I was writing a huge, magnificent and pathetic post (that will most probably won't be published as I suck in those things), about the one year anniversary of The PuG. Yes, our guild is almost a year old.
Then I stuck with writing something "magnificent" about our PvE progress. We killed all normal bosses, did a hard mode, progressing well for another and more are coming, it's not at all bad. But we know that "not at all bad" is not enough. We are top 16K according to WoWprogress, even if you assume 25 raiders in an average guild, there are only 400K players ahead our raiders, out of 10 million. Top 4% is really something to be proud of. Especially as we have no attendance or voice communication or more importantly any form of ilvl or achievement check. I proved that good players could be found simply by self-selection according to question: "Can I play without social fun manifesting in false kinship of lol, gz, l33tspeak and anal jokes?".
On the other hand we did not become the standard of raiding. We don't have 5-10K players in 5-10 sister guilds, no PuGs forming in all the servers to use the "magic", the only key to successful casual raiding. Why? Because having 2*4 hours a week in fixed attendance is not something that an average player can't or doesn't want to do. A 2*4 fixed attendance guild with a good raid leader instructing on Vent can and do outperform us. The fact that this scheme needs the selfless help of the raid leader who spoon feeds them is irrelevant as there are such people in proper supply on the market. The hypothetical statement "in a World where no one is selflessly helping others, The PuG would be top 100" is just as interesting as "in a World without tap water Coca Cola Company would be the most profitable company".
Because of this, our guild is a niche guild for two kind of players. One is so fed up with childish (and often abusive, racist, sexist, whateversist) jokes that he is rather giving up on 1-2 bosses and 3-4K better WoWprogress place and come to us where he can play without this crap. The other kind can't schedule his time due to work or family reasons, so can't keep even the lowest form of fixed attendance but still wants to raid.
The PvE encounters are scripted, repetitious. You need to execute them perfectly in hard mode, and with some slack in normals. This can be analyzed, repeated, ordered by a raid leader just like any mechanical job can be overseen by the manager. Self-employed, "free" plumbers are not significantly better than employed or even outright oppressed plumbers. Happier maybe, having more free time, having more money, but not better. The plumbing of the communist countries wasn't bad at all.
PvP encounters are dynamic, adaptive, unpredictable, especially on the large scale. While optimal set of moves for all 2v2 arena battles can be learned and commanded, good luck spoon-feeding 10 players at 3 different bases facing one of the billions of permutations of enemy setups. Here individual thinking ability is more important. The free scientists and engineers of the Western World have proven to be much more effective than the centrally controlled ones in the Soviet Block.
In large scale PvP we could be much more than a niche guild. We could be a world class guild in this. I will much more focus on RBGs than before. This is the place where I could unquestionably prove that the asocial idea works.
On guild achievements we are already World Class, but that only prove the obvious: for huge projects corporations with paid employees perform better than a bunch of sparkling eye volunteers.
PvP encounters are dynamic, adaptive, unpredictable, especially on the large scale. While optimal set of moves for all 2v2 arena battles can be learned and commanded, good luck spoon-feeding 10 players at 3 different bases facing one of the billions of permutations of enemy setups. Here individual thinking ability is more important. The free scientists and engineers of the Western World have proven to be much more effective than the centrally controlled ones in the Soviet Block.
In large scale PvP we could be much more than a niche guild. We could be a world class guild in this. I will much more focus on RBGs than before. This is the place where I could unquestionably prove that the asocial idea works.
On guild achievements we are already World Class, but that only prove the obvious: for huge projects corporations with paid employees perform better than a bunch of sparkling eye volunteers.
45 comments:
>but that only prove the obvious
Don't forget, some things are obvious only to goblins. M&S and socials will tout any successful organization that has volunteers (even if it also has paid employees, like Red Cross) as a 'huge success' as they achieve that fabled moral victory, even if profit or assets are higher for other companies.
What about voice chat?
Because we will get trashed by world class opponents with such a crippling disadvantage.
Your achievement stands on the merits you've outlined and for that I congratulate you.
Where I disagree with you is with regard to the use of voice. It can be a tool used for spoon feeding others but it doesn't have to be. In the same way that air traffic control might be able to guide planes into land if the pilots were simply none thinking drones but it doesn't follow that because they use voice communications they can now employ less intelligent or capable pilots
It is only a tool for communication how it is used can be good or bad.
@Lyxi: voice chat is a disadvantage if people have brain. No leader can see your situation and make decisions for you as fast as you do.
Voice chat is an advantage for bad players who can't make decisions and the RL must do it for them.
@Gevlon
What about voice chat in PvP? As you pointed out, PvP is not scripted, it is unpredictable. Communicating what's going on to the team is crucial.
Calling out targets, calling incomings, redistributing forces on the fly and so on and so forth.
P.S. I see sparkly-eyed volunteers ahead of you in the achievement chart. Sure, your way works good, but that doesn't mean volunteers don't.
Not using voice in RBG is shooting yourself in the leg no matter how great your players are.
@Lyxi: The same goes for us. I can't image how our kickers would communicate without it when one bad kick means wipe.
Yes you can see your situation faster than your raid leader but this does not change the fact there is 25 people in raid and two players making the same correct decision can actually end up in wrong decision.
This was especially interesting to see on HC Omnotron. At first I placed a mark on me and told others to follow. It did not work. Then we set two points in the space and I was just telling which one to use in a given moment. And it worked. Human communication and decision making in large group is really interesting.
There's another reason why The PuG won't be able to outperform a fixed attendance 8 hrs / week guild and that is one of consistency.
- They have the same core team, so farm raids don't have to adjust for who is and isn't there every single raid. And that saves a lot of time.
A lot of wipes are caused by new or different set ups, that require slightly different tactics, or different players performing different roles (ie. interrupts, gongs, heal instead of dps).
The link above to the top guild that doesnt use voice comm was wrong, correct link is here:
http://www.wowprogress.com/guild/eu/ravencrest/Borked
Voice chat is an advantage for bad players who can't make decisions and the RL must do it for them.
Gevlon, you are allowing your irrational bias against voice chat cloud sound judgement. The leader of a RBG (I assume you have a leader) with voice chat is not there to give play-by-play of each encounter, but to call out any shifting strategies based on what the enemy team is doing.
I mean, honestly, just look at what you learned from your TB games. Remember when you called out for someone to kill a siege and then half the team went? A simple key-press would have cleared things up, and can be done while you are healing. Knowing your offense is getting clobbered or not and thus whether to have your own FC kite outside the flag room instead of making a last stand on the cap place - all while healing in the face of the enemy - is huge.
I mean, with your argument, it almost seems as though you are claiming that no leadership of any kind is necessary as long as the players are individually intelligent. I hope we won't have to go over why that's an asinine claim again.
@ Grim: There's nothing wrong with hindering the PuG by not using voice chat - after all, the whole purpose of the PuG is to prove a point, not to excel at any cost.
@ Gevlon: I realise that you seem to be more interested in the social gratification that comes with being in the top 4%, rather than the social experiment that the PuG was. As such, I will simply note that your statement:
"I proved that good players could be found simply by self-selection according to question: "Can I play without social fun manifesting in false kinship of lol, gz, l33tspeak and anal jokes?"."
... is incorrect. Your good performance is also due to your strict raiding rules that prevent endless wiping from stupid mistakes.
Note that this is intended as a backhanded compliment. I agree 100% that such raiding rules enhance raiding performance, but as always, I want to point out that in doing so, you cannot make any claim about your success and the success of your good players being due solely to the asocial nature of the guild chat environment. The job-like raiding rules have played a role in your success as well, and as far as social experiments go, you haven't removed this confounding factor from your test.
"Voice chat is an advantage for bad players who can't make decisions and the RL must do it for them."
Voice chat is form of communication. Communication is a tool for cooperation. This can be one-way, top-down, with a raid leader saying: "defile in 5", "X, don't stand in the fire", "so the tactics of this fight are [...]". Which is indeed spoon-feeding.
However, there are other uses for voice chat. They're more exceptional, not obvious to everyone, but they certainly exist. An example is communication between healers. I don't want to type that I'm popping Hymn of Hope. If I have popped Hymn of Hope though, that means I won't be healing whatever I'm assigned to. The other healers must know this. The other raiders must know that I am not intending to move for 8 seconds. I found this useful on e.g. Chim. An alternative to voice chat in this example would be a macro (at your choice to a specific healer-channel), but this would always be triggered and can create noise. On voice chat, the individual decides to communicate he popped an [in that situation] important CD.
In bad guilds/PUGs, voice chat is a tool of expression used to measure how retarded people are. Not all English accents are equal either.
@ Anon, Ace uses voice chat. You can read their guild rules here:
http://ace-up.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=2888&sid=2ffdb764b711481292c9cdb7adcf95b2
Quote: "Be able to use ventrilo and relevant addons like boss mods. You MUST be able to use voice communication during raids."
@Azuriel: what little "leadership" is needed can be done by pre-set macros.
TB is a very bad example, leading there is needed EXACTLY because most of the participants are utter morons.
@Squishalot: if the raiding rules work, why are they not widespread. I mean it doesn't take much to introduce a 300G fail gold to every guild.
Except it's impossible BECAUSE they are social and punishing "friends" is out of question.
While I don't question that the direct cause is the raiding rule, it would not work without the underlying asocial system.
Your claim is just as wrong as claiming that "illiteracy is not the major negative factor of Africa's development, as in the western countries getting written manuals make the difference. Let's just give written manuals to Africans and they'll be fine"
@Squishalot
I am not contesting Gevlon's right to hinder himself in any way he pleases.
I was contesting only this line:
voice chat is a disadvantage if people have brain
Also, Gevlon is right about that socials will never raid the PuG way. They don't really need to and they couldn't even if they wanted.
I am at practically the same progress as Gevlon, but my guild uses voice chat, a fixed schedule and a great deal of hand-holding.
Oh and then there is constant drama all over the place.
But with a zealous core hardcore raiders, it is possible to get these people to down a hardmode or two, while few of them would survive for a week in the PuG and some would ragequit as soon as some accountability for their mistakes would be demanded (as some actually have done already).
Socials raiding is as much diplomacy as it is gameplay.
It is clearly impossible to compete in rated battlegrounds or arena without voice chat. The situation is dynamic and constantly changing and no-one can be expected to be able to see everything that is going on and react in a way that is harmonious with the way their teammates react.
Mage is casting something bad, you better cyclone him. Oops, your friend kidney shotted him and someone else repentanced him. Now you have wasted two cooldowns, how can you avoid this without voice chat, without an incredible and impractical number of /say macros?
Voicechat is a useful tool that can be badly used, just like any other tool.
Show me your 2500+ rated non-voice arena team and I'll recant.
"voice chat is a disadvantage if people have brain"
So you think that your teams performance would actually drop in RBGs by using voice chat?
You are basically saying that those arena players with 2800+ rating and competing in international competitions would actually do better if they stopped using voice? yeah.. course.. makes perfect sense.. /facepalm.
@ Gevlon: "Your claim is just as wrong as claiming that "illiteracy is not the major negative factor of Africa's development, as in the western countries getting written manuals make the difference. Let's just give written manuals to Africans and they'll be fine""
I'm not making a positive claim. The only claim I'm making is that 'you can't confidently state that illiteracy is the major negative factor when poverty, hunger, disease and other factors exist'.
And I disagree that other guilds don't use a penalty mechanism. Top guilds use a much more effective approach - benching and not being invited back. The only thing that's really 'unique' to an asocial guild is a financial penalty and invite back.
@Morons mentioning arena: arena fights are in a limited, easily overseeable space. The purpose is to kill the first enemy with orchestrated moves of CC-ing others.
Rated BGs have various, distant objectives. If there are 3 people at LM, their communication is merely spam to the other 7 who are not there. Any kind of arena-like communication turns into a white noise of 10 people screaming various stuff all the time.
No one uses voice chat in rBGs that way. One guy speaks issuing orders to the others.
@Grim
Socials raiding is as much diplomacy as it is gameplay.
This is a most perfect single sentence conclusion to the project that Gevlon's been working on for a year. Today's post seems to acknowledge that the a-social method certainly works but it is only different from the social method rather than better.
"voice chat is a disadvantage if people have brain. No leader can see your situation and make decisions for you as fast as you do."
Here I, as Lyxi, and I guess some others, disagree. You seem to be judging voice chat using the same perspective that you use when you command TB (where you do a nice if not great job) and when you command Rbg (where I believe we all, including your command, need improvement).
I believe Lyxi and I see it from a different perspective: easier to relay information, not commands, to other players without having to type and easier to ask for help (when it's needed) without having to type.
I can see where you see the issues and dangers of voice chat but I have to say that I feel you are disregarding the benefits as information gathering tool.
For PvE I mostly agree with you that voice chat is not that necessary: might be useful for when something goes very bad and you try to save from a wipe or for someone to give out certain milestone information, but overall a PvE is "just" a scripted dance - once you learn it and you are skilled enough on it you dance it while sleeping.
However like I've said before: your guild, your rules.
"voice chat is a disadvantage if people have brain. No leader can see your situation and make decisions for you as fast as you do."
Have to disagree on this. Even intelligent players can make bad decisions, or good decisions that are bad in light of choices made by other players.
Simple example: 3 intelligent players are guarding LM. Someone calls inc on farm (easier with voice, too!), all 3 of them make the smart decision to help out farm because LM is not in danger and 3 players is a waste. Good decision? Yes. How about all 3 people doing it? Not really.
But wait, since they're all smart players, they will see that everyone decided to leave and make a rational decision to turn back and defend, resulting in wasted time.
With vent, one of the players hearing the inc could say "X and me are going to help farm, Y, guard LM", not because X and Y need to be told what to do, but because even among intelligent people, communication is often required for optimal results.
To take a page from Sirlin, whom you admire so much, if you are aiming to be competitive in PvP, you will fail at becoming "world class" because you're a scrub who's crippling his guild with no voice chat rule. You might make top 5%, but you'll never make top 50.
@Gevlon
No one uses voice chat in rBGs that way. One guy speaks issuing orders to the others.
Wrong!
While in AB it is indeed hard to use voice chat to properly communicate targets and CCs, it is pretty much the same as arena in Capture-the-Flag BGs. Also a lot like that in Gilneas with its 3 bases and most fighting going on in one of them.
And even in AB it is far more efficient to call out incomings (with numbers and setups) over voice chat, than it is to type.
An anon mentioned wasting cooldowns in arena due to slow communication, now picture this:
Arathi Basin. Fights going on in LM and BS. The situation calls for 1 person to move from LM to BS. If two people figure this out and both jump at the same time its even worse for their team than wasting a CD.
If they stop to type "going bs" that requires them to stop fighting for a couple of seconds and is also slower than calling it out on Vent.
Not to mention, that looking at the map and figuring out how many players are where to come to the conclusion that 1 must move to BS also results in downtime that could be saved if someone in BS would just report the situation and LM could figure out what to do while engaged with the enemy.
RBG is just 10 people. It is quite possible for 10 people to make efficient use of a single voice chat channel without polluting it too much with noise.
Why PvP in WoW I think is the harder question to answer.
MMOs, who sell subscriptions by the month, want to give advantages who have spent more time/$ on the game. How long you have subscribed or how many weeks of arenas you have endured overcoming lack of skill seems like something for M&S.
And WoW is mostly about PvE, so players interested in PvP tend to choose a different game.
And of course voice is a help in PvP with multiple resource nodes not in sight of each other doing an unscripted fight. It is certainly doable without voice; but it is a handicap.
As for voice chat in PvP you're flat out wrong Gevlon.
As a matter of fact, you're joining the M&S club if you refuse competently used direct communication in a combat situation.
There's a reason succesful military operations depend so heavily on good information, communication and analysis.
And no, military communications has nothing to do with handing out a radio to every idiot to implement some kind of sex-hotline during field action.
@Iodael
Actually "relaying infomation" can be achieved just by looking at the map and/or raid frames. It's not like we suffer from tunnel vision (and practice can help us to resist it in the heat of the fight).
Gevlon, I have to side with the others here that if you want to do world class PVP, you do need voice chat. The reason why is obvious.
In PVE you say, that the encounters are scripted. The possibilities are limited, as are the failure modes. Someone who needs voice chat to tell them they stand in the fire, or that the boss will enrage is simply not prepared.
In PVP this all changes dramatically. Every player already uses their eyes to focus on the opponents and their team, and has to react quickly. Furthermore, although there is an optimal way of doing stuff in PVP in a vacuum, it is not a vacuum. Your opponents will adapt and change their behaviour. Especially in RBGs, more so than Arena, you cannot foresee all the changes happening. People need to be able to make quick decisions (otherwise they will suck at pvp anyway), but also need to be able to quickly communicate them WHILE being engaged in an unpredictable battle, with an uncertain number of allies and opponents.
You see 3 dudes running towards a base, where there is only 1 defender. You are 4 at your flag. 1 or 2 should move to the other base, but if you type it, it will be too late already. You can't really prepare it well in a macro, and even if you do manage to, then the 4 at the base need to read it, and act upon the decision. Valuable time is lost, as is the base.
In PVP, where seconds count more than PVE, and where the situations are continuously changing and unpredictable, you will need voice chat to reach world class.
Unfortunately I just moved to Horde, or I would have joined you on the PVP part for the PuG
With so many nay-sayers I got a deja vu. In the past ICC was thought of as not doable by casuals in blues, but look at that - only PP, BQL, Sindy and LK were left alive.
So let's give it a try. Not "fine, I'll do it your way but deep inside I want us to fail just to disaprove the point". To really try and win without voice comm against some good team. That would feel great, don't you think?
So very often I hear argument saying: "PvE is scripted predictable event while PvP is unpredictable and therefore so much more difficult".
I am a raid leader of a semi HC guild (raiding only 3 times a week) and we are currently on 12/13HC. And tell me why if PvE is so easy and predictable its so difficult to find players who can keep pace with us. And players we hire usually have a few hard modes down so they are "more progressed" than the PuG. Still they often lack the ability to move properly or interrupt properly or lack dps or etc.
And the same goes for voice chat. Its not actually "a chat". Nor its for me to tell people what they are doing wrong during the fight. Its there to give other player important information like "I have cinder xy please kick instead me". And this is important to know about voice chat. If the player can't speak when its necessary it means he is not very good player.
If you don't need the voice chat in a battleground than either you have so much time during the fight you can type as much as you want or there is not so much to say to the other players which means everything is pretty predictable.
@ErmK:
"Actually "relaying infomation" can be achieved just by looking at the map and/or raid frames. It's not like we suffer from tunnel vision (and practice can help us to resist it in the heat of the fight)."
Others in this post have already presented several examples of what I was trying to discuss, chief among them the necessity to be fluid in a bg battle and reallocate forces very quickly.
We already face one disadvantage in PvP: our team is fully open with no pre-defined fixed roster (as appropriate following guild rules). Having no voice chat to try and exchange information seem to an additional unnecessary disadvantage.
Personally I see no evil in trying out voice communication for rbg's. If it degenerates into a mess of shouting and yelling we can always backtrack on that decision.
Evolution and progress (which I think all will agree is a sign of intelligence) is achieved by trying out new things, even taking wrong paths (often by taking wrong paths), and then learning from the mistakes and coming back to correct them.
Having said that I also believe that we still have a lot to learn in our rbgs and PvP skills before voice chat will be the break or make feature (at least I have, making no particular claims about the others): I still have lot's of work in terms of learning PvP in general and rbg's strategy in particular.
@Jumina: Hard modes need perfect EXECUTION. It's hard.
Not complicated though.
The voice chat question is one of your weak points. Not that I don't understand your point, but decreasing the effectiveness of the group you have at hand by not using all the tools you have at your disposal is moronic
@Gevlon: There no such thing as perfect execution. Everybody makes mistakes and there is 25 people who can make mistakes. To react when something is not according to script is what makes good player good. And when you can come up with something which helps other player in raid than your are outstanding player.
On the other hand you can make lot of mistakes in battleground and nobody notice until you make something really moronic.
Another reason.
Tunnel Vision is constantly put down as a mark of a bad player. Its not quite true.
WoW is predominantly, in 99% of cases visual based. Theres virtually no feedback inside of the game aside from visual. This means that in a tense PvP situation, when you re hard pressed to read visual stimuly from your screen, it is hard to integrate the text from the corner of your screen in your thought patterns. (Mainly because vision is serial-based).
You can train and become adaptive with this, but its been scientifically proven that the human brain works at a higher efficiency if different information is relayed through different channels at the same time.
Serial bursts of information are considerably slower than parralel ones.
Of course, the brain operates at a speed of between 1 m/s and 10 m/s (which is a lot slower than electronics wich work at about 300000 km/s) so in an ideal situation, doubling the channels of communication doubles information througput. (Of course, language is far from ideal, having a large degree of redundancy.)
Theres another point.
Youre basing your whole theory on the assumption that two intelligent players will make the best choice for the system they re in. This assumption is contradicted by numerous studies in game theory, in which Ill just example Prisoners Dilemma, and the Chicken Game.
In Prisoners Dilemma, optimal personal strategy is not globally optimal.
In the Chicken game, again, both players following optimal strategy will end up with a suboptimal result.
I highly doubt we re going to get anywhere near world class.
Im sorry Ermak. Im not going to suspend my views on PvP to fit an arbitrary cast of asocial rules, and I ll be damned if I ll do so quietly.
Also, I find your obeservation insulting. It doesnt matter what I *feel*. I try my best in every fight. It does not matter what my feelings are on the subject of voice chat.
*Try our best* to *feel good after* is not good enough for me. In fact, its borderline stupid. I feel best after winning, using everything I can. Ill follow Gevlon because its his project and so far the PuG is the only guild who does both PvE and PvP (RBGs) with no requirement for attendance or {help teh guld, respec plz}.
Gevlon has something to prove, I dont. I m actually not even interested in what his goals are. I m not going to subscribe, however, to a stupid idea. I agree with the rationale for PvE, and to an extent for PvP. (Voice comm is gemming +40 stat gems over +36 ones. Meaning it s the top of the game improvement.)
For now, sure, we can improve without voice chat. A lot. However, this will not be enough for *world class*. Good enough to be good, but not good enough for the top.
My Rated Battleground team would be never reach 2000 MMR without our Vent server...
"3 incoming to lumbermill!!"
"Steven, disengage and heal at the lumbermill"
"DPS spike the druid Nebu!"
"I need AoE at the goldmine, they're trying to cap!"
"Respawns in 9 seconds - where do you need backup?"
And that's just Arathi Basin for starters.
@Ermak-
"With so many nay-sayers I got a deja vu. In the past ICC was thought of as not doable by casuals in blues, but look at that - only PP, BQL, Sindy and LK were left alive."
Yes, some hard-mode veterans did the easier bosses in ICC on their blues-only alts. I was a nay-sayer then, and remain one today. I'm not going to give them credit for accomplishing things they set out to do (clear ICC), but didn't (and, most likely, couldn't).
I don't even understand why Gevlon has the belief that groups without voice chat can be of a similar level to those with it. There doesn't seem to be a single reason for believing so, and all the evidence points to the contrary. The same is true for Arena, and raids.
It is a completely moronic idea to compete with 'top guilds' without voice chat. The sooner you realise that the less frustrated you will be with your distinctly average performance.
Better to be happy with what you are, a guild serving a niche of players who want to raid and do BGs without inane chat in guild and with no attendance requirements.
You have zero chance of competing with the top guilds, or of attracting top players in any case, without voice chat.
Why no "threshold level" of resilience to enter TB? They have ilevel for heroics so why not minimum res?
I sort of understand the no voice chat thing for raids, because the goal of the PuG was never to down everything at any cost, and I understand that you want individual performance. It is, however, definitely a hindrance, and the idea of being "world class" in PvE or PvP without it is silly.
The argument that three people talking about their fight at LM is useless to the rest of the BG only shows that you have a personal problem with being overstimulated by auditory information. If you want to be world class, you have to get better, plain and simple. You have to be able to process information from multiple sources, figure out which is relevant, and apply it while executing your own fight and making good tactical decisions.
You might even be right that for most people it is hard to pay full attention to what they are doing when other people are talking about something else. World class PvPers are not among those people.
Voice chat may be good for bad players who can't make their own decisions, and bad for players "with a brain," but it is even better for players with optimally functioning brains.
"WoW is predominantly, in 99% of cases visual based. Theres virtually no feedback inside of the game aside from visual."
Yes, obviously. There is no touch, taste or smell feedback. There is however hearing feedback (e.g. DBM whining you are standing in the fire). 99% sight / 1% hearing is a bold statement, with no argument to back this up. Text, just like the whole screen, is also visual. The trick is to have important information in your peripheral vision (usually the middle of the screen) while making optimal usage of audio feedback as well.
If there are DPS who can maintain high DPS while following the tactics of the fight and adapting to the situation at hand while another person can only maintain high DPS and remain focussed on that (or obsessed with the meters) then one is better player than the other. For the other players (who he does not play with) it is of no concern whether that is because person A drank coffee, because he is using vent, because he trained himself to do it for 20 hours, or because his mother is looking over his shoulders providing him important feedback. He did it.
Gevlon, you've shown that an asocial organization can have some success. Yet social, casual guilds like mine (also without attendance, ilevel, achievement or activity requirements) have done just as well. This shows that an asocial environment is incidental to downing bosses without abusive lolkids or micromanaging raid leaders.
If The PuG goes into RBGs and becomes "world class", you'll show the same thing: that an asocial environment can spawn success but that other guilds with other principles can achieve equal success. Even if you surprise your doubters, I don't see how this moves you beyond being a niche guild.
The question isn't whether the asocial idea works but whether it can be compelling enough to a broad range of players.
Gevlon, I am surprised that you are unable to see how good players could take advantage of an instant, flexible way to communicate.
There is a reason in team sports (basketball, volleyball, etc) players are expected to talk and communicate with their teammates on the court. That reason is not to cover up for weaker players but instead to work together more effectively.
Given the fact that you recognize communication is important (otherwise you would have banned typed chat as well) it should be obvious to you as well that the instant flexibility that comes with voice communication would be very valuable.
@Anon "99% sight / 1% hearing is a bold statement, with no argument to back this up..."
It's not so bold, what audio only cues have you used in wow? Remember the mantra is 'don't stand in the fire' not 'don't stand in the noisy area'. Try playing with no sound versus playing with no monitor, I assure you it's at least 99x easier.
On voice chat:
It is a good tool because audio + visual is easier for anyone to process than visual + visual, even in the best laid out UI. For example, would you rather 1) drive down the highway listening to an audio book, or 2) drive down the highway trying to read a book. That's the difference between text chat and voice chat. Expect to crash more often even with highly skilled and competent people. Sure someone who can read and drive might be more skilled than an audiobooker, but giving that person a audio tape as well will just make them that much better.
@ everybody talking about the voice chat issue:
I'm personally wondering why Gevlon doesn't trust his self-selected good players not to abuse voice chat, seeing as his primary worry is about cluttering the chat channel. Shouldn't PuG members, being the asocial, intelligent people that they are supposed to be, be able to sort out when they should and shouldn't be saying things on Vent?
Or are they not really the asocial, intelligent people that they are supposed to be, and simply sheep under the direction of a single leader?
I'm surprised that Gevlon ignores the high amount of evidence and goes on to make this claim "voice chat is a disadvantage if people have brain. No leader can see your situation and make decisions for you as fast as you do". If it were a disadvantage, then high-end guilds (e.g. Paragorn) would not be using it. Does Gevlon accusing the members of having no brains??
Regardless, there are a lot of important uses for voice chat - things like coordinating burst on bosses or calling out things that are happening. The calling out does not necessarily need to be the domain of the raid leader only. I'm not claiming that voice chat is necessary for high-end raiding (I think the former Nihilium did this before), but it certainly helps and gives and advantage.
Csdx, what I meant is that the percentages are meaningless. Audio compliments video. The optimization lies in how you let it compliment video. And how you optimize your input methods. After all, you cannot get out of fire without mouse/keyboard.
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