Raid Team Misscommunications

[lightpenguin]

Hey folks!

It unfortunately appears that the game of telephone ended horrifically this week. I'd like to get the opportunity to apologize and explain what's going on.

Two weeks ago we had Garrosh at 3% health. We were confident that on the 27th we'd have him down for certain. The question came up "so what's next?" Us raiders are always hungry for the next challenge. Enjoying an easy boss kill? Nah, let's keep bashing our heads against walls, right?

The question had come up for Ten and Myself as well. He and I are regularly on this forum talking in private messages. He does his best to understand my vision for the raid team, and spread that message to folks in game. This isn't the ideal way of doing things, I prefer to discuss with folks during raid time. Really, I should be posting more messages here, I'm just not so confident this forum is regularly looked at. This is totally my mistake, and a change needs to happen in the future to ensure that any event organizer can successfully communicate with the folks they're playing with.

So what was the message that got sent out two weeks ago? "Well, as far as I understand, folks get together on Wednesday nights to clear up to where we want to be on Fridays. Let's start tackling some easier Heroic bosses on Wednesday night!" I was hoping to discuss it more on the 27th, but unfortunately my life has been caught up in my own new raid boss: an 8 week old puppy. He's been a ton of work, my GF thought she'd have it all handled on her own, but was very wrong. As a result I haven't been able to make any events for the last two weeks.

Without me there to even set things up on the calendar, Ten has done what he always does: his best to help spread my vision. He did so knowing what I had stated on the 19th, and knowing that I personally only have one night a week that I can raid, which would mean I'd need to start showing up on Wednesday nights instead of helping people farm the later normal mode wings on Fridays. 

Unfortunately, it seems the game of telephone ended at: Friday night is cancelled, Wednesday is the new raid night, it will be exclusive to the folks hardcore enough to take on Heroic bosses. Epic. Fail. 

So let me do my best to make my original vision for the raid team clear to everyone.

My original understand was that a decent group of people were always raiding on wednesdays as a guild group with a few PuGs if needed. Knowing this, I suggest we use that natural time slot to make the earlier wings more challenging, get better lewts, etc. My goal would have been to have two raid nights on the calendar, a wednesday night clear of the first 8 bosses with heroic attempts where we can, and a Friday night clear of the last bosses, including Garry. 

We've always had a mixed bag of players in our raid nights, some excel at what they do, others are more casual and just want to have some semi-challenging fun. Every raid night I'm looking to balance these two forces. Often times I'm swapping folks in and our for different fights, yes this is often because I'm making sure the right folks are in for the loot drops, but I'm also making sure that we're avoiding unnecessary challenges *and* including as many guildies as possible. We don't need every single person to master Blackfuse to have a fun friday night after all.

My vision was that this same practice would continue. Ten and I had indeed discussed figuring out which guildies were in the best position to help us start taking down heroic bosses. Was my intent to ban everyone else from participating? Hell no. We're a long long way away from being a guild that can get any more than 2-3 heroic bosses down, and even then we want to stick to community focus and not be another raid guild.

We'd be doing things the same way we do every raid night, try the fight with the folks that are in, and adjust based on our weaknesses. If someone is struggling with a mechanic after many attempts, we're not going to bash our heads against the wall, instead we'll give other folks a shot at it until we've got the optimal team for the progression fight. Once it's on farm, we'll start being more flexible about those tough fights, to ensure we're getting people exposure while avoiding frustration. So what would that have translated to on a Wednesay heroic night? First off, we would NOT sit on heroic immersius all night attempting to down him with our top folks. We'd be making attempts on the easiest of the easy first 8 bosses, and then moving on to others on normal. Just like we normally do on friday nights, I'd be looking to include everyone, keeping the right challenge level for the whole team. To deal with heroic bosses, yes, we'd need to know who our top raiders are, because if the best of the best can't bring it down, it's not even worth the headache. Beyond that? The list wouldn't matter.

So that's it really, that's all the change I had in mind. Unfortunately I'm not exactly sure how every bit of misinformation went out. Aside from me not making Friday's anymore (and really, you guys have those fights without me, I'm not your rock, you all rock!) I hoped they would continue as normal. If others had decided that they too couldn't do two raid nights a week, and were instead more interested in a Wednesday schedule, that's another issue entirely, and one that should be talked about. I honestly didn't think about that one at the time.

One thing is clear to me, and it's that I'm not doing a great job in this leadership position. The new raid-boss at home is keeping me challenged (learning the phase one "need to potty dance" mechanics is a pain, and I keep triggering his bite attack!). For the time being, I'm going to need to step down as our Raid Leader. When my life gets a little more calm (I'm hoping a month, but it could be more) I would be happy to take over again if needed. But in the meantime, someone with more time to communicate and work with guildies is necessary.

I apologize for all of this confusion.

[Deleted]

With the current plans posed at the Guild Meeting clearly not working, we'll be drawing up a revised set of plans asap. Since LightPenguin is stepping down and I've been trying to hand off my nebulous status in organizing raid events for like 3-4 months now and also given the current predicament falls a lot on me, I've looked around for a suitable replacement. As luck would have it, Deathmoo has been taking a strong leadership role in the last month since my vacation and after a lengthy discussion, I feel is engendering the ethos of the community, will be provisional raid lead for this coming month. As I understand he will looking to meet with people and hear their thoughts before formulating a new plan going forward. Perhaps in a month LightPenguin will be back and the raiders will vote amongst themselves the new leadership structure.

To address some of what was going on behind the scenes from my perspective:

I interpreted Light's schedule shifting to Wednesday play as moving the regular raid event to then. Additionally, with the discussion of Heroic progression, that seemed the time to do it. Wednesdays were an impromptu event series because of the desire for a specific lockout for the main team on Friday at the request of Light for either me or Devesh to do. I opted to make more of a guild event out of it for anyone else who wanted to farm gear still from the early bosses and a way to make more room for people not on the main 10-man team to start gearing up. This was augmented by Light swapping people out on a fight-by-fight basis on Fridays, taking out people who didn't need gear from a particular boss or struggled with a fight.

Over the past 2-3 months we've been doing Wednesday raids, it attracted more raiders who didn't fit on the 10-man team and the day of the week worked better for them. Towards that end I was concerned of Wednesday group getting a lockout that was detrimental to those players and sought to create a second team primarily for these people filled out by alts from the main team to avoid the sluggish results of pugging the remainder. I was worried the revised schedule would only alienate these people from raiding again, but I implemented Light's plan as I saw it and figured we'd fix things after if it didn't work. I made sure to mention at both the meeting and in the notes this revised schedule was tentaive and subject to change for exactly this reason.

As for Heroic progression, I've heard grievances about certain people not being invited to go and disgruntlement over certain others asked to go. I've heard arguments along the lines of people feeling entitled to go because they were on the 10-man team, or that they deserve to be carried and also that newcomers to the guild don't deserve to go to the front of the line. On a personal level, I am...bothered by these trains of thought. We attempted some heroic fights about 5 weeks ago and it met with dismal failure on the basis of being unable to make the needed checks. With out 10-man group already geared up, attempting the same thing with what we have is like trying to squeeze water from a stone. It's a wonderful sentiment to continue with our current group, but it is also unrealistic. A successful venture into heroic would require us to make changes. Swapping our weakest 2 people out for 2 new members who knew the fights enough to teach them and geared enough to carry our "top players" was a sensible and imo needed change.

We went through this same song and dance when we attempted to form a joint raid team with Legion. We put forward our best members at the time with the intent that they would clear progression and gear up and then others would be swapped onto the team to the extent it could afford to do so while remaining viable. We have carried forward that same attitude with our raid team since, even before we downed Garrosh, we began to swap out people who were geared, for others so they could get their chance. LightPenguin also promised any 10-man qualified raider a Garrosh kill for the achievement and mount before the expansion's end. I was going to take a head count this week of anyone who hadn't gotten it yet and made plans to see to it. We put our best people forward, but we don't leave others behind.

We have maintained our Flex night on Saturdays for people who need the gear and also the practice for 10-man, dropping our main team to one night of progression raiding a week to ensure that no one would be left behind. In recent months my fear about my leadership of the event were doing that prompted a search for a new raid lead to ensure that open atmosphere. I run workshops periodically for anyone who wants help getting qualified for 10-man or Flex so they don't get left behind and always make personal time when asked outside of that as well.

Yet still people feel slighted if they are not ranked as the top players, the first to enter progression, and their words betray fears of being left behind. The posed plan was to have the guild run all 3 tiers of raiding so that everyone can have what they want and no one gets left out with the freedom to move between the tiers. Have we earned so little of your trust in all this time?

I hear this talk about friendships vs progression. Progression seen as something cold and unfeeling, done with strangers. And then raiding with friends making it a purely social and casual activity. I don't see these as opposite things. Why is it such a foreign idea to run challenging content with friends? Haven't we been doing that with 10-man as is? It is not exclusionary to be honest in knowing who can and can't handle the difficulty of a particular challenge. Does this somehow invalidate the other raid difficulties and being able to play with friends there? Are we not being inclusive by coming back for others and always offering to help them improve so they aren't held back? I seem to be alone in thinking this. It was posed to me if I would feel differently, if I was the one being excluded from progression. If actions speaking louder than words, then I answered that when I chose to sit out of the team with Legion to make a point all would get their turn to go, I was willing to give my slot to someone else and let others go before me. If the guild wants to go forward with heroic progression, I will do so again if that's what it takes to get the point across.