Raiding Guild Spotlight: Vodka of Mannoroth-US

[WoRBot]

We're back with another Raiding Guild Spotlight, this time talking with Vodka of the US realm Mannoroth.

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[koenigsegg]

Go-go Vodka, my new favorite PvE team! Since the fight between Sk and Nihilum is over. And I really don't care over 25'th november and their progression. On my progression lists they are gone.

[bigity]

Hm sounds like the same crap from all the 'elite' raiding guilds, especially the poo-pooing of making raids more available to the average player. I like when they mention RL obligations they only mention work and school.

[ellessdee]

Sorry Mr. Top End Raiding Guild. You are not paying premium price for this flight. Be happy you get to be the first. If that isn't enough.... then idk.

[Tom Phoenix]

Before these changes, knowing how to set up groups properly and making sure all of your raiders were receiving adequate raid buffs was just as important as having a roster full of exceptional players and a solid strategy when working on a new encounter.

As I said at the last guild spotlight, it was more of a requirement then a choice. If anything, it was an illusion of choice. Plus, some setups will still be better for certain fights. Therefore, theorycrafters can still calculate the best setups for certain encounters.

But as in the last guild spotlight, nice interview otherwise.

[Misuteri]

I wonder if Blizzard will ever get the hint that balancing PVP and PVE is impossible and WoW is NOT a competitive game. Every top guild tells them that, every top team is a cookie cutter combo, some classes are unrepresented in competitive play all together. No such concept as a "counter class" should exist in a competitive setup. Imagine a Madden tournament where the worst Packers team could beat the best Viking team just because they were ruled to be the Vikings counter team.

Yet they keep screwing over everybody that plays this game, PVP and PVE alike, in an attempt to successfully "class balance".

Resilience ruined this game and if you don't believe me go play a 49 or 59 twink where every class has a chance to do exceptionally well and even a warlock can destroy a rogue 1v1 better than 50% of the time, try that at 70 or 80.

Its no wonder I am letting my subscription lapse 11/30. I got too tired of the big old $#it sandwhich and told it was the best thing going.

[Tom Phoenix]

To be fair, Blizzard has not been completely unsuccessful in that endavour. This is not to say that the game is balanced, but it certainly is a lot more balanced now then it was in the original.

Can WoW ever be balanced? Now that is a universal question, but one thing is certain. Blizzard is not willing to give up on it.

[Erz]

I'm also getting a bit tired of the number of times I've heard complaints about Blizzard in some way damaging the game by making it more accessible (I chose accessible rather than casual as that's somehow become a perjorative term amongst certain sections of the wow community).

In a situation where raid stacking is not only optimal but almost mandatory then any guild that either can't recruit well enough geared and high enough quality players of X Class, or who simply don't like benching their friends just because they're the wrong sort of healer/tank/dps for a given fight is going to suffer. That's not a measure skill, it's just an arbitrary and uneccessary limitation on the progress of those guilds.

With regards to difficulty of Naxx I can only reiterate what other people have already said. The vast majority of players missed out on the fantastic raid instance that was Naxx 40 and many those of us who did make it inside regret that we were unable to see the whole thing; Blizzard have openly admitted that Naxx is designed to be extremely easy and I suspect that's aimed towards showing off one their best bits of design to whole community.

If the 1% at the top are breezing through the next tier on the first reset then we might have something to worry about but until then, I've got some unfinished business with KT to sort out.

[Pepperwolf]

i'm starting to dislike a lot "hardcore-semi-non-life" guilds ..

it's funny that they're not even like 1-2% of the player base, and still they think that changing something they don't like/agree, is wrong. Sure, because it's wrong to think in the other 99% of the players that have something else to do in life, or even the ones that have a lot of free time, but prefer to ENJOY THE FUCKING GAME.

yesterday I was doing dragonblight quests and I said to my friend "the game already paid itself, those quests pre-wrathgate, dragons fight, and the taunka coming to the horde are just epic" ...

and i think it's even funnier when i read in the world firsts thread some days ago, when people said "it's ok to sacrifice everything else for the sake of getting world firsts if that's your choice" ... and today i read something like this on BBC. ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/portuguese/repo...ogame_dg.shtml my language version, so i have no clue where is this news on the uk version)

... blablabla the swedish 15y old kid gathered 6 friends in his house on saturday to play the new version of the game World of Warcraft, blablablabla ... they played all day and continued playing during the night, barely eating something in front of the computer. Somewhere around 2h am. the kid suffered convulsions and blabla, after playing for more than 24h ..

go go mrs. world firsts

[Revenançe]

One question that should have been asked is why is the name not capitalized. Not gonna lie it looks really fucking tacky. It doesnt matter how successful you are if you look unprofessional, in my opinion. Im sure alot of people would say "it doesnt matter its a game" but clearly it does if you your entire guild is rushing through leveling just to clear end-game content.

Let's face it no one cares if you got 5th US first or world fifth for that matter. There are "no points for second place". 1 year from now the only people that will care is an entire guild more happy to be in 10th place than anyone else. So much for aspirations. In a year, the only thing that people will truly remember is server first but perhaps the denizens on server have already resigned themselves to being second best.

If I could ask a vodka member or any other "hardcore" guild one thing it would be: "Now that you have sped through the quests in Northrend and sped through through end-game content what are you going to do now aside from farm seemingly old content and compete for glad titles?"

[spoohne]

Originally Posted by Revenançe

One question that should have been asked is why is the name not capitalized. Not gonna lie it looks really fucking tacky. It doesnt matter how successful you are if you look unprofessional, in my opinion. Im sure alot of people would say "it doesnt matter its a game" but clearly it does if you your entire guild is rushing through leveling just to clear end-game content.

Let's face it no one cares if you got 5th US first or world fifth for that matter. There are "no points for second place". 1 year from now the only people that will care is an entire guild more happy to be in 10th place than anyone else. So much for aspirations. In a year, the only thing that people will truly remember is server first but perhaps the denizens on server have already resigned themselves to being second best.

If I could ask a vodka member or any other "hardcore" guild one thing it would be: "Now that you have sped through the quests in Northrend and sped through through end-game content what are you going to do now aside from farm seemingly old content and compete for glad titles?"

I haven't quite hit 80 yet, but i can probably guess that most of my guildies will continue to run heroics, and await new content, playing casually until the new dungeon hits. I honestly don't understand the people who say we are 'no-lifers'. We took 2 days to get the dread of leveling out of the way, and continue to play the game like everyone else.

When new content comes out, we raid for 3-4 weeks hardcore(7 days a week), and once a dungeon is on farm, we only have to play about 3-4 hours for 2 days. If you do the math, the average guild will spend MUCH more time in a dungeon than we do. We just spend a bulk of our time upfront, because we can.

[beho]

It's cool that we're getting some insight into the hardcore world-first competitive guilds, but I have to agree that some balance here would be nice and an interview with some less hard core guilds talking about how they solve real in-game problems would be nice.

The kinds of things we run into as middle-of-the-road guilds that I'd like to see people interviewed and cover are things like:

Dealing with unskilled players - Tell us a story where you've managed to take a n00b tard and turn them into a great player, or on the other side how did you identify a player so completely hopeless that they'd never help you progress.

Dealing with ego - You've got a guy who's exceptionally good and knows it, but uses it to belittle the guys around him. Do you address it directly or let him go for the good of the group?

Recruitment - How do you attract good players and keep them interested while trying to get from the critical 5 to 10 an 10 to 25 stages?

Sitting People Out - How do you handle the in-between stages where you have more people logged on than you can bring to a raid? Who goes and who stays?

Leadership - Do you play the "Angry Tank" role and push people through fear and intimidation, or do you play the Diplomat who can talk people into doing better?

Loot Distribution - Are you using Loot Council, Weakest Equip, Random Roll or DKP and why? Have you switched from one or another at any point in time for any reason?

Life Balance - How many raid days is acceptable for content progression while ensuring you're giving the guys/girls enough downtime to live normal lives? Is 1 raid day a week possible to see everything?

Roll Roulette - Core raiders come and go leaving gaping holes in roles (this was really bad in BC), I suspect LK hasn't fixed this totally so how do you deal with massive and disruptive role changes, recruit, overstocked roster or respec/reroll?



I'm going to go out on a limb here and say these are problems 99% of us face in raiding guilds, not necessarily content locks, gear checks and world-first problem solving issues (Admit it -- most of you just crack open WoWWiki to find boss strats!). Get some guild leaders in here to talk about how they handle these issues for your next installment please

[Eulo]

Originally Posted by beho

It's cool that we're getting some insight into the hardcore world-first competitive guilds, but I have to agree that some balance here would be nice and an interview with some less hard core guilds talking about how they solve real in-game problems would be nice.

The kinds of things we run into as middle-of-the-road guilds that I'd like to see people interviewed and cover are things like:

Dealing with unskilled players - Tell us a story where you've managed to take a n00b tard and turn them into a great player, or on the other side how did you identify a player so completely hopeless that they'd never help you progress.

Dealing with ego - You've got a guy who's exceptionally good and knows it, but uses it to belittle the guys around him. Do you address it directly or let him go for the good of the group?

Recruitment - How do you attract good players and keep them interested while trying to get from the critical 5 to 10 an 10 to 25 stages?

Sitting People Out - How do you handle the in-between stages where you have more people logged on than you can bring to a raid? Who goes and who stays?

Leadership - Do you play the "Angry Tank" role and push people through fear and intimidation, or do you play the Diplomat who can talk people into doing better?

Loot Distribution - Are you using Loot Council, Weakest Equip, Random Roll or DKP and why? Have you switched from one or another at any point in time for any reason?

Life Balance - How many raid days is acceptable for content progression while ensuring you're giving the guys/girls enough downtime to live normal lives? Is 1 raid day a week possible to see everything?

Roll Roulette - Core raiders come and go leaving gaping holes in roles (this was really bad in BC), I suspect LK hasn't fixed this totally so how do you deal with massive and disruptive role changes, recruit, overstocked roster or respec/reroll?



I'm going to go out on a limb here and say these are problems 99% of us face in raiding guilds, not necessarily content locks, gear checks and world-first problem solving issues (Admit it -- most of you just crack open WoWWiki to find boss strats!). Get some guild leaders in here to talk about how they handle these issues for your next installment please

Thanks for the feedback. We'll keep that in mind in the future

[Narwal]

All guilds deal with the same issues.

A hardcore raiding guild has people that sit out. We have tryouts who don't make the cut and we have to inform them politely that they haven't made the raid team. There is alot of social complexity to a raiding guild just like any other guild.

What you, as a guild, have to do is to state your vision and your goals. You have to adhere to them. When you recruit, you have to bring in players that share the vision and the goals of the guild. This means, if you're a casual guild, don't recruit the player that wants to be hardcore. He/she will cause problems when you aren't what he/she expected and it will break harmony within the guild.

Many hardcore raiders have very similar backgrounds. They wanted to raid with players who had the same dedication and skill level as them. It's this similarity that bonds them closer than most other guilds. The problem that I see with less hardcore guilds (casual if you will) is that they don't have a vision or a goal. The members are often all of different skill levels and all have different reasons for playing and different goals in game.

If the guild sticks to it's goals, and those goals are clearly stated, you will get the recruits of the types of players you want. You just have to remember, it takes time to build a guild. You have to be rigorous with applicants to make sure they are what they say they are. Members in a guild will appreciate that you are recruiting the types of players that you say you will. That will keep them loyal.

Fix that, and you'll have a sustained guild.

[beho]

Originally Posted by Narwal

All guilds deal with the same issues.

I agree, but I think many of them deal with the issues in different ways. The questions I proposed would bring out that uniqueness in the interview process. Otherwise the interview makes you guys sound just like the previous hard core guild that was interviewed.