We have run into The Wall on multiple occasions. This is the unusual phenomenon where as a raid you can be working away at a goal for weeks and weeks (be it a particular encounter, achievement, or instance), and end up getting “stuck” on this one goal for what seems like an inordinate amount of time. Then, when you finally get it down, the very next week you go in and get the encounter down effortlessly.

As I say, this has occurred for us on multiple occasions; most recently on the Yogg-Saron encounter. Our first kill took 5 nights of hard slog (spread across 3 weeks). The following week was a one-shot. So why did this happen? And is there anything that can be learnt for future times that we hit the wall?

Hitting the wall

Unless morale is remarkably high, or momentum is particularly strong, I believe that there is risk of hitting the wall on basically every non-trivial new encounter that the raid faces. Here is the approximate pattern that I have seen whenever Ka Pai hits the wall:

• The fight is explained, and some time is spent setting up the fight and the appropriate roles.
• A reasonable attempt is made at the encounter, that ultimately results in a wipe due to being unfamiliar with the fight.
• A lengthy discussion results that focuses in detail on early aspects of the encounter and how they can be improved on, in attempt to iron out some of the little problems that were noticed.
• After some time, a second attempt is made, which is far less successful than the first attempt.
• A period ensues where little further progress is made, and wipe after wipe occurs; people get fed up and frustrated.
• This can continue for a very long time, with only a little progress being made over that time.
• If nothing is done to buck the rut, then getting the encounter down is purely a case spending so much time on it that you cannot fail, or dumb luck (getting on the RNG’s good side), or similar.

On the surface, this is simply a case of an inferior geared raid group battling against a challenging encounter, and employing the “practice makes perfect” mantra – they spend so much time on the encounter that it becomes second nature, and is eventually beaten. However, I’d suggest that there is something deeper going on – that this is more of a subconscious psychological effect than it might first appear to be. I believe these may be some of the things that are going on:

• The tone of the raid leader changes. Instead of talking about how to beat the encounter, they start talking about how to avoid doing particular things in early phases of the fight (e.g. I spent a long time discussing how to avoid clouds on Yogg).
• Raiders are given copious amounts of information and instructions about what to do, and, more importantly, what not to do.
  • Firstly, the human brain is not as good at multitasking as we might like to think. Give someone any more than 2 or 3 things to focus on, and the activities which are not receiving the main focus are going to suffer as a result. This is readily seen with healers and DPS becoming “tunnel visioned”.
  • Secondly, I’m a firm believer in the idea that if you give someone something to think about then they will likely subconsciously act it out. If you tell someone not to do something, then unless they are focusing a lot of conscious energy into not doing it, they will likely continue to do that thing without thinking about it; simply because that thing they are not supposed to do is still in the back of their mind.
• Large amounts of time are spent on explanation. Information overload happens quickly, and raiders zone out.

Of course the caveat of being a psychological effect, is that if it can be understood, it can be avoided, or nipped in the bud when it is noticed to be occurring. The hard part is working out how.

Going around the wall

Based on my thoughts on the above information, I have been trying some of the following things, with varying degrees of success. I’m not suggesting you try all (or even any) of these, but hopefully they are food for thought.

• If there are many parts or complex phases to a fight, I make it clear before any explanation takes place that we are going to build on each attempt for the first few attempts. I let my role leaders know how many tanks/healers we need, briefly what jobs they will need to be doing, and let them assign the appropriate people. I give a brief “high-level” rundown of the entire encounter, but only give full details for the early parts. Following a wipe, I keep it positive, highlight one or two things that can be improved on in the early part if necessary, then set up details for the later parts of the fight. I believe these pulls/wipes can teach the basic concepts of the fight in a much quicker fashion than a 10 minute spiel about the fight. Give an overview of the fight, and let raiders learn the detail through experience. This process of building up the strat should only take 2-3 attempts, don’t let it drag out too long.
• As a raid leader, I try to continue to keep a confident tone, and to keep the subject of my discussions focused on the later phases of the fight. I try to talk like I know and truly believe that the raid is going to get the fight down this attempt. I don’t talk as though this attempt is just a step on the way to getting a kill. If every attempt becomes another step, then we never have our sights on the final goal, and subconsciously my raiders are not set up to reach that goal – instead, they’re set up to have a “better wipe” – this is not a good thing. The exception to this is the buildup of the first few attempts (as outlined above), where it’s expected to be a wipe, and I’m simply trying to convey the mechanics of the fight quickly.
• Knowing that raiders can get tunnel visioned easily, I actively do three things to ensure that the mechanics of the fight take precedent over individual threat, DPS, or healing.
  • As best I can, I try to boil each role down to one or two very simple tasks. I try not to give instruction overload. For example, a ranged DPS on Yogg might have the phase 1 instructions “Assist tank X, and focus on avoiding clouds”.
  • To supplement these basic instructions, I try to provide “advice” for how people can do their job better. Notice that this turns the whole concept of telling someone what not to do, on its head. Instead of saying “don’t run in front of clouds if you need to go around them” I’ll say “make sure you run behind clouds, as that way you have to move less distance”. I’ll usually try to give a sensible reason for any advice that I give also – this seems to help the advice “click” in peoples’ heads, and makes it more memorable; and of course makes it seem less like I’m making things up just for the sake of saying them. Treat your raiders as the intelligent humans that they are.
  • Finally, if there is any one important fight mechanic that is not really happening due to not enough raider focus being dedicated to it (e.g. avoiding clouds in Yogg, or getting out of Shadow Crash on Vezax), I will state as clearly as possible that I simply do not care about what their [DPS/Healing/Tanking] is like, so long as they are getting that one fight mechanic right. I’ll explicitly state, that they should focus on performing that mechanic over and above the actual role that they are there to do. This sounds a little extreme, and one might think that suddenly DPS drops to zero and healers don’t do their job. In truth, I’ve found that people are so deeply ingrained to do their job, that this only tips the mental balance just enough to get them to focus slightly more on the fight mechanic – but usually that focus is enough to push through to the next phase. The idea being, that if they focus on getting it right, then after a while it becomes second nature, and they don’t need to focus on it at all – the DPS and healing is secondary, and comes naturally once the fight mechanic is practiced.

Most importantly, my focus as raid leader is always on beating the encounter, not what was wrong about the previous attempt.

Incidentally, I have no formal psychology training, although sociology and psychology both interest me greatly. If there is a technical term for what I’ve described above, I’d love to know what it is so I can investigate further – be sure to let me know!

When starting Ka Pai, my end goal was always going to be 25-man raiding. In fact, if Blizzard decided to bring back 40-man raids, I’d probably have aimed to be doing them, too. Of course, in the early days, cobbling together enough people to form a 10-person raid was challenge enough. The build-up process to 25-man raiding was only fully completed after about 4-5 months, and went something along the lines of the following:

• The first few weeks of 10-man raids had a maximum of about 6 guildies in them. The rest of the numbers were made up through favors from friends and my previous casual guild. Their help was invaluable, and in truth I might have given up a long time ago without it. If you don’t have a pool of friends or a partner guild that you can politely draw from, then you should use PuGing at a last resort.
• After some time, we managed to clear enough content that we were starting to get some attention, and a trickle of quality applicants. These were of course grabbed as quickly as we could get them. We didn’t make compromises, though; if someone wasn’t up to scratch we didn’t take them, plain and simple. I do not regret this for a moment. After a few weeks we were in the position of being able to do full-guild 10-man runs (no outsiders). In retrospect, this was probably our biggest milestone in terms of numbers. It’s a “proof-of-concept” – the ability to demonstrate that you can in fact function as a viable raid guild, that you’re not just a group of 5 people PuGing raids.
• With a full guild run, we found that we were able to make better progress, as we spent less time waiting to fill the raid each night, and morale overall was improved. With this stronger progression, the apps kept on coming, and we kept on pushing recruitment. Before long we had standbys each night for our single 10-man run. Once we reached around 16 people with strong attendance, people started getting a little tetchy, so I once again reached out to friends and friendly guilds, in order to leap to two 10-man raid groups; with some success. This was a particularly testing time for the guild, and I needed to make a call about when the time was right to make the change. Too early and both groups would struggle, too late and people would start getting frustrated with being on standby so often.
• In truth, two 10-man groups was far from ideal; people started becoming a little segregated into their groups. I endeavoured to mix things up each week and make sure that the groups were balanced, but constantly changin. Don’t give one group all the geared players, for example. This only breeds resent, as one group flies through content and the other languishes – and this resent will carry over when you do eventually start 25-man raiding.
• Obviously the end goal was 25-man raiding, and so we recruited to move past two 10-man groups ASAP. Basically, as soon as we had about 20-21 raiders with strong attendance, we started doing 25-mans. This involved a rather painful period where for a while roughly the first half hour of each raid was spent in trade chat attempting to pug the remaining spots. Sometimes we got them all, other times we went and did easy bosses with an incomplete raid. However, in retrospect I believe this was a valuable time for the guild.
  • Firstly, it meant that when we did finally get the numbers to do 25-man raids without using outsiders, it was such a confidence boost not having to carry PuGs, that morale was very high at that point, and we made enormous progress in the following few weeks.
  • Secondly, as the weeks went on, we started reusing the same PuGs. I was actively adding to friends those PuGs that were performing well and had a good attitude, and whispering them later in the week when we were continuing the instance. In the end, we picked up around 4-5 quality players that we only knew through their performance when we PuGed them – they enjoyed our raid environment and atmosphere enough to want to join us (we generally didn’t push them, though, apart from the odd ribbing in raid chat). Most of them are valued raid members to this day.
  • Finally, it meant we were getting our name out there. Admittedly, it went a little against my mantra of “image is everything”, as we were quite spammy when picking up people, but most of those players that we did take went away from the raid with a good experience, and I don’t think there were ever any ill feelings about the guild – I was careful to make sure that we weren’t publicly disrespectful to anyone that joined us as a PuG. They were there because we needed them, after all.
  • There was at times a little tension in-guild about PuGs cleaning up gear, though – so we introduced rules such as “maximum of 2 non-tier and 1 tier piece per PuG per run” – and made these rules explicitly clear at the start of the run / at the time of invite. Guildie loot was handled internally using our DKP system, with rolls used to “compete” with the PuGs as a means of expressing interest in the loot. I.e. everyone (including guildies) rolls if they want an item of loot, if a guildie wins the roll then DKP is used to determine who receives the loot, out of the guildies who rolled.
• Of course, after some time we finally reached sufficient numbers to start full-guild 25-man raids. At this point we continued recruiting to the point where we are today; we have a core of around 30-32 people, all with strong attendance. The extra numbers mean that we can still hold a successful raid if we have a few people away (which inevitably happens now and then – and I try not to be too hard on attendance).

In summary; don’t give up. Recruit, recruit, recruit. You will have ups and downs, be ready for the downs, and celebrate the ups. Have a goal in mind, and stick to it.

Recruitment

• Think about what makes your guild different. What do you have that other guilds don’t? Why should someone join your guild over any other? Maybe you have a casual raiding approach. Maybe you hit content harder and faster than any other guild on the realm. Maybe you only raid 4 hours a week. Maybe you have the realm clown in your guild. In my case, my guild was the only one raiding on the particular times that I selected, and therefore I was uniquely attractive to people in that timezone – and I made sure people knew this. You should not consider having a guild bank, tabard, website, or Vent server as being differentiating factors. Advertising these as special will only make your guild seem laughable.
• Trade/general chat spam is an interesting tool. Used correctly and sparingly, it can be a great way to get your name out. However, before you go rushing off and creating a 4-line macro and spamming it for hours on end, have a think about the following points:
  • Why are you creating such a macro? Is it just because you’ve seen an endless stream of other guilds do it in the past? Think about whether this is actually a good reason to be doing it yourself.
  • Think about how you felt about such macros prior to creating your guild. In truth, if you’re looking for a guild, they are potentially quite useful. However, your primary goal at this stage is not only to recruit as many people as humanly possible to launch your raid team, but also to get your name out there as a quality raiding guild. If the only way that people know you is as a spammy macro in trade chat, then their first impressions of your guild are not going to be good ones. When you do later become a big successful guild, that impression is going to last, and you’re still going to be thought of as that spammy desperate guild, even though you might now be quite the opposite. Image is everything, and first impressions last.
  • If you are going to create a trade chat macro, keep it short. Don’t mention that you’re new. Mention the guild name, your website, your raid times, and not a lot else. You should also include your differentiating feature in a succinct form, if applicable. Use proper english – no TXT speak. “<The Guild> is recruiting! Raids at 6-10pm server. Visit theguild.com or PST for details. Canadians are people too!” would be an example of a good trade macro. Bonus points if you can make people laugh or get a little interactive conversation happening in response to your ad – as long as the ad itself is kept short. If someone is actually interested, they will either check out your website (which must be useful and accessible, as outlined in the last post), or they will pst you, in which case you have an excellent opportunity to convey the full details that you were going to put in your trade spam originally – only now you’re conveying them to someone who’s actually interested, and not the entire population of trade, most of whom couldn’t give two shits.
  • Not only should you keep your macro short, but don’t spam it every minute for two hours. I’d suggest once per half hour, a maximum of 4 times in an evening – maximum. Make sure it’s during peak time. Remember, the key is to get your name out there (and get a few bites along the way), without coming across as the spammy, desperate new guild.
• Perhaps the best way of getting your guild name out there in a way that doesn’t come across as spammy and desperate is through various public forums that are available to you.
  • First and foremost, create one in your official realm forums (on forums.worldofwarcraft.com). As with all your threads, keep it regularly updated and bump it every few days.
  • Additionally, create a thread in the Guild Recruitment forum on the official forums. If there are any local gaming forums for your country/region, be sure to check out if they have a guild recruitment thread or forum.
  • Similar to the trade macro, make sure you’re not annoying people by bumping every 5 minutes. Once every few days is plenty.
  • I won’t go into details about content, apart from saying: follow a structure, keep it concise, and mention your website 2 or 3 times. The aim is to drive traffic to your website which you then convert into applications through making it easy to apply.
• Write down names. Everyone you talk to that shows the slightest bit of interest. Get out a piece of paper, and write down their name. When you’re starting out, you pretty much have to take what you can get. If someone is talking to you from an alt, make sure you find out their main’s name. When I first started, I had a bit of paper that grew to about 20 names. If someone is showing interest, but doesn’t actually fill out an application or pursue your guild further, then wait till they come online, and talk to them. “Hi, it’s ___ from ___, was just seeing if you’d had any further thoughts about joining?”. If they’re not interested, ask them if they have any friends that might be. Be proactive.

When I first started the guild, I was on my own. I had done some reading on creating a successful guild, but I was really trying to build up a raiding guild from scratch. I had no friends who were going to take the plunge with me, and I literally had noone but myself in the guild on day one. My guild now (less than a year later) successfully raids 25-man content 3 nights a week (2nd Alliance guild on the realm in terms of progression), and has over 200 members (across just under 100 individual accounts). So, how did I go from having literally noone, to building a successful raiding core?

Well, as will become apparent, it was not easy, but I’m going to kick things off with a few thoughts about one of the most important aspects of a budding guild; the website.

Guild website

Your website is arguably your most important tool when starting a guild. It is the public facing part of your guild. It’s the place you send people who are interested in your guild. It should be the hub of everything that a potential member could ever want to know about your guild. Some ideas/thoughts about the guild website, in no particular order:

• If you have the expertise, get a proper domain name and hosting. Don’t go the route of free packaged guild hosting such as GuildLaunch, unless you truly have no other option. They are ad-laden, restricting in terms of features and layout customisation, and (perhaps most importantly) look far less professional than a custom domain. Image is everything. Buy a domain, buy some hosting, and get a slick design happening.
• What is your website there to achieve? Apart from providing discussion forums for your raiders, the primary purpose of a guild website is usually to open up recruitment options. Prominently display the classes you’re looking for, keep them updated, and make it easy to apply. I cannot stress this enough. Every hurdle you add for potential applicants is a potential applicant that you lose. What if that was your next star tank that you just lost?
  • Put apply links in your header, in your guild blurb, underneath your recruitment classes, basically anywhere someone might be looking for it. Make it clear.
  • Don’t force people to sign up to a forum to apply. If possible, create a custom page with a bunch of questions to fill out. In my guild’s case, we use guest posting in a special public forum, which does the job, but we need to filter out a lot of spam.
  • Browse to your website, and try to be in the mindset of a potential applicant that was just given your guild domain name. Is it easy to find the link to apply? Is it clear what classes you’re looking for? When you click apply, is the actual process to apply clear and simple? Are you asked for too much information? Too little?
• Think about URLs. A lot of this advice is technical, but again, it’s about looking professional and making it easy for potential applicants. In my case, I have set up two URLs; /apply redirects to the applications forum, and /charter shows our guild charter. These are easy and memorable links to share with people; a lot better than e.g. /forums/viewforum.php?f=7, and more professional than “go to our website and click apply”. Image is everything.
• Include detailed and archived guild progression, including hard modes. Even if it’s a shortened version on the homepage, with a link to view more detailed progression. Progression is something that high quality applicants will be looking for. Additionally, if you have time, generate screenshots of recent kills for your home page, and post them as “news”.
• You want to create a “home” and a hub of discussion for your guild members. I’d say that a forum is pretty essential. Keep the number of forums low (e.g. Member Discussion, Off Topic, Healer/Tank/DPS Discussion) to keep the posting dense. This gives the appearance of more active forums, and encourages more people to post. Create threads about anything and everything… Instance strats, upcoming patch changes, screenshots, new member introductions, loot rules, guild rules, bank rules, pictures of your cat, etc etc. You want 75%+ of your raiding core checking your forum every day, as this is an important outlet for dispensing information and keeping your raiders in the loop. The only way you will achieve this is if the forum is a genuinely interesting place to hang out, with a lot of good discussion taking place.

If there’s one thing you take from this post, let it be this: Image is everything – and first impressions last. That little mantra will help out your early weeks and months immensely. Strive to have the image of a stable professional guild in everything you do, and make sure you avoid being that annoying, spammy, desperate guild that everyone loves to hate. This mantra will also become part of your regular guild affairs too; you should never tolerate drama in a public arena, and make it clear such drama is not tolerated. Such things are not good for image. More on this at a later date.

Internet, Blog.

To kick things off, I’m going to give a brief introduction to myself and the origins of the guild.

I started playing World of Warcraft (WoW) shortly after the release of the Burning Crusade expansion. I’m not sure of the exact date, but it was approximately halfway through 2007. My friend who got me into the game was a pretty avid raider at the time, and naturally, once I reached level 70, I found myself also drawn into raiding. I had a few fleeting experiences with hardcore raiding guilds, the longest lasting about 3 months. However, the more I raided with these guilds, the more I realised that it was difficult to balance normal life (ranging from social life, to work, to university studies) with raiding life. This was compounded by the fact that I was raiding with guilds that were based in a timezone 2 hours behind my own, meaning that I was often up raiding till the small hours of the morning.

It was with this realisation, that, when my guild at the time disbanded, I decided to take a hiatus from hardcore raiding and focus more on aspects of my normal life. I kept playing the game in an amazing social guild that did the occasional no-pressure low end raids on the weekends, and I additionally led PUG raids here and there, but it was all very casual. My life was on track, all was well.

And then I started missing being on the bleeding edge. In those first few fleeting months when I hit level 70, I felt like I was on top of the game. I knew I had the skills, I was able to top DPS charts with mid-range gear, and while my guilds at the time weren’t the hottest property in terms of progression, they were far and away better than the little social Kara runs that I was doing with my social guild. I missed that feeling when you are one of the first guilds to get down a new boss that you’d been working on for weeks. I missed the structured raids and hotly contested DPS charts. I missed being challenged in my raiding. But by that point, I’d been raiding low end content for 6 months, and in terms of gear, I was completely unappealing to high end raid guilds. It seemed all was lost.

And then the Wrath of the Lich King expansion pack was announced, and I saw an opportunity. It coincided well with the end of my university studies, meaning I’d be a working boy. And it occurred to me that I would have considerably more time in the evenings for raiding, without the constant hassle of exams and assignments and projects. On top of that, a new expansion meant a clean slate in terms of gear. It was the perfect opportunity to slot back into hardcore raiding! I informed my social guild that I intended to start raiding again with the release of WotLK, and began the hunt for a new guild.

Then I struck a problem: I live in a timezone that only a handful of guilds cater to. The majority of guilds in my battlegroup are 2 hours behind (which is why I was in those guilds previously), and this was not going to be a feasible raid time for me, especially with the earlier starts mandated by working life (no more 11am starts at university!) – and I quickly discovered that there were no guilds raiding at my ideal raid time on my current realm. I had one of two choices: transfer to another server, or start my own raiding guild.

And so, on a whim, the next day I had a completed guild charter, and a one-man guild ready to be shaped. Ka Pai was born!