One of the things I've never really got into in WOW is the auction house, this isn't due to a lack of interest, in fact the economy in WOW and how massively it varies from server to server fascinates me; I suppose the main reason I haven't bothered is the time it takes to make money, I've always had enough gold to get by, but never been filthy rich in WOW terms, but providing I could get hold of all the stuff I needed for raiding I would stay away. If I needed reagents I'd generally go grind for them, the only occasions I would venture into the Auction House was when I was short of time before a raid, needed a couple of materials to level up a trade skill, or when something was on there which I needed but was on for less than the time it would cost me to grind it myself; for instance, Golden Pearls, back in the days of Vanilla WOW I needed two for the Mooncloth Robe which was the best crafting robe for healing at the time, it required two Golden Pearls which retailed at 80-120g each, so I wouldn't be getting much change from 250g, 250g was a massive amount back then, so of I went to grind, it took about two hours of killing things but I got there, I'd have made about 50-80g in 2 hours of grinding so it made sense to go for the pearls. Now the duckers and divers amongst you will be asking why I didn't simply grind Golden Pearls to make money at 1 pearly an hour it'd average in the region of 100g an hour profit rather than 30 ish, well simple really, these pearls were quite rare, but also quite specialist at the time, they weren't used in too many recipes, so should anyone grind them on mass the bottom of the market would quickly fall out, and by the time I came to need the third pearl, it had. Someone had obviously been grinding, there were loads in the AH, the best price was in the region of 50g which meant it was far more advantageous to simply click buy than go spend hours grinding.
Since coming back to WOW, I've used the AH occasionally for bits and bobs, gold is quite easy to come by these days, so the occasional glyph or reagent, but again, never really selling. That was until this weekend; I've been levelling the druid over the past few weeks, while doing this I've skilled up both mining and herbing (this was my primary reason for levelling this character as I was sick of the flight form druid sweeping in, herbing, and flying off as I'm still stood there trying to dismount and wondering where the hell my herb went) on the way I've banked all of the materials (and the cloth too) gathered rather than selling it. The druid is now in the mid 60's which mean, with the stash of higher level herbs I had on my mage from his herbing, I could pretty much level inscription from 0 to 525 in one shot, there were occasions where I was a few herbs short so a swift trip to the AH filled the gaps, whilst I was being rinsed of my gold for these stacks of low level herbs, I noticed something; how much money there was to be made on the AH these days. As a result of levelling inscription I had loads of glyphs, cards and scrolls, on my server glyphs go for anything between 20-200g 20 for the crap stuff which no one but the people who must have every possible glyph for their class, around 50g for the useful but optional ones, and anything from 100-200g for the 'must have' glyphs. This is a huge amount, and probably a reflection of the 30-50g price for most stacks of herbs (other than the top level ones which are just silly prices). I decided I'd have a punt with some of the glyphs, it seemed a waste to just vendor them, so I stuck about 15 of the hundred or so I had on the AH, choosing the ones which were going for more than 80g, and just slightly undercut the best prices on there. To my surprise I sold 5-6 of them which more than covered the cost of the materials I'd had to buy to fill gaps as I levelled. Smelling a profit, I put another 20 or so on, and got thoroughly hacked off with the amount of time it took to check the prices, and create the auction. It was only a minute or so per auction, if that, but it soon mounted up. Yesterday I decided to do something about it, I decided to have a read up on the addons available for auctions, I'd previously used Auctioneer a little bit, but as I'd never really got into auctions, I'd never really tested it fully, I headed over to the developers page and to my disappointment it hadn't been updated since last October. Undeterred I had a look through wowinterface.com and curse.com, picking the addon which had been downloaded by a good number of people and received some pretty good reviews, this was Auctionator. I can now instantly drag items into the interface giving me a breakdown of the current competing auctions, automatically selecting the best price, and even offering the ability to buyout some of the sillier priced items (I spotted a Glyph of Obliterate on there for 8g, which I instantly relisted for 99g and sold 10 minutes late!). My early success encouraged me to stop slacking on the enchanting front, utilising some of the vellums I'd created for levelling (the mage is also my enchanter) I knocked out a few enchants to the level, to my surprise they sold too! All in all, with no more than an hour spent this weekend (including a good 20 minutes researching and installing the addon), I reckon I've made in the region of 1500g, now this is a bit of a false figure as I already had all of the mats for the items which I sold, but even so, if I was grinding mats purely to sell in the AH there's good money to be had.
The blogsphere has been awash with news of the instances in 4.1 since the first inkling that Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub we're to make a comeback in the same way that SFK, Deadmines and Onyxia did in Cata, and Naxxramas did back in Wrath. There's been a mixed response on the blogs I've read, and the comments left on those blogs, some hailing it as a great idea, some lambasting blizzard for profiteering and laziness.
The draw of rehashing old content, from blizzards point of view, is pretty clear. Instance design is not an easy thing, simply reusing old instance 'skins' takes a lot of time (i.e. cost) out of the development and testing process so hypothetically sees more profit for them. If you assume profit equals entertainment value though (i.e. blizzard keep making profit as long as their game still entertains people) is this quite the case? Larisa talks about an analogous gum chewing exercise in diminishing returns with her post on the subject, and I have to say I agree (to some extent) with her on this; players play WOW for entertainment, entertainment comes in many forms, but in terms of raids and heroics you can safely say it generally comes down to a mixture of: the challenge, new experiences and loot. If the instance is the same layout and the same strategies, the longevity of the former two is diminished. That leaves you with loot, I've talked about this previously, people think they want loot, but actually they don't it's a pseudo-reward, people need loot to progress to the next stage in the game, it's a means to an end, nothing more (though I accept there are some people in the game who just want loot for loots sake). This potentially leaves Blizzard in a dangerous position which many companies see them self in; reducing costs to boost short term profits, but at the expense of future opportunity. Opportunity is a very difficult thing to measure, and because of this the men in grey suits tend to ignore it; if an organisation cuts costs and costs alone they eventually erode that company's ability to make and money, this is a long drawn out process and is hard to see happening until it is too late. In the same way, Blizzard could find themselves in the position of having a disenfranchised customer base, who up sticks and jump to another game where all of the content is new to them.
The flip side of the coin is actually two fold, firstly, a lot of the players who've been around the block and look back to Vanilla WOW with a certain fondness (despite all of its failings that we've all conveniently forgotten) the chance to run those early instances again, with an added bit of spice is quite appealing. But also, for those players who never played in the days of Vanilla WOW, and there are lots, all of these instances will be new (or very nearly new) to them.
I'm undecided as to whether it's actually a good idea or not, and I suppose the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. I suppose the trick for Blizzard to achieve success with this is balance. Mixing desirable old content with enough new content to attract new and old players alike without giving the impression of the stale gum Larisa refers to for those who've been there before. My fondest raiding memories of WOW are in the days of Molten Core, and Zul'Gurub, but actually thinking about it now, you can compare it to that old flame from school that you never quite got over, as memory fades the downsides are forgotten and the good memories highlighted. Just as in the days of progress raiding in MC, it was mainly fun, but quite often an organisational nightmare which took at least 30 minutes to set up, and 15 minutes per wipe to organise which turned into a monotonous, soul destroying, grind as people geared up for Nax. In the same way, when you really think about it, the old flame was a phsyco bitch from hell and you're well shot of her…. But that's nostalgia for you…
From the limited information which has been released, I'm thinking (or is it hoping?) Blizzard might have got the balance right, they seem to be following their tried and tested model of opening up end content to the masses, just in a different way, this time converting old end content to new 5 man stuff. I like the idea (I think) of the higher ilvl requirement which makes for a heroic-heroic of sorts. I just hope, I mean really hope, that this isn't simply the accountants standing behind the game designers, with their clipboards, ready to pounce on any though of innovation which isn't focussed at maximising short term profits for the shareholders. Old content is fine, so long as it's innovated around, taking the best of the old world content and building on that, so long as this is done in addition to new content and not instead of new content, and for the love of the children, please not all of the old content; there are some things that are best left forgotten (LBRS anyone?).
I'd never really considered myself an altoholic, yes I played alts, but I'd never really got into multiple toons in a big way. Throughout WOW I've generally had 3 characters at the top level, be it 60, 70, 80 or 85, generally one as a gatherer primarily and the others two as my main play-things, one which was my primary raider the other as my alt runner.
I've tended to have a play with other classes in the past, but nothing too serious, I levelled a warrior to level 60 to have a go at tanking, but didn't really like it, then Death Knights came along and he became my tank and gatherer, so the warrior got neglected, stuck in the outlands at level 63. Anyway, I was doing a little house keeping over the weekend, clearing crap out of bags and seeing if I had any spare bank space when I realised I had a character in every class but Shaman! Most were in the 40's or there abouts, those of you who've been reading regularly will know I've been levelling a druid which is now getting on for 65, I remember playing around on a Paladin about the time of TBC getting to 50 odd, and then I spotted my hunter, I didn't even know I had a hunter!?! Its level 63 SIXTY THREE!!! How can I forget levelling a toon through 63 levels?
Quite bizarre really; so it seems I am an altoholic, I even created a level 1 Shammy just to complete the set… there we go, I've admitted it, the first step on the road to recovery is admitting there's a problem after all…
I wonder how many alts the average is and how many of those are 85 or regularly active, I suppose only Blizzard knows the answer. I've found my alts incredibly useful for a number of reasons, primarily, for trade skills, I use one alt to collect stuff, one to enchant and inscribe and my main for alchemy and gem crafting which works well for me. In the past when I've been raiding, and didn't need the gear on my main the primary alt of the moment was my 'fun' player who'd do the 5 mans and alt-raids etc. I've also previously used an alt as a sanity character back when I was actively raiding and a GM, sticking it in the guild so I could keep an eye on guild chat and log over if there was a run I was interested in happening but just kick back and relax a bit more. As far as most of the guild were aware this was just a casual member so I didn't get the constant questions about DKP, when the next raid was, randoms whispering asking for a guild invite etc. etc. More recently my alts have been my go-to characters when I'm time constrained, you need at least an hour for a random heroic these days, probably more like two if you get one of the longer instances or encounter 'issues' with the PUG… plus the wait time in LFD. So if I can't guarantee I've got at least 90 minutes I tend to either log over and level something or jump into a normal.
I've found alts have been both an important boost to my performance on my main, in terms of positional play and understanding the new dynamics of other classes and other roles (particularly tanking). I've also found they can sometimes be a bit of a hindrance; healing on the druid, especially early instances is about as simple as it gets, little heal, mid-heal, rinse, repeat. With the addition of an occasional panic heal when you've been caught staring out of the window, on a number of occasions I've dropped straight out of a lower level normal into a five man and found myself forgetting about Chakra, refreshing Renews, Prayer of Mending and a whole heap of other stuff. I've also noticed my DPS mashing rotation is similar on my Death Knight to that of the order of mash for my shadow spec, similar, but not quite the same, which has led to me firing off Mind Blasts without Orbs up and refreshing SW:P when there's been no need.
I'm not sure what the point of this post is, more an observational post I suppose, whatever, the sandwiches have been devoured and I've shed loads to do, if I plough through it I might be able to get home early and start levelling the Shammy…
In continuation to my earlier blog on evaluating your SimulationCraft results, this post covers the stat weightings (or scale factors) in much more detail. These are the numbers that anyone new to SimulationCraft will generally be looking for, they are the way you decide one piece of gear is better (for you) than another, the way you chose your gems, enchants, how to reforge and even which buff food and flasks you use. There are a few things to note about stat weights, firstly they are variable, as your gear evolves, so do they; secondly they are unique to you and your gear, this means that the websites proclaiming the definitive stat weights for your class are, at best, an approximation of an approximation – unless they've been calculated with your stats in mind they won't necessarily be applicable to you; finally, and probably most important, the weightings are a reference, and nothing more – unless you are absolutely perfect in your DPS rotations and positioning, your play style will have a far bigger impact on your DPS, use the stats as a framework for improving your overall performance, but don't expect getting your stats right to instantly make you hit 18k DPS.
A word on variability of stat weights
As I mentioned above, stats weights will vary with your gear (and the level of the mob you're fighting) I've knocked together this graph to try and illustrate this from the five examples I made for my last post. Notice how Mastery gains in importance as your gear (or buff level) improves. You'll also notice that Spirit and Hit are useless to me in heroics, that is because I've reached the hit cap (Spirit gives hit with the xxxxx talent). The other weights vary as your stats change, this is why it's important to run a simulation yourself, I'd even go so far as to run one each time your gear changes so that you understand what the implications are. If you're a more serious raider, you might want to play around comparing what your performance should be like with and without raid buffs so that you can adapt your unbuffed gear to give you the best performance when in a raid.
It's been a pretty busy week on my blog, the busiest one traffic wise since I started spewing my ramblings onto paper (well electronic paper). My post on SimulationCraft seems to have struck a few chords so in an attempt to aimlessly chase ratings expand on my success I thought I'd have a stab at explaining what the actual results mean in plain English.
So you've read the idiots guide, you've ballsed up at least 5 attempts at simulating your characters DPS, you've gone back and read the guide again, read the official help files a bit, scratched your head a bit, and finally got some figures that look like what you've been reading on the interweb. Brilliant! You've got a page of completely incomprehensible maths, statistics and pretty graphs that'd look more at home on a PowerPoint at that next dull management meeting you were trying to avoid…
There are some figures that (may) make sense to you instantly; there are others that are best when compared to an average, or a target of where you want to be. If you're comparing something you need a baseline, for this example that's you! (or me as the case may be). For the record, I've run 5 different simulations; one with the ultimate tier 11, 25 man gear, with all the raid buffs and trimmings; one with the equivalent 10 man gear and the same buffs; one with my crappy heroic gear with all the same buffs and trimmings; one with (a slightly unrealistic) all the buffs and trimmings but with the target_level override set to 87 (i.e. a heroic boss), you'd NEVER get this amount of buffs in a 5 man as you simply wouldn't have the classes there required (you're pushing it for a 10 man); and then finally, a far more realistic 5 man scenario with just plain old Fort, Int, and MOTW (a reasonable assembly of buffs in my view), oh and replenishment as you'll be keeping that up at all times (WONT YOU?!?) as it's one of your main sources of DPS. The baseline scenario will be the final, and probably worst DPS(it's chugging away as we speak, so we'll see if my prediction shows me up to be the eejit you suspect me to be).
I'm setting the fight length to 350 seconds (nearly 6 minutes), 2 adds, Patchwerk style fight, and assuming you're the best of the best when it comes to mashing keys and given you (well me) an elite skill level – the trick is to only change one variable (or set of variables) at a time so the comparison has some meaning. As homework, I'll leave you to run your own simulation, with your gear, with a realistic skill level and fight scenario, I can't stress highly enough that stat weightings will vary massively depending on your ability (or lack of it), your gear, the number of adds, the type of fight, and a whole host of other variables, what is certain is the figures are a model (a model, by definition is an approximation, and only an approximation) of reality. Go read about statistical modelling in a text book or here on Wikipedia or somewhere else where stats geeks lurk.
Lecture over, and here we are, remember I'm using me as the baseline, the links to the full reports are at the end, I'll reference sections only, for comparison in the main text to keep my ramblings to sub War and Peace word count.
First of all, and the thing you're almost all certainally here for, the scale factors, or stat weighting s as they're sometimes known. You'll notice two values, a scale factor and a normalised value; the latter is the one you want, it simply skews everything so that it's a direct comparison to your best stat (Int) to make it easy(er) to compare one stat to another when you come to chosing your gear. I'll be posting some specific analysis on stat weights in my next blog so if you're still confused check back and I'll endeavour to confuse you more.
Int will always be best, if haste comes in at 0.5 and Crit at 0.25 it means that Int is twice as good as Haste, and Haste is twice as good as Crit (and thus Int is 4 times better than Crit). Put simply, if given those weights, you have a simple choice of a tunic with 100 Int and 150 Haste, you'd always chose the first one (but it's never that simple is it?).
Next you're at the charts, the damage per execute is a telling chart, if interpreted correctly; it's basically saying for the amount of time you spend casting these are the spells which do the most damage – i.e. devouring plague is an instant cast spell so does the most damage per cast.
Next is the damage source pie chart, you'll notice that mind flay is near the top in all, which seems counter intuitive given the last statement. But think about it for a second, mind flay is your filler when all of the other spells are on cooldown or waiting for procs, you're casting it for the most time, so it does lots of DPS, but bang for buck its lower than the others.
The other thing to note in these early graphs is the mana timeline graph, if you're going oom regularly, you're doing something wrong (or something right, i.e. emergency healing which is saving the wipe), I've heard a few Shadow Priests complain about mana issues, this should never be the case with any level of gear.
The most important graph in my opinion is the DPS scaling at the end, this basically says if you add 100(for the sake of argument, you could use any figure) of any given stat, what is the expected DPS increase? You'll notice for me Haste Crit and Mastery all look pretty much the same, crossing once or twice; for the best spec there's a far bigger difference as you follow the graph up with Haste becoming the worst and then the best and then the worst etc. as you go up. This is because of a whole heap of internal metrics (some of which we know about or can approximate, some which Blizzard keep close to their chests).
Notice on the t11 graph, Hit and Spirit have a scale factor up to 0 (i.e. if your gear was worse) and then abruptly stop giving a dps boost – this is the hit cap. Also notice for me, it's pretty much horizontal (at target_level 87) which means I'm over my hit cap for heroics (naughty me, I'll be remedying this immediately).You'll also notice, if you look at the 3rd scenario that my dps drops, even though I've got massive buffs, this is purely because of the hit cap dynamic, and is a good reminder to follow the basic principles that have been with us for all (well almost if you forget the last 3 months) of WOW - get hit capped first!
That's it for the basics, there's loads (and loads and loads) more, have a read, if there's anything you want me to explain (or make up on the spot) leave a comment, or email, tweet, or send a carrier pigeon. I'll be posting an additional blog on the differences of the stat weightings specifically tomorrow.
Report Download
Scenario 1 – best T11 25 man gear, all buffs, raid boss
Scenario 2 – T11 10 man gear, all buffs, raid boss
Scenario 3 – my crappy gear, all buffs, raid boss
Scenario 4 - my crappy gear, all buffs, heroic boss
Scenario 5 - my crappy gear, sensible buffs, heroic boss
Whether you're new to WOW, been milling around Azeroth off and on for years, or a hardcore lunatic, there's one thing that's pretty much certain you'll have in common; at some stage (I'd guess pretty frequently) you'll need someone else's help or advice on something. This could be anything from not knowing there's an auto-run button, to working out where a quest item drops to finding the best in slot piece of gear for your class, and which mob drops it. Back 'in the day' of Vanilla WOW, you got a dauntingly thick 'manual' which was already 3 patches out of date and after a cursory glance was swiftly consigned to the back of the drawer (I know this because I've just binned mine after an office clean-out during a particularly dull conference call). Back when WOW was new there wasn't much in the way of internet information to be had, everyone was still learning the ropes and it was quite common to see questions in general chat asking questions which would have red hot scorn poured all over them nowadays should an unsuspecting newbie be silly enough to ask. The fact that people now (generally) know the game better, there's a lot more information available on the interweb, and the complexity of the questions mean that they're not as simple as the "where's Wailing Caverns?" you'd see in Barrens chat at least twice a minute. Trying to glean the finer points of DPS rotations from general chat is simply impossible.
I've (obviously) come back to the game and been playing for three months (is it really that long??) and am at a stage now where I'm comfortable, but don't claim to know everything that's gone on since I left and the thing that strikes me is the complete dearth of good information that's out there. Now I'm not saying there's no information, in fact, there's loads of it, my issue is that much of it is out of date, and not only out of date, but now completely wrong and misleading due to patch changes, some of it was never right in the first place, either just because it was incomplete, or a completely incorrect interpretation from the original author. It was pretty daunting for me as a priest, who'd kept an eye on developments, returning to the game to work out what was going on, for someone new to the game it must be near impossible, the learning curve is so steep I'd imagine a lot of players give up before getting anywhere near 85. Let me give an example, over the weekend I started mucking around with my Death Knight, I'd already fumbled my way to level 82 with him, in something akin to a spotty teenager fumbling with a bra strap in the dark, in order to do some mining for my priests Jewel Crafting habit. But I'd decided to give it a proper go, so first up I Google for "death knight levelling spec" which brings me to a site which states categorically that unholy is the way forward, I looked around a little more and found nothing to dispel this, so off I went looking for "unholy dps rotation" and various other connotations, which took bleeding ages. After a bit of messing around I decided that I wanted to do a few instances and I wasn't particularly enamoured with the potential 13 hour wait time as DPS so I collared the one of the guilds raiding DK's who'd just logged on and pumped him thoroughly for information. Turns out all three specs are equally as viable for DPS, the Frost spec that I'd read as being 'the only one' for tanking claim was complete arse, and I set off copying his tanking build from the armoury (after a quick lesson on ability priorities, apparently DK tanks don't do rotations, they have priorities – it looks like a rotation to me…I think they just want to be special). It turns out that most of the sites I'd visited were completely out of date, even though some of the (the tykes) had 4.0.6 in the keywords, it looks like these are auto generated to boost traffic.
So my question to you is how do you get your information?
My first point of call for simple information, the type that has a definite answer is friends or guildies, I'm not too bothered about looking like a nub, so I'm happy to ask in guild chat if necessary. That is providing it's not something you can get from wowhead, I'd be first to mock a "where's the Hyjal Guardians Quartermaster" as it's a simple search, but something more along the lines of "where in the interface do I change the contrast" which isn't such an easy question to Google is fine.
I use wowhead extensively for all quest, NPC and related information
Wow wiki for boss strategies, although I've been incredibly disappointed by how out of date, and badly edited / written, some of the pages are, even to the extent of having to edit them myself.
For the more 'fluid' questions of stat priorities playing styles and similar questions which don't have a 'binary' right or wrong answer it's a lot harder. Shadow priest.com used to get a lot of my time, it was always a bit of a jumble, but recently it's been horrendous, trying to work out what's relevant to 4.0.6 and what's now, whilst wading through threads of several hundred replies is painful. Tankspot and elitist jerks have filled a little of the hole left by shadowpriest.com, whilst they're not focussed entirely on Shadow Priests, they're generally pretty tidy and hold good information.
The official forums or right out, they tend to be full of guff; people who don't really know what they're talking about spouting their opinions as if they were fact. When someone who does know what they're talking about comes along they're drowned out by all the drivel.
And then there be blogs, since starting this blog I've got to grips with the blogsphere, I never really read too many WOW blogs before coming out of retirement, other than the trusty WOW Insider which was a daily haunt of mine, it took a little bit of getting used to, and I still don't feel totally 'there' but I'm slowly building up a list of authors who I 'trust' because of the continuing quality of their posts, I'm starting to feel I can take what they say as gospel (not that I ever would totally take something on board without checking, but that's just me). And even with these blogs, if you do a simple web search you can quite easily end up at an old post that is out of date (and now incorrect) with no way of telling whether it's correct or not.
All in all its rather difficult to find concise information which you can have confidence in nowadays, I have to say I've been quite disappointed with the amount of erroneous information that's out there, especially the occasional sites which are pulling nasty tricks with keywords to get hits; as a result I've made sure my tags are all up to date, and the permanent information pages which I'm writing (watch this space) to supplement the blog musings will be kept up to date (or at the very least marked as out of date).
As an ex guild leader, recruitment officer, raid leader, website admin, raider, and now just plain old run of the mill casual I've seen what goes on in a guild at pretty much every level, both publically and behind the scenes. Over the past three years or so I've been studying an MBA which looks at all aspects of business. This has been sponsored by my employer and has an obvious tie in with my day to day work but I've often considered that a typical guild structure mimics that of a corporation, not only that but the types of character, and more specifically leader match the people you meet in industry and the types of characteristics you find in people which makes companies or teams more likely to succeed, or fail, are almost identical to those you find in WOW.
I'm going to talk a little here about leadership characteristics (I don't necessarily mean an appointed leader, anyone can 'lead' something in a given situation) which make for success in any organisation (including guilds). It's important first to understand what the objectives are of an organisation; you may assume all commercial organisations exist solely for profit, and that may be true, to an extent, for some. But profit for who? The owners? The shareholders? What about the workers? They make a 'profit' of sorts in their pay packet every month. Even customers make a 'profit', when looked at in these terms, they are gaining some sort of benefit from being a customer there is value in this benefit to them (the reason they derive value doesn't matter, it just matters that they do). Charitable organisations aren't really interested in profit in normal terms; they are mainly focussed on helping their target area. Even culturally company's outlooks differ, Japanese corporations, for example often regard future growth as highly, if not higher, as current profit, whereas western organisations tend to focus heavily on the short term here and now, often to the detriment of longer term stability (incidentally one of the contributing factors of the current global recession). So actually when you look under the hood of what makes an organisation tick, it differs wildly. Being very generalistic about the objectives, you could say that any objective of an organisation is to give value to its respective stakeholders. Stakeholders are anyone who has a vested interest in that organisation, no matter what it is; value is whatever benefit they derive from being a stakeholder. For a shareholder in a big company it might be the yearly dividend they receive, it may however be the opportunity they get to turn up each year at the AGM and shout at the CEO, my point is it's down do the individual; as a WOW player, in a raiding guild, it might be the shiny purples, it might be the experience of raiding, it might be the social scene, it might be the fear of not playing (addiction) or a whole range of other reasons unique to the individual. As a leader, it is important to understand what makes the stakeholders tick (and it may change from minute to minute or year to year).
Once you understand what makes people tick (or at the very least what makes others tick is not necessarily the same as you), a leader can set about trying to lead. I'm going to draw heavily from a text book which I read cover to cover for my first ever MBA module, "Reframing organizations: artistry, choice, and leadership" by Bolman and Deal, it's a great read (if you make it through the first two chapters which are truly awful), if you're actually interested I'll link this and any other reference material at the end.
So, you know what makes people in your guild tick, you understand people have different outlooks on life, and you know these differing views will inevitably cause friction at some point, how do you go about setting up your organisation (guild, raid or even 5-man party) to succeed? Firstly ask yourself what does success look like, if it's a heroic party, it might be clearing the instance; it may however be simply completing the daily heroic requirement, skipping everything that isn't necessary, it may simply be the first boss because the party's been set up to get a particular piece of loot. It may be a combination of all three (and any number of other) reasons for each of the members, already you have a possible 15 permutations (from 3 'success' criteria and 5 members) for a simple 5-man, it's a wonder any part s ever successful! For a guild it's much, much, more complicated! Hopefully you're starting to see there is no one correct answer which suits everyone, and even if it did, it would change so frequently you'd tear your hair out. All you can hope to do is abstract a set of principles or goals which mean success and apply a general framework to achieving that. By abstraction I mean Bob wants epics, lots of epixxxes; Fred wants to be the highest DPS in the guild; Clare whose sole aim in life is to wear the Mantle of Nefarius can all be abstracted to complete Blackwing Decent 25-man by x date. The framework is the tricky part, how do you as a leader best lead? This is where I'm going to reference Messer's Bolman and Deal, they refer to "four frames" of which a leader can use to lead; structural, human resource, political and symbolic. Each of the four frames is better suited to some leaders personalities than other, each has its place and depending on the situation will become more important than others.
I'll describe the four frames briefly, but if you're interested go read the book referenced at the end (it's available to view, in part, on Google Scholar)
- Structural: the most obvious, it's about the organisational boundaries, chain of command and process, there being a set list or blueprint for getting things done. A good example of where this works is an army, in the heat of battle soldiers, no matter the rank, fall back on their highly structured, highly disciplined training.
- Human Resource: sounds a bit corporate dunnit? Not really, the HR frame focuses on how characteristics of organisations and people shape what they do. It's the 'most important asset are our people' mentality, whereas a structural organisation will have people doing things because "that's how it's done" a HR focused organisation will more likely have people doing things "for the love of the organisation" (i.e. their derived value is more than just the pay check at the end of the month).
- Political: it's not a dirty word, don't assume it's the negative aspects of spin and self-interest you see in the media. Viewing an organisation from the political frame simply means you're making decisions to achieve set goals whilst taking account of scarce resources and diverged interests. It's a balancing act of trying to satisfy the most people possible in pursuit of achieving your goals.
- Symbolic: this is often one of the most powerful (and possibly destructive) a symbolic leader can be extremely powerful in terms of motivating people, think Ghandi or Martin Luther King, people we willing to die for their cause. Symbolic gestures too are extremely powerful, I remember a story of a Chief Executive and Chairman (possibly Ikea, I can't remember the exact details) who would share a hotel room whenever they were away on business "to save money" now in the context of a multi-billion pound company, a £100 a night saving isn't great, but the symbolism of the gesture is immense. Similarly adverse symbolic gestures can be hugely detrimental, think about the bad press city bankers have been getting lately for taking huge bonuses when the tax payers across the world have paid Billions to bail them out.
No do something for me, try and think of one example of each of these frames have been applied in your guild, by design, or by accident – is it the structure of officers and raid leaders, the selfless help offered in gearing a member up to raid who's taken some time off or the GM benching himself for a raid because there are more people wanting to raid than there is space? Actually, I've only given positive examples, try and think of one positive, and one negative, and then try and decide whether the person(s) involved acted without knowing the consequences, or whether (in your opinion) they'd weighed up the pro's and con's and taken the course of action with full awareness of the consequences (probably best to keep your findings private, you might upset people if you post your examples on the guild forum – political frame and all that… :-)
If you're an experienced GM, raid leader, manager, or have had any other reason to 'lead' a group of people you've almost certainly recognised yourself in what I've said, perhaps more by accident than design you'll have done things which could be construed as fitting into one of the four frames. Whether you're a GM, raid leader, or just a standard player, take some time to think about what you and your 'colleagues' want from the game in any given circumstance, and try to work out the best way to achieve 'success' whatever success may be.
WOW is a strange animal, it thrusts people into situations, which in the real world they'd never dream of, yet they survive, and not only that, excel! How many people have managed a team of 40+ people? Not many, I've had a reasonably long career in industry, managing a variety of teams, and approached that number in a couple of occasions, but think back to Vanilla WOW I was regularly organising and running 40 man raids, as were thousands of others across WOW. Leadership, more importantly good leadership isn't about being the boss, or necessarily the one who gets all the credit, it's about getting more out of others than they thought they were capable of in pursuit of achieving the organisational goals.
Even as an individual raider in a group of 25 you can have a positive impact on the group as a whole, think about the symbolic gesture of passing on a bit of loot, even though you're top of the DKP tree, for a newer raider who's gear is far worse – the total improvement to the organisation is far larger, but the symbolism of you looking after the interest of the whole guild or raid won't be lost, others will take the example and act in a similar way.
Now the reference – the link to Google Scholar http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=tsFj7wgczvYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=reframing+organisations&hl=en&ei=C9NbTdePMJKShAfJ7OXuDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA
Or the proper Harvard style reference for you more studious types:
Bolman L.G. and T.E. Deal (2003). Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership, San Francisco, Jossey-Bass
