Someone approached me in the guild, telling that someone (let's just call him Déathnite) does very poor job. I did a quick check on the logs and noticed that he was below "Déathnite" on several fights, so I told him to mind his own poor performance before attacking others.
Later he replied with details about the actions of Déathnite that are not overall damage done related like targeting wrong adds, taking avoidable damage. He also pointed out the huge gear difference between himself and Déathnite, I mean he had near-blue gear and pulled 4.5K+ where Déathnite pulled 5K in 245-264.
I write this post because I've been there. I wrote how gear is overrated and they just claimed that "lol u just cant get decent gear". I was happily sitting over my 5-10K gold and tried to explain people that they don't need to farm and the "lol i farmed a bike u haz nothing" kids forced me to set up an industry to reach the goldcap just to continue my blog.
I've been there when I was logically right but nobody listened simply because I couldn't provide black and white empirical evidence. So it was really bad when I realized that this time I dismissed a good player's analysis simply based on a single damage done number. Back then I was sure that once I've reached high enough to be the one who is approached and not the one who approaches, I will treat people much more decently than I was treated, simply to remove necessary tedious grind from the mankind around me. And here I am, doing exactly what I was hating so much.
However, being where I am now gives an insight to things I did not see back then. Back then I developed an idea with logical analysis and presented it. I spent several hours of work on it and asked for only half an hour to verify the logic. I thought that the dismissal of my work without empirical evidence is simply due to stupidity, extreme laziness or outright jealousy. Now I'm overwhelmed by approaches.
I can't give your analysis half an hour because I don't have half an hour. If 100 people want half an hour its 50 hours. And 98% of those people are bringing some nonsense. Empirical evidence is hard to get as it needs lot of grind. Calculating that a blue-geared resto druid can heal Ulduar takes about 2 hours. Collecting blue gear took about 5 and clearing it took another 6. Thats 110 hours for the whole raid. Terrible waste of human hours right?
But looking at a killshot took seconds and it immediately separates me from the 10K wannabe geniuses who claim that "i cud do it without healerz". I have killshot, they don't. In a perfect world people would give half an hour to a fellow man since they would have all reasons to believe that they will be presented an insightful and carefully constructed analysis. In a world full of M&S, if you reached any position of power or visibility, you are approached by hundreds of retards spilling on you whatever nonsense they happened to conjure up in 5 mins. You need a quick and safe filter to separate diamonds from mud. The only filter can be black and white empirical evidence.
So if you are where I was years ago, having ideas and no one listening, don't get upset, defensive or sad! Start the hard work to get the data. It will take lot of time. It will feel pointless as you are proving something that is obvious to you. But it's necessary since you want the attention of people whose time is greatly diminished by drooling morons. Don't take it personal, we are not ignoring you, we have to ignore everyone unless we want our heads explode.
It's not our fault and not yours. It's the fault of the M&S.
So dear guildmember, please start collecting gear that allows you to get into the top 5. 245 with some 251 will do with your skill. Then people will listen. Until then you look like one of the "4K in 25 man" morons who think they are smarter than EJ. You can't imagine how many are they out there.
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A classical moron incoming. If you want more morons, send more morons!
Later he replied with details about the actions of Déathnite that are not overall damage done related like targeting wrong adds, taking avoidable damage. He also pointed out the huge gear difference between himself and Déathnite, I mean he had near-blue gear and pulled 4.5K+ where Déathnite pulled 5K in 245-264.
I write this post because I've been there. I wrote how gear is overrated and they just claimed that "lol u just cant get decent gear". I was happily sitting over my 5-10K gold and tried to explain people that they don't need to farm and the "lol i farmed a bike u haz nothing" kids forced me to set up an industry to reach the goldcap just to continue my blog.
I've been there when I was logically right but nobody listened simply because I couldn't provide black and white empirical evidence. So it was really bad when I realized that this time I dismissed a good player's analysis simply based on a single damage done number. Back then I was sure that once I've reached high enough to be the one who is approached and not the one who approaches, I will treat people much more decently than I was treated, simply to remove necessary tedious grind from the mankind around me. And here I am, doing exactly what I was hating so much.
However, being where I am now gives an insight to things I did not see back then. Back then I developed an idea with logical analysis and presented it. I spent several hours of work on it and asked for only half an hour to verify the logic. I thought that the dismissal of my work without empirical evidence is simply due to stupidity, extreme laziness or outright jealousy. Now I'm overwhelmed by approaches.
I can't give your analysis half an hour because I don't have half an hour. If 100 people want half an hour its 50 hours. And 98% of those people are bringing some nonsense. Empirical evidence is hard to get as it needs lot of grind. Calculating that a blue-geared resto druid can heal Ulduar takes about 2 hours. Collecting blue gear took about 5 and clearing it took another 6. Thats 110 hours for the whole raid. Terrible waste of human hours right?
But looking at a killshot took seconds and it immediately separates me from the 10K wannabe geniuses who claim that "i cud do it without healerz". I have killshot, they don't. In a perfect world people would give half an hour to a fellow man since they would have all reasons to believe that they will be presented an insightful and carefully constructed analysis. In a world full of M&S, if you reached any position of power or visibility, you are approached by hundreds of retards spilling on you whatever nonsense they happened to conjure up in 5 mins. You need a quick and safe filter to separate diamonds from mud. The only filter can be black and white empirical evidence.
So if you are where I was years ago, having ideas and no one listening, don't get upset, defensive or sad! Start the hard work to get the data. It will take lot of time. It will feel pointless as you are proving something that is obvious to you. But it's necessary since you want the attention of people whose time is greatly diminished by drooling morons. Don't take it personal, we are not ignoring you, we have to ignore everyone unless we want our heads explode.
It's not our fault and not yours. It's the fault of the M&S.
So dear guildmember, please start collecting gear that allows you to get into the top 5. 245 with some 251 will do with your skill. Then people will listen. Until then you look like one of the "4K in 25 man" morons who think they are smarter than EJ. You can't imagine how many are they out there.
--------------------------------
A classical moron incoming. If you want more morons, send more morons!
23 comments:
Good post -- this is the kind of post I'm talking about (last post's comment section). Sure, it is from The Pug, but it isn't just 'this is how content X went.'
Your advice actually is quite good, and is applicable to many things outside wow.
Few examples off the top of my head:
In school, think you are smart? Get the good grades and/or test scores to prove it.
In work, think you deserve that promotion, and you are the best candidate for that higher job? Work more hours, get more tasks done, better quality and more efficiently.
In love, think you are the best for her/him? Hm, not sure exactly if/how it applies there. Not being M&S is a good start though.
Anyway, you get the idea. Someone once said: 'shortcut to success: lots of hard work.'
Addendum 'shortcut to having your ideas respected: lots of hard work gaining empirical data.'
Sometime you come over to my bar, hanging around, telling me that I've changed in a good direction, giving me a nod and a tap on the shoulder. But I'm not the only one changing over time. You have too. I think you've beocme more pragmatic. Like most of us. Because it tends to work better. After all you've got a fairly successful guild now that permits you to raid when you want to raid on the conditions that you like. I doubt you would have had that if you'd stayed fanatic about your ideals. I remember how vehemently you used to argue against using expensive enchants and gems in your gear. And nowadays you stress that of course you need to be gemmed and enchanted, otherwise you're a slacker. The young man with the hig ideals has well...smoothened out a little maybe?
Anyway as always it's a joy to see your critical self analysis. It's kind of rare.
@Larísa: just watch tomorrow's post!
Thanks Gevlon, you just summarized why the whole system of academic "bureaucracy" is in place. It's not being elitist, it's just filtering out the hordes of M&S.
Also, by collecting empirical data you guarantee that you also understand well what you are proposing.
while I won't comment on the M&S 'fault' stuff because I really find putting blame on others in such ways nonsense, I agree with you on how much leadership can change your perception on things.
It's a valid experience that is a good one to make - it's changed a lot of things for me in the game. In retrospective I was also able to understand some of the reactions and 'mistakes' of former leaders I had met before better. it's not an easy job to be the judge and decision-maker all the time; if anything, perspectives get a lot more complicated and the time factor is just one of them.
you can be the best and most dedicated leader but at the end of the day you only got so much time to take care of everything - hence why a good team is so important.
It makes me so angry seeing this mail and how mean it is. It says it is from unknown so it's not even possible to tell the person how wrong they are. I wish there was an easy way to get rid of people who are this mean and this wrong. I guess they only way to get even is to keep selling those glyphs for cheap.
I wish I would have known of the new morons a few weeks ago, I had a real gem. 0/0/71 Prot Paladin....he was dual specced too 71/0/0, this guy was intense.
He was picked up to tank an ICC10, imagine that, but after some time passed I asked him about his spec, told him how it wasn't optimal, tried to be nice and give him some direction and his reply was;
"I wanted a pure tanking spec..."
Correction:
"I will threat people much more decently than I was threated"
I will treat people much more decently than I was treated.
A little log analysis is good for a player. My raid leader was whispering me asking why damage was so low on the outside of hallion compared to the inside. I didn't have an answer until I looked at the (raw) logs. People on the inside can not see outside and vice versa. So he was only seeing P1&P2 damage.
One of the few times merged logs are useful.
@ Yaggle
Mean and wrong is a nonsense social construct. The sender (mail message) was a moron, and that's why he made the MotD. There is no getting even, there is just laughing at his stupidity and moving on.
Mean is someone publicly humiliating you in the real world. And wrong is you bludgeoning him half to death for it.
That said relatively speaking all actions are equally pointless in the grand scheme of things.
This situation reminded me so much of an article someone gave me to read once long ago when I was in situation of always letting myself take on other people's responsibilities. So I had to go look for it... It's called "Who's got the Monkey" - I had forgotten there was I time I used to study this stuff. Published in the Havard Business Review. http://www.meilink.net/files/whosgotthemonkey.pdf
Hopefully the link will work. If not it describes how one's time can be taken up solving other peoples problems and the importance of redirecting these "monkeys" to their proper owner.
Now I must make time to reread this...
I get hate tells all the time. I tell them to undercut me all they like. I have my thresholds set to where I will make money! If prices get too low, then I won't post (if they are ridiculously low, sometimes I will buy out!) In fact, just hit my 2nd gold cap this morning!
So, what happens know? You have a guild member who underperforms. The guild rules say he can be removed from a raid for abysmal performance, which is rather vague but does suggest to me less than 5k. Obviously he could do better, be he could also do worse. He may occasionally do something stupid and cause a wipe, which is a 300g fine, but it doesn't sound like he's doing that every fight. Presumably then he will continue raiding, unless you decide to retroactively change (or ignore) the guild rules.
So what was the point of some other guildie coming up and bitching about him? It sounds like he was trying to score points with the GM against another guild member, rather than spending another week or two gearing up and then letting his numbers do the talking for him.
@Yaggle - I assume the letter writer made a little alt and deleted it after they sent it. If this happens to you, you can still report it. Blizzard has logs of everything said and done in game, and can find the guy easily.
Even if you knew who he was, it still looks better (from a GM perspective) if you don't respond, and report the harassment.
Very Good post. Your advice is true. Regretably in this world of M&S sometimes one just has to ignore everybody or risk to be assaulted by hordes of morons.
Btw, it's nice to see some good ol' "You are ruining the economy" mails again =) It's a classic. One would think they have already learned by now, considering how fast the information travels on the internet.
Congratulations on a very good post Gevlon. I look forward to your post tomorrow!
@shadowstep:
I read what you said about the words "mean" and "wrong" and realized there are at least two meanings for the word "wrong". There is "wrong" as in right and wrong, in a moral sense, and there is the way which I meant it, which is synonymous with the word "incorrect". The sender's advice on proper way to price glyphs was incorrect; that would have been a better word for me to have used. As far as the word "mean" being a useless social construct, honestly I am not sure where you are coming from there. You mentioned that publicly humiliating somebody was mean. I guess it is, if it is done intentionally. I don't think it is mean for a teacher to tell a student they are wrong in front of the whole class, although the student may very well feel publicly humiliated. Whether something is mean revolves around the intent, rather than the effect. I believe the sender of the e-mail who called the glyph seller a "dumb piece of shit" certainly did have intentions of hurting the recipient's feelings. They may or may not have(depending on the person), but the intent was certainly there. As far as the bludgeoning goes, I would completely agree with you that it would also fall under the "mean" category.
This fits in well with http://blessingofkings.blogspot.com/2010/08/gearscore-and-fico-scores.html
In particular, its better to turn down too many (miss some acceptable) than too few (take some bads.)
Basically, the less important something is, the better is the quick oversimplification. Gear score is irrelevant for planning a realm-first cata achievement team. The other extreme, it is probably quite appropriate if you are trying to spend 10 minutes to organize a 20 minute VoA. You just can't spend 15 minutes interviewing 24 people with a 10 minute time budget.
BTW, this is why the M&S pug 6/12 was valuable to the team; more so than a well-run raid that provided lower gear/badges.
@WeekendWarrior - ugh. have you ever been in an organization after the department has been to one of the time management classes. it practically takes a court order to get someone who doesn't work for you to do something. And if you need effort from another department where it takes longer to find a manager to make them provide you the input...
Anyway, this sort of thinking can easily deteriorate into a dysfunctional bureaucracy where all anyone ever does is say "it's not my job"
I'm still waiting for the day when Gevlin finally admits that he's neither a-social nor antisocial.
Yes, there are alot of idiots out there. Weeding them out and locating the few rare "gems" that fit with you and that you enjoy spending time with doesn't make you asocial. And I'm finding it very hard to comprehend why it is that you are so incredibly hellbend on everyone thinking you are.
I love your moron today.
It's amazing how long it takes that invisible hand to "fix" the market when everybody's "buy" button is broken.
and it's so, so, so good to be the only player with a working "buy" button.
@Anonymous
"it practically takes a court order to get someone who doesn't work for you to do something."
So true. So true. But the article was targeted to folks who do work for you to keep them from upwardly delegating problems that are theirs to solve.
The problem is not with the time management classes or other training. Its with the people and the organization itself.
I have years of experience with some of the largest dysfunctional bureaucracies: the U.S Navy, the government. The larger the organization the more layers of management who must create their own empires. But if you study them and learn the way around the obsticles then you can get things done.
P.S. In classic organization theory, Max Weber (circa 1900s) "is usually described as having believed that bureaucracy is the most efficient form of organization. In fact, Weber believed bureaucracy to be the most formally rational form of organization. As such, Weber conceived of bureaucracy as being more effective than alternative forms. In his day administration was based on written documents. This tended to make the office (bureau) the focus of organization. He did not share the modern conception of a bureaucratic organization as being slow, rigid and inefficient. His primary concern was to establish ways of behaving which avoided the corruption, unfairness and nepotism characterizing most 19th century organizations."
But now... it is what it is...
I think you took the exact wrong lesson from this. After all that work put into Undergeared to disprove the gearscoring morons, you're using them as an excuse to repeat their mistakes. It's actually a fair bit worse since at least they don't know any better, even if you took the incremental step of including the recount.
Look, there's a reason good leadership is considered so highly valued and rare, as well as why there's often a high expectation of experience when being hired for such a position. Part of it is having done these calculations enough to have an intuition about what ideas have merit before resorting to the calculator, another is being able to effectively sort good ideas from bad even in areas you lack expertise.
One of the problems was that you basically threw out the baby with the bathwater. When you evaluated your ideas with the goal of making an asocial guild, you also neglected to account for the benefits of those ideas you dismissed as social and lacking value. While the idea of officers and understudy raid leads can be abused as undeserved prestige positions, it also helps to delegate in cases when the leadership simply can't watch and evaluate everything at once. There's some minimal support in restricting alts, but the gamble seems to be that some amazing, astounding leader that can manage everything without support would surface fully formed.
Doesn't seem likely to me. If such a leader even exists, they would no doubt be leery of the burnout that comes with an unsupported leadership position where they're expected to micromanage everything when simply playing a videogame. The system works well in things like naxx and ulduar where the runs aren't mutually exclusive, but you're already seeing some of the conflict that comes with lacking a hierarchy; rather than collaboratively attempting to maximize utility, your relationship with treesome seems to be veering sharply into the passive aggressive.
Re-evaluate how you filter good input from bad. Obviously recount failed you. When I was working on my master's project, my professors would require me to present, in clear terms, the problem, my proposed solution, and a deadline to either implement or abandon the approach. That type of formalized report is the heart of every standardized form used to manage a massive amount of information. This is also why academia requires a huge number of citations and references to demonstrate thought and research. Obviously there are methods out there that don't require resorting to being "social" but aren't a complete surrender of those benefits either.
Re: Today's Alleged Moron
I think the fact that he sent an anonymous (From: Unknown) message to complain was moronic, but as for the content...
"You do realize that undercutting by an obnoxious amount does NOT magically make you sell your glyphs." TRUE. There is no shortage of gold, thanks to 1) infinitely respawning monsters ("in the wild" and in instances) with infinitely deep coinpurses, 2) quests, especially repeatable daily quests, and rarely (if ever) mentioned 3) thanks to the scourge of hacking, every account (and guild bank) restoration introduces more gold into the overall economy. People don't bat an eye at paying 50, 75, or 100 gold for a glyph; they aren't watching the auction house intently for bargains (ZOMG glyphs are cheap, must buy LOTS!).
"People are STILL going to keep undercutting you." Again, TRUE. The nature of the glyph business made management by addon mandatory, else you'd spend hours listing, cancelling, and scanning. Like other processes that get automated, laziness is introduced in glyph selling. A lot of glyph sellers pay no attention to the prices, they just press the pretty buttons and go AFK. The ones that aren't lazy - they undercut, too, because they've planned for this contingency.
"All you've done is fuck up the market for half the glyphs so no one, INCLUDING YOURSELF, will make any money." FALSE. We will contine to make money. But, I defy anyone to show me where they experience enough volume increase covered the price decrease to maintain the SAME TOTAL revenues. Case in point: another seller on my server last night decided, seemingly in a hissy-fit fashion, to put up a wall at 4g. Her (pronoun chosen due to character names) usual approach is periodic hit-and-run single glyph posts (you will see several single glyphs at staggered prices, depending on the number of times she has undercut before the oldest expired). Last night, it was 5-8 of each glyph at 4g, which said to me, "Fine! If I can't make money at higher prices due to higher competition, NO ONE WILL!". And this will be the case, because that 4g was immediately undercut, and the cycle continues. I have yet to see any real data, but I estimate that would need to sell 3 TIMES the glyphs to maintain the same revenue stream. It ain't gonna happen, on ANY planet.
The rest of the mail message was pretty meaningless. He is a moron for whining about it, but it isn't because what he said was patently false.
(Word verification is acting weird - apologies if this is repeated)
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