ll get to the actual agreements in a moment.

Step 2: Advertise it

You can sell something but if no one knows about it, you’re not going to be able to make any gold. No one’s going to come to a run they don’t know about! Hit up trade chat and see if anyone local is interested in the kills. Failing that, see if anyone on Open Raid is willing to go. Advertise on your server’s forums! They’ll ask you for a price and that’s going to fluctuate greatly based on things like your server progression, what they’re entitled to, what bosses are going down, and so forth.

If you have a guild website, consider creating a page dedicated to this information. Make sure you include the important stuff like the price and what they get. Include who they should message about it. Throw in the dates and times if you know it for a fact. If loot prices are different, specify that too.

In fact, some guilds have websites with full pages dedicated to just selling runs.

That’s where the next step comes into play…

Step 3: Settle on the terms and price

Are clients paying for just a Garrosh kill? Do they want a specific item? Do they want all items? Are they expecting a full clear? Heroic boss kills? All of those factor into. Speak to your client and figure out what they want. It seems the going rate for a straight up Garrosh kill with whatever loot they want is 15k.

A full heroic 14/14 run with loot, achievements, and the mount went for upwards of 800k gold.
A full heroic clear with just the achievements and no loot went for 300k.
Heroic gear: 20k Heroic Warforged: 30k
Heroic weapons: 35k
Heroic Warforged weapons: 80k.

Naturally the going rate of this stuff is going to be influenced by demand and the progression capabilities of your server.

Figure out and set your guild prices for:

  • Loot (Both normal and warforged)
  • Achievements
  • Mounts
  • Titles

Talk to your client and figure out exactly what they want and what they’re paying for. Once you have that step figured out…

Step 4: Arrange payment

Take a deposit.

Some guilds ask for non-refundable 15% up front. Other guilds ask for 50%. Consider cutting a deal on the price if the run is scheduled to occur on the day of. Again, this obviously isn’t going to work if the player is on a cross realm since they can’t trade gold but if they’re willing to transfer servers on an alt, take that into consideration. I find that the more well-known a guild is, the higher the deposit they can command. Reputation seems to play a big part. Guilds that routinely top the kills race ask for a higher deposit because they don’t want to be ripped off. Buyers can rest easily knowing that these are guilds who are also quite serious and skilled at what they do.

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