Posts with tag WoWJutsu

Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.

According to wowjutsu.com, more than 25,000 guilds in the world are better than mine. That's rather disheartening in an objective sense, but I also have no idea how they get their info or determine these ranks. (The info also appears to be a bit outdated.) Despite our abject failure in the rankings, somehow we seem to be doing just fine. We're adding new recruits at a steady pace, raiding frequently and successfully, and having plenty of fun doing it. So 25,000 is a large number, but it's just a number. Does your guild care about their worldwide rankings? This week's e-mail comes from a frustrated raider who thinks his officers put too much emphasis on climbing up the ranks.

Dear Scott,

I've had a few issues with members in my guild lately that I feel put too much importance on guild rankings. I'm sure you are aware of the sites like www.bosskillers.com and www.wowjutsu.com. I see these sites as sources of controversy, others see them as a sense of where they stand on the realm and in WoW in general. We have officers trying to push our guild into doing fights, EoE 25, when we haven't even done EoE 10 yet. Naxx is still a constant wipe fest, with many of the easier achievements not yet complete for a majority of the guild. We have a lot of under geared people that still run around in Heroic and SSC, yes SSC, gear but that doesn't matter to them. We beat Kel'Thuzad one time so we are ready in their eyes. We would leave bosses up in Naxx so we could go spend the night wiping and never be able to get around to getting a full Naxx clear.

It's very, very rare that pioneers are actually the best at what they do. They have great ideas, and those ideas revolutionize their field... but they're just ideas, concepts. It's not long before someone else improves those initial concepts and makes them the new standard. This more or less describes the situation around WoWJutsu.

WoWJutsu was once the number one guild ranking website, tracking progression, boss kills and all of that great stuff. Unfortunately, it hasn't kept up with the times. WoWJutsu's tracking relies on the Armory, crawling the whole thing and using gear that characters have equipped to determine progress. In order for your guild's Malygos kill to be marked down, members of your guild need to have Malygos drops on their Armory profile. This is the only way, as far as I know, that WoWJutsu will list your kill.

What does that mean? Well, it implies that guild progression isn't tracked properly at all. The first guild on a server to clear all of the content can easily come in third or fourth or twelfth on the ranking list. If your armory page doesn't update right away, that alone is going to throw your guild's progression record off. As minor as it may seem, it actually has some bad side effects, specifically when it comes to recruitment. If you claim your guild has cleared the hardest content in the game when you're looking for applicants, and people check WoWJutsu to make sure you're not making false claims... well, WoWJutsu's inaccuracies could imply that you're lying, when you're not at all. It's damaging.

This got me thinking... what good does basing your progress against other guilds do? Sure, there are the ultra competitive guilds like Death and Taxes and Nihilum. However they approach the game in a way that leads them to needing to care about how close the guild behind them is doing. For most of us, competing against other guilds is only going to lead to unforeseen frustrations. Most guilds have a boss or two that they get hung up on. Back in the days when BWL was hard, my guild spent a long time defeating Razorgore, and after he was gone the rest of the instance fell within a month. This kind of common hurdle in WoW is not reflected in WoWJutsu; all you get to know is that a guild is stuck on a boss, not that they're going to have amazing progress after it.

Ready Check is a weekly column focusing on successful raiding for the serious raider. Hardcore or casual, Kara or BT, everyone can get in on the action and down them some bosses. Sadly this week, Hong his stuck clearing trash in SSC. It's bad news when the little fishes come back, trust me.

There are a number of things that drive people to raid. Character improvement is one aspect, but for most raiders that I've run across, it's all about seeing content. These are the explorer/achievers who see bosses not as just a challenge, but as a stepping stone to where even more reclusive mobs and areas exist.

In the past, raids experienced pretty linear difficulty levels as they plowed through instances. You could skip ahead some if you stumbled across a particularly nasty boss (/wave C'thun), but you pretty much just worked down the list of baddies since each one got slightly harder. Even in Naxx where you had four different hallways of death to pick from, and the attunement wasn't dependent whatsoever on previous content you've completed, the progressive levels of boss difficulty kept you on the straight and narrow. You didn't have a chance killing the Instructor if you weren't skilled and geared well enough, no matter how much the Argent Dawn loved you.