Guild drama and Kael

[Griever423]

This is going to be a bit long winded so bear with me.

There has been a lot of debate in guild recently about progression and the direction the guild is heading in. We're currently SSC cleared and 3/4 TK. We decided before we even killed Vashj that we were not going to do what a lot of other guilds were doing post 2.4 and skip Kael for Hyjal and BT. This was a decision made by the officers (myself included) and the GM.

It would seem that a lot of the other guild members don't necessarily share the same views about progression as the management does. Whats more, the fact that we don't use DKP (we use loot council) doesnt seem to sit will with a number of members. The management will argue that DKP is stupid and the people who work the hardest and show up to raids and put in effort are the ones who deserve the loot and "we" dont want loot going to people who dont deserve it. So with loot council the people who deserve loot and the people who are the most "skilled" are the ones who are first in line.

A few of the officers have put it out there that the "lesser" people really have no incentive to show up to raids when they know they wont be receiving loot. As it happens, the people who dont share the views of the management reguarding progression are also the ones who arent as "skilled" as other members. Most of those people have left the guild already. The management will argue that they're noobs who only care about loot and want to ride the MH/BT loot train. All of those people who left the guild recently left for guilds farming BT and hyjal.

Now we don't have the people to even form a raid. we're consistently 5-7 people short of making a solid raid group. Our last attempt as a full raid on kael was 2% into P4 with the entire raid alive and only one adviser up when kael came into play. We are SO close to getting him down, but now we're stuck.

We've all been talking as officers about ways to go about solving our problem, and quite frankly I'm frustrated as hell. The GM and other officers basically say that we have principles as a guild and we're not about to change them due to some kids who only care about loot. If they dont like it they can GTFO, which is what has been happening hence the lack of progression raids. We've opened the recruitment doors wide open in attempts to try to focus on kael again but its going to be slow work.

I'm really torn, I think moving to a DKP system would resolve a lot of issues and make raiding more enjoyable for everyone. I talked to every single person who left the guild. Some of them were good friends and many of them benefited a lot from the guild gear wise. They were regular raiders who were with us for many guild first kills.

What can we do? Are our guild principles too purist and is our loot system too discriminative? Is it so wrong that we want to earn the right to step into hyjal and BT instead of just riding the loot train that is the first half of each zone? Is it stupid that we want to give our best players gear because we believe they deserve it the most?

I'm venting a bit here as well...forgive me I'm just really frustrated and I dont want to play when stuff like this goes on. I feel as an officer I should be stepping up and trying to find a solution to this mess, but I'm really at a loss here and I feel quite helpless.

[Clifford]

Firstly I would alternative killing the easier MH/BT bosses with Kael'thas attempts. Allow people the pleasure of some easy loot and new content whilst still clearing the T5 instances.

Loot ... I wish there was an easy answer. We use a modified /roll system prioritised according to class and raid attendance. It has served us well but there are times I think we should have gone the DKP route. However, it takes just one selfish act to make you realise that there is value in DKP as people will only roll/bid for items they really want.

[Satrina]

So with loot council the people who deserve loot and the people who are the most "skilled" are the ones who are first in line.

Is it stupid that we want to give our best players gear because we believe they deserve it the most?

This seems pretty backwards to me. The strong suit of loot council is that upgrades go to where it will benefit the guild the most, making your raid stronger overall. Of course, at that point your core people who always show start to get antsy, as items first go to the person who will use them best, which isn't always the core people (who tend to have better gear already). The ride goes around again and again.

This is why I personally don't like loot council at all. It's supposed to be "fair" but human nature is what it is, and someone will always see bias or unfairness in the system since it is predicated on a group of people making the decision. It isn't an unfair position to take since the people distributing loot are only human, and the determination of who "deserves" a piece of loot most is subjective. DKP, for all its flaws (and there are many) is not fair; it is impartial. It's hard to argue against losing because the other guy had more points than you. Of course, DKP generally ensures that your core people get the loot first since they put the time in and have more points, it's just the impartiality that makes it easier to swallow when you lose. What people lose sight of under both systems is that the guy who just got that piece of loot only needs one and the next one will go to someone else.

There are plenty of other systems out there too, Suicide Kings and so on, that have their own pros and cons. If people are dead set against DKP, one of those may suit. Even so, this isn't your primary problem I think.

Any officer who is seriously labelling people "lesser" needs to be removed from officer status. You will have, in general, 8-12 core people who can be counted on to be there for raids, know the strats, and generally do their homework. The "lesser" people are the ones that actually enable you to raid. Treat them like second class citizens and of course they will leave. Consistently deliver the bulk of loot to the core players and of course the others will leave.

Counting on an entire group of 25-45 people to all be dedicated to the progression of the raid as their measure of success is naïve. Yes, progression is a great measure of success, but the only individual measure people have is their gear. You will look a very long time for a full raid of people who don't care about loot and only progression. That said, lootwhores abound and should be avoided since they tend to be little founts of drama. There's a happy medium, but leadership should not try to apply their same ideals to everyone because that just won't work. We're all unique snowflakes and all that.

As for Kael vs. Hyjal/BT, that's subjective too. I hate that the attunements were removed, though I know it's Blizzard's pattern of content access (release hard, nerf once for 2nd tier guilds, nerf twice for 3rd tier guilds, remove attunements for the rest). Those bosses will give you gear that will make backtracking to Kael easier. On the other hand, once you've had success in Hyjal and BT, getting people to go back to the T5 content involves a lot of grumbling as to what the point is. (We killed Kael 4 times before the attuments were lifted, and never went back.)

[minrog]

If you aren't a pure progression guild it's less important that you stack loot on 10 core people. Having a lot of loot drama is worse than losing that 5% performance increase from optimized distribution.Burnout and loot drama seem to be the main guild killers in TBC. It's kind of amusing but I would label Razorgore, Ragnaros and Vaelastraz the main killers of guilds pre-TBC

Loot is easier to acquire now (by like a factor of 10) so in order to keep people out of one of the billion other progression equivalent guilds or Arenas the GM and the Officers are going to have to stop using the loot system as their playground. Yeah, you didn't say they were doing that but with "Loot Council" or "Officer Decided" systems the overwhelming majority of the gear is going to end up on those guys + a couple of hand-picked favorites. I might mention that those favorites tend to be the 100% attendance go-to guys, but it doesn't matter people are still going to resent it.

I managed to get our system changed to something similar to the suicide kings setup, though it is closer to the Ni Karma system in operation. We did have to add in role priorities on gear (eg. tank gear goes to tanks if they want it, before people's off sets) but other than that it's worked out really well.

I regards to your progression I have to say my guild is in a nearly identical situation. We have just Vashj and Kael left and those fights suck a lot. I wish we could just down them already and leave them behind along with Leo. We decided to make a stab a week at Vashj till we outgear her enough to make it trivial, so we farm MH and we're going to start clearing Sunwell trash and BT this week I believe.

The problem with refusing to hit the Tier 6 is that as soon as you start getting the Tier 6 you realize the Tier 5 gear is trash and you have to replace it all. The longer you wait to start picking up the T6 the slower that replacement process is going to be later on.

Good luck to you with your guild, hope you can get those two down and pickup your title.

[Wesclorck]

No loot system is perfect. IMO, the most important thing about loot at your point in progression is to let it cause as little drama as possible, and that means DKP, and that means occassionally your non-core will get the drop first.

[squishmitten]

In regard to your loot council problem, I would always go with loot council over DKP. It seems to me to be very common that players actually have no clue as to what gear would benefit them most. My guild does loot council but used to do DKP pre BC.

We had a rogue in our guild who got every single weapon he could use before other rogues cause he had more DKP than he knew what to do with. Many items were not upgrades that he got just for different looks. He was one of the first guild members and no other rogue was ever going to catch him for DKP. And it was the same with several classes (altho the DKP leaders generally weren't dicks about it).

But thats the advantage of a loot council. A group is more likely to show discretion than some noob who comes alot. As well a loot council can be asked why a decision was made and better be able to give a good reason.

Our loot council considers attendance, how big an upgrade, when the members bidding last got loot. As well inevitably the member's attitude and general behavior in guild is considered although only in extreme situations is it mentioned. This usually leads to the gear being spread around a fair bit with the most regular members getting more gear simiply because they bid more.

Our council is made up of leaders who know the classes/specs biding on the item, the master looter and one random member who is not in leadership. Raid commanders are not permitted in the loot council because they already have more than enough influence on the members.

We have had a few issues since the start of BC and have made some changes to correct those issues (such as not letting RCs be in the council). The majority of our problem now is people who have been in the guild a reasonably short period of time demanding to know why they didn't get X loot the first time it drops.

[Celandro]

You are around the same position we were. Im going to assume 3 raid nights since you didnt say so.

What we did:
1) Raid schedule of:
1 night T5 progression (kael or vashj)
1 night of early T6 (rage, anetheron, najentus, kaz, supremus, azg in that order)
Alternating weeks of extra night in T5 and extra night in T6.
Kill Vashj 10 times (30 helms)
Kill Kael 4 times (12 chests)

Kael chests now have badge replacements so 4 raids is sufficient to get everyone their vial, tanks some necklaces and a few people chests.

You MUST drop T5 from your raid schedule asap

2) Switch to a (slightly modified) Ni Karma system. Basically you get points and you can either choose to spend half your points (bonus) or a constant number of points (nobonus) or free (offspec/pvp). Your points get added to a /rand and whoever has the highest of /rand + points spent gets the item. Our karma system, including how we started it is described here: Poseidon Guild :: View topic - Ni Karma System
The main difference between us and the addons you will find is if you have 150 points, you only add 75 to your roll and it costs you 75. This makes loot a bit more random looking but adjusts the loot very little in practice. A normal raid will generate between 20 and 30 points.

3) Recruit quickly and heavily.

If you don't do those 3 things, the guild will collapse faster than you think possible.

[clavarnway]

No loot system is perfect. IMO, the most important thing about loot at your point in progression is to let it cause as little drama as possible, and that means DKP, and that means occassionally your non-core will get the drop first.

^^ What he said. Suck it up, those people who you don't think "deserve" the loot as much are what let you raid. Treat like them like trash and they WILL leave.

[geros]

Are you sure people's intention to go to MH/BT is entirely loot driven? I'd rather see Illidan down before wotlk than kael personally. When WoW first came out players dreamed of taking down illidan and arthas, not kael and vash. The mudflation of badge loot already puts an asterisk on any 2.4 kael/vash kill, I'm not so sure why people are so hellbent on killing him just to say they could.

[Armstrong]

I'm not so sure why people are so hellbent on killing him just to say they could.

A guild's prior accomplishments play a big role in determining the quality of players it is able to recruit, which in turn can have a pretty significant effect on the guild's success.

Furthermore I suspect that most people who've killed both Kael and Illidan would actually tell you that the Kael encounter was more challenging, more epic and more fun than Illidan.

Obviously every guild has to choose the progression path that makes the most sense based on their schedule and other factors. That said, now that I've seen both Kael and Illidan first hand, if I somehow ended up in a guild that only had enough time to work on killing one of the two before WotLK, I would definitely want it to be Kael.

Also, for many guilds, simply due to the progression path for each instance, it would make more sense to work hard on actually killing Kael rather than to end up with 7 or 8 bosses down in BT and not having killed either Kael or Illidan when the expansion comes out.

[Caoin]

My guild is a reform of my old guild that disbanded with the addition of two guilds we absorbed. We are currently 3/4, 5/6, 4/5. We do t6 content two nights a week and work on the t5 end bosses two nights a week.

One of my policies as guild master is not to let people know where we are going ahead of time. We wait till people log on, see what the raid looks like, then make a decision as to what the group of people we have online is best suited to do. This way we don't have people picking and choosing which nights they show up to raid, and usually have 38-40 people online at formup time. People are expected to have all their consumables and reagents on a nightly basis anyhow, and these things are not contingent on where we are raiding on a given night, so people are expected to be prepared and ready to go regardless of whether we are working on Vashj or clearing 4/5 MH.

We also do not use loot council, and we will never use loot council except in the case of Legendary drops. We use EPGP (which IMO is far more impartial than ANY DKP system) and give priority on main spec and tier tokens to tanks and healers in order to avoid having the DPS outgear them by too great a margin. Loot council is too open to interpretation of intentions.. and not giving your "lesser players" (lol epeen much?) loot in favor of your officers and cores is a sure fire way to destroy morale and lose people. Would YOU want to raid 4 nights a week with no chance of seeing a reward for your efforts? Would YOU want to be referred to as "lesser", part of the reason being you are not given the upgrades you need to improve?

[Caoin]

Two things, on a related note:

Unless you are in Sunwell right now, min/maxing to the point tha tyou are only giving 12-15 of your players loot priority seems a bit foolish. >.<

And also, there is a flipside to gearing your "Core" first. I was once the Raid Leader for a guild pre-BC that used a Loot Council system. All the officers and Core people got geared up first, so we basically wound up with a lopsided raid... half in great gear and half in "Meh!" gear. One day, the bulk of the officers and core decided that they outgeared the rest of the guild enough that they really didn't need us anymore and all /gquit in the same day to form their own guild, leaving myself, the priest officer and the GM with nothing but people in blues. We wound up going from downing the twin emps in AQ40 to wiping on Razorgore all in one fell swoop.

Moral of the story: If you pile loot only on select people you are also piling length onto their epeen... and sooner or later they may start feeling like theyre doing you a favor just by being in your guild and all leave for greener pastures of their own where they aren't "saddled with undergeared noobs" as the warlock officer who left put it to me.

Ditch loot council and find a more impartial way to distribute loot, then recruit your ass off, being honest abotu your intetions to clear T5. There are still people around who hold killing Vashj and Kael as a priority.

[Wulverin]

We actually set up and posted a schedule to the guild about progress when the attunements were taken away, we were at 5/6 and 3/4 at the time. We raid four nights a week for 4 hours.

Our schedule was:-

1) 3 weeks of 2 nights MH and 2 nights BT
2) As many weeks as it takes to down Vashj on a 2 nights SSC and 2 nights alternating MH/BT schedule.
3) As many weeks as it takes to down Kael on a 2 nights SSC and 2 nights alternating MH/BT schedule.
4) Back to MH and BT, two nights per week each.

We'll review again once Archimonde has been killed a few times and we're in the back half of BT.

It helped to make people aware of what was coming in advance and it helped to alternate nights of banging our heads on Vashj/Kael with getting some nice new shiney gear in MH/BT off the farmable bosses.

[Griever423]

I havent looked at this thread in a while. I guess I'll give you guys and update.

The people I was referring to in guild who were frustrated with loot etc. all left the guild. We lost about 6-7 regular people. It doesn't sound like too much but it definatley hurt us in a big way. We couldnt do anything that wasnt on farm for about a week. All we could do was recruit our asses off and hope we got enough people in to make a raid and kill Kael. I'm happy to report that kael is dead and we have been in T6 content for 2 weeks now.

I'm glad the management (myself included) and the GM stuck to what we believed was the right thing to do as far as the direction and the principles of the guild are concerned. After I posted this I saw a few of Ciderhelm's posts in other thread with similar situations as mine and I have to say my outlook on what was going on changed. I'm glad we purged the guild of the loot whores and got back on track.

As far as the kael fight goes...that has to be the most epic encounter I have ever tanked in the game to date. My hands were shaking when he went down. The rush was just crazy. He was totally worth the 4 nights we devoted to him.

I appreciate all of the replies I recieved. The advice was helpful and I thank you guys. Now to get some rest before we go do some more BT tomorrow.