As you most probably know, by posting the guild rules, on June 17 2010 I announced my new and final project The PuG. It is a guild based on completely asocial and business ideas:
The PuG has and always had a busy LFM activity for low level and heroic dungeons, saving our members from having to play with arthasdklol, suffering his chat while carrying his 800 DPS butt. During leveling and later gearing this activity will be very much used. We could also fill lower level raids like Ulduar drake run and such.
We have a pretty good tank-healer-DPS ratio, actually we often lacked DPS in raids, because the rules keep the mostly DPS-playing M&S out. Tanking and healing are immersive and entertaining activities, and many player would happily do it. I don't think there are too few tanks and healers among good players. The statistics are screwed by the swarm of M&S who can only fill the zero-responsibility DPS role so they do that. Keeping them out solves the problem naturally. Also, "wherz my hil lol" and "gogogogog" are unknown to our guild, making it a pleasant place for tanks and healers, allowing us to continue to recruit DPS, unlike the "social raiding guilds" that are permanently full on these roles.
The no-chit-chat rule keep any kind of racist, sexist or homophobic filth out of the official chats, making the guild a pretty good place for female players. This is an unforeseen positive event, I did not expect so many females in the guild, but happy to see them.
Currently we have 149 players (since alts are not allowed, 1 player = 1 character), everyone logged in the last month (as 1 month inactives are kicked), only 11 of them have not logged in 20 days, and 24 between 10-20 days. Most of the members are active every day, despite the pre-expansion blues. In the last week about 20 players joined or re-joined. There are usually 15-20 players online in prime times without any planned events and 5-10 off-times. Such activity and size guarantees fast guild leveling. The median achievement point count is 1800, meaning that most players here don't really focus on fluff and/or new characters rolled exactly for this guild.
Our presence have stabilized the previously pretty starved economy of the server. Now the auction count is around 10K instead of 4-5 and every field are covered. You can buy anything and everything. The same obviously applies to selling, lot of our members are swimming in gold, making the gold-bid raids very profitable (usually 1.5+K pot).
Our focus after 4.0.1 was Wintergrasp and we look forward to Tol Barad and rated battlegrounds. Wintergrasp on our server used to be horde dominion with 20% alliance victories. We elevated it to 25-30 while playing casually, to 40% when we used the addon WGClean to discipline M&S. After the 1:1 ratio was introduced and our members provide 1/3-1/2 of the alliance team, our win rate elevated to 70%. We expect similar results in Tol Barad.
As a personal note: for the first time in my WoW carrier I feel home and in a place where I don't have to either wear the mask of a "freindly heplfull peep" and constantly be disgusted by lolling M&S or raid according to the management's schedule. I can access any content I want without restrictions and find group to do such activities. I play when I want, the way I want.
PS: I hesitated to write this to a summary post, because it is "original research" but it's so important (if true) that it must be mentioned. I noticed that in prime times we don't only win Wintergrasp, we obliterate the horde, despite this time our members give a smaller percentage of the alliance and we have several catapult-lollers. There are hordies who gained reputation for being good PvP-ers, and they are absent from peak hour battles and when I chatted them, they told they were not allowed to enter. The early afternoon battles are more balanced. In total off-hours the horde often wins. I was curious so I went to bed early in the weekend and "participated" in the battles around 5 AM. Except I did not get in (for some reason in off-hours there are more alliance in the server, despite huge horde population on peak hours). The alliance was represented by utter morons who lost terribly. I never got in the battle when the alliance side had less players, the same was reported by other guildies. Then I checked the achievements of the ones who got in and they all had very few WG wins. It is possible that the WG (and Tol Barad) the queue is not random, but favors the less frequent players "to give everyone a chance". It means that in peak hours the experienced players of the more populated side can't get in as the "queue" favors the new players and the M&S, providing devastating victories to the less populated side.
PS2: Goblinish tip for wannabe realm first lvl 85s! If you are on a PvP server, pay huge bounty to players to gank opposing side high level players. Today spam /trade: looking for gankers, who help me level, paying 10K G for 2 hours fun job, whisper me at 11:30 PM. Then organize them to 2 groups and send them out to Hyjal and Vashij'ir to gank those who would level fast.
- Social chit-chat is forbidden
- Asking for free boost, free crafting, cheap mats and other forms of "selfless help" are forbidden
- Gear is distributed with gold bid
- Anyone can form and join any raids
The PuG has and always had a busy LFM activity for low level and heroic dungeons, saving our members from having to play with arthasdklol, suffering his chat while carrying his 800 DPS butt. During leveling and later gearing this activity will be very much used. We could also fill lower level raids like Ulduar drake run and such.
We have a pretty good tank-healer-DPS ratio, actually we often lacked DPS in raids, because the rules keep the mostly DPS-playing M&S out. Tanking and healing are immersive and entertaining activities, and many player would happily do it. I don't think there are too few tanks and healers among good players. The statistics are screwed by the swarm of M&S who can only fill the zero-responsibility DPS role so they do that. Keeping them out solves the problem naturally. Also, "wherz my hil lol" and "gogogogog" are unknown to our guild, making it a pleasant place for tanks and healers, allowing us to continue to recruit DPS, unlike the "social raiding guilds" that are permanently full on these roles.
The no-chit-chat rule keep any kind of racist, sexist or homophobic filth out of the official chats, making the guild a pretty good place for female players. This is an unforeseen positive event, I did not expect so many females in the guild, but happy to see them.
Currently we have 149 players (since alts are not allowed, 1 player = 1 character), everyone logged in the last month (as 1 month inactives are kicked), only 11 of them have not logged in 20 days, and 24 between 10-20 days. Most of the members are active every day, despite the pre-expansion blues. In the last week about 20 players joined or re-joined. There are usually 15-20 players online in prime times without any planned events and 5-10 off-times. Such activity and size guarantees fast guild leveling. The median achievement point count is 1800, meaning that most players here don't really focus on fluff and/or new characters rolled exactly for this guild.
Our presence have stabilized the previously pretty starved economy of the server. Now the auction count is around 10K instead of 4-5 and every field are covered. You can buy anything and everything. The same obviously applies to selling, lot of our members are swimming in gold, making the gold-bid raids very profitable (usually 1.5+K pot).
Our focus after 4.0.1 was Wintergrasp and we look forward to Tol Barad and rated battlegrounds. Wintergrasp on our server used to be horde dominion with 20% alliance victories. We elevated it to 25-30 while playing casually, to 40% when we used the addon WGClean to discipline M&S. After the 1:1 ratio was introduced and our members provide 1/3-1/2 of the alliance team, our win rate elevated to 70%. We expect similar results in Tol Barad.
As a personal note: for the first time in my WoW carrier I feel home and in a place where I don't have to either wear the mask of a "freindly heplfull peep" and constantly be disgusted by lolling M&S or raid according to the management's schedule. I can access any content I want without restrictions and find group to do such activities. I play when I want, the way I want.
PS: I hesitated to write this to a summary post, because it is "original research" but it's so important (if true) that it must be mentioned. I noticed that in prime times we don't only win Wintergrasp, we obliterate the horde, despite this time our members give a smaller percentage of the alliance and we have several catapult-lollers. There are hordies who gained reputation for being good PvP-ers, and they are absent from peak hour battles and when I chatted them, they told they were not allowed to enter. The early afternoon battles are more balanced. In total off-hours the horde often wins. I was curious so I went to bed early in the weekend and "participated" in the battles around 5 AM. Except I did not get in (for some reason in off-hours there are more alliance in the server, despite huge horde population on peak hours). The alliance was represented by utter morons who lost terribly. I never got in the battle when the alliance side had less players, the same was reported by other guildies. Then I checked the achievements of the ones who got in and they all had very few WG wins. It is possible that the WG (and Tol Barad) the queue is not random, but favors the less frequent players "to give everyone a chance". It means that in peak hours the experienced players of the more populated side can't get in as the "queue" favors the new players and the M&S, providing devastating victories to the less populated side.
PS2: Goblinish tip for wannabe realm first lvl 85s! If you are on a PvP server, pay huge bounty to players to gank opposing side high level players. Today spam /trade: looking for gankers, who help me level, paying 10K G for 2 hours fun job, whisper me at 11:30 PM. Then organize them to 2 groups and send them out to Hyjal and Vashij'ir to gank those who would level fast.
18 comments:
The PuG seems like a great place for those who don't look for much social chat in their style of play.
I also despise some of the idiot guild chat that can go on, but i find it worth it for the decent guild chat that goes on most of the time. All in all i'm lucky enough to be in a good guild when it comes to "people-with-brain/idiot" ratio. I imagine I'd feel kind of lonely in game without my guild chat.
But if this sort of thing is what suits you, it sounds like an awesome place to be.
@Sanitee
It's not like we don't talk at all, it's just that guild chat is reserved for the serious in-game stuff, and anything else can (and most times is) discussed on the separate channel, made specially for that. The idea is that you can maintain the level of social contacts you like - you can unsubscribe from "/casual" any time you want. You can't unsubscribe from the guild chat, so it's more restricted.
You actually CAN unsubscribe from guild chat, but then you may miss out on important guild business while trying to get away from the spam. So
/casual is an excellent solution.
The out of normal hours popularity of the BG is interesting. Have you considered that the server might be heavily populated by people in a time zone that suits these times ?
Taking your example - 5am CET/server time is 7am in Russia.
With only one example it's difficult to know if there's any correlation.
It seems to me that your description of WG queue is the one that actually exists. My underpopulated faction used to lose about 80-90% of the time. Later Alliance became less interested in WG, so Horde started to win about 20-30% of the time. Now we as Horde win around 95% of the time. Often we face level 76+ players on Alliance side, though I'm pretty sure that they have enough players at level cap who want to join the battle (on my server, Horde:Alliance ratio is 1:5-7).
Probably if I had more time, I could have finished my "Veteran of Wintergrasp" achievement in just several days, since so far I've seen Horde lose WG three times after the "balance patch" was deployed on live servers.
@Alibra
not entirely true
i set guildchat as shitchat for the guild, people who dont like it can just deactivate it in channel settings, the bussiness runs over officer chat, only requests for pvp/pve allowed there, people who dont follow the rule will be unable to write for a 2 weeks.(Can keep reading though)
Does anybody know if there is a horde guild like this on any EU realm?
I would have migrated to The Pug a long time ago provided it wasn't on the alliance side..
I've tried searching, but can't find anything on the subject.
I might make a new worgen and come join in after Cataclysm, just haven't really been able to face the prospect of levelling another alt up till now.
This piss me off that I won't have internet at my new appartment until Wednesday.
But I agree Gev, this guild is what I could call home because I found exactly what I was looking for and even if I had to buy wow, tbc, wotlk again because i moved from US to EU, it totally worth every dollars.
I very badly wish there was a US guild with similar functionality to the PuG. Especially with the incoming guild perks (which I despise), being unable to participate in locked in raid scheduling will be quite detrimental for me. Sigh...I think I'm going to have to buy my way into some raiding guild and tell them to just ignore me - all I want to do for raiding is one night a week of GDKP runs :-(
Great work overall though Gevlon.
@Spectral: Since you can purchase Classic+BC+WotLK for next to nothing nowadays, have you considered dropping your US account in favor of an EU account? The latency difference is hardly noticable if you have a good connection.
@Spinks: I hope you can join. I'm especially happy to see other bloggers as they could bring the good news to more readers
Some time ago I did 5man heroics with my shaman who has utterly bad gear as I don't play him often. I noticed that he got the invite very often after 10 minutes in the queue (despite waiting time was given as 15 minutes), when my other much better equipped hunter had to wait about the 15 minutes that where estimated.
It's only anectodal evidence, but I do think there is more to the DungeonFinder than pure time waited. WG/TB might be the same.
@Treeston
I thought about it briefly, but I was concerned about potential cultural differences, and I really don't like the idea of abandoning my present characters. On the flip side, if I could talk a friend into joining me, RAF would make leveling entirely feasible.
Unfortunately, I've gone and bought Cata now, and I think I'm too cheap to see the $40 go to waste. As such, I'll probably just wind up joining a big guild on my server (maybe for a fee) just to take advantages of the perks while running GDKP raids.
For my future reference though, do the EU servers seem much different in terms of language/culture, or is English generally the accepted go between? I don't really have the time available at present to go beyond English.
@PuG: I must say I had never a more compfty guild. No senseless stupidity, quite educated conversations and also some humor in casual. Only thing I´ve got to get used to, is that my sarcasm / irony doesn´t work as well in written english.
@now: Server down, 300k auctions active, 25 completed quests and only 1200g left for flying. Let´s hope I did no miscalculations.
Oh yes and a happy Cataclysmday to all of you and the PuG member, since I will not be there for the next few days since hitting raid and pvp average status is now on.
"carrier => career"
as per commenting rules
The discussion thread on old NA WoW forums that was moved from DPS forum to PvP mentioned a character that had not done the weekly Wintergrasp quest was able to get in where a character on the same account that had already done the weekly quest could not.
Gevlon, do you think someone could start up a successful PuG guild on the US side if:
1.) They don't have a blog/audience
2.) They have little prior experience in leadership?
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