Posts with tag complaints

Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available now from No Starch Press.

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.

Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available now from No Starch Press.

Just about every guild has its complainers. The bigger your community, the more you'll have to deal with members who think you're single-handedly out to drive the guild into the ground, and they are the only ones standing between you and wholesale destruction. Perhaps I'm overdramatizing, but sometimes it can certainly feel that way. Some complainers can be positively relentless.

This week's email comes from an officer who's afraid the complaints are about to force his guild leader to take drastic action.

Hey, I'm an officer of a medium-sized raiding guild that currently has two 10-mans and working on getting a third. During ICC we had three 10-mans, which we will call A, B, C and a 25-man [...] When we began raiding, we only had enough raiders to form one 10-man Raid A. Two months later, we got enough people to form another raid B, and a few weeks after that we form the last one Raid C. Everything was going good, all the raids where progressing [at] a similar pace, we down Lich King a few times, did a few heroic modes, than decided to close down our 25-man raid a few weeks before Cataclysm because of attendance issues.

Than a bombshell dropped, one of our raiders (we shall call him Jon[...]) posted that he was concerned with our move to 10-man raiding in Cataclysm (basically not having a raid). We quickly addressed this issue saying that there would be two 10-mans at least with the possibility of a third, Problem solved, at least we thought. Then one of our [raiders] (who we will call Bob) posted a very long post on forums. He stated that while the GL [...] and I were excellent guild leaders [...] the other officers were effectually a joke. He went on to say that the Guild does not come together on anything, stating the last guild event he considered significant was our last ICC 25-man raid. Stated that during most days there is maybe five people online, "A WoW guild that does not raid, dies." (Despite us saying that we are done raiding until Cataclysm.) [...]

Larisa's got a good rant about something I've considered before in a slightly different context: players aren't very good at anticipating how temporary game changes will work out. We, as a group (not individually necessarily), are quite quick to judgment when we see changes to the game, and the word Larisa uses is "conservatism" -- she notes the examples of the reaction to the zombie outbreak and the Children's Week batleground issues, and says that players "tossed the gift away, like spoiled kids." We (again, in general, not you specifically) have a very short view of how temporary changes will affect the game, lambast Blizzard for changing what didn't need to be changed, and very often, when the dust settles and the zombies are gone or the event is over, we realize that it wasn't so bad after all.

She's not talking about class changes here -- those are more permanent changes that affect the basic rules of the game. But specifically with temporary events (I'd even throw the Brewfest controversies, and the Headless Horseman complaints in the mix), players sometimes have reactions that are way out of proportion to the events themselves. These holidays and world events are temporary: shouldn't we just enjoy them while we can?

It's definitely a valid point, and something to remember for the next time a temporary event throws off your usual routine in-game. The fact is that we players are spoiled -- Blizzard generally does a great job keeping this game fun, and so when even a little issue sneaks into the game during a temporary event. But Larisa promises that next time she gets shaken up by a temporary change, she'll give it another chance. Sounds like a great idea to me.

Looks like quite a few of those players who threatened to complain about Blizzard ended up doing so: over on the local Better Business Bureau website for Blizzard's region, our favorite game developer has earned an F. The BBB says that they've been given this rating "for reasons such as that they have failed to respond to complaints, their advertising is grossly misleading, they are not in compliance with the law's licensing or registration requirements, their complaints contain especially serious allegations, or the company's industry is known for its fraudulent business practices." Ouch. We don't really know that any of those things are true about Blizzard's way of doing business, but there are certainly many people on the forums every day who claim that the first two especially are major issues.

Personally, I'm as big a critic of Blizzard as anyone when I think that there's something to complain about, but this rating hardly seems justified -- even if the BBB has received tens of thousands of complaints, that's still just a small portion of the playerbase. And despite the occasional downtime and various class nerfs, they hardly deserve an F rating, especially when a company that many people really do have issues with is riding along with an A rating. The BBB page also says that Blizzard's mass bannings have been a factor in many complaints -- there is probably no distinction made (or that can be made) in terms of complaints between people who have broken the ToS and people who have not.

At any rate, even if the F rating is there, it obviously has very little effect on Blizzard's business -- how many of you ran to check the rating before you decided to subscribe to World of Warcraft? It seems like a few customers (who may or may not have broken the rules to begin with) have ruined Blizzard's reputation with the BBB, but it's fairly apparent that the BBB doesn't hold much sway among Blizzard's customers anyway.

[Thanks ThisURLNotFound!]

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

In my first rant last year, I called out all the officers who, in the dark times before Wrath went live, resorted to rampant poaching -- rather than alliances -- to keep their raiding guilds afloat. Today I am going to rant about nonofficers. And specifically, against my better judgment as a contributor who would like to continue writing this column for WoW Insider, I'm going to rant about some of the people who obviously read this column and have written me to ask for advice.

I appreciate the fact that you think of me as someone to turn to for help. It's certainly flattering and I have tried to give you the best advice that I can.

However, I have been trying to answer a lot of e-mails over the past week and I see the same type of complaint over and over again. I won't use a real e-mail as an example, because I don't want to embarrass anyone, but the gist of these e-mails goes like this:

Hi, Scott.

I am not an officer in my guild. I am a member who attends raids and earns loot. But I don't like a decision the officers have made, or I disagree with the way they run the guild. How can I change the guild to be the way I want it to be?

Sincerely,

Concerned Player

This may come as a big surprise, but not everyone likes to do Arenas. Even some who very much enjoy Battleground play, are not enthralled with the small-scale and highly-competitive arena environment. I'm of the opinion that if you don't enjoy the arena, you probably shouldn't do it. Sasquach of Bahazzar is with me on this one. Like me, he enjoys arenas and is not partial to the PvE game. Sporting a 2300 rating for Season Three, he's looking forward to doing arena matches in wrath.

The original poster vented his frustration that all PvP gear has an arena requirement on the test realm. Though Battlegrounds and Arenas are disparate systems with divergent goals and playstyle, Blizzard is putting rating requirements on all PvP gear. Even playing battleground after battleground, players will have to do arenas in order to don any PvP gear.

Most folks are probably at least aware of Shamus Young's DM of the Rings series. It was the only web comic I've ever religiously checked every day, on the off chance the creator was feeling kind and had put up an extra comic. DMotR has long since finished, but Shamus is still out there blogging on various gaming topics.

Shamus started playing World of Warcraft about a month ago, and has been having the same growing pains many of us rookies did in our younger levels. But since Shamus is something of a name in the pen-and-paper gaming Internet circuit, it's interesting to see what he has to say in his review of WoW.

His first complaint is about low drop rates for quest items -- yeah, the eyeless Murlocs of Westfall spring to my mind. Most of the other issues are pretty familiar (bag space, respawns, res sickness). But one that did really stick out for me was a complaint about the in-game day/night cycle. Shamus would prefer a four-hour cycle to Azeroth's day, so that he could actually see the change. I think it's a fair point, even if we have heard it before. So, Shamus's list doesn't really bring a brand new light to how we view Azeroth, but it's still an interesting read.

Scattered Shots is for hunters. 'Nuff said on that topic. The Freezing Trap David was stuck in last week also wore off a little bit, thanks to Daniel, permitting him to write once more without his fingers snapping off from the cold.

In the wake of the recent confusion regarding Scare Beast, once again some hunters have gotten to complaining a lot about the state of their class. While on one hand, there are certainly problematic issues hunters are having, it's really not fair to say that the class is broken. It isn't -- being a hunter is more fun than its ever been, and it looks like this class will only get better in the future.

Nonetheless, looking at the problems we do have might give us a clearer sense of where we're going in the future. With more and more information coming out about Wrath of the Lich King, and especially since Blizzard started asking for feedback from hunters, it's worthwhile to have a look at what holes do exist for our class, and how future changes might seek to plug them up.

A few readers have sent us tips already to let us know that there are issues with the RSS feed here on the site. We appreciate you all letting us know, and we are aware that some of the older articles are getting published on the RSS feed as new. We've also noticed that the RSS feed will sometimes publish new articles twice, leaving you with two copies of the same article in your reader.

We're aware of both issues, and have forwarded information onto our tech guys about it-- they say a fix is coming. If you have any other issues or questions, feel free to post them in the comments below, or send us tips via our tips page. Thanks for reading, and for sticking with us through these issues-- we're hoping to get them worked out soon.

... and all through the forums, people were having pre-order problems and blaming them on Blizzard. Among the complaints:

• People on the East Coast won't be able to roll instantly on new servers since they'll be at the store picking up their copies of BC. On a similar note, west coasters are complaining that they'll be three hours behind since they can't pick up their orders until midnight their time. Blizzard, sadly, does not offer to provide free plane tickets to Maine as a remedy.
• How can Blizzard take Martin Luther King Day off? We have rights! Extra points for the use of the phrase "Blizzard could bomb a hospital full of babies and puppies tomorrow and many of you would defend them."
• Nerf ice storms! Also, due to the storm, Gamestop may have some trouble getting all their copies.
• Taking a vacation to play BC is the same as being a crackhead, because there's no better place to counsel people about video game addiction than on a forum about video games.
• Best Buy won't give BC preorders to customers today. DO SOMETHING! Oh wait, the game actually does come out tomorrow, not today. Taking "no" as an answer seems to be difficult for some people.

Do you anticipate any problems getting your copy of Burning Crusade?

An anonymous low-level alt on the WoW Raids & Dungeons forums posts about the (lack of) fun her guild has had raiding Naxx after the patch. She bemoans that many useful healing mods no longer work, dungeons keep crashing or lagging badly, and of course, there's the maddening click ... click ... click sound of people joining and leaving the raid, which is the raiding equivalent of listening to someone scrape their fingernails across a blackboard for five hours.

Other raiders note that certain boss encounters are nearly undoable post-patch, including Patchwerk (which was hotfixed fairly quickly) and Instructor Razuvious (priests mind controlling Razuvious's students were not able to use their "pet bar.") Less-progressed raiders have been discouraged by paladin and shaman loot dropping for both factions. And of course, there are the personnel issues associated with trying to raid right after a giant patch. What do we do with these trees of life? Why are all our healers either PVP-specced or missing in action? And for crying out loud, who's been going through half the instance 0-0-0 specced because they forgot that the talents reset?

Have you given up on raiding until the post-patch madness subsides, or are you planning to fight the good fight right up until the expansion?

As usual, this Wednesday is maintenance day for European players, and it also marks the second in a batch of hardware upgrades for selected servers -- upgrades which have already caused an extended extended maintenance. These upgrades are long-overdue by many players' reckonings, with plenty of stories of fatal lagspikes during raids or other adventures flooding the forums.

Reader Hammer writes in with a few other complaints of note (thanks!):

• The main wow-europe.com website is frequently down, with many parts of the site either bad links or inaccessible -- including the all-important Account Management section.
  
• Several servers are repeatedly experiencing problems and random downtime; poor Draenor is an example. Here's hoping the upgrades help with this.
• The new forums may look good, but they're often down -- for example, when the EU login server was broken for several hours yesterday, nobody could get on the forums to find out more. The forums, designed for European players, run on American time, adding extra confusion.
  

We Europeans may have been sitting smugly through US players' tales of woe for the last few months, but it looks as if the game's popularity has caught up with itself on our continent as well as across the pond. So, it's not just the Americans and Australians who have material for complaint; Asian players haven't spoken up yet, but we'll give them time.