H2O Dunham
04-21-2010, 10:16 PM
This is something that a friend told me about and I thought it is better to learn from someone that has been through something, than to repeat it.
So here is the premise.
The only thing that really changes in this game, are the players.
When new content is released, so is new gear. So the new goal shouldn't be just to clear the tier, it should be clear the tier with a higher relative ranking.
I know people look to gear in the hopes that we can do more difficult encounters. This idea isn't even backwards, it is just wrong.
The theory is that we all have things we can improve upon. I know that many of you think that your only limiting factor is gear.
This idea is wrong.
You are wrong.
I don't care who you are.
Quit being bad.
That's something I say a lot. But blanket general statements like this are useless.
To not work on your play style, or interface, or rotation, or whatever while other people are always striving to be better, is pretty selfish.
We don't intend to recruit better players, but if someone has grown stagnant, and cannot improve past where they are - that's something worth replacing.
The greatest progression that we can see with our guild is in ourselves.
YOU have to get better if WE are going to get better.
Excuse me while I erect my personal soap box.
I view world of warcraft much like I view musical performance. I have played an orchestral wind instrument for ten years now, and the most common trait of under-performing musicians is an obsession with the physical instrument they play. Much like gear in this game, the quality of one's instrument is an upper-limit determining factor. However, the limit imposed by the horn is usually far beyond the player's abilities. Regardless, simply because that is the one limiting factor beyond their control, they will blame it for their poor performance. Ultimately, if your goal is to be a good player, you must push yourself without regard to external limitations. Part of being a musician, much like being a good raider, is the work of self-improvement itself- the act of performing in any situation is one of organic growth and artistic expression, not a static "achievement" which rewards immediate satisfaction.
To improve your ability to perform music, you must practice. The thing that makes a cellist a virtuoso is not their Stradivarius- it is the five to six hours of practicing they have done six days a week for the last thirty years. To be a good musician, you must therefore enjoy the glory of the performance at least as much as you love the work of music making. Similarly, to be a good raider I have found that one must not only enjoy killing the boss but you must enjoy progressing toward the kill. My attitude toward this game today is completely different from my attitude in Burning Crusade, primarily because back then I saw the game as the racking up of accomplishments and not the act of self improvement itself. Today, I enjoy progression itself no matter if a kill is even within sight. While the raid has significantly improved in terms of it's "raiding attitude" in the last year, it is evident that attitude and raiding philosophy remain serious issues. There was no reason that we wiped so many times in TOGC two weeks ago, beyond our own lack of drive and desire. It was a situation where I could easily tell apart pulls where the raid felt apathetic to a kill and pulls where the raid cared, because when we cared bosses died.
Part of being a good performer is taking care of, and caring for, your instrument. Raiding toons are the instruments we play when we raid. The concept extends from your character itself in the game, to your user interface, to your operating system environment, to your hardware. Use the best hardware you can. Reformat your computer periodically. Take care not to needlessly increase your latency with hyperactive and needless addons. Maximize your character's upper limits of performance with theorycrafting and proper speccing and enchanting. While these things seem and are second-nature at our level, it's still easy to revert to the old practice of blaming factors beyond our control- ISP, upstream bandwidth, etc. And while these are all issues that exist and randomly hinder our ability to play this game, the fact that there are so many accomplished world-class raiding guilds in existence with kills we do not have proves that these issues are not substantial enough to prevent us from performing at a higher level. I think that easily the largest problem in our raids is disconnecting players. Everyone can do better.
Playing music is as much introspective as it is interactive. When playing in an ensemble, you cannot just focus on your job alone- you must dynamically react and adjust with the players around you in wordless communication and artistic expression. The orchestra comes alive when rehearsing and performing- instead of being atomized, each player focused as a laser on their own part and sense of discrete rhythm, they must communicate with the rest of the ensemble dynamically and react to each others tonality, pitch, and style. The orchestra thus gains a life and momentum of its own that transcends it's individual players, and makes music such a wonderful thing to behold; even as a listener, the creative collective force of the ensemble invites you to become part of it as a spectator.
The raid is much the same animal as the orchestra, only in miniature. When you learn your own job well enough, much like when you have practiced your music enough, the act of the job itself- be it in pressing the right keys or hitting your rotation precisely- becomes secondary to your reaction to the players around you in any serious environment. Our yogg saron progression raids have been a perfect representation of this principal- as we practiced, the actual playing of our characters took up less of our attention then the actions of others around us and we began to work as an ensemble. The volume of our vent chatter diminished. Pulls happened faster. Tolerance for inattention reduced. Just like an orchestra practicing Sibelius 4, we acclimated to the framework of the raid like the musicians acclimate to the framework of the notes themselves and the raid's transcendent communal character started to breathe freely and become successful. From my perspective in the raid, I have observed that we have gradually become better at coming to the raid with the right mindset and the proper respect for each others as reasonable human beings. Much of the challenge in raiding is getting used to relying on your peers to support you and to act on that trust. For example, note that as we started to trust each other in Yogg we started to focus less on screaming at others when we got feared and started to expect the dynamic reaction of our fellow raiders. Taj's 10 man has this feeling of trust and mutual expectation in our progression, and it has been heartening to see it take root in the 25 man- nevertheless, this intangible and essential quality of world-class raiding is something that we must continue to develop and support.
What am I specifically working on right now? I am trying to get to phase three of yogg with more sanity, push my dps on corrupter tentacles more, do more damage to Yogg in phase three, streamline respeccing, and reconfigure my user interface in such a way that raid warnings, global emotes, and DBM dont all show up on top of my cast bar (DOH!). Generally I'm also trying to quit my addiction to being a bad player and increase my general level of focus in the raid.
For my own little soap box, let's have a server history lesson, shall we? I'll preface this by saying that I'm speaking generally and IN NO WAY saying we have these problems, but you know what they say about those who fail to learn from history.
Every guild on Auchindoun has fallen apart because of one of two reasons (or more commonly, a little of both):
1) The leadership decided that they were gods among men and started treating everyone else like they were idiots.
2) Members of said guilds thought they were a lot better than they really were. Problem 1 may just be a subset of this, in most cases.
The examples of 1 are obvious. Conq is the big one. Synergos was doing really well while it lasted, but that's simply not an environment conducive to stability among your raiding core. Once you hit bosses you actually have to beat your head against for a while, people get sick of being told how bad and worthless they are and just stop showing up. Happy Ending had the same problem, as did Traumatize. "But that's how it works in Ensidia/Premonition/Whatever big-named sponsored guild! And look how successful they are!" Yeah, and those people make their living on this game. It's a lot easier to stomach 24/7 criticism when you're getting paid for it. If your boss tells you you're an idiot every morning for 20 years, you're still going to keep coming into work if it pays six figures and all you do is sit at a computer all day. If you're volunteering at a soup kitchen, though, and your boss tells you you're an idiot every morning for 20 years, you're eventually just going to tell him to piss off.
The textbook example of guild number two was SERIOUSLY NOTHING IMPORTANT. NOPE NOTHING WAS EVER HERE NOW PLEASE STOP BEING OFFENDED.
My point is, don't let these happen to you. You're not that good (unless you're Taj). I don't care if you're an officer or a veteran or whatever, there's something you could be doing to improve your playing (unless you're Taj). And it doesn't have to be a gold-sink thing either (though those can't hurt). Yeah, popping an extra haste potion before the pull for 5-10 seconds of 500 extra haste right at the start of the fight might net your 5 more DPS over the course of the fight. You know what would net you a lot more? Not standing in fire and dying. Not eating Shock Blasts or spikes or the 14 bazillionth jump of Malady. We talk a lot about the gold-sink methods of improving your performance, but dropping Enchanting or Alchemy for Jewelcrafting to pick up 2 SP or 5 AP or whatever is not going to make nearly as much of a difference as paying more attention, moving sooner but less often, streamlining your rotation, or changing s a bad glyph out, or even respeccing. Maybe you love Affliction or Arms or Mutilate to death, but if Destro or Fury or Combat puts out better numbers then you're not doing all you can as a player, and for no good reason (exceptions made for special cases like Demo and Balance that bring gigantic buffs that outweigh the personal DPS loss, and for gimmick fights obviously). I'd love to be able to be Fire or even Frost instead of Arcane, but Fire doesn't compete (and well, lolfrost).
The fact is, never assume that all you can do to improve is get better gear or do something hideously boring and grindy like switch professions or make a hundred trillion gold so you can use 2 potions on every single pull of everything including trash (unless you're Taj). if you want to do those things, then more power to you. I recently powerleveled JC because I wanted a Jewelcrafter and it felt like a decent investment, but I understand that doing so didn't make nearly the impact that polishing up my play will make. Just realize that you're not irreplaceable, no matter what, again unless you're Taj (or the only person in the raid with a "Heroism" button), and you should do all you reasonably can to improve your character so that you can contribute fully to the group.
...On the other hand, let's all also try to remember that at the end of the day, this is just a game. No great opportunities will open up for you in your life because of how well you do at it, nor will any doors be slammed in your face because your DPS is a little lower than it could be. Getting upset and yelling and raging because someone touched a cloud or didn't give you Might or had to go AFK because their dog was throwing up on the carpet is just silly, and makes you look more than a tad out of touch with reality (which in turn might actually get some doors slammed in your face). We all have bad days, but try to realize you're dealing with other real, live human beings that may also have just had a crappy day. Guilds that forget this end up quickly crossing over the line into problem number 1 above. At the risk of offending someone, statements like "all disconnects/crashes/lags are your fault" are not only treading that line awfully close, but sound pretty ridiculous when said out loud. Of course ISPs have problems. Of course computers crash with no prior warning or visibly apparent reason. Not even your ISP or power company guarantees 100% uptime; they're called "99% guarantees" for a reason, and they're not required to schedule that 1% downtime in advance at a convenient time for you. Computers may be "perfect" (by which I mean they don't actually just fail for no reason), but they are created by imperfect beings and programmed by imperfect beings and operated by imperfect beings, all of whom have the potential to make mistakes whose effects may not be felt until much later, say for example in the middle of the clouds on Yogg-Saron. Someone disconnecting/crashing/lagging a couple times a week during a raid is well within standard statistical probability and yelling at them over it, while perhaps cathartic for you, will make them feel bad for something that is truly no fault of their own. On the other hand, if you're disconnecting/crashing/lagging a dozen times a night, every night, it is extremely unlikely that it's your ISP's fault, and if it is you should gather some neighbors together for a class-action lawsuit, because that sure as hell doesn't constitute 99% uptime. And of course people will just make a mistake here and there (except Taj, of course). Even Kungen makes mistakes, I'm sure. Because someone touches a cloud once in their entire history of attempting Yogg, or throws out a BoP or Bubble/Sac a little early, or innervates the wrong target does not make them a bad player, it makes them a human being. When they do it for the 14 gazillionth time, then there's something to worry about. Until then, keep your pitchforks and torches in the garage.
As always, it was not my intent to step on anyone's toes or hurt any feelings, but there are just some things we all (myself included) need to be aware of.
So here is the premise.
The only thing that really changes in this game, are the players.
When new content is released, so is new gear. So the new goal shouldn't be just to clear the tier, it should be clear the tier with a higher relative ranking.
I know people look to gear in the hopes that we can do more difficult encounters. This idea isn't even backwards, it is just wrong.
The theory is that we all have things we can improve upon. I know that many of you think that your only limiting factor is gear.
This idea is wrong.
You are wrong.
I don't care who you are.
Quit being bad.
That's something I say a lot. But blanket general statements like this are useless.
To not work on your play style, or interface, or rotation, or whatever while other people are always striving to be better, is pretty selfish.
We don't intend to recruit better players, but if someone has grown stagnant, and cannot improve past where they are - that's something worth replacing.
The greatest progression that we can see with our guild is in ourselves.
YOU have to get better if WE are going to get better.
Excuse me while I erect my personal soap box.
I view world of warcraft much like I view musical performance. I have played an orchestral wind instrument for ten years now, and the most common trait of under-performing musicians is an obsession with the physical instrument they play. Much like gear in this game, the quality of one's instrument is an upper-limit determining factor. However, the limit imposed by the horn is usually far beyond the player's abilities. Regardless, simply because that is the one limiting factor beyond their control, they will blame it for their poor performance. Ultimately, if your goal is to be a good player, you must push yourself without regard to external limitations. Part of being a musician, much like being a good raider, is the work of self-improvement itself- the act of performing in any situation is one of organic growth and artistic expression, not a static "achievement" which rewards immediate satisfaction.
To improve your ability to perform music, you must practice. The thing that makes a cellist a virtuoso is not their Stradivarius- it is the five to six hours of practicing they have done six days a week for the last thirty years. To be a good musician, you must therefore enjoy the glory of the performance at least as much as you love the work of music making. Similarly, to be a good raider I have found that one must not only enjoy killing the boss but you must enjoy progressing toward the kill. My attitude toward this game today is completely different from my attitude in Burning Crusade, primarily because back then I saw the game as the racking up of accomplishments and not the act of self improvement itself. Today, I enjoy progression itself no matter if a kill is even within sight. While the raid has significantly improved in terms of it's "raiding attitude" in the last year, it is evident that attitude and raiding philosophy remain serious issues. There was no reason that we wiped so many times in TOGC two weeks ago, beyond our own lack of drive and desire. It was a situation where I could easily tell apart pulls where the raid felt apathetic to a kill and pulls where the raid cared, because when we cared bosses died.
Part of being a good performer is taking care of, and caring for, your instrument. Raiding toons are the instruments we play when we raid. The concept extends from your character itself in the game, to your user interface, to your operating system environment, to your hardware. Use the best hardware you can. Reformat your computer periodically. Take care not to needlessly increase your latency with hyperactive and needless addons. Maximize your character's upper limits of performance with theorycrafting and proper speccing and enchanting. While these things seem and are second-nature at our level, it's still easy to revert to the old practice of blaming factors beyond our control- ISP, upstream bandwidth, etc. And while these are all issues that exist and randomly hinder our ability to play this game, the fact that there are so many accomplished world-class raiding guilds in existence with kills we do not have proves that these issues are not substantial enough to prevent us from performing at a higher level. I think that easily the largest problem in our raids is disconnecting players. Everyone can do better.
Playing music is as much introspective as it is interactive. When playing in an ensemble, you cannot just focus on your job alone- you must dynamically react and adjust with the players around you in wordless communication and artistic expression. The orchestra comes alive when rehearsing and performing- instead of being atomized, each player focused as a laser on their own part and sense of discrete rhythm, they must communicate with the rest of the ensemble dynamically and react to each others tonality, pitch, and style. The orchestra thus gains a life and momentum of its own that transcends it's individual players, and makes music such a wonderful thing to behold; even as a listener, the creative collective force of the ensemble invites you to become part of it as a spectator.
The raid is much the same animal as the orchestra, only in miniature. When you learn your own job well enough, much like when you have practiced your music enough, the act of the job itself- be it in pressing the right keys or hitting your rotation precisely- becomes secondary to your reaction to the players around you in any serious environment. Our yogg saron progression raids have been a perfect representation of this principal- as we practiced, the actual playing of our characters took up less of our attention then the actions of others around us and we began to work as an ensemble. The volume of our vent chatter diminished. Pulls happened faster. Tolerance for inattention reduced. Just like an orchestra practicing Sibelius 4, we acclimated to the framework of the raid like the musicians acclimate to the framework of the notes themselves and the raid's transcendent communal character started to breathe freely and become successful. From my perspective in the raid, I have observed that we have gradually become better at coming to the raid with the right mindset and the proper respect for each others as reasonable human beings. Much of the challenge in raiding is getting used to relying on your peers to support you and to act on that trust. For example, note that as we started to trust each other in Yogg we started to focus less on screaming at others when we got feared and started to expect the dynamic reaction of our fellow raiders. Taj's 10 man has this feeling of trust and mutual expectation in our progression, and it has been heartening to see it take root in the 25 man- nevertheless, this intangible and essential quality of world-class raiding is something that we must continue to develop and support.
What am I specifically working on right now? I am trying to get to phase three of yogg with more sanity, push my dps on corrupter tentacles more, do more damage to Yogg in phase three, streamline respeccing, and reconfigure my user interface in such a way that raid warnings, global emotes, and DBM dont all show up on top of my cast bar (DOH!). Generally I'm also trying to quit my addiction to being a bad player and increase my general level of focus in the raid.
For my own little soap box, let's have a server history lesson, shall we? I'll preface this by saying that I'm speaking generally and IN NO WAY saying we have these problems, but you know what they say about those who fail to learn from history.
Every guild on Auchindoun has fallen apart because of one of two reasons (or more commonly, a little of both):
1) The leadership decided that they were gods among men and started treating everyone else like they were idiots.
2) Members of said guilds thought they were a lot better than they really were. Problem 1 may just be a subset of this, in most cases.
The examples of 1 are obvious. Conq is the big one. Synergos was doing really well while it lasted, but that's simply not an environment conducive to stability among your raiding core. Once you hit bosses you actually have to beat your head against for a while, people get sick of being told how bad and worthless they are and just stop showing up. Happy Ending had the same problem, as did Traumatize. "But that's how it works in Ensidia/Premonition/Whatever big-named sponsored guild! And look how successful they are!" Yeah, and those people make their living on this game. It's a lot easier to stomach 24/7 criticism when you're getting paid for it. If your boss tells you you're an idiot every morning for 20 years, you're still going to keep coming into work if it pays six figures and all you do is sit at a computer all day. If you're volunteering at a soup kitchen, though, and your boss tells you you're an idiot every morning for 20 years, you're eventually just going to tell him to piss off.
The textbook example of guild number two was SERIOUSLY NOTHING IMPORTANT. NOPE NOTHING WAS EVER HERE NOW PLEASE STOP BEING OFFENDED.
My point is, don't let these happen to you. You're not that good (unless you're Taj). I don't care if you're an officer or a veteran or whatever, there's something you could be doing to improve your playing (unless you're Taj). And it doesn't have to be a gold-sink thing either (though those can't hurt). Yeah, popping an extra haste potion before the pull for 5-10 seconds of 500 extra haste right at the start of the fight might net your 5 more DPS over the course of the fight. You know what would net you a lot more? Not standing in fire and dying. Not eating Shock Blasts or spikes or the 14 bazillionth jump of Malady. We talk a lot about the gold-sink methods of improving your performance, but dropping Enchanting or Alchemy for Jewelcrafting to pick up 2 SP or 5 AP or whatever is not going to make nearly as much of a difference as paying more attention, moving sooner but less often, streamlining your rotation, or changing s a bad glyph out, or even respeccing. Maybe you love Affliction or Arms or Mutilate to death, but if Destro or Fury or Combat puts out better numbers then you're not doing all you can as a player, and for no good reason (exceptions made for special cases like Demo and Balance that bring gigantic buffs that outweigh the personal DPS loss, and for gimmick fights obviously). I'd love to be able to be Fire or even Frost instead of Arcane, but Fire doesn't compete (and well, lolfrost).
The fact is, never assume that all you can do to improve is get better gear or do something hideously boring and grindy like switch professions or make a hundred trillion gold so you can use 2 potions on every single pull of everything including trash (unless you're Taj). if you want to do those things, then more power to you. I recently powerleveled JC because I wanted a Jewelcrafter and it felt like a decent investment, but I understand that doing so didn't make nearly the impact that polishing up my play will make. Just realize that you're not irreplaceable, no matter what, again unless you're Taj (or the only person in the raid with a "Heroism" button), and you should do all you reasonably can to improve your character so that you can contribute fully to the group.
...On the other hand, let's all also try to remember that at the end of the day, this is just a game. No great opportunities will open up for you in your life because of how well you do at it, nor will any doors be slammed in your face because your DPS is a little lower than it could be. Getting upset and yelling and raging because someone touched a cloud or didn't give you Might or had to go AFK because their dog was throwing up on the carpet is just silly, and makes you look more than a tad out of touch with reality (which in turn might actually get some doors slammed in your face). We all have bad days, but try to realize you're dealing with other real, live human beings that may also have just had a crappy day. Guilds that forget this end up quickly crossing over the line into problem number 1 above. At the risk of offending someone, statements like "all disconnects/crashes/lags are your fault" are not only treading that line awfully close, but sound pretty ridiculous when said out loud. Of course ISPs have problems. Of course computers crash with no prior warning or visibly apparent reason. Not even your ISP or power company guarantees 100% uptime; they're called "99% guarantees" for a reason, and they're not required to schedule that 1% downtime in advance at a convenient time for you. Computers may be "perfect" (by which I mean they don't actually just fail for no reason), but they are created by imperfect beings and programmed by imperfect beings and operated by imperfect beings, all of whom have the potential to make mistakes whose effects may not be felt until much later, say for example in the middle of the clouds on Yogg-Saron. Someone disconnecting/crashing/lagging a couple times a week during a raid is well within standard statistical probability and yelling at them over it, while perhaps cathartic for you, will make them feel bad for something that is truly no fault of their own. On the other hand, if you're disconnecting/crashing/lagging a dozen times a night, every night, it is extremely unlikely that it's your ISP's fault, and if it is you should gather some neighbors together for a class-action lawsuit, because that sure as hell doesn't constitute 99% uptime. And of course people will just make a mistake here and there (except Taj, of course). Even Kungen makes mistakes, I'm sure. Because someone touches a cloud once in their entire history of attempting Yogg, or throws out a BoP or Bubble/Sac a little early, or innervates the wrong target does not make them a bad player, it makes them a human being. When they do it for the 14 gazillionth time, then there's something to worry about. Until then, keep your pitchforks and torches in the garage.
As always, it was not my intent to step on anyone's toes or hurt any feelings, but there are just some things we all (myself included) need to be aware of.