Greedy Goblin

Thursday, November 11, 2010

LFM 10 man raiding guild

Are you in a strict 10-man raiding guild that plans serious raiding in Cataclysm? Are you in an arena team? Convince your guild/team to transfer to the Agamaggan-EU alliance side and join The Pug!

Now why would you do that?
  • Due to the anti-leech guild rules, we will never ask you to carry anyone. You can have your own custom channel for organizing your raids. So far, so good, but hey, in your current guild you don't have to carry anyone either and you have gchat, so it's merely neutral.
  • Fast guild leveling. The Quick and the dead (lvl 15), For great justice (lvl 18), Have group, will travel (lvl 21) and Mass resurrection (lvl 25) directly affects PvE gearing and raiding speed. Many other guild talents are saving you lot of money and provide non-PvE related utility. While all guilds can level up, the large ones will be much faster as the guild XP gains are additive up to a daily cap and we can get even more XP from achievements, that will come much more frequently if 150+ people are doing it.
  • Premade rated BGs, Tol Barad.
  • Fast normal gearing via gold bid. If you go raid the first weeks with your 10-man group, you take loot from each other. If you go into 2 normal raids with 5-5 other PuG members, you see 2 times more loot. Of course you have to win them by gold bidding, but since the others are not in a hurry, they won't bid too high. I definitely won't bid 4K G for an item that will sell for 3-600G in a month.
  • Easy to find replacement. Some regular members can't come and you are down to 8-9? You can just grab any guild member and he can do 80-90% of the top player's performance. Much better than not raiding. Your regular member leaves and no applicant available? You can raid with a competent replacement player until you get a proper applicant. You no longer need him? He won't mind as the rules are explicit: every leader can choose his team.
  • 5-mans, PvP and other activities. You come online on Saturday 10 AM, no one else in your 10-man team is online and want to do a heroic? You don't have to go with 4 randoms but with 4 competent guild members. As in the previous point, 80-90% of the top performance is much better than the 20-30% that the LFD can throw at you.
  • A guild full of goblins: there is nothing in Azeroth that we can't craft - for a price of course.
  • Not very progressed server: good chance for server firsts.
Why do we want you?
  • Faster guild leveling: every new member speed us up even more. Not to mention that pro players do achievement-worthy actions more often (without going out of their way), so we get guild achievements (outside-cap XP) faster.
  • It's good to be a replacement. We don't want to / can't raid 4-5 days a week, so bleeding edge raiding is out of our reach. But it's great to be in such raid some times.
  • You want gear fast. You pay well for gear. We love gold.
  • 5-mans, PvP and other activities. It's always good to have some more good players available for doing such content. We don't want to play with arthasdklol any more than you.
  • Your progress will be done under our guildname, making good PR for us, attracting more applicants.
To make the needs of such groups (like voice communication, loot council) compatible with our rules, the "non-guild group" terminology formed. As long as you form your raid outside of the guild chat and calendar, your raid is considered a /trade pug and you can do whatever you want. Of course in such cases the guild won't protect you if you are wronged, as we don't police /trade pugs.

If you are on the wrong side of the Atlantic, I can only give a good advice: find similar 10-man guilds and merge. You still raid separately, using your own private channels, but get perks twice as fast and you can 5-man, PvP together.
-----------------------

Otterlover found a new way of botting: lvl 1 bots are being killed by lvl 3 bots at the graveyard. Since the low levels can instantly resurrect without penalty, the lvl 3 bots could get 2K honorable kills in an hour, getting the 100K achievement in 2 days. He created a video and reported it to Blizzard. Obviously got only the standard "we'll look into it" message.

31 comments:

John Newhouse said...

That video is a very proof that Blizzard really accept bots.

Sue said...

Blizzard are aware of this little trick regarding low level pvp and I have seen people complaining after getting banned for doing it for too long. Unless they already fixed it, there is another reason why they are doing it besides an achivement, which won't matter much when your account gets banned anyway.

Anonymous said...

Yet, Blizzard did nothing with people using 1sec gcd haxx (3rd party software lowering your ingame gcd), probably because they would have to ban majority of top pvp/arena players.

Caramael said...

You forgot to mention Tol Barad :)

Completely offtopic: I just realize why everyone went south in yesterdays WG: it was the weekly quest to destroy a tower. It may be interesting to note that I did complete that quest, even though I was defending the keep the entire battle and never got near one of the towers.

Visalyar said...

You can also use it by multiboxxing so it wouldn´t even be botting (accept the rezz while you are on the "main" character)... ...well you have to stay there all time and do something very boring but, well.

@Sue: would be interesting to know what blizz calls "too long"...

@Caramael: You can also recieve the vehicle-kills from the keep while being south it´s a raidwide share.
I think it was more the herd instinct to be honest. I generally don´t care about questtargets but generally focus on a self given objective (fail there yesterday).
Also I forgot to reestablish my full UI since double-transfer, I usually have the little Map in the lower left corner to have a continious eye on the strategic positions. I noticed that far too late. Yesterday´s personal perfomence would have earned me a private debate with my usual premade leader (would have been 75% shounting).

Visalyar said...

PS: the transfer would be interesting but we still have a language barrier between german and english (would be a big problem for ~75% of my personal favorite companions in arms). Excluding the doubletransfer problem (horde) of 45€.

Anonymous said...

How many people are online in "The Pug" a normal week evening?
Before patch 4.0.1 and after.

Gevlon said...

@Anonymous: about 15-20 when no event is in the calendar. Of course more when there is a pre-planned event.

But also similar number is online off-evening times as we are with very different playing schedules.

Grim said...

The post claims that a member of The PuG is 3-4 times better than the average player. Why would that be true?

Last I checked, there was nothing in the rules about being any good at the game.

Gevlon said...

@Grim: I never claimed that. I claimed that LFD throws arthasdklol in his way. I don't say that EVERYONE or even the average player is that bad. But one out of the 4 others being such a moron is enough to ruin anything than faceroll content.

Andru said...

Will these guilds HAVE to adhere to the no voice communications rule?

That seems an unfortunate case if it's true.

Visalyar said...

@Grim:
the defenition of an average player is defenetly screwd in wow focused on raids. As I experienced, the "average" random-raid member is of nonexistent. I´ve quitted random raiding about 3 month ago, just because of that. I´ve had 5 "bad" raids in a row, where ~10/25 player took 0,5-0,7% of the raids incoming damage. Several members took up to 40% of the damage (different encounters), none of them a tank...

I´ve started my statistic there. The M&S seem to have a pretty big amount in random raids ~55% (fellow serverinhabitants helped me with the statistics by logs, etc.). It´s a lot bigger than in the lfd or bg. That´s just because decent raider often have their fixed groups. Also the mass opportunity to fail by movement and sheer inexperience/ignorance is a lot more massiv than in lfd/bg. Running into a pure /2 raid is the best opportunity to run into a mass of (point of view focused on raids) M&S or newbs.

The average rndm raid player doesn´t know the boss(tactics) and/or has no flask & bufffood and/or has not the patience to learn (criticism) and/or is not proper enchanted/gemmed.

All this is prohibit by the PuG´s rules. So automatically every PuG´s member disregarded of the person´s personal performance is a better raidmember than the average rndm raider by meeting all requirements (well yes in theory but that´s safer than /2).

Gevlon said...

@Andru: see update.

Anonymous said...

I wish you would play on a US server =/

Grim said...

@Gevlon
"You can just grab any guild member and he can do 80-90% of the top player's performance. [..] 80-90% of the top performance is much better than the 20-30% that the LFD can throw at you"

Even if "LFD can throw at you" is meant as merely a possibility of getting a moron, there is still the claim that any member of The PuG will do 80-90%. The rules might weed out the most egregious cases of moronity, but that does not ensure any skill at or knowledge of the game.

Anonymous said...

"No alts" rule is going to pose quite a few problems, as well.

Anonymous said...

A quick question: May a Pug Guild Member be allowed to have a secondary char in the Pug to capitalize on Perks such as G-mail (Instant mail between guild members, usefull for secondary Mail-bank chars), Working Overtime (+10% to level-up skills, usefull for profession-alts) or Bountifull Bags (Gain more stuff when using gathering professions)?

Also, how do you plan to use the gold collected from the Cash Flow perk (5/10% addition money when looting that goes to the Guild Bank)?

Gevlon said...

@Grim: as Visalyar said, I have yet to meet with an "average" player. The average is formed from two groups, competent players who read tactics, gem, enchant, and utter morons. If you kick the latter, only the former remains.

Lima said...

My 10-man guild killed LK on 10m HM a few weeks ago for the first time, without using voice comms.
If everyone is fairly alert and knows what to do, it's not needed that much.

The guild just had its 5-year birthday so I doubt we'll go anywhere though.

Anonymous said...

About the botting issue: Blizzard sure seems to know the problem, I think I saw a blue post on a thread about that..

Found only picture link: http://www.wowbash.com/images/1288626253.jpg

Andru said...

Well, there is something you can do.


If you assume the PuG is a superset over several smaller guilds, it could work this way.

Your plan is to prove that the PuG is a rational virtual 'server community' so to speak.

In it, you have the guilds that set their own rules.

However, if those small guilds want to make cross-guild raids (by taking people from other guilds, or unaffiliated players), they'd be 'public' raids, so they have to obey the PuG general rules.

If they go with an full in-guild group, they have the liberty of setting their own rules. Much like two of your guild members can start a 'megan fox tits' channel and lol in it without any repercussion.

What do you think?

Shobbs said...

Pardon my ignorance, and maybe I could find this information elsewhere, but can US players create a character on Agamaggan simply by selecting it from the "choose realm" list or is that simply Agamaggan-US as opposed to Agamaggan-EU?

tl;dr: is there a dedicated set of realms for US and EU, or are they all readily available?

Tobold said...

What about guild ranks to differentiate people of different guilds? That's also an idea. Or you could draft the best players into the PuG's core.

What do you think?

Fex said...

EU realms & US realms don't merge, realm's have two instances, an eu one and an us one. At least every older realm works like that. Lightenings Blade for instance exists in the US and the EU with different players on both realms. The choice of realm depends on the installed software, To migrate to an US realm you'd have to get your hands on the US software, wich will not work with your EU login code's ( tested aprox 6 months ago )

On a second note i'm not even sure if character migration to an US realm is allowed from EU realms you'd have to check on that aswell.

Ferdinand said...

I haven't read anything on the subject recently, so this may have been changed, but isn't there a fairly low cap on the number of members who can contribute to guild leveling?

John Newhouse said...

@Shobbs and Fex: Since I moved from US to EU to be in Gev's guild, here some answer to your questions:

1) EU and US servers are not the sames. You have access to the servers based on the software (EU or US version) of WoW. So if you move from US to EU, you will have to buy vanilla wow, tbc, wotlk and cataclysm all over again.

2) You can't transfer from EU to US (and vice versa) your characters. (Was the hardest part, considering I had already had 12 level 80 on US)

Anonymous said...

@Ferdinand
last i checked it was removed,
i went the same route as gevlon and started heavy recruiting last week. The more the merrier in terms for guild leveling.

AKA Tha Schust said...

Is it necessarily an issue if the ten-strict guilds use voice communication for their raids? Technically speaking they would anyways; as long as they adhere to The PuG rules when in PuG raids (as opposed to their own ten-man raids), then wouldn't it be worth the tradeoff to incorporate them for guild leveling?

Kuckuck said...

Similar to the subject of completing quest objectives without active participation:

I feel I should mention something that I discovered in a LFD group before the patch that added the deserter debuff upon leaving a group.

Simply, we engaged the final boss (I hit it a few times) and then I left group. I instantly queued up for another LFD and got in instantly as I was a tank. A few moments after we buffed up and said hello I recieved the emblems for killing the boss from the other group.

I'm not sure if this information is useful anymore because I haven't had time to play at all since then.

Taemojitsu said...

A lot of the better raiders are no longer present in the World of Warcraft. See Death and Taxes as mentioned before in an (unpublished) comment.

If you need to suggest that hardcore raiders need to be dishonest to achieve progression while a part of The PuG, maybe you should consider the reason for wanting to attract such a component to the guild.

A bit off topic but I wonder how WotLK is doing in China. You can see a bit on the CN-Armory, but most English speakers who are knowledgeable don't bother to talk about it. How does it feel to encounter content that is obsolete before you have even had the chance to attempt it... at least according to the game design and its developers. Of course the players who went to Taiwan servers are not in the same situation, and the goals of the society and individuals might be different.

Soviet said...

I just moved from US to EU servers to play with my boyfriend. It is likely that I will be creating my Worgen (after I get done leveling my shaman and my goblin with my bf) on Agamaggan.