Fri 3 Apr, 2009
I’m going to make an open statement here to be clear. I am not… nor will I ever actively be recruiting from my old guild. I almost feel like a carbon copy of Matticus in the wake of him breaking off to form his new guild. Given the activities of the last week I just wanted to throw that out there, but to be fair to those who are asking me a million questions I’ll go on record here as trying to highlight the new guild. Given the horde of questions I got pelted with last night I hijacked what this post was supposed to be about for today.
There are both advantages and disadvantages to forming up with a new guild. The advantage is that in many respects you approach it with a new mind set. You lose a lot of baggage, and new ideals are formed. Yes… over time those transform. They’ll get diluted or grow as the guild grows, but when something is born anew, we face it with some ideals which shape the core of a guild. The disadvantage is of course that you’re throwing yourself out there kind of in the wind. You’re taking a leap of faith that might very well bite you in the ass.
Understanding The Lost Ones
The guild is based in many ways on some oriental flavor, but the core tenant if I were going to give one is…. “We rise together… we fall together.” We have two sides to the guild. Well to be fair… there’s really a core group that comprises almost the entirety of the guild. The Lost Ones is our designation for the general membership. Its core meaning is based in oriental lore I’m sure. Our GM is a freak for those types of things. As the guild is called Rosuto Samurai, I can bet money there’s a reasoning behind it.
While we won’t expect everyone to drop everything anytime someone so much as squeaks, the goal is more collaborative. We help each other out and build in many respects what you’d deem social debt. A good example is the following. We had a realization that none of our existing raid team had enchanting. Well I have high level enchanting on a character I have no intentions of raiding with, but that doesn’t really help when you’re running into an instance and have to sell purples rather than building up the Abyss crystals you’ll need for the highest level enchants.
Within minutes of one of our members volunteering to swap his profession over to enchanting, everyone was scouring their banks and alts looking for enchanting mats. I easily donated 400-500g worth of enchanting mats. Nobody really cared. The goal was to get someone up there quickly. We looked up where we were short mats and everyone scattered to instances to farm greens for DE bait. In two days we had gotten our guy to 300 with enough enchanting materials in Outland stuff to easily hit 360-375.
See… everyone came together… had a good time while still working toward a goal. While nobody asked for payment. Nobody expected anything in return, you can bet money we’ll do something similar to help someone else out again. Collaboration, respect… teamwork. Some times its ok to take a hit personally to help the man/woman next to you rise. You can’t expect me to carry you all the way there. I expect people to do work themselves…. educate themselves, but when you don’t know… or are in need, I will help you learn what you need or help you get it. You just have to show up expecting the level of work required to reach the goal.
Understanding the raid program
I wish I could give everyone every single detail of the program. The reality is, I can’t. Its going to be done in the next week or so. I’m on vacation so thus I have very little excuse to NOT get it done. But I can share with you the vision we’re building upon.
Raiding in The Rosuto Samurai is a privilege not a right. What does that mean? Well what it means is that we expect our members to put in a level of effort to maintain the right to raid. There is an individual rank in The Rosuto Samurai for characters that are raid approved. Its going to be required for a person to fill out a request every time they want a character approved for raiding. That may sound a bit odd, but here’s the rationale.
Every application is going to include two things. The first is a statement outlining the character’s raid readiness. It should outline the character’s current gearing, progress on reputations relevant for obtaining head and shoulder enchants and progression important caps such hit caps, defense caps etc. The second thing every application will be required to submit is a gear map. A gear map will include a listing of the gear that could be deemed upgrades from their current state including but not limited to:
- Crafted gear
- Instance gear
- Badge Gear
- Reputation based gear]
- Raid gear
This seems like a lot of work, but its easily accomplished using Wowhead.com. The purpose though is to set the stage for the mentality we’ll be looking for. We want people to adopt the ideal of education. We want them to educate themselves. Understand their own needs as well as begin to research boss fights etc. We don’t expect everyone to be an expert. Far from it, but we want people to get into the mode of learning about things before they show up.
Will we have mains?
Yes people will be expected to have a main, but if a person wants to go through the effort of applying and maintaining the standards to keep multiple raid level toons, then they can do that. Having depth on the team isn’t a bad thing, but we certainly won’t be there to gear up people’s 47 alts over helping the team ready for the next challenge.
Let me put it another way. I’m huge on cross training. I don’t want to be in the situation where I’m the only tank who knows how to do a certain boss fight. Thus the team is screwed when I decide I need a day off. People need the ability to come and go as their home life intrudes, but from the same note, we are asking people to use common sense.
One statement I heard once was… “Well once I’ve got all the gear out of 10 man, what’s the point of continuing to bring that character? What’s the point?” Well let me put it to you this way. See those 9-15 people who helped you get your gear and fully equipped? You’re telling me that they don’t deserve the same respect from you that they just gave you to help you get to where you are? They don’t deserve the same opportunity to gear up so they can help progress to the next tier? We should start gearing your second character before we finish gearing up other people?
Its not meant to sound harsh, but ideally we want to be clearing Naxx in a short time period. I’ve been quoted as saying… “My goal is 3 hours and out for Naxx.” And I mean it. I’ve had people stare at me like I’m insane. I can also see people staring going… “You’re going to waste 3 hours in Naxx???? We do it in 2 or less…!!!!” And once we’ve got Naxx nailed into “easy mode” the point will be to try some of the achievements. Why not try to kill Maexxena in 20 minutes after Anubre Khan dies? Why not kill Faerelina without using the Acolytes? Make it a challenge… and make it fun.
Raising the bar is what is about. Train people to a masterly level. Then extend them. Sartharian is easy mode? Add a drake up. One drake up easy mode? Add a second one…. and a third. Got Malygos nailed? Kill him faster. I don’t want the mentality to be running in to Naxx just to clear it. If Naxx is easy, we need to make it harder. We need to work on the achievements. We need to be able to balance things between training and hard mode.
That being said… I’ll take a person who does 1500 DPS and is busting their butt looking for upgrades, examining their shot rotation or has the balls to say, “You know what… I need more gear… I need more experience in heroics before I step foot back in Naxx” over the guy who does 3000 DPS and is a complete tool.
Can you teach people Naxx and speed run it? Yes. Its a bit of an adjustment, but the long term goal is we want to get in the mode of limiting time on trash and maximizing time on bosses. How do you do that? Stopping AFKs every two minutes. Stopping killing mobs you don’t have to. Stopping having people stand around trying to figure out what gear they need (thus the gear mapping….. see… method to my madness..)
My goal is to teach people to excel. My goal is to help people learn to be good raiders first. Then help them achieve greatness. I truly believe anyone can achieve greatness. We have a guy in the guild right now. One of our hunters that I keep an eye on. Back in the days of Kara, he was a noob. Well not in a bad way, he just had never raided, but he busted his butt. It took him a bit, but once he hit his stride, he was a damned good raider. He was a very solid player. I’m happy to have him. Has he hit his stride yet for Naxx? No, but you know what? That mentality he has… examining his rotations…. looking for upgrades… trying to find ways to improve… yeah.. that’s the stuff. That’s exactly what I’m looking for.
logtar says:
We are still dealing with a group of people leaving our guild and creating ripples of animosity where there was no need for any of it. As long as drama is not part of the split, I think the birth of a new guild is awesome, but that is not the case most of the time. Best of luck, I think you have a great plan.
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Dark says:
I am the new enchanter Starman is talking about and i managed to get to 350 in 2 days thanks to the help and generosity of my guildmates, hats off to you guys.
Kyuui says:
As the GM (aka Shogun) of The Rosuto Samurai i can tell you doing what we did for Dark, will not be uncommon; when you help each other, you get better, when you get better, WE get better
Oh, and nice post star
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