MMORPG

Viva La Artisan

by

Rebuilding the Core

Last night I tackled one of the harder aspects of getting a guild back on its feet, at least as far as infrastructure is concerned.  Stalwart of course had been trucking along without much of a formal structure, but there were signs of stress as many fractures had formed over the years I had been gone.  One of my first steps in trying to right the ship was trying to build a coalition of officers representing different parts of the guild and pulling them together into one team.  Essentially I was looking for the players that were already reaching out and engaging other guild members.  At the same time I was looking for individuals with keen insight and a level head.

After much consternation about my choices, I finally developed a strategy.  Essentially in House Stalwart there are two major raid groups that represent the thrust of where the guild is going.  Unfortunately many times these two teams are going in completely opposite directions.  My hope was to find a way to represent both forces equally on this officers council of sort that I was building.  From Team “Nothing Can Go Wrong” I have tagged Athelia and Arria, both of which are extremely positive forces in the guild.  Additionally both have shown a level head and extremely excellent judgment skills.  They are constantly engaging other players and the wealth of their game experience is something we can always use.

Then from Team “Leftovers” I brought in Gamad and Shorty.  Shorty and I have a long history together, and he has always been one of those players that is willing to give the shirt off his own back to help someone out.  Additionally he is a whizkid with the auction house and will be helping liquidate some of our overstuffed guild bank to help buffer our repair money.  Gamad is relatively new to the guild, in the grand scheme of things, but in that time I have seen her continued to grow and reach out to new players.  She has always been willing to step in and help when help is needed.  Additionally I have seen that she is a peacemaker and mediator, and will help out greatly in smoothing over the rough spots.

Finally you have myself and Rylacus the person who so valiantly “kept the lights on” over the last year or so.  Together we represent the legacy player, the folks who have been around since vanilla and most of them in House Stalwart since that time or at least Burning Crusade.  We are the ones who remember the way things used to be, and have the roadmap to return us to glory.  This mix of newer voices and older voices should mesh together to create something greater than the individual parts.  There is still a lot more work to be done, but I feel more confident in moving forward now that I have the key pieces in place.  There is another one of these “legacy” officers that I still need to talk to, to gauge if they still want to fill that role or not.  But last night made me quite a bit more confident about the total outcome of these changes.

Viva La Artisan

Another big change that I am wanting to implement in the next few days is the Artisan rank.  At one point I had one of these, but it never really worked out quite like I had wanted it to.  Essentially back then I would choose a single crafter for each profession, but that process ended up ignoring a lot of people who want to contribute to the guild.  My plan is to make the entire process much more transparent and open this time around.  My goal is to create an application process through our forums that allows individuals to sign up to fill the duty of “crafting for the guild”.  What I mean by this is that they would have expanded access to the guild crafting coffers, but have the responsibility of filling in the gaps when someone needs gear.  The artisan rank would make it clear to identify just who could craft gear for players.

The other major responsibility that comes with the rank is to create a “shop” of sorts on the forums.  It will be the responsibility of guild crafters to create a post outlining the major things they can create with their professions.  Additionally I expect these Artisans to watch the forums for any item requests and then respond back in a timely fashion as to whether or not they can provide the service.  I am going to have to figure out the logistics of this whole program, but over the years I have had more guild members wanting to know how they can help out.  Buffering the leveling process by providing new gear, especially as someone reaches the level cap is a massively valuable service.  I know Shorty for example already provides new players “care packages” of things like bags… and this has been entirely of his own initiative.  I can only imagine what could come of a more organized system.

Bring on the Warband

Finally I am wanting to work out the details of organizing the raid groups within the guild.  I am staunchly against a “raider” rank, because singling someone out just because they raid as somehow better just feels morally wrong.  What I do want to create however is transparency in who is actually organizing and leading the raids.  As a result one of the various guild ranks will be turned into a “Raid Leader” designation.  This serves two very simple purposes.  Firstly it will control access to the raid materials tab in the guild bank.  However more importantly this will clearly identify who a guild member can approach about joining in the raid.  Additionally I would like to get someone from each raid to maintain a thread on the forums outlining what the raid does, when they raid, who exactly someone can talk to about joining.

Additionally I want there to be a clear “you must be this tall” line drawn for each group.  Item level is a double edged razor, but with it you can size up some basic requirements as to how well geared someone needs to be to be able to compete in the content.  I am by no means saying that there needs to be an automatic system of entry.  I do not want to get into the business of determining who can raid and who can not.  I do however want the raid groups within House Stalwart to be much more transparent on how one gains entry.  Additionally  I feel as though if you enter one of the raid groups in good faith that you should remain loyal to that team. 

There has been some bad blood in the past as various individuals have transitioned between the teams without adequately informing the leadership of their previous team.  I want this to stop, we are one guild with a shared mission of trying to make the game a better place for all of us.  My hope is that by exposing the raid groups and the processes for entry, that it will be extremely clear how transitions should work.  Additionally I would like to see rosters posted of the current members of each raid, that way there can be no doubt in when someone is encroaching on the domain of the other raid.  I am not saying there can be no transfers of lineup… I just want the entire process to work more transparently.

And Then I Actually Played…

WoWScrnShot_121213_212154

I won’t lie… most of my night last night was spent dealing with various guild business in trying to create this new vision.  Additionally I spent more than a bit of my time counseling players and trying to smooth over rough spots.  Shortly after I had talked to Arria and brought him into he council he designed to run a heroic scenario.  I took a break from leveling Gloam to do so, as my Paladin still had not finished the quest that guarantees a 500+ epic of some sort.  The biggest struggle in gearing my alts has been on trying to get a weapon.  I had heard from many friends that weapons DO actually drop from the loot bag you get from your daily heroic scenario.  Problem is so far in all of the scenarios I had run I had not actually seen this happen.

So I went into the run expecting to get a few valor points, but not really expecting much from it.  I am so thankful I took the break from my rogue because I walked out with a shiny Immaculate Pandaren Hammer of the Earthshaker.  This actually is about the ideal weapon for a retribution Paladin, so I can finally stop sucking it up with my 450 weapon in LFR.  It was a fun little run but I failed miserably at tanking the pirate boss with the saber.  I had never actually used it, and I was trying to move out of the fire while hitting the cooldown and just got oneshot.  On my deathknight I never use the saber and simply move out of range.  So we missed the bonus by a few seconds, and I feel bad about it… but everyone that was with me was fine with it.  They were happy to see I managed to pull a weapon.  Now I just need to get the same success with my shaman… twice.

Faffing Pays Off

by

Administrata

WoWScrnShot_121113_224041

As part of my return to the leadership of House Stalwart, there is a ton of base level clean-up that I need to do.  One of the first pieces I decided to tackle was shifting any character that has not been online in the last year to “retired” status.  So many guilds kick the inactive, but I have never really liked that concept.  It feels harsh since in my experience so many people renew their subscription on a whim.  Logging back in to a friendly guild that has missed them, is a much more enjoyable experience than finding out they have been booted out into the cold.

This is compounded now by the concept of guild faction, that was added in with Cataclysm.  Booting a character from a guild has serious repercussions for the player.  It takes awhile to get to exalted with a guild, especially at maximum level…  so punting folks out and making them potentially redo all that faction work just seems cruel.  Setting them to retired rank seems like a good solution, since I have stripped that rank of all bank privileges to protect the guild from someone getting hacked, but if someone does return for a length of time I can bump them back up to an active rank. 

I had originally planned on doing this for anyone that had been gone for over 6 months… but ended up calling it quits after finishing with the “1 year” folks.  It took me what felt like an hour to get that far through the list.  I can only imagine what it is going to be line when I redo every single one of the almost 900 characters guild notes.  One of my goals is to do a guild census of sorts… get to know every single person that is in the guild that joined during my 2 year absence.  Part of this is to set accurate guild notes that follow a pattern so that you can use addons like Prat to merge the two in chat.

WoW Bucket List

One of the concepts that I have latched on over the last few weeks is the idea of a WoW Bucket List.  The first time I had actually seen this in a formalized form was over on Cuppyville, where she proudly lists her WoW Bucket List in the top menu of her site.  I don’t quite have my formalized enough for that, but I have started a Google Docs Spreadsheet and as I think of things have begun adding them to it.  Always in the past when I have left WoW, it has been because I “ran out of things to do”.  I say that in quotes, because really that was never the case in actuality.  There are far too many things to do to have ever been “done” with the game.

What happened instead is I got frustrated and lost sight of the things I wanted to do once upon a time… but have long forgotten about.  My theory is that in keeping this bucket list, I will be able to pick things off of it on those rainy days when I can’t think of anything worth doing.  Now several of them do require lots of people to complete, like finishing off my Glory of the Icecrown Raider achievements that I am missing only a couple of sub achievements on.  But I had a conversation with a guild member last night and we talked about having some sort of a rotating raid achievement night for old school content.  I love ticking off these things, and its even better when you can help a whole group full of people check those goals off as well.

Some examples from mine are…

Bucket List Saves Day

WoWScrnShot_121113_221042

One of the most amazing bloggers/podcasters… @AlternativeChat constantly extolls the virtues of “Faffing about”, that is doing the piddly little things that only really matter to you.  After my hour of wrestling with the guild roster, I was not really in the mood to focus on anything much.  I had originally planned on working on questing my way through Hyjal on Gloam, but as I logged in to do just that everything felt “hazy”.  Normally this might have been one of those times that I logged out frustrated with not feeling like making “real progress”.  However It was at this point my WoW Bucket List paid off.   I looked at my long list of objectives and decided that last night would be a mount farming night, as I could chat freely while doing it.

Soloing old content is one of my biggest enjoyments in any game.  There is so much nostalgia wrapped up in making your way through content that used to require a large group.  You feel epic as you trounce monsters that used to trounce you regularly.  Had I not raided every last bit of this content, I doubt I would have the massive shot of nostalgia that this gives me…  but it almost always guarantees a smile on my face.  As a result I started the evening in Tempest Keep, as a friend of mine and I made a contest of it over on our Mumble server.  We started at roughly the same time and tried to see who could clear the dungeon first.  Neither of us managed to get the fabled Ashes of Al’ar to drop… but last week another guild member did so it has renewed our interests.

From there I took a trip over to Utgarde Pinnacle to battle my old nemesis Skadi the Rutheless.  Across the board the protodrake model is one of my favorite mount designs, and to the best of my knowledge the only two that are still available that I am missing… are the blue and yellow.  While the concept of the Time-Lost Proto Drake intrigues me… and every time I have occasion to be in the area I fly the circuit of spawn points “just in case”… I do not have the fortitude to farm it.  Instead I battle my old nemesis in an attempt to steal his mount whenever I have downtime.  I both love and hate the fact that it is heroic, because it limits the amount of grinding I can realistically do in one sitting.

Faffing Pays Off

WoWScrnShot_121113_221648

Upon failing once again to walk away with that ever elusive proto drake, I moved on to the next target which was The Stonecore.  The second boss of the instance, Slabhide has an equal chance of dropping Reins of the Vitreous Stone Drake on both Heroic and Normal.  As a result I tend to farm this mount resetting the instance over and over until I reach the instance lockout timer.  Honestly this is one of the least frustrating farms I have done in a game, as there is a warp gate immediately after the boss that can take you right back to the instance.  So you clear your way down, fight Slabhide and warp back up to the start, zoning out and resetting it.  It was on my fourth clear of the night that luck smiled upon me and I got to tick something off of my Bucket List.

WoWScrnShot_121113_221924

  Here is a gratuitous shot of me riding my new prize immediately after exiting The Stonecore.  This is my very first of the “stone drake” mounts, as I never managed to complete the heroic achievement for Cataclysm.  I ended up leaving only a few months into the expansion, and at that point achievements were just not a priority.  I have quite a few of the things ticked off however, so it is on my bucket list of things to finish up.  I have to say… the Stone Drake model may give the Proto Drake a run for its money.  My absolute least favorite however is the Cloud Serpent model, which has seriously harmed my progress on all of the Pandaria achievements. 

The moment I got my drake I had to tweet @AlternativeChat to share my moment of faffing paying off.  My hope is that tonight I can return to progressing on Gloam, but if not I am sure I will just grab another thing from the list.  Tuesday I had every intent to work on gloam as well but instead wound up running around the world with a pack of guildies farming the Zandalari Warbringers for an attempt at their mount.  So to be honest… my primary plan is to work on Gloam, but I will as always be open to suggestions of alternative paths.  Whatever option we end up choosing is completely fine by me, so long as we have fun doing it.

The Rebirth

by

The Founding

Back in 2004 House Stalwart was born out of a bunch of friends getting together and planning a community for the launch of the newest up and coming MMO…  the World of Warcraft.  Over those years we’ve had a somewhat bumpy and often storied past, but at the core the guild remained based on a few core tenets and a shared sense of ethics.  It was a set of values that spanned from game to game, and some of my proudest moments were when one of my random guild members would do something awesome out in the world… and news of it would get back to me.  I had built a really awesome thing, and people were happy in it.

The problem was that at the time I was not really happy in the game any longer.  The yoke of leadership was chafing, and towards the tail end of Wrath of the Lich King, the guild pretty much went on autopilot.  With the release of Cataclysm we went through a lot of major changes, as the shift of focus went away from a non guild based raid, to actually raiding as a guild.  In the process we gobbled up four or five different guilds that had been feeding the Duranub Raiding Company.  As a result of this upheaval was a lot of social strife, as various groups that were not entirely used to sharing the same guild had to cohabitate.

The Fracture

As this happened I got more distant myself, because I simply was not enjoying the game anymore.  When I got into the beta of a game called Rift I grabbed on with both hands, and tried my damnedest to recreate the magic of House Stalwart over there as well.  There was a big leaving as folks flaked off to join me in Rift.  It didn’t last of course, but it was enough to pull a good number of people away form the WoW guild.  When Star Wars the Old Republic released another big chunk of players flaked away, and each time something new came out the cycle would happen again.  I had set the events in motion and it had left the guild in a state of chaos.

In many ways House Stalwart was somewhat of a failed state when I returned for my brief stint during the launch of Mists of Pandaria.  Guild chat was deathly quiet, there was a significant fracture in the guild forming that I talked about the other day, and as a whole the entire place was filled with people that did not know who I was.  The number of things I would need to do to fix what was wrong with the guild just felt staggering.  I did a few minor adjustments, but for the most part I assumed that since the guild was running itself, that this must be what the players had come to expect.  The place no longer felt like home, so after a few months of personally getting bored with WoW again… I left.

The Hope

When I came back recently something had changed, either in me or in the guild itself.  I saw a glimmer of the greatness we once had.  Additionally I saw a lot of problems that I thought could be fixed.  I was reluctant to take back the yoke of leadership, because quite simply I was not sure if I would be around for long.  I expected this stint in the game to go much like the last, with me getting tired of it all and going elsewhere.  I had daily conversations with Rylacus the steward I had placed over the guild after my return during Pandaria, and almost always they ended up with some discussion of me taking back the leadership.  To be truthful when he handed back the highest rank on Monday I was still very reluctant to do so.

When Rylacus agreed to take over, it was to keep the lights on and things moving forward.  We had an agreement that if any of the heavy lifting needed to be done, or any drama arose that it would be me that dealt with it.  Over the year of him at the helm, he did a phenomenal job of maintaining the status quo and keeping the guild moving forward.  I would honestly say that the guild itself experienced a bit of a renaissance with his hands off approach, and we are more active now than I have seen in years.  However as a guild on autopilot for over two years, there has also been a lot of discord and resentment that had set in.

The Problem

The other night a long time guild member sent me a tell in game and wanted to talk to me, as the founder about the guild policies.  He said that he wondered about the recruitment policy, and whether or not we ever looked back and reflected upon whether or not an invite was a good one.  I spouted off the well rehearsed lines I have always said, but as I was saying them… I realized that no really we did not any more.  Then he hit me with a statement that cut through to my heart like a razor.  He wanted to talk to me about the “falling guild standards”, and I guess I had realized this was happening but until he came to me and talked to me about it… I was in a bit of a state of denial.  Things were in fact far worse than I had let myself believe.

In particularly a lot of the recent strife has centered around a recent invite, the nephew of a long time member.  Generally what happens in this case is that I bring up the issue with the sponsor, and if they cannot deal with it we remove the person from the guild.  I had gotten lax to be honest, and without that guild master tag… I imagined that it is no longer my duty to police the guild.  The reason why I took up the tag in the first place all those years ago, is because no one else was going to create the type of guild I wanted to exist in.  As I sat there over the weekend, I realized that once again… no one was going to step in to fix the wrongs in the guild if I did not step up and do it myself.

The Solution

After much soul searching, I accepted the guild leadership of House Stalwart in World of Warcraft on Monday night.  I had originally intended to ease my reforms into the guild, but last night things reached a crescendo ending with the quitting of a long time member.  I managed to talk the member back from the brink and they rejoined… but as a result my first act was to lock down a few of the functions in the guild at least temporarily, and to remove the most negative of the influences from the guild.  Over the coming weeks I will be identifying every single one of our  869 current members.  I want to know who they are, where they came from, who they are connected to… and most importantly if they are a positive influence in the guild.

I had already been working hard with mixed results on trying to bridge the gap between the haves and have-nots, but I feel like there is a lot more work to be done on that front.  I am trying to exist in both worlds and get the two sides talking and interacting regularly… and in some ways this is working, but in others… there is still a lot of resentment to work through.  When I kicked the questionable member from the guild last night, I had a chorus of private messages thanking me.  Many of the members simply thought that no one cared about that sort of thing anymore.  No one had been complaining about anything to myself or Rylacus until that one brave member stood up and said “this is a problem” and shook me back to reality.

The Rebirth

My ultimate hope is that we can turn the tide and bring back House Stalwart to its glory days.  The chapters in the various other games that I have founded have clung tightly to the original tenets, but the original guild strayed from the path.  My biggest hope is that in writing this, and reaching out to the members… is that they now know that I do care, and I do want things to be better.  I want players to interact and communicate regularly filling my screen with happy green spam.  I think last night I took the first steps along a long path that will usher several positive changes.  I hope that folks now realize that my door is always open, and if they have any issue… be it game related or otherwise that they can talk to me at any time.

We used to jokingly call ourselves the “Little Guild that Could”, and over the years that “Little” part changed drastically, but I feel that spirit remained in place.  It felt like as a whole we were pulling towards some shared goal.  This is the magic that I want to revitalize in the guild, the fact that we are not just a tag to wear over our heads but instead a large extended family.  This tapestry is woven out of so many different personalities and play styles… but together we have always been something more.  I am back, because I love these people and I have missed them.  I want to be the leader I used to be, the leader they deserve.  I played WoW for over 7 years without fail… and after two years of wandering around nomadic… I have simply gotten tired of all the jumping.  I feel like I have come home, but there is going to be a lot of work to return the guild to the home I want it to be for us all.

The Messy Breakup

by

Winter Wonderland

Over the night we got another dusting of snow, and as a result I had to once again dig my jeep out before coming to work.  Firstly… Cold is not one of those things that Belghasts do best… especially a 70 lb lighter Belghast.  This morning as I was getting ready the weatherman said something to the effect that it has been over 150 hours since we had been above freezing.  As I was clearing my vehicle it was 20* outside with a wind chill of significantly less.  I realize this is nothing like the –27* that my Canadian friends have been experiencing this week, but still…  it is in the realm of “effing cold”.  I have been wearing a fleece jacket and then a big winter coat on top of that.

All of the car clearing caused me to get up and around significantly later than I had planned, and as a result I am getting this started significantly later.  Supposedly we will experience some melt this afternoon as temperatures finally go above freezing.  Thursday is supposed to be in the 40s… which seriously feels like short and t-shirt weather as compared to this.  There is no way I could actually survive in a Winter climate.  The irony is… as much as I dislike snow in real life, I tend to love zones that have a winter theme in games.  I love Winterspring, Icecrown and Storm Peaks.  I feel like I would enjoy snow if it were not for that whole cold thing.

The Messy Breakup

The other day I talked about how I may have been wrong to avoid the looking for group tool and pugging in general.  From 71 to 80 I had a really great run of 26 dungeons without much issue at all.  It was a clean and efficient way to level.  However upon entering the Cataclysm dungeon queue system that all changed.  The first group I got was Blackrock Caverns.  Everyone seemed to know what they were doing, and was more than geared enough for the content.  As a result it went quickly and smoothly and I thought that maybe just maybe my luck would hold until I was able to level into the Pandaria content.  This however was not the case, or at least not the case for very long.

My next queue was Throne of the Tides, and within moments of stepping through the doors we began a horrific wipe fest that ended with most of the party rage quitting after the tank failed miserably at the first boss encounter.  As a rogue I ended up tanking most of the adds, and was able to pop cooldowns and all that wonderful stuff to at least down both of the casters.  However the tank just seemed to lack the hitpoints and avoidance/mitigation to survive in the instance.  It was not until the third, fourth and fifth bad queue of Throne of the Tides that I started to notice a pattern.  They were all wearing the 1-80 Heirloom gear.

Public Service Announcement

2013-12-10 07_30_58-Item Comparison Tool - World of Warcraft

Simply put… the heirloom gear that caps out at level 80 is simply not viable for tanking the cataclysm instances.  The problem is that Heirloom gear is itemized for the previous expansion.  At 80 it is itemized like it is a low ilevel Wrath of the Lich King blue, which is significantly worse than the lowest ilevel Cataclysm green.  Essentially the quested gear you get early on will be better than anything but epic gear from Wrath, and even then on most of my characters I was changing put purples for greens left and right, especially for tanking where the stamina matters so much.  The above image shows the Polished Breastplate of Valor as compared to Hardened Obsidium Breastplate.

Taking away the fact that the Valor breastplate contains zero tanking stats, it has 391 less armor and 100 less stamina than a Cataclysm tanking green.  The tanks that I see rolling into the level 80 dungeons wearing full heirloom gear simply do not have enough hit points to survive the level of damage that is being dealt by the encounters.  That is even with getting out of all the things they are supposed to be getting out of.  Essentially if you are reading this blog and leveling an up and coming tank, please god do not queue as a tank until you have switched out your level 80 heirloom gear with green quest gear at a minimum.  Granted I am generally more diligent than the average player, and I did not queue at all for ANY dungeons until I had swapped my heirlooms out for quested items. 

Gear Changing

To be truthful I logged in my leatherworker and crafted a full set of gear, and logged in my smith and made two blue axes…  but that is probably going above and beyond what anyone should be expected to do.  However in each expansion, that first zone gives you a complete set of gear including weapons and trinkets within the first few quests.  Over the course of the evening you can go from relatively crappy gear to greens that are better than most of the raid content gear from the previous expansion.  You can maybe limp by as a dps, but especially as a tank, the Cataclysm content is brutal on anyone who has not shifted out their entire set of items. 

I seriously doubt that any of the offending tanks I ran into will actually read my blog, but here is hoping that maybe I catch a few people who simply did not realize that heirlooms are not itemized as the new expansion until you ding 61/71/81/86 etc.  This is the problem with the “mudflation” that has set into blizzards system, there is always a massive jump in stats between expansions, and in the case of Wrath to Cataclysm… it is simply not sustainable for dungeon running.  Hopefully in the post “Item Squish” world the change between expansions will not be nearly as traumatic to the player base.  I am hoping once I managed to get to the next tier of dungeons this problem will for the most part go away, and I can once again return to leveling through instances.  However in the meantime… I am questing my way through Hyjal for what feels like the billionth time.