Thanks for the terrific feedback so far guys. I really appreciate It.
As far as the organization of my raid group(s) go in warlords, I have two potential ideas to go about it in mind:
- Have one raid team focus on going from heroic to mythic. That one team would consist of x number of starting positions and y number of rotational slots. This would be similar to your situation in your guild where the elites were guaranteed spots, while everyone was rotated in the remaining slots.
So let’s say I would for example have 15 starting spots and 5 rotational slots. I could rotate in a group of 10 rotational people every week. 5 would get to raid one week, the other 5 the next. This could potentially work, but there are upsides and downsides to it.
Pros:
-this would ensure everyone gets to see raid time.
-evenly distributes loot among the rotational guys so it doesn’t feel like we are bringing in “dead weight” on any raid night.
Cons:
-over time, some of the rotationals might want more than just to raid every other week. And might want a guaranteed spot. Then u of course run into the situation of if I give them a guaranteed spot, I might run out of rotational spots Which puts me back into the situation I’m at now where the remaining rotationals/backups would get bored and leave.
-the rotationals wouldn’t gear up as fast as starters would, and might slow down progression. This is something we might just have to deal with, though.
On top of this, we would have an optional raid nite on sunday evenings to test out trials, experiment with exotic boss strats (something we like to do), get some more gear, and just have some fun. And it would be done on the difficulty that was one lower than our current team was on during the tues/thurs raid week (so if tues/thurs was mythic, sunday is heroic, or if tues/thurs is heroic, sunday is normal).
I have one large issue with the optional raid night with my guild however. A good amount of my guild (~2/3-~3/4) has almost no interest in raiding a 3rd night. So they would NEVER sign up to do the optional 3rd raid night. This has been proven in this tier when we have tried to do an optional flex run for people on sunday evenings, and only a couple times did I have enough guildies to run it. Otherwise I have like 4 people show up and go “oh we don’t have enough? Alright later,” and then log off. So this leads me to my potential second solution.
- Have TWO raid teams within the guild. Have one that’s labeled as the A team and the other as the B team. The A team would be focused from going from heroic->mythic, and the B team would be focused from going from normal-> heroic. Have the teams raid on different raid nights, so if those few people from the A team would like to raid more than two nights a week, then can swoop in and assist the B team if need be. Crap, I forgot to mention since you didn’t know klocker, all difficulties are on separate lockouts now. Think of it as t9 all over again.
Due to mythic being a fixed number of players, and heroic being a range from 10-30 (yes, 30), the A team would have a fixed set of 20 players that are labeled as “starters.” If the starting mythic team has someone drop out whether temporarily or permanately, they can snipe players from the B team to use in the 20man. But, seeing as the raid teams raid on separate nights, things are on separate lockouts, and the teams are at different difficulties, the players from the B team being sniped for the A team can still raid with the B team if they wish to do so, but they would have to raid more. The end goal would be to have people “graduate” from the B team and move to the A team when permanate spots open when their gear and skill level is ready.
Pro’s:
-Designating a fixed 20 players as starters has a potential to give a raid team good consistency. You don’t have the situation where you wish “x player was rotated in tonite because of y fight mechanic.” You would always have the same team unless something comes up.
-having the B team Means everyone who is prepared gets a chance to raid due to flex tech. This by far has to be one of the best things blizzard has ever done for the game.
-you can use the B team to evaluate trials and newer players, and give raiders an opportunity to shoot for becoming part of the A team by proving themselves in the B team.
Cons:
-this structure would require more people to operate, and also another capable raid leader who is willing to hold things together and push a team forward.
-some people on the B team might feel as if they are second rate players for the simple fact they are on the lower difficulty team. Which lowers morale and might make them unhappy.
-having more people just means more work for the officer core, which could lead to top level burnout, which can be catastrophic for guild structure.
So those are my two options for raid group structure, now onto everyone’s favorite controversial topic; Loot!
I have taken a very interesting twist on loot in the past. Right now we just use open rolls, Because honestly if you need any more than that in a 10man setting, your guild needs help. But when we ran 25mans in tot for 4 months or so, I invented a rather interesting loot system which I’d potentially like to revise and update for warlords.
There is one thing I have always been in unhappy about all loot systems in wow, each one only seems to focus on one thing. Dkp seems to focus on the people who are there the most, loot wheel focuses on gearing up the WHOLE team evenly, loot council seems to focus on pinpointing specific raiders for loot in order to maximize the raids potential, etc. Now I understand these systems work for a lot of guilds, that’s fine. But I’m an engineer, so anytime I see something that has obvious flaws, I want to figure out how to try and optimize it. It’s in my nature. So that’s what I’ve done with my take on loot.
So let’s start by asking, “what do raiders like in a loot system?” One word, CONTROL. They want CONTROL over how loot comes their way. The more effort they put in, the more they want out, right? That’s exactly what dkp does. But in my opinion dkp isn’t perfect, as it can really put a dampener on the newer raiders that come in, and prevent them from getting loot for awhile (at least from my past experience with it, that’s how I remember it. This was like 4 years ago so if I’m wrong anywhere please correct me.).
Ah, but loot wheel! That gives everyone an even chance to get loot! But the one HUGE problem with loot wheel is it in now way rewards loyalty and attendence. And can be a very slow way to gear up a raid. I had a guild use loot wheel in BC, and it costed us the only dragonspine trophy we ever saw drop because it went to some noob hunter who had been in guild for 2 days and left the guild a week later, when it shouldve went to either myself (hunter) or the other two rogues we had who had all been there a lot longer and were stable raiders.
Well, then loot council surely is the way to go! You can give loot to the people who need it most and maximize raid potential quickly! But alas, with power, comes corruption. Peoples biases get in the way of loot distribution and it might not go to the perfect person that way. And the worst of all, is when a piece of loot doesn’t go one persons way, in loot council, that person AUTOMATICALLY has a direction to point the finger of blame on their troubles, the council. And when people have someone whom they can point the finger of blame at that isn’t themselves, They will become angry. Which is never good.
So, how? HOW can a loot system be perfect? Well, nothing is ever perfect. But, I think I can design a better one than any of these.
The secret to all this? Math and numbers. You can use them to both distribute loot evenly, and reward those who put in the work.
So here is the system i have devised. I will Describe the system as it was in tot, then talk about the changes I have considered for warlords in the next post.
D.A.W.N. Loot System (Don’t Argue With Numbers)
This system is structured around a priority list of people in your raid team on who gets loot. The higher up the list you are, the higher your priority for loot. Each players priority Is determined by an equation that takes into account each raiders current guild rank, attendance, ilvl, a gear audit score, and raid nights since last upgrade. Each component of the equation is weighted to determine it’s importance (this is obviously the part I as a designer of the system have the most trouble determining. And I don’t precisely remember what the weights were at the time. So I will leave them out of the following equation for simplicity).
Equation:
Priority score = (rank + gear audit score + attendance + nights since last upgrade)/ilvl
Let’s break down the components of the equation:
Rank: this is a base value that simply increases as your rank increases in the guild. Officers and myself have the same score as the highest normal guildies can achieve to remove any bias from the equation.
Gear audit score: this was something I implemented to force some of the more inexoerienced raiders at the time to keep their gear in tip top shape. There is four categories for gear audit (3 for healers), you got a point for each category you completed.
-dps/tank gear audit points:
1 pt for having gear for the proper spec on
1 pt for using a full set of proper glyphs
1 pt for being hit/expertise capped.
1 pt for being fully gemmed and enchanted
-healer gear audit points:
1 pt for having gear for the proper spec on
1 pt for using a full set of proper glyphs
2 pts for being fully gemmed and enchanted
Is it sad I had to implement such a thing into the system? Possibly, but it did it’s job well. People very quickly realized they had to stay on top of their gear if they wanted more of it.
Attendance:
Now I counted attendance slightly different in my system. The equation was as follows:
Attendance = (raids attended + (excused absences * 0.5))/ total raids possible to attend
The reason I put in the excused absences being worth half a raid is because I didn’t want people feeling punished as much as a no show if they had something like exams, vacation, etc they had to leave for. It worked rather well and people seemed to like it.
Raid nights since last upgrade:
Here is the magic that makes the whole system move. This is simply a value that every raider who has attended the raid that evening will get incremented at at the start of the raid. When you take a piece of loot, your raids since last upgrade value is reset to 0. If you don’t get loot for multiple nights in a row, this value of course keeps getting incremented by 1 each night, until you have moved far enough up the list to get a piece of loot, then you move back down.
Ilvl:
Why is the whole equation divided by the persons ilvl? Here is my reasoning. People who typically need loot more are the lower ilvl guys. Dividing the equation by ilvl gives them a slightly increased chance go get loot while they don’t have any. This part of the equation didn’t seem to have a HUGE impact on people’s overall priority, but it still did provide a minor boost to people’s score at lower ilvls.
This whole system was kept track of using at Google doc the whole guild had access to view. I had to do the gear audits and ilvl data entry manaully, which took a good 30min of work before each raid nite. In the future if I wish to ccontinue to use this system, I would like to automate this process with macro script buttons in Google docs.
Let me know what you guys think of this system. Yes, I know there were some flaws with it and I plan to address them in wod if I continue to use the system. I’ll talk about those in my next post. Once again, sorry for the wall of text.