Officers' Quarters: Firelands will not save your guild
by Scott Andrews 
May 23rd 2011 at 2:00PM
I try to be a glass-half-full sort of guy, especially when I write these columns. (I don't always succeed, but I try.) In my opinion, leaders should be optimists who prepare for the worst. Today, however, I have a rather pessimistic message for you: Firelands will not save your raiding guild.
What I'm seeing with my own guild and what I'm hearing from all of you, week after week, is that guilds are struggling right now. With Cataclysm offering no new way to advance characters, long-time players are tiring of WoW's endless gear treadmill. Slots are becoming tougher and tougher to fill as players grow bored or frustrated with tier 11. Officers are burning out at a blistering pace. The playerbase, in general, is poised for something truly new -- not just a rehash of old raids.
Firelands is our best hope -- but I'm sorry to say, it won't be enough.
Seven bosses (plus the obligatory one in Baradin Hold) is a rather paltry number. As has been noted, we haven't had so few bosses in a tier since the Coliseum days, generally regarded as the most disappointing tier in WoW history. The Firelands bosses that have been tested on the PTR all sound really interesting so far, and I'm looking forward to meeting them with weapons drawn. The fact is, though, seven bosses is seven bosses. Players are going to get bored of this tier faster than Tier 11.
Summer doldrums
Worst of all, summer is upon us. Traditionally, summer has not been kind to raiding guilds. Personal schedules change. Attendance plummets. Some players know their playtime is going to drop so drastically that they don't even bother subbing to the game during the summer months. Even the players who are extremely dedicated will be going on vacations, visiting friends, or enjoying outdoor activities that may cut into their raid time.
These are all important things to do in life, and we can't hold it against them. In fact, I hope that all the officers out there reading this will take advantage of the summer, too.
A case could be made that last summer was worse than this summer is going to be. After all, Icecrown Citadel was six months old when May rolled around, and Ruby Sanctum was all we got that season -- one new boss instead of Firelands' seven, plus an insane amount of trash. Players were fed up with Wrath, on the whole, and looking forward to Cataclysm.
However, ICC was gated, so some of the bosses hadn't been available as long as others. Blizzard also limited progression by restricting the number of possible attempts on end-of-wing bosses. Finally, the instance had a stacking buff that gradually made the content more and more accessible. Many guilds were just hitting their stride in ICC during the late spring -- and the buff didn't even cap out until July. Everyone was excited to face the Lich King in his citadel and defeat him at long last, so a lot of players stuck with it for much longer than they normally would.
Decent PUG players were much easier to come by back then than they will be this summer. The easy accessibility of Coliseum loot, combined with Frost emblems and epics from the three Icecrown heroics added in patch 3.3, made gearing up for ICC a breeze. The stacking buff and growing familiarity with Icecrown's bosses gradually made bringing puggers into your raids more and more viable to make up for poor attendance, if you were so inclined.
Gearing up for Firelands, on the other hand, will be a long, long road for someone who is fresh to 85. Skill is not gear, but even the most skilled player will have no business in Firelands wearing ilevel 333 rares.
The upcoming Cataclysm expansion, in some cases, also kept people playing last summer. Some players didn't want to jeopardize their raid slots for the expansion by taking a few months off. We didn't know then, after all, exactly when the expansion would launch. Other players were getting their characters prepared for the road to 85 or trying to finish up all the Wrath achievements while the content was still part of the endgame.
Now we've seen what Cataclysm has to offer, and to many players, the level 85 experience has been underwhelming. Overall, I don't sense anywhere near the same excitement that WoW had when we were all waiting for this expansion. The recent reduction in subs seems to support that hunch.
Why am I telling you this?
I'm hearing from too many people these days who are hoping that Firelands will fix everything that's wrong with their guilds. It happens just about every time a new raiding tier is added, and sometimes the raid is so compelling that it does ... at least until people get sick of it.
Firelands will be released sometime in the next few months. When it goes live, you're going to see a resurgence in attendance, and maybe some MIA raiders will start showing up online again.
It won't last. It won't sweep away longstanding recruiting issues. It won't solve your loot system woes. It won't permanently energize lethargic officers. And if you don't prepare for it now, the shortened tier and the summer months will absolutely crush your guild. You and your fellow officers need to look ahead and make some hard decisions.
I highly recommend reading this column from 2009 about surviving the summer months. Everything I say there is still relevant, sound advice. Unfortunately, it is doubly important this time around.
This is all just conjecture on my part. I could certainly be wrong about everything, but from what I can see, the summer of 2011 will be the toughest one yet for raiding guilds in WoW. Be optimistic if you choose, but also be proactive about solving your guild's problems now -- before you're left without options. Firelands alone doesn't have the legs to save your raids.
/salute
Recently, Officers' Quarters has examined how strong new leadership can create a guild turnaround, the pitfalls of promising more than you can deliver, and lessons learned from Scott's own guild demise. Send your own guild-related questions and suggestions to scott@wowinsider.com.
Filed under: Officers' Quarters (Guild Leadership)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 6)
Necromann May 23rd 2011 2:08PM
Hakkar's legs made me laugh so hard I fell off of my bed.
Scomparsa May 23rd 2011 5:08PM
Hakkar's legs would make me laugh hard, too...considering he's a giant half-snake half-raptor god.
ENOUGH! May 24th 2011 10:49AM
Even though some players don't raid, for about 60-70% of players raiding is the end game.
Blizzard did several things at once in Cata. They changed healing and tanking mechanics, that drove away many players from those roles. If you are lucky to be in one of the top 5 guilds on your server you probably didn't noticed the lack of tanks and healers as much since your guild had a strong draw for recruiting due to progression and reputation. For all other guilds it was painfully obvious that these roles were in short supply and raids were hard to put together for lack of these roles and guilds fought over players in these roles.
If a guild was a car engine, this was like dropping a handful of sand into it.
Another change was adding healer mana as a type of second soft enrage for all raids, now not only was DPS before the enrage timer a factor, but now so was healer mana.
And finally, the player coordination factor of raids were increased. Most had some gimmick that required almost everybody to do it almost perfectly or the raid wiped. This seems to have been implemented as AOE damage penalty in most cases. Everybody does not move out of the flame pillar on magmaw, or everybody does not switch dps on ODS to prevent shield breakage...
To raid you not only needed mostly competent players, now you pretty much needed all of the players to be competent, just one slow, laggy, or 'sandwich eater' as we used to call them in MC days, and the raid wipes.
And finally the gearing up for raid grind was possibly the worse it has ever been, if you actually wanted to get all the gear from heroic 5 mans that you could before raiding it was 6-12 weeks of grinding for badges depending on how much gear you wanted vs. how grind you could stand.
What was the result of all this, well for blizzard it meant that players would take longer to complete content, good for them, less work for the same amount of money coming in.
For players, raiding was much less fun all-in-all than it has ever been. Sure some guilds cleared content, a very small percentage of guilds. Many players, those healers and those tanks who didn't like the new mechanics, the 'sandwich eaters' who now wiped the raid, the people who were forced to sit on the raiding bench for lack of healers or tanks to form raids with, all of them were losers in this expansion.
Amaxe May 23rd 2011 2:09PM
It's a bleak assessment, but I can see nothing wrong with your reasoning.
I think Blizz will have to either settle for mediocrity or work hard to get the game back to where it was.
Wild Colors May 23rd 2011 2:25PM
The only thing I see wrong with it is that Firelands might save casual guilds and PUGs a little bit. The switch of the current 359 Valor gear over to easily-obtainable Justice Points will make the Tier 11 raids *a lot* more accessible to guilds and individual players who haven't gotten to see them yet.
I agree that guilds that are actively working on hardmodes now will likely burn through the Tier 12 content pretty quickly and then be bored silly.
Krytture May 23rd 2011 2:52PM
I think it could work out. its funny, the article talks about people being more busy during summer, less people online, and it talks about there only being 7 new bosses.
Doesn't that match-up perfectly then?
You don't have to raid 3 or 4 nights a week. You can raid 2.
My guild currently does Thur, Fri, Sat, Mon. Though, we only need that many now because we are working on hard modes. Normal, we can clear BoT in just over an hour, and we would only spend 2 hours in BWD.
I see one raid, 7 bosses, as dropping atleast 1 night from our schedule, and depending on how hard Firelands is, spending 1 night running BoT or BWD for peoples gear, fun, achievements.
So, this will help cooldown the burnout effect, and it will workout since less people will theoretically be logging on on a normal basis.
And if your logged on during a normal raiding night, but no raiding is happening tonight, there is a HUGE new questing system opening up that you can play around with. And I'm sure there will be 2 new heroic dungeons as well.
Still bored? Level an alt? Make some tea, start a fire in your fire pit, and learn to play an instrument?
Still not happy? Recruit pugs and go earn some achievements.
I think Blizz got it right, why flood us with content during the season when less people are online or can reliably show up?
pr.vidovic May 23rd 2011 4:19PM
Honestly, I think the problem is people don't really -want- the game to be back where it was. Because right now, the main game principles aren't largely different from those from back then. That is what bothers people, it's the same grind over and over, no matter how they try to dress it up. Why people didn't mind that back then was because it was all still new and there was lots to explore and learn about the game.
It's easy to say that they have to do something drastically different - but the MMO concept, to me, seems very restraining in that aspect.
kaminari May 23rd 2011 5:23PM
i see a couple of points wrong with his logic; gearing will be icc era easy, with JP t-11, current raid pugs and zul'again.
he forgot about dragonwrath, teracgosa's rest, and firelands may not be meant to keep us entertained that long, blizz just made a paradigm change to make patches with less content but more often.
Frank-potato May 23rd 2011 6:41PM
@Krytture,
A few details, there won't be new 5-man dungeons. The new heroics that where scheduled to be released with Firelands were ZG & ZA. Also, the huge questing thingy you mentioned, it's not huge, and if blizz keeps their promises (awards a mount), it will be something that people are going to blast their way through like a speeding bullet. Last but not least, i believe that people who wanted an alt, already leveled an alt, there is too much down time for that between now and the release of the patch.
just saying, i was one of those who got excited when blizz said that every patch was to be released with multiple yet shorter raids. eg. BoT, To4W, BWD.
The Dewd May 23rd 2011 2:18PM
Is there any indication that, like ICC, there will be any new 5-mans to fill in some of the gaps for guilds who aren't finished with T11 yet? Or for non-raiding members who want to try to "keep up" like they could with the ICC 5-mans? Or is 4.2 scheduled to just be a rehash of last summer?
captain draenor May 23rd 2011 2:27PM
oh i'm sure they got heroic ragefire cavern, heroic wailing caverns, heroic blackfathom deeps, etc all lined up for "new" content to fill the gap.
Noyou May 23rd 2011 2:39PM
I see what you did thar.
XayÃde May 23rd 2011 3:35PM
Yes, they are called Zandalari heroics =)
Blizzard said that patch 4.1 and 4.2 would be only one patch if their patch release philosophy were still like the Wrath era. They chose to release smaller patches at a quicker rate than big patches at a slower pace. At least, that was the plan... Which seems to have failed since the first raid tier is lasting over 5 months already.
Wild Colors May 23rd 2011 2:22PM
They need to spend some time on something that isn't a raid.
Give us a world event of some sort. People look back on those fondly (for that matter, people enjoyed Shifting Sands at the time as well).
Or give us some sort of actual alternate progression path. No, Archeology doesn't count. Path of the Titans came close, but was a bit too single-player oriented.
How about this (yes, it's stolen a bit from Rift, but hey, Rift stole a lot from WoW, and WoW has already stolen from EQ, and the world goes round and round):
Let players with max archeology get a new thing from digsites (possibly only when used in conjunction with a moderately expensive reagent) called an "Ancient Scripture" or "Ancient Summoning Ritual" or something of that sort. Set up a couple dozen cool looking areas in the open world of Azeroth (they already exist, you just need to remove the mobs so they don't interfere). If you take the Summoning Ritual there and use it, it will summon up a boss (or the ghost of a past bos, or something). Depending on what reagent you combine the Ritual with, you can get a 5-man boss (drops 353), 10-man (359) or 25-man (359).
Of course, since it's open world, you can always bring a million people and overpower it. But since the amount of loot it drops will be based on the assumption that there are only 5/10/25 characters, you'll face a diminishing rewards problem.
The boss that gets summoned would depend on the number of people and the type of digsite in which the Summon Ritual was found. Just grab something from a prior dungeon/raid that involved that civilization and spruce it up a bit, and then slowly create new bosses and put them in. The exact boss you get would be random, at least once more than 1 was available for that civilization and that number of people.
There we go - a non-raid path that's fun, involves teamwork, doesn't take as much time, gets players admiring the beauty of azeroth again, re-uses old content, still gives out some loot for the loot-hungry, etc.
Alternatively, Blizzard could just make raids scale (9-11 players and 23-27 players would be a *huge* boon to guilds). Yes, it's tricky, and may not balance perfectly correctly, but.....Blizzard, you need to remember that sometimes cool things aren't perfect! Take a few risks!
Trisnic May 23rd 2011 2:35PM
I would be thrilled to see something like the AQ gate opening again in the game. Everyone could participate in that. Unfortunately that kind of thing doesn't seem to be on the radar, at all.
Wulf May 23rd 2011 2:40PM
For the record, the idea from Rift you're suggestig WoW adopt was also (originally?) implemented in Anarchy Online years ago as the 'Pocket Boss' concept.
Wild Colors May 23rd 2011 2:59PM
@Wulf Aha, my mistake! I never give AO enough credit. Funcom really has fabulous game ideas. Execution is a little more hit-or-miss, but they dream big.
Jack Spicer May 23rd 2011 3:03PM
I am also discouraged by the raid/guild focus of Cataclysm so far. Although you can argue that raids were always the premium content, at least with other expansions I didn't only have 2 top-tier heroic raids to run.
Amaxe May 23rd 2011 3:12PM
An event would be interesting, but I think Blizz would have to get away from the "On the rails" approach we've been seeing in the last few events.
Perhaps I am unrealistic, but I'd like something PvE based which is not A-B-C-D-E-F quests.
For example, perhaps something like how the Horde-Alliance war progresses, and how it will impact things, phasing thing to show the changing fortunes of war. Also, if the defeat of Deathwing and the healing of Azeroth is so important, the war will be counterproductive to the efforts of the Cenarions and Earthen Ring...
Thrall: OK, we need to cooperate to heal this world...
Garrosh: For the Horde! Kill the Alliance dogs!
Varian: For the Alliance! Drive back the fitlhy Horde!
Thrall: /Facepalm Oh for F@#%'s Sake...
Seems to me if we have need of another united front the war needs to be defused.
jason9144 May 23rd 2011 4:04PM
Pretty much right on the money. I am not a raider...haven't been since BC, work, life...mainly kids...it just doesn't happen. This game NEEDS something other than just raiding in the PVE aspect. Dailies you can only do so much before you want to take that rock from Underground Economy and shove it into your eye.