Greedy Goblin

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Gutenberg vs Arthasdklol

Don't miss tomorrow's post! I finally understand where my critics are right, and how are they still wrong!

The PuG update: despite the huge interest in the project...

we will not go 25 men. The reasons:
  • Interest =/= activity. Every second guy who comments or writes a mail "this is the greatest thing ever, count me in" won't start a char; every second who does doesn't get 85; every second that does won't come to raid
  • Internal competition: one raid does better than the other, people in the second are motivated to catch up or get in, the people in the first are aware that the others are wanting their spot. In 25 "everyone are included"
  • Less organizing in 10. I hate it, and do only because no one else does


I want to clarify the point of the "undercommunicated" project. I'm obviously not against "communication" itself. This blog is a form of communication too. You can access new knowledge in only two forms: original research and communicated by someone who already knows. Obviously, if a piece of information is known by someone, it's much easier to get the information from him than inventing it yourself.

Mankind used "voice chat" and "text chat" from the beginning of the history. Advancement was pretty slow in these ages. Even if at some place some genius, or extraordinary community (like the ancient Greeks) invented something, it was soon lost, as the information could only travel with word of mouth and handwritten letters. The loss of the man or the few letters was the loss of the information. Then a guy named Johannes Gutenberg invented printing, allowing one author to communicate to thousands, and his work to remain in many copies after his death. Reading became the most important skill for success.

The information relevant in WoW raiding is no different from any other kind. Expert authors have created reliable information and placed it in the 21. century form of printing: the internet. You can read the first hand class information from the ones who do original research on the field, the EJ staff. The boss strategies are summarized by the official Journal, and every aspect discussed by experts on sites like Tankspot or class blogs. These are all forms of communication: the author is telling you the information. Refusing to use them would be stupid.

Why would anyone prefer the information communicated by a less skilled person when he can get it from the best available source? I mean, I could never teach someone playing the class I play as good as the EJ guys do (who taught me). He prefers my voice because he is too lazy to read, or too dumb to understand. He prefers to get spoon-fed by a lesser expert then making the effort to learn from the best.

The pre-Gutenberg chat has only 4 fields left. Every other fields are covered by printed works:
  • Original research. When no one knows something, then those working on it has no written books to read. Their most recent results has to be communicated directly to coworkers. So it is completely normal that the EJ guys are "chatting" in the forum posts or the first raids that act before the addons or videos are available are discussing in voice chat how to cope with a new, unknown mechanic. My project is not doing original research, we are not even aspiring world top 10.
  • Local information. Communicating something that happens there and then, like when you call your partner that you are stuck in a traffic jam and will be late. That information cannot be found in any books. In raiding it could be discussing "who will go up at Beth". No strategy guide contains the names of the characters in your raid. However discussing it takes a few minutes with written chat, there isn't much loss here.
  • Chit-chat: no real information is transmitted, the communication is done because it's fun by itself. No need for that in a raid, no doubt.
  • Spoon-feeding: repeating (in lesser quality) the written information to someone who did not bother to read it. In a raid it's the typical "Arthasdklol don't stand in the fire" (despite there are addons for that) or "discussing strategy": telling lazy people what the dogs of Shannox do. I simply don't want to raid with  people who need it, and want to prove that you don't have to either.
I never used voice chat in any of the projects (yes, Undergeared got to 8/12 with no gear and no voice), but never cared about it either. I thought that it's a minor convenience telling who goes where (what I type now), and an annoyance for the constant Chuck Norris jokes. The number one form of boosting was right front of my eyes and I ignored it. While "u need gear lol" was only common among failures aiming for 4/12 ICC, "Arthasdklol taunt NOW!" is everywhere. All my blogging was around a message "serve your own interest and don't boost others", yet I did not even see the most obvious form of boosting: thinking instead of him.

Stop commenting "in hard modes there are 8 different stuff, no one can track all of them, you must use voice to coordinate"! It's nonsense. Why would voice be any less distraction than the 8th DBM warning? And how come that the guy who yells can see all 8 stuff for himself, and for you too and has the brain capacity to to yell at you while handling his own things?! Because he is skilled and you are not!


PS: I'm especially expecting the influx of burned out raid leaders, people who did the yelling and got enough. It would be a really effective revenge on the ones who sucked the life-force out of you.

31 comments:

Brent said...

I've managed to get our voice chat down to a military style comms except for me (RL). People give short sharp information messages, and I give the running commentary. I would give up the commentary, but people have said "Its much easier to hear it and turn off half the DBM warnings while being a healer/DPS, than watch the warning and everything else". *shrug* I guess it comes down to different people's processing methods for situational awareness. I have no issue reading the screen and watching 20 things at once.

Leeho said...

We use vent for things that you are not warned about be DBM.

For example, on Baleroc hc you have 8 people out of 25 rotating on crystals. Sometimes one of them gets debuffed from someone else cause of movement error or unlucky link. I really doubt that persons who are assigned on backup can keep track of who has debuff cause it's not his turn and who has debuff in his turn and needs to be backuped. That's why when someone needs backup, he asks on vent. He could type, but raid chat is a mess cause of addons warning of cds and such. Also it takes a pause in dpsing, and on Baleroc hc you really don't want your dps to pause.

Also we use vent for Riolyth. Maybe that was the cause of your raid issues with him? Even in 10m you want one person to clearly state where the boss is going at the moment, and which leg to dps.

Anonymous said...

"And how come that the guy who yells can see all 8 stuff for himself, and for you too and has the brain capacity to to yell at you while handling his own things?! Because he is skilled and you are not!"

Gevlon? Why on earth are you assuming it's 1 guy? Have you ever thought that someone else might see something you skipped?

Azuriel said...

It's nonsense. Why would voice be any less distraction than the 8th DBM warning? And how come that the guy who yells can see all 8 stuff for himself, and for you too and has the brain capacity to to yell at you while handling his own things?! Because he is skilled and you are not!

A) The vast majority of DBM warnings are visual (timers, text, screen flashes), which competes with other visual cues like character abilities, boss abilities (fire on the ground, etc), spell effects, numbers shooting everywhere, and so on. There are significantly less auditory cues by contrast, and anything that has an auditory cue has a visual cue already. Voice chat therefore provides an entirely new vector of input.

Obviously that does NOT mean it cannot be distracting. It can and is, at least with irrelevant information. If you talk on a cell phone while driving, you have same (bad) reaction speed as a drunk driver. If the caller was helping you navigate however... different story.

B) I was my team's raid leader, and the main tank. As the main tank, 90% of the time I was pressing 12131412..7, once the boss was in position. My rotation did not need to be perfect outside of cooldown management - if I was the best tank ever, the difference would be irrelevant. Meanwhile, we had hunters who would boost their DPS by noticeable margins by getting off ONE extra Steady Shot over the course of a 7 minute fight.

Bottom line: not all raid members have equal roles in terms of mental bandwidth in fights. The ones with "easy" jobs have the time to make the calls. It is just like American football quarterback who makes play decisions instead of the linebackers who have more pressing matters to attend to: the quarterback has the time, the others do not.

Good luck with your experiment. Since you never used voice communication anyway, I am not sure what you intend to "demonstrate." Not using any chat at all during raiding would be interesting, but there's really no possible verification, just like no verification your raid members aren't using voice chat behind your back right now.

Ephemeron said...

If written communication is so superior, then why is the activity that you call "spoon-feeding" (and the rest of the world calls "teaching") so widespread even now, six centuries after Gutenberg's invention? Why do universities conduct lectures and seminars instead of simply handing out textbooks for students to read?

The answer is brutally simple: because it works. As you've grudgingly admitted yourself in one of the comments to the previous post, the presence of voice communication (or any other teaching tool) invariably has a positive effect on the group's performance.

That said, your observation that teaching is essentially a form of boosting (and therefore antithetical to the ideals and purposes of your guild) is quite correct. However, I believe that there is a better goblinish solution to this problem than banning it outright.

Think of encounter knowledge as a valuable resource, not unlike herbs, truegold bars, flasks, gems or epics. You can farm and craft these things on your own or acquire them from other people.

In this model, unrestricted voice chat is akin to the dreaded 'communist collective', where the most dedicated raid members are forced to craft and farm stuff for others "for the good of the guild". On other hand, a full ban on voice chat is equivalent to demanding that each player must singlehandedly farm and craft everything he or she owns, without participating in the game economy - a terribly inefficient and unreasonable approach.

The rational, fair and goblinish solution is to allow those players who are, for one reason or another, better than others at absorbing and reprocessing information, to sell their knowledge to their less fortunate colleagues. In social guilds, this "teacher's fee" comes in the form of respect and admiration, guaranteed raid spots and officer promotions. For The PuG, the obvious method of payment is gold. Those who rely on voice chat for warnings and guidance should pay those who provide said warnings and guidance.

That's how the whole world operates, after all - if you don't have a particular skill, you HIRE someone who does!

Steel H. said...

Too many strawmen, and mostly for stuff you aren't familiar about

- Nobody is yelling "Arthasdklol get out of the fire". You won't even get to prog hardmodes with Artahsdklol in your raid
- Most heroic fires will kill you before anyone has the chance to see you in it. They actually yell "wth happened" when they notice you are dead some time later.
- Nobody is explaining what the dogs do in H25. For example, we call out location of crystal traps which are thrown 60 yards away from the kiter mage across a field filled with players, corpses and crap. And he maybe he lost track of where his next trap is. Just asked him about this right now in /w, and that happens. By Yogg’s black blood, you do not want to call this mage unskilled in any way, you’ll loose half the respect I have for you if you step into this trap.
- Ok, the tanks do call out taunt rotations. So I’m dpser in the (upper)middle of the pack, still can’t properly sync CDs with procs, and was rescued by this guild from ICC 4/12 - they are officers, raid lead, veterans of Naxx 40, SWP, killed LK 25 with no buffs when I was Raptor Striking boars around Kharanos, and have been tanking since the Old Gods… This is a hard one, I need to think about it.
- “how come that the guy who yells can see all 8 stuff for himself, and for you too?” he is not, he is seeing his own 8 bars he needs to worry about as tank, that I am not seeing, because I’m watching the 8 bars I need to worry about that he is not seeing, because he has ENOUGH stuff to worry about.
- Or, he is seeing the 8th stuff because he has specifically been assigned to watch it and call it out in vent from a set of 25 players, so that the other 24 can use their attention that would be taken by 8 to concentrate better on 1-7, 9-16. I remember this was the case on H Cho’Gall. This is what happens when you are pushing beyond the limits of your skill.
- Oh, I remember know what I missed in my Magmaw 25H rant from yesterday. I was also yelling at a holy pally that I saw repeatedly sitting in the middle of the room when he shouldn’t have been there 2 seconds before meteor. Yes…
- Sound is another channel of feeding info to the brain, as there is so much the eye can focus on (I’m sure I’ve seen some studies about it) We are not calling out DBM bars, but mostly stuff that isn’t covered by DBM, that mostly is a part of our specific strategy, etc. If we’d write and addon to call that out in 5 minutes for as brand new strat, we would not call it in vent anymore
- I totally agree with your guild philosophy and not having vent, and I think at your level and structure it’s a positive thing, and will teach your players excellent behavior.
- Ok, thought about the taunt call business. I was about to tell my tanks how much they suck, but I decided at the last minute it’d be better if I s.t.f.u, focus on running out of the lava faster, and go practice Aimed Shot for 6 hours at the dummy instead.

Grim said...

Not all situational information is provided by DBM.

The most obvious example is Ryolith. Atm he is nerfed to nothing, but while it was still normal to have 5 volcanoes up and 2 of them active, shouting what to aim for was crucial.

Also, ad hoc rearranging of crystal tankers when someone fails at Baleroc (and if you intend to make your firstkill a perfect one, good luck, but it will take like 2 extra weeks).

There's also the little things, like warrior tanking Shannox (especially HC) will at some point need to heroic leap away to drop stacks. This will often take him out of healing range. Healer must know when that will happen.

Giving order to kill the last add in 2nd transition of Ragnaros.

Then there is stuff, that some people see better than others. Often tanks are in the best position to monitor this or that mechanic because everyone else needs to look out for 5 more mechanics all the time (Ragnaros is one of those).

Anonymous said...

You wont even find at this time a guide for most hardmodes.
Made you raid to much normalmodes, where a Person wrote a guide with a strat that he thinks, its the best.

This doesnt work in Hardmodes atm. The main strat are set, but in every hardmode you have several key positions.

Lets take an easy example and only 1 mechanic: Baleroc HM Shards (10m): Will you use a shadow priest for the first shard so the healers get fast stacks? When do you start your cooldowns an which cooldowns. Probably disperson on 19, aura mastery on 15? -> The shadowpriest wiped? Why? In the next try the MT dies. Why? Next try everyone survives, but tank dies to Decimation Blades.

You have no written guide, that explains you why all those things happend. You dont have a bossmod jumping on you: Hey RL, you wiped to the Decimation Blades at 3 Min, because the MT had a no avoidance luck on the pull, so he had to use more CD's than usual. At the same moment 1 healer slacked at the 1. shard and only got 70 Stacks. Oh and you only survived the Other blades because the MT had dodge luck or a healer critted.

No you see the MT dieing at 3 Min to a decimation Blade and you will have no clue why... Because of no guide, you dont know whether 70 Stacks are good or bad, you dont even know about the shadowpriest tactic ;)

This was only a example, you dont even have to use a shadowpriest tactic. There are other ways, like 3 healing it. Or using a 3 dd rotation for the shards at 50%.

Not only top 10 guilds have to work without guides ...

Squishalot said...

Other people have mentioned most things that I wanted to say, but more importantly - I still don't see how you justify DBM without justifying voice chat. After all, DBM is spoon-feeding, but in written/flashing form, rather than in vocal form.

chewy said...

You're obviously not going to change your mind so I'm going to sit back and watch with interest as your experiment unfolds.

But I maintain, as do many others, that it's not the mode of communication that makes the difference, it's the communicators.

Gutenberg created the method, he didn't create the knowledge.

Gevlon said...

@Squishalot: DBM is an addon, a tool. Voice chat itself is useless, it needs a person who spoon-feeds you on it.

@Ephemeron: teaching survived Gutenberg because it's targets are officially considered "morons": the children. There is a reason why they can't vote.

Also, theoretically information could be sold. However it's impossible to measure. What is the unit of the sold quantity?

Riptor said...

It will be interesting to see how this new project develops. I can see only one issue where you will eventually run into trouble without a voice chat (or just waste enormous amounts of time). You mentioned yesterday that you would like to advance to the top and/or range of hc Guilds. That would be the Guys that, when a new content patch arrives, clear normal as fast as possible to then engage in the hc race for kills. (this is what I understood will be the aim rank wise; if I misinterpreted disregard the following arguments).
Information gathering will be a Problem. The Information and Boss Strategies will not be available by the time you encounter the Bosses. The only valid Sources of Information you’ll have available are the PTR, the List of Abilities of a Boss published pre Patch (mmo champion, etc) and some Beta Videos. If you are well prepared you will have a general Idea what a Boss will do in hc but what actually awaits you is somewhat in the dark. Now during Progress you will gather Information try by try and combine them to an avid strategy. This however requires a lot of Communication between the Raiders as each of them, defined by their Class/Role may see another angle/solution to a Problem in a new Bossfight. Without VC this Process will be much more time consuming, ultimately costing you ranking due to the time spent typing.
To summarize: At a high stage of Progress, there will be no Tankspot Guides, EJ only allows encounter Discussion once they themselves have defeated the Boss and the Bossmods usually take some weeks to actually work as you will be the Information gatherers that make Bossmods possible (by submitting your Logs to the Modders).
Anyway, best of luck with the new project

Jumina said...

You can always come up with some solution which replaces the voice chat. But it does not change the fact its the fastest communication tool.

And if people are using voice chat for proper communication its a good sign they are active and interested in the success. Its strange but often people who did not communicate at all where often dead weight in the raid.

And its true there is no simple guide to hardmodes. We had to study logs to decipher how other guilds are doing Rhyolit in order to correctly split dps between targets.

Anonymous said...

Undergeared had an understandable aim and it contributed to the desired result of encouraging more people to understand skill > gear.

This project, however, seems a little less easy to "buy into". I simply do not understand why you have this strong conviction that Voice Chat = crutch for poor players.

Will your next project be no-communication? Working on the basis that even /raid or /rw could be construed as a crutch?

The argument that the use of Voice Chat runs counter to the a-sociality of the guild ethos is almost understandable though your reasoning that in order to support it you would need to record everything is a little strange.

There's perhaps another angle to this as well; whilst you consistently mention a-sociality; one could argue you are creating a social environment; it's your social enviroment. The rules under which it operates are your rules; you have created a society. If you truly desire an a-social experience in this game would your aims not be better met by being an individual in your own guild?

Anonymous said...

A guildie of mine used to have a really shitty PC, so he didn't use a single addon in WoW. He was one of the best raiders in our guild even with that sort of "handicap". He didn't have the luxury of boss mods handholding most of us enjoy. He learned to follow the warnings that are already build in WoW and to read tactics beforehand.

From my own experience I can tell that even if there are 8-10 different things happening during an encounter, half of them are not your business anyway. As a damage dealer you don't care how many stacks of a debuff tank has as you're not the one who is supposed to taunt to heal.

What bothered me the most in 25 man raiding is that by the time I learned what was there to learn about the fight and was ready to kill the boss, some other people needed 10 more hours to sort their shit out and I felt like I was boosting a bunch of noobs, wasting my time (as well as gold-time).

ardoRic said...

@ Ephemeron, If written communication is so superior, then why is the activity that you call "spoon-feeding" (and the rest of the world calls "teaching") so widespread even now, six centuries after Gutenberg's invention?

Let me just point out that teaching is vastly different from the spoon-feeding Gevlon critiques on voice chat.

The real life equivalent to the spoon-feeding that goes on voice chat would be having a teacher with you your whole life pointing out when you get your sums wrong (yes, really basic stuff) and how you should correct it.

This should be unacceptable, and I have grown very silent on my guild's vent as of late because it's mostly the sort of thing that goes on there during fights.

Anonymous said...

I still do not understand how can you enforce no voice chat rule. You may be happily believing that you're raiding without voice while other 9 raid members are telling each other "ok, let's not dissappoint the old goblin man, noone tells him ever!" in some Vent or RaidCall channel of which you are unaware.

Steel H. said...

I guess I went on on too many details and kept spinning around the nail I wanted to hit. As I explained in my many posts, I understand and demonstrated that voice is indeed compensation for "lack of skill".

What I have a problem with is words like "stupid", "unskilled" and "Arthasdklol" being tossed at Cata 25man HC levels. By someone who hasn't yet experienced it. Need to find some different concepts here. Of course, if you weren't saying that, I retract all of it and call peace. That's all.

Otherwise I wish you all the success, and will be very impressed when you succeed. However I get a feeling you are tilting at wrong windmills here. "5K gs for uldaur" was a different affair. You must not forget the scope of it: you were proving that the uber nerfed content of WotlK (and mainly 10mans at that) required minimum gear gear, and setting a point of reference for skill. If we can do these bosses in i200, with people who never have seen these fights before, then you, in your welfare i264 should be doing this*x. You never wanted to prove that guilds should be doing 25man heroic LK and Yogg+0 25 in blues (there was still some mathematics scaling up though, as loose as they were). And the good players already knew the value of skill vs gear. Yet now it seems you want to go after everyone's vent, young and old, big and small as an absolute value, across the board (again, if you are not, I call it peace). Even Paragon is calling defiles and auramasteries and "kill it ffs" in vent... I'd let it go at this point.

Gevlon said...

@Steel: your comments did not go unheard, please read tomorrows post.

@Last anonymous: such thing needs perfect conspiration from 20+ people (as we rotate different ones), from different countries, not knowing each other. And why would anyone bother? They could just join a guild with official voice chat.

Anonymous said...

You really don't need voice chat if you just raid easy and static normalmode content and never did something challenging. On normal, you just have to know the boss, don't stand in fire and eventually the boss will die and drop loot. If one repeatedly fails here, he has to be sort of simple minded. Alysrazor is the best example, because this fight is so static. Even the tornados spawn and move exactly the same way every time. This fight would be a good example to show that communication is obsolete and that skill matters.

On the other hand, some hardmode fights need ad hoc communication because of situations that can differ from fight to fight. We are currently working on ragnaros hc in 10man, trying to hit p4 with just two meteors.
The fight has a lot decisions to be made on the fly and the person who makes them isn't a better player than the others, but he chooses from different possibilities that one which we will do NOW. For example, you have eight sons random spreaded across the room for six dps and ten seconds do decide, how to handle them - while still pushing die boss until he finally submerges. Then you have to choose one of the sons to stay alive until the end of the intermission, depending on how the intermissions works out. Thats just one example, there are many of this situations.

We don't use voice chat to amuse us with silly jokes. We don't use it to have a raid leader tell others what they have to do - we haven't been using a dedicated raid leader for almost a year now.

It is just moronic to call people, which cleared 6/7 normal on the first day of firelands (without visiting the PTR) to "have to be spoon-feeded" because they rely on using voice chat.

Strutt said...

Gev, you say "@Squishalot: DBM is an addon, a tool. Voice chat itself is useless, it needs a person who spoon-feeds you on it."


Who do you think input all the warning into DBM... a person. So yes DBM is exactly like voice chat, just automated, but the information you are seeing on your screen did come from a person.

Imagine said...

The unit of the sold quantity is time.

Anonymous said...

Where I think Gevlon is wrong about Voice Chat is in that he always assumes that it is spoon feeding to a lesser player from a better one. It is entirely possible and actually likely that in an environment where all players have skill and are taught to read up on encounters that there would be a balance on the use of voice chat. So the player calling out one person's mistake in one raid could be the person being saved by someone else in a future raid. Voice chat isn't a crutch that prevents players from researching raids, it is a method for making small game time corrections, in order to prevent wipes because of a small slip ups. These mistakes can happen with all players from veterans, including Gevlon, to new players experiencing raiding for the first time.

IrOn TuRtLe said...

"we will not go 25 men."

The choice of words makes this sounds like a guild policy, rather than a Gevlon policy. How does this not conflict with the "You can start any raid in the raid times" rule?

You say that multiple 10-man raids are better because they create competition, but then you say you only organize raids because "no one else does." How can there be multiple raids if no one else organizes any?

Sten Düring said...

Baleroc. I'm the decimate tank. If I take two straight hits and AD triggers, I either call for a taunt or get my RL breathing down my back so hard I'll need half an hour to stand up again.

Does this mean I'm spoonfeeding either my RL or my retard co-tank?

Hell no!

The third hit, if it lands, could wipe the raid. My co-tank is guaranteed above 90%.

Who wants to know?

Well, co-tank obviously, but also my healers. My taunt-command signals that they should stay the hell away from me with their heals and swap to the taunting tank.

We're also likely to have a reverted handover if my co-tank did indeed take those 90%. This is to make sure he's refilled for his usual duty. This might or might not happen. Depends on where my WoG is in the cycle, if I received a left-over heal when calling out the first taunt, if the co-tank was healed up fast enough for us to skip the ping-pong.

Now, convice me that we should juggle this data over written chat, because I'll personally suggest to the RL that the healer who's reading chat instead of watching target health gets raidkicked.

Anonymous said...

Gevlon, your concept of raiding reminds me of robot competitions where you set up your script against the AI script and then let both run as programmed. If you have a good script and everybody executes it well, you get a repeatable kill. If not, you wipe and adjust your inputs.

The alternative you clearly want to avoid is a remote-controlled robot that isn't pre-programmed but responds to commands as they are issued. In this analogy, the raid leader uses voice chat to control the various raid members (e.g. "taunt now"). Your project offers people who are tired of remote-control fights the chance to experience another type of raiding where kills are programmatic because they are designed for success and built with quality materials.

However, there is another way for a robot to beat the competition: an AI with adaptive learning that can alter it's approach as it goes. This is more like the HC raiding I've done than either pre-programmed scripts or remote-control inputs. And it's particularly suited to an environment like The PuG where group composition is variable from raid to raid. It requires fast iteration of strategy and effective communication between various systems. High-performance components are necessary so that sub-optimal results can be attributed to decision-quality rather than simple malfunction. In such a system, voice chat can act as a lubricant: when applied in the right place at the right time in the right amount, it enhances performance; otherwise, it can be disasterous.

ardoRic said...

Sten Düring, that's what macros and raid warnings were made for.

Not saying that you're not using vent the right way with your example, but you could certainly achieve the same with written chat.

csdx said...

No you have it entirely wrong, having someone call out taunts or incomings isn't "boosting", it is specialization of work.

This specialization is why we have technology and free time and just about everything else. Hopefully as someone at least passingly familiar with economics this much is obvious to you. It's the reason we're not all farmers spinning our own wool and churning butter.

So voice chat lets people take specialized roles in the raid. Rather than everyone having to watch a timer, only one person does and everyone else can better focus on their job. This is important because people only have so much ability to pay attention to many things at once. Thus by having only one person pay attention to something, everyone else has less pressure, meaning better performance and less mistakes. This game is built on the basic 3 role specialization (tank/heal/dps) and some bosses add more like gong banger, or kiter.

At the end of the day you'll get a team of specialists, or if you take a pessimistic view of it even, you'll still likely end up with a structure much like the army, with officers and the grunts they command.

csdx said...

Also, what you don't seem to realize is that anything that could be done with voice communication is done by text chat as well. Both written into the 'chat' box or said out loud are the same. You can convey local information, chit-chat, or even spoon feed with chat (hint: /rw).


The key difference is not WHAT they communicate, but HOW QUICKLY. Now sure 'local informatoin' plans can be made in advance, but even the best plans will fail more often than not if they cannot adapt.

If a plan is completely rigid, then even one mistake will cause the whole thing to collapse. Since WoW is real time, the faster you can react and fix an issue, the more likely you are to turn what would've been a wipe into a victory.

Anonymous said...

Actually, I think it's more accurate to say that in most raids there are 8 different things going on at once, and everyone only focuses on the 2-3 things that are most relevant to their role in the group, and 99% of the time stuff occurring in your specific "zone" is not relevant to everyone else. VC comes in when something occurs in your individual zone of attention that actually needs to be communicated to the broader group.

Leeho said...

Do you need a separate project for this? There are quite a lot of guilds who raid without voice, take a look at http://www.wowprogress.com/guild/eu/ravencrest/Borked for example. They did quite a lot of content in previous tier.