As life has gone on in a post-Naxx release world, the more I'm struck by how much the last two raids, Naxxramas and Ahn'Qiraq, shook up guilds.* While some guilds have gone on to complete Naxx and are in semi-hiatus while waiting on Burning Crusade to drop, others have gotten oh so close to finishing Naxx only to come up short. And there are those who are still trying to finish content in AQ40 to just get to the point of being able to start running Naxx.
And then there are guilds that simply don't have the personnel to get a 40-person raid on their own and have to work with other guilds to just get a shot at clearing content.
Even within the guilds that have been raiding Naxx, all is not roses and cream. If the guild has enough personnel to have multiple 40 person raids, great. If a guild only has enough to put together one 40 person raid, then there are issues with having a bench to work with, and also keeping that bench viable. I've watched guilds have a constant level of churn trying to keep a bench at all, much less keep those last 5 spots in a raid team filled.**
All of this has me watching and waiting for the other shoe to drop.
***
When a raid team is forced to reduce from 40 to 25 (and later, from 25 to 10) there's bound to be some hurt feelings.
I've mentioned this before, but I know that I'm not going to be part of the 25 selected to raid when our team goes through this process. For starters, Fire Mages*** aren't as dominant in raiding in BG as they are in Vanilla/Classic. Most of the 25 person raid compositions I've heard talked about for BC have mentioned about 3 Mages max, and I've even seen some raid compositions with 2 Mages. Assuming either composition, I'd be left off the 25 person raid team. On a good day, I'm 4th of the 6 Mages. Most raid days bounce around from 4th to 5th; some of it is my reaction time isn't what it once was, some of it is my lack of gear compared to the rest, and some of it is that I don't have the killer attitude to start DPS almost immediately, trusting in the tank to hold boss aggro. (I've died too many times due to pulling aggro to do that.)
So I'd be going onto either the bench or a "second" raid.
But here's where it gets weird. When I read the TBC channels in Discord****, people are all talking about what they want to level and what spec is best, etc. etc. Nobody wants to disturb the excitement by asking the hard question: who's getting cut?
It was briefly broached in last Thursday's Molten Core run when someone (can't remember who) remarked that it was sad that with BC so close now that there are only a limited number of times left where we are all able to raid together. And then just like that, nobody said a peep about it. Maybe it was that the reality of it meant that 40% of a raid was no longer gonna be there, but perhaps people already knew where their pecking order was.
And what I expect is that raid teams will potentially fracture not along where the needs are, but where the cliques are.
***
I've noticed that if you have people who you hang with regularly in a guild, you're going to stick around even if you may be on a raid's bench. But if you don't have that clique or general reaching out to include you in things, you're much more likely to split for greener pastures. It's only human nature after all to want to go where you're valued. And if you're in a guild but don't really know anybody, and people don't make extra efforts to reach out to you, then yeah, you're going to feel like you're not really there for any reason than to fill out a spot.
Looking back on my time in the guild I'm in --yes, the guild that has me as the only active Classic player-- I think I could have done more to play a couple of lower level alts, so I could participate with the slowly declining guild lists. Perhaps if I'd done more, the guild could have lasted longer. But then again, maybe I'm just kidding myself as I'm not only the only regular player but the only guild officer who logs in as well. Even the GM doesn't log anymore, and that says a lot.
But still, I've seen the unintentional lack of inclusion have an impact on various friends in various guilds. You join, you're excited to meet people, they're happy to see you, and then everybody goes back to their own subgroups. And then you wonder what's next. You get kind of stuck into this middle area, and it's quite easy to be present and yet not be "there".
***
So you've got a lot of dynamics in play coming into BC:
- Are you actively raiding or on the bench?
- Are you part of a raid team and/or guild subgroup that hangs out together?
- Are you part of a class that is not going to be as dominant in BC? (Or the reverse?)
- Is your guild able to put together a single 40 person raid team? Two? More? None?
All of that feeds into what's going to happen in BC when 25 person raids become the mains, with 10 person raids taking over the old ZG/AQ20 style 20 person raid.
My belief is that while some raid teams will successfully navigate a reduction from 40 to 25, they're going to lose critical pieces because of the cliques. If your Main Tank also has quite a few friends who are going to be left off the raid team, I could easily see that Main Tank joining their friends in starting up another raid team, and maybe leaving the guild altogether. Suddenly that first raid team is in need of a Main Tank and potentially other people to fill the gaps. Did that original raid team stop raiding Naxx before a player finished Atiesh? How that player handles that disappointment is going to be telling, and could potentially fracture a raid team.
So yeah, this is gonna get crazy real fast, whether people like it or not.
And me, I'm going to be watching and waiting to see what happens. As much as people want to not talk about it, this is going to definitely affect them, like it or not.
As for my raid team, well, I think I know how some of this will pan out. I'm not gonna say anything, because I've intentionally kept myself out of the guild, but I've a pretty good idea what's going to happen. The real question I have is whether things will be worked out emotionally or not.
*That's setting aside guild drama the has blown up several previously well known guilds on Myzrael-US, such as Azeroth's Redemption and All Quests Matter (I was told by an ex-guildie that the name is from the Vanilla era, but was unfortunately a casualty of current events). And there are other large guilds that have had some pretty big splintering, even though the main guild has remained viable (such as Indecisive breaking away from Sunrise).
**The Guild Recruiting channel on the Myz Discord is good for watching that sort of thing, as well as the recruitment ads in the in-game LFG channel. I hardly ever --evah!-- see a guild recruitment ad in the actual Guild Recruitment in game channel.
***And Mages in general.
****And boy are there plenty on various guild Discord servers. That's how it goes when you're a pugger; you accumulate guild Discord servers like people collect autographs.
EtA: Fixed a "of" to a "or". Makes a bit more sense now.
I was never a raider but this is still emblematic of the kind of social anxiety that eventually made even supposedly casual "family" guilds too pressurized to be any kind of fun. There's a point - and it's surprisingly low down in the supposed hierarchy of commitment - when mmorpgs cease to become video games or even hobbies and become straight-up, unironic extensions of regular human socialization. That comes with exactly the same benefits and penalties as it would if you were talking about a group of friends, acquaintances and colleagues in a "real life" situation.
ReplyDeleteThe real problem, though, as I experienced it, is that the archetypes from which the in-game social experience draws seem to revert to those that were common in adolescence or even childhood. Cliques abound. There's a quasi-romantic but really toxically passive-aggressive adoption of friendship rituals. Behaviors are predicated on supposedly agreed social norms that are actually control mechanisms orchestrated by dominant individuals.
I never much liked the guild concept but after I'd given it a fair run for five or six years I came to believe the way most games endorse and support these kind of social structures is inherantly toxic. I'm very happy to be free of it.
Ironically, the game I know that does guilds in the least-toxic manner is the one I play most, Guild Wars 2. Allowing everyone to be in up to five guilds simultaneously and (until the unfortunate addition of raids, at least) having no structured content requiring guilds other than a range of relatively benign fun activities releases most of the steam from the pressure-cooker harmlessly.
If guilds in WoW were genuinely designed to be appropriate frameworks for the content of a video game rather than the alternate social networks they're almost always seen as, the reduction of raid size would be a positive change. Players would split into smaller teams and more people would be able to enjoy the new raids with fewer being benched to wait their turn. That's probably what the developers had in mind. Instead it all becomes another opportunity to drop people who aren't in with the right crowd.
I'd say it's like high school all over again only my school was never even close to being as cliquey and weird as mmorpg guilds can be.
I went to an all boys high school, so I never got to see what the social dynamics are between teenagers inside class, but from what I can tell guild dynamics are very similar to what is encountered at work. I realize that this might be an even worse scenario in your eyes, but I personally have always been an outsider, away from the cool kids, so I can pick up on that sort of dynamic pretty quickly. The thing is, I don't believe that it's an intentional shunning or something; people are just used to a limited number of friends and it takes time to burst out of that circle and remember to include others more often. And unlike some guilds I've seen in the past, where the guild will tolerate some pretty horrible people just because they're good at playing the game, the guilds I interact with on Myz-US are composed of fairly decent people for the most part. There's a bit of arrogance from the top guilds, but that's to be expected.
DeleteStill, I'm a bit older than most of the people playing in Classic --I'm not the oldest on the raid team, there are two others older than me-- but the majority by far are in their late 20s to 30s. I'm old enough to be their father, and I think that's given me perspective that they might not have.
I do believe that in the long run the reduction to 25 will be a positive change, but I also think that there will be a shake up as people figure out how things will end up. As was pointed out to me in a long discussion with a friend last night, I might be (ironically enough) in the best position of all, because I can figure out where I want to go when the shakeup is over. I have a couple of invites from people I know that if things don't work out I can join them instead. And a lot of that is because I constantly try to reach out in game to include people who might otherwise feel marginalized.
But circling back to my original comment, the guild system really does feel like my experience at work. It might be sad, I suppose, but over my 30+ year career in work people do devolve into tribal groups at work as well that are reflected in office politics and off work activities. At the software company I worked for (over 500 people in the software development team at its height), there were tons of little groups and cliques among the development staff which was fostered by the perception among the devs of the various teams. So yeah, it might be high school (or younger), but it's also adulthood. Or even found in neighborhoods; just ask anybody in a neighborhood with a homeowner's association about their neighborhood factions and you'll get an earful.
I think guilds are at their best when people join them as free agents and then foster fresh connections among each other as equals. The best guild glue are those rare members who talk a little bit to absolutely everyone. Pre-established friend groups within a larger guild framework are just a bit risky and I always eye them with suspicion, remembering the breaking apart of my guild back in late Wrath when a group of friends decided they didn't need the rest of us anymore...
ReplyDeleteIn regards to TBC though, one factor you haven't mentioned yet is that there's also uncertainty in terms of the effect that having to level up again will have on people. Ten more levels seem trivial and fun, but I've forever been scarred by the priest healer that was part of our team in original TBC and then dropped out in Wrath purely because he hated levelling so much that he couldn't even make it out of Howling Fjord. I don't necessarily expect to see anything as drastic in Classic TBC, but we have a couple of people who only have their single level 60 character and were notoriously slow to level even that, which I do suspect will at least open up a considerable gap between them and those who'll eagerly rush ahead into the new content...
I think guilds are at their best when people join them as free agents and then foster fresh connections among each other as equals. The best guild glue are those rare members who talk a little bit to absolutely everyone.
DeleteI completely agree with you. However, I also believe it's natural for people to devolve into smaller groups based on familiarity and similar interests. The real question becomes whether those smaller groups dictate raid composition going forward.
When I began thinking about what's going to happen in BC, my first thought was how you got screwed over, Shintar, and whether that was going to happen to me as well. But the more I thought about it, I wasn't going to be in trouble as much as others on the raid team: the people who, like me, don't really have a foot in any cliques and may or may not be considered "extra" of a particular class when dropping down from 40 to 25.
(Under the realm of "Really? Did I just read that right?" a friend of mine was trying to recruit me for their Naxx raid team to effectively replace the spot that another friend of mine vacated after she had issues with how the raid leader behaved after failures to down K'T. I don't know if the friend doing the recruiting knew I was good friends with the second friend or not, but boy did that feel awkward.)
In regards to TBC though, one factor you haven't mentioned yet is that there's also uncertainty in terms of the effect that having to level up again will have on people.
You're right, I haven't, and I'll be honest in that I'm not going to do the rush to L70 and then sit around saying "I'm bored" in Trade Chat. I intend to enjoy the leveling experience in BC as I never experienced it when it was THE expansion for WoW, and I'm not going to powerlevel or do any other bullshit boosting just to get raid ready.
I know the raiding guild has been discussing among themselves what they're going to do. (I'm free to chime in, but so far I've kept quiet lest I accidentally generate a concerted "Join the Guild" effort once more.) Among other things, people are talking about the quickest path to get to L70 and then get raid attuned, and it seems to frequently revolve around running tons of instances and then picking a very specific path of quests to maximize that output. That's great if you've seen it all before and just want to get to "endgame", but I really couldn't care less about endgame at that point. Hell, I might even switch to Horde to spend more time with Neve rather than view her as just an alt. After all, I really like raiding, but that doesn't define me.
I guess the best way of putting it is "Hold onto your hats, it's gonna be a bumpy ride!"
Hi Red;
ReplyDeleteFor years I read the Eight Years in Azeroth blog. If you haven't heard of it, it detailed a life as the GM of a large raiding guild that tried to be both friendly and raid-competd me of exactly what that GM talked aitive.
Reading your entry reminded me about the same difficult decesions regarding BC's 25 man vs Vanilla's 40 in his post back then. Here's the blog post if you're interested:
https://eightyearsinazeroth.blogspot.com/2012/08/2-1.html
Bill
Wow. I'd never read that blog before. By the looks of it, the blog started up back in 2012, some years after he's started raiding. I think I'm going to have to spend some time reading, although I will dispute the "casual/hardcore" nature of his activity in Azeroth. GM-ing a guild with two 40-person raids is not casual, and his writing indicates to me that he was far more in the hardcore end of things if he's referencing Elitist Jerks (both the guild and the website, several of whom who are now on the Blizzard staff).
DeleteBut yeah, I see where he's coming from. I suspect that our experience might be similar, but his was more of an unknown situation whereas ours is that almost everyone on our raid team has experienced some form of BC leveling (either when BC was current content or on the way to Wrath).
Hi Red;
DeleteAye, at first glance, it’s very easy to make that conclusion re: casual vs hardcore. I had much the same thought when I first started reading Hanzo’s blog. I found 8YIA about a year into his writing, so I went back to the beginning and was able to get a better grasp on the story.
I found that the real difference Hanzo was trying to make in differentiating his guild from the other progression guilds on Deathwing-US was mostly in terms of people management, and perception. A lot of time and effort spent in trying to be a guild that fostered good playership and personal responsibility, while still maintaining the ability to progress and see as much content as possible.
I enjoyed the blog tremendously, as it dug into the investigation of why people do what they do, one of my favourite hobbies. That and reliving the days of yore in WoW.
Can’t recommend reading through the blog, it’s time well spent. The memories are so thick you’ll have to brush them away from your face (Field of Dreams). It’s time well spent.
Bill
Sigh... can't recommend highly enough reading through the blog.
DeleteBill
Oh boy, you referenced another of my favorite movies.
DeleteThe funny thing is, I didn't have a great relationship with my father, just like Ray Kinsella did in the movie (I read the book and don't recall that in the book). And even after the movie I still didn't, not for a long while. It was only after some brain surgery in 2002 --and his subsequent minor stroke-- did the relationship between me and my dad thaw. In Ray's case, it took death and the climax of the movie for that relationship to finally thaw, but that ending scene still gets me.
Anyway, I intend to dig into the blog in my spare time, just to see what made his guild tick. I've been stuck into an unfamiliar role at work this past year --a management role-- and I've found that watching guild leaders manage things provide a good baseline on how to manage a remote team. So more understanding never hurts.
Gah, that didn't look like it in the preview.
ReplyDelete"both friendly and raid-competative" took me back to that blog, of exactly what the GM talked about.
-Bill
My dirty little secret is that I'm constantly fixing my grammatical errors. I don't always put an EtA on the end of a post unless I see more than a few eyeballs have seen the post first.
Delete