Greedy Goblin

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

You must fine the failers!

I don't really like farm raids but people need them for gear and valor points. So we run farm raids. Few days ago luck shined upon me as there were enough healers online for me to skip. So I happily logged off, knowing that the others will clean most of the place without me.

They killed 3 bosses in 1:30. Disaster. When I asked "how much fail gold you got" and the raid leader said "zero", 3 bosses did not look that bad. Actually it's a miracle they could kill anything without fail gold. I mean, what the hell did they expect?

The natural reaction to mistakes of someone who has any sociality left is "not my fault". It was lag, bad luck, someone else, bug, anything, just not me. The fail gold is not only there to compensate people for the fails of others. Its purpose is also to face the failer with his fail. It was your fault and no, it's not something irrelevant, we just wiped on a farm boss, you wasted 6-8 minutes of 9 people by being lazy, stupid or careless. Pay up!

If he, even sub-consciously believes that it wasn't his fault, he has nothing to fix. After paying they rarely do the same mistake again.

What I must do differently is calling out the failer myself. From now on, after wipes I just say "Now find the failer!" and let the others do the job. I won't pull until they don't find it, so they get use to it. Also, any other raid leader will have easier job as he only needs to call "Now find the failer!", instead of doing it himself which needs both game skills and a-sociality to confront someone in front of 8 other people.

11 comments:

Squishalot said...

This seems to be a bit of a habit, and the biggest criticism that I've layed at The PuG's goals. I still haven't heard of a raid that you haven't led that progressed with any decency, following the rules.

Maybe leave them for a week and see how they go?

Anonymous said...

What about an incentive for stepping up for your fails? If you declare your own fails, you only pay 2/3 of the fail money (or 3/4, the percentage isn't the issue). This way you save time, and build up a self-responsability culture.

Andru said...

You omitted quite a few relevant bits of information just to have your 'socials are bad, mmkay' conclusion.

Allow me to shed some light on what actually happened.

1) We had an less-than enthusiastic raid leader. Or barring that, one that is not used to leading. Either way, had a lot of downtime while he fixed whatever it was that needed to be fixed. I'm not blaming him in any way, seeing as no one else was willing to lead at all.

2) We had a DCer whom we were not able to replace straight away. That's another 15 minutes. What were we supposed to do, fine the offliner?

3) Only Uranax, who replaced the DCer knew how to operate GDKP, so that took another 5-10 minutes of dillydallying.

4) Wipes were all different, and no person made the same mistake twice. I thought fines were supposed to make people realize their mistakes. Well, people did, thus an extra slap in their face would have not made them even less...uh...mistakeful.

To expand this: On Unsleeping, we had a wipe on Yellow+Red. People were spread out. Fine who? All of us? What would be the point, the money would have been redistributed back to us, minus the time spent collecting it. Second time it didn't happen again.

Second wipe on Unsleeping, had a wipe on Green+...something. This time, some people spread, while some people ran like headless chickens and connected to people who were spread. Fine who? If no one paid attention to these fails, we would have had contradictory accounts on whom ran into whom, with nothing more to base on than personal word. The time spent watching people blame each other was better used killing him next try.

Then we killed him. Neither mistake 1 nor 2 happened again.

On Warlord, we had a wipe because of 7 bounces. Personally, since I was on the opposite side of the boss, I did not see who bounced it past 5. No one else, not even from the ranged camp knew either. Blame who? The uncaught thief is a honest merchant. We fixed it by agreeing to bounce to 3, and if mistakes are made, we could correct them on the fly. Surprise, mistakes didn't happen anymore.

The second wipe was of Uranax positioning the boss wrong and the ball spawning behind, far away from the ranged camp. This is the only mistake where fail tax could be lifted unquestionably. Regardless, it didn't happen anymore. And we killed him. Might I add, while you were droning on about it in Guild Chat, blaming everyone for a raid you weren't even part of!

Your post today is scathing, but a vast exaggeration of what actually happened. Sometimes, bad stuff happens. And sometimes, people do not need a fail tax to fix what went wrong. And sometimes, I feel, that the time arguing on who did what wrong and asking for fines would be better spent on actually not doing that thing wrong again.

This is, obviously, down to personal impression, but let me remind you that I was in the raid, and you were not. Whatever conclusion you half-hurriedly drew was based on incomplete information and wishful thinking.

-Lyxi

Anonymous said...

If I could make an argument me and an old school raider were talking about tonight, the newer raiders have too much of a problem trying to figure out what they are doing/failing to call out others for their failures.

The only issue with 10m vs 25m that i can find is a a RL in a 10m guild can tell raider #6 to stop doing xxx. this compares to a 25m guild RL being able to only tell 5 people to not do xxx.

The first leads to the dependancy on the RL and the second leads to a dependancy on reading Recount and WoL logs to find out who messed up. If you could teach someone to read the activity, death, and damage taken tabs of those, then you can teach them to find the fail. Otherwise you are depending on them to see 10 other raiders running around during the encounter which most people can't do.

Anonymous said...

Also if it took that long with just a few wipes, clearly there is a lack of training in how to run an efficient raid. Such a way would be there is no reason for a raid reset of longer than 5 minutes (and in reality 2 minutes) from any wipe.

If the reset were that longer than that with everyone there, your really shouldn't have raided in the first place because you didn't have enough players to run it.

Gevlon said...

@Lyxi: last time I checked the rules, being AFK, DC can be fined for 300G. If he pays enough 300G, he may stop downloading porn.

Sum said...

I think that if you want others to raid lead and someone does and they're slow and wipe a lot, you should then not go and write a blog about it calling it a "disaster".

Raid leading is tough work when starting out and like in any new endeavor whoever is doing it will make mistakes. Having the GM and usual RL of the guild then mock their efforts has to be a pretty depressing experience.

Of course, you're "asocial" so maybe you don't care. But don't be surprised if you have no volunteers for raid leaders.

Also the comment about DC'ing because of downloading porn was... pretty stupid. fine your DC'ers if you like but why be insulting as well? Had a bad day or something?

Andru said...

He didn't come back online Gevlon. Can't fine someone who's offline.

Secondly, he DCd during Morkhok, but didn't wipe us, we killed it 9 man. I was under the impression that only mistakes that lead to a wipe are fined.

strutt said...

Not your raid, not your rules. Last i remember anyone can start a raid and have their own rules. Why is it they MUST do it like yours? The raid leader didnt force any of the other to join his raid, he didnt force them to stay.

Tivadar said...

I don't think the find the failer thing will improve performance.It may teach the raiders the way to find others mistakes.It won't fix the raid leadership problem which is clearly what happened at this raid though.

Rindle said...

Now this is exactly why I don't raid with The PuG anymore. I think the "fine (and mock) the failers"-mentality is counter productive. At least it is to me. I am eager to learn from my mistakes. If I realize my mistake or get it pointed out to me I gladly pay the fine and do my best to correct my error. Being social I play this game to have fun and to me having fun is improving myself and raise the bar for what giving my best means.

I was happy to join The PuG. I was happier to raid with you (I've never raided before so I was tremendously nervous!) but I was very dissapointed to find out that the raids quickly turned into emotional blamefests.

When not playing WoW I work in upper management in marketing. In my free time I do rock- and industrial climbing and volunteer as a driver/navigator of high speed crafts in maritime rescue. All of these are high performance endevours, all requiring the utmost of the teams performing and these environments are almost void of blame. We give each other heaps of positive feedback and praise. When somebody makes a mistake we communicate dispassionatly about it, try to repair the damage, learn from it, breathe in, breathe out and let it go.