Officers' Quarters: The strategy behind casual motivation
by Scott Andrews 
Jun 27th 2011 at 3:00PM
A guild's raiding suffers most when your players feel entitled to rewards without making the effort to earn them. Part of what makes leading a hardcore raiding guild easier in some respects than leading a casual raiding guild is that your players are always motivated to do their best to succeed. This week, an officer asks how she can motivate her casual raiders to meet some basic requirements and get a second team up and running.
Hi Scott,
We run a small casual raiding guild on a server that isn't very progressed. We currently have one successful 10-man team, and have been trying to get a second one off the ground since February. We have some lenient requirements for raiders to pass: they must be willing to listen on Vent, have DBM installed, be appropriately gemmed, enchanted and glyphed, and as of 4.1, have an ilevel of 346. The raiders in the current 10-man team had no problem with this at all, but the people who would comprise the second team, and complain about wanting to raid, have put in very little effort towards actually raiding. At the time of writing this, it's June -- we have endured 4 months of trying to get this team off the ground, 4 months of complaining, and 4 months of trying to help these people get a raid happening, to no avail.
We have tried recruiting but have been having a high turnover of people who HAVE put in the effort and found themselves without a team; they get frustrated and start looking elsewhere, and I really don't blame them. Meanwhile, the lazy members remain and continue to complain, but do nothing to progress themselves towards actually raiding, no matter how often we remind them. You can't walk into Blackwing Descent with an ilevel of 328, no enchants and only two glyphs -- these people don't seem to understand that! One member even told us he was "far too busy and important" irl to have time to watch a boss fight on Youtube, despite being fairly active and often online.Hi, Frustrated. Boy, this is one of the most annoying parts of casual raiding, and I don't blame you for feeling that way. One question for you: Did you put these requirements in writing? Are they listed on your website somewhere? Such requirements never feel quite tangible enough if
It feels like all of these people want something for nothing -- they want to raid but they don't want to put the effort in to learn any of the fights themselves or meet the requirements we've set out. And when they're frustrated at not raiding, it's the guild leadership they look to for blame. I'm completely at a loss for what to do here; the old adage of "you can lead a horse to water but can't make it drink" really comes to mind. Simply giving up and canceling the second team isn't the answer, because then it punishes the people who HAVE been putting in the effort. Everyone (including the officers) is incredibly frustrated at this situation -- it seems like no matter how many times we remind them to put in the effort, they assume that raiding will be like it was in Wrath.
Any advice you have on this would be great,
Frustrated
they're merely understood.
The power of the written word
As I mentioned last week, writing down your policies is an incredibly helpful way to prevent drama and head off complaints. By formalizing your requirements in writing, you give your members a checklist of things to do. It won't get everyone to do it, but at least you can point to it when people want to raid before they've met these standards. The written requirements would also serve notice to people who are looking to join that they must do these things if they want to raid with your guild.
I would also suggest keeping a public list of players who are "approved" for raiding, so you have a black-and-white system for determining who gets invites and who doesn't. Ask players to request an evaluation for the list once they've met all the requirements and feel that they are ready.
Have an officer or a class/role leader look at their armory and give them feedback. It's a great opportunity for some constructive criticism before the player sets foot in a raid. Then the evaluator can either put them on the list or tell them what they still need to do to qualify.
You could even go a step further and post a list of required roles for this second team. Post the people who qualify in the appropriate spots and leave blanks for the spots no one can fill yet.
You'd be surprised how something so simple can serve as a kick in the pants for people to get things done. Seeing others on a list that they're not on is a stark reminder of their own laziness. Your requirements are so simple and reasonable that hopefully it shouldn't take much more than that to get people to meet them -- if they truly want to raid.
Consider other solutions
Until you get this second team off the ground, it might be a good idea to rotate into your first team some of the players who have been patiently waiting for the second. When patch 4.2 goes live, some of your first-team players will probably want to skip out on farm runs of tier 11 instances anyway.
If every player who qualifies gets a chance to raid, it could serve as more motivation to people who aren't yet approved. I imagine it may be hard to feel motivated when you know you'll just be sitting around waiting for everyone else to catch up.
In all honesty, depending on how many players you have that qualify to raid outside the first team, you may be better off in the long run working out a rotation and not bothering with a second team at all. Recruiting is very difficult right now. If you have only two to three extra raiders, then it's probably not worth building an entire team out of that until you manage to recruit more people.
Don't give in
As for the guy who says he's too "busy and important" to watch a 5-minute video -- wow. What a lame excuse! He has hours and hours to raid, but not an extra few minutes to prepare to raid well? I don't buy it.
Yes, it's casual raiding, but the fact that he thinks his time is more valuable than others' is the exact opposite attitude that you want to see in your raiders. That is one member who should never see the inside of a raid instance until he changes his attitude.
Maybe once the tier 11 nerfs hit with 4.2, your second-team players may see a surge in activity to get prepared and jump in. Don't count on it, however. And don't let them blame you for the lack of additional raiding, either. Make it clear exactly who is preventing these raids from happening -- themselves.
Whatever you do, stick to your guns and don't lower your standards. Outside of Vent and ilevel, your requirements are really just the minimum anyone should do when they're playing group PVE content in any form. It goes beyond smart play to a matter of common courtesy. The moment you give in to the laziness of your players, you'll put your guild on a slippery slope toward failure.
/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 3)
raposo02790 Jun 27th 2011 3:25PM
The player who is to important irl should be booted from the 2nd team and never see a raid if you decide to rotate. Talk about a bad seed. His type will sabotage efforts, and should not be tolerated.
mark Jun 27th 2011 3:40PM
the last time i saw somone say something like this - we refused to take her to the raid
and we suggested she use the raid time to get set up - since she had obviously set the time aside
"ive got better things to do" /log
/gkick (were a raiding guild ffs)
this might seem a bit harsh but 2 weeks after joining a raiding guild?
Tom Jun 27th 2011 5:55PM
I'd like to outline the way it might look to people from the other side though.
"I've done 5 man content some. It feels like I've done it a lot and I'm getting bored of it. I'd like to try out this raiding thing. After all, isn't it just a few more people and a bit more fun? Why do I suddenly have to train and work at it and make it a job?"
And I have a lot of sympathy for this. I feel like the current game might be missing a UBRS - something that isn't much much harder, but is a little bit bigger and a caters to larger, but not necessarily more committed groups.
At the moment there is quite a large jump in difficulty and commitment from the 5 man content to the 10 man content. I think the game could use some easy 10 man content which is less a raid and more a larger 5 man for players who want to try raiding, but don't have the time.
Natsumi Jun 27th 2011 7:40PM
@Tom
Actually, there isn't really a jump from 5-man Heroics to 10-man Raids.
Devin Jun 27th 2011 9:50PM
I hate it when people use the excuse "I don't have time to raid". You can get up to all of the current tier raid content final bosses with six hours a week. If you don't have time to do that then you're going to have a helluva with an MMO anyways unless you mostly enjoy the single player aspect. I would say that if you have time for heroics, you have time to raid; if you don't then don't expect a seat.
Spellotape Jun 27th 2011 10:12PM
@ Natsumi.
I kind of feel like the step from regular heroics to troll heroics is pretty notable difficulty-wise for most people and is a good step in between raids. That said, I think the people who notice it the most are those who are prepared to raid but can't/don't when they have to put more effort in to carry the subjects of the OP's letter.
Cheb Jun 27th 2011 3:42PM
It's going to be painful, but you might try letting the second team people go raid one night and see how badly they do. That might also be a good motivation for getting them to work. If they haven't been in yet, they might think you're being too strict regarding requirements.
Another option is to pug people. If they see you filling with pugs instead of guildies, they know you're serious about the requirements and might put forth some effort. Either of those might motivate your lazy people to get their butts in gear.
allison.lins Jun 27th 2011 3:48PM
AND you might find yourself with some new members interested in putting in the effort
Scomparsa Jun 27th 2011 4:01PM
This. My old guild in BC did this with our 2nd raid group. The raid leader (GM on his alt) took our undergeared, zero-experience raid team into Karazhan and....they failed horrendously. 5 people gquit immediately, stating they play the game for fun, not to bash their heads on a boss for hours. The rest of the group farmed heroics and rep for weeks to get in and get it done. It was great.
DayDreamer Jun 27th 2011 6:11PM
What's a little more illuminating to the players is having them do an "outdated" raid and have them humbled at how difficult it is. Try to get them to do ICC with the achievements.
In fact, if they stand by their priorities, they may want to ONLY do outdated raids.
I had considered doing that before I actually got the opportunity to try a casual raid for Cataclysm content. It certainly has some crazy encounters, but others were just fine. I'm hoping the 4.2 nerfs make them all just moderately challenging. (I found Valiona & Theralion to be just right in 4.1, but Ascendant Council & Throne of the Four Winds were just nuts.)
It may be that without increasing the frequency of updates, that there is no middle-ground between professional raiding and doing outdated content. Either you do the same (recent) content for months on end because you can't beat it, or you beat it (outdated content) and then have nothing to do.
The Giant Jun 27th 2011 3:49PM
Paraphrasing your quote: You can lead a loot whore to youtube, but you can't make it think.
Jack Spicer Jun 27th 2011 3:53PM
What is this a picture of?
Samutz Jun 27th 2011 3:57PM
Entrance to the Bastion of Twilight on top of the spire in Twilight Highlands I believe.
thawedtheorc Jun 27th 2011 5:57PM
I appreciated your joke, Jack- even if these other heathens didn't.
Scunosi Jun 27th 2011 3:53PM
In my old casual guild we actually always ran pretty smoothly. I think it helped that most all the members had raided somewhat back in the day, so they knew things were supposed to work just didn't want to put in as much time when it came to killing bosses. They were all masters of their class, geared properly and such, just didn't want to be raiding 5 nights a week. In fact, most of them PvP'd pretty hardcore as well, which I tend to believe in the end can only help your PvE game 'cuz it really helps a player learn all the ins and outs of their, and other, classes.
Anyways, just about the only thing we ever fought about was watching raid videos. One of the members was adamant everyone needed to watch a video to figure out Yogg (to be fair we probably should have as wiping at the beginning of phase 2 wasn't going to teach us anything about the next 3 phases) while another said he hated the idea of "reading up" and would rather learn by doing. Usually I'm supportive of learning by experience but when a fight lasts as long as that one you really need at least some sort of prior knowledge to do it. In the end we never did down him as a guild, but we continued on well enough, full-clearing both regular ToC and ICC, and getting 6/12 HM ICC as well.
It really all just depends on the strength of character of your members I think. If you weed out the people who don't really want to be there, the ones that are just hoping for easy loot, you'll end up with a really classy bunch that'll just tear through raids (full-clearing Naxx in 4 hours? Yes please!)
Izzy Jun 27th 2011 3:57PM
I'm almost positive this is my guild. =\
KPB Jun 27th 2011 4:06PM
I'm sure there are literally hundreds if not thousands of guilds in WoW that would roughly match up with this. After ICC and the 30% buff everyone expects raids to be a total joke where you could completely under-perform and fail at mechanics and still manage to make progress through normals. 4.2 will bring this back to some extend with the huge nurfs to normal raids but firelands is still gonna be a real challenge.
Priestess Jun 27th 2011 4:45PM
Lol, I thought the same thing, at least until I hit the second paragraph. KPB is right, there are hundreds if not thousands of guilds across WoW who struggle with issues such as these. Which would of course be why such articles are written and read and discussed. I see a lot of good ideas out here. What my guild has done has varied, but it works out in the end. The bottom line always comes down to enjoying the game and being with people who enjoy it how you do. Obviously, some people in this scenario are not compatible. =)
Dakiri Jun 27th 2011 4:51PM
It's funny, because I said the same thing. Like, this is the same exact language a friend in the guild used in a private chat with me recently...kinda crazy that so many people are going through the same thing.
Honestly, it's a terrible situation, because we have about 16 people in the guild who are truly ready to raid. It's just enough where it's too many to get a reasonable rotation going without pissing people off, but obviously not enough to get 2 10 mans. And of course, the 12 or so of us that have been raiding since December have slightly better gear, way more experience, and (in a few, stupid, annoying cases) a sense of superiority that goes back to ICC. We've tried having a normal 10 man and then an alt/main run for everyone else, but that didn't really work out. It's looking now like the only way things will work is to blow up the raid team and keep recruiting...when the available talent out on the server is pretty bad. Not a happy time for us.
Mortenebra Jun 27th 2011 5:50PM
At first I thought an alternate me had written this letter, or maybe I'd written the letter in my sleep and didn't let myself in on the plot. Anyway...
... I'm going to refrain from parrotting the previous commenters. What I do have to add, however, is another layer to the dilemma: We actually got a second 10-man team running during late Wrath. They were struggling with Sindy and I even hopped in with my healer to help them out on a couple of nights. That team promptly fell apart during Cata's launch and, despite my best recruitment efforts, we couldn't get people to fill in. If we did get recruits, they demanded raid spots and loot and, much like the letter-sender's situation, complained if the raid didn't get off the ground, then either leave or force us to kick them out. They wanted all of the goods without any of the work, and that just doesn't fly in our guild simply because every person in the guild has a RL commitment of some sort that inhibits their capacity to make WoW into a second job, or at least be online to herd cats 24/7.
The final straw was when the leaders of the second team suffered from burn-out, and another two core members had to leave the game due to health issues. And that was that. The remaining people gave up because, well, it meant they had to put in effort where they used to just be along for the ride. Our first team is (miraculously) still going fine after taking along what members of the second team we could when three of the members of our original ICC10 team decided to quit WoW.
But now, despite all that, we're accused of being a "clique" where there's the "raiders" of the first raid team and "other," with people-- well, more like just one person-- complaining that he sees "the same people running together all the time." This of course ignores the fact that my husband and I frequently try to get a dungeon run together on non-raid nights and ask for people to join us (of which the complainant is online, mind you), only to be met with silence; and the times we finally get something going it's, well, when a couple of the other regular folks log on and actually respond to us.
How does everyone else deal with this sort of thing? Are we, in fact, a clique, even if we aren't trying to exclude people from dungeons, etc? Is there a way to dispel the presumption that there's a "clique" just because there's only one fully-functional raid team?