Retirement Reasons and Reminiscing Part 1

Kurn / / apotheosis, facepalm, raiding, ramblings, T11, T12, T13

It’s official. In eleven days, my World of Warcraft account subscription will expire and, for the first time in years, I will not be renewing it. This, I imagine, is not news to anyone who’s read this blog more than a couple of times in the last several months, or listened to Blessing of Frost since, oh, Firelands was nerfed.

I haven’t actually clicked the “cancel” button yet, but the last time I renewed my sub, I used a game time card so that even if I forgot to cancel, they couldn’t bill me again. Once I do hit that button, I plan to use these forthcoming posts to help describe my reasons for leaving the game. (There’s no way 500 characters or something like that would ever even put a dent into my reasons and feelings about the game.)

Anyhow, I’m not out to convince anyone to quit or that the game sucks or anything of the sort. Play or don’t play, that’s your choice and your choice alone. I feel compelled to document my decision and my reasons to better understand it all myself. I also want to blog about it because I’ve become more interested in the decision to game/raid/etc than the actual content of the game and so exploring my own reasons seems like a good place to start.

Reason 1: The Evolution of Raids/Accessibility of Raiding Content

Since I discovered what “raiding” was, back in Vanilla, I have wanted to raid. I wanted to be like that guy from my server, Thack (no, not Theck, Thack) who was in 9/9 Dreadnaught Armor (warrior T3) and who was a Scarab Lord. He would stand around Lagforge Ironforge on his bug mount, in his gear and would basically just look awesome.

I was fascinated by the idea of a team, a real team, of 40 people working together in concert to do stuff. So when I discovered what raiding was, courtesy of my brother who was killing Ragnaros with another guild, I went into research mode. I found out everything I needed to know about attunements and questlines and then I shared that info with my guildies. The old Fated Heroes guild had a significant problem in that people would join the guild, we’d work hard to help them get to 60 and then they’d hop over to a raiding guild on the server. So I approached the GM and asked him if he WANTED to raid. All the officers did, they just didn’t know how to retain the players. That’s where I came in. I helped to educate the players and helped to put into action these plans about raiding. I did attunement runs out the wazoo. I helped recruit people. It was a great team effort just to start raiding ZG, then AQ20 (to an extent) before finally hitting up MC and trying to down Onyxia.

Then, the guild kind of fell apart and we kind of went our own ways for the start of Burning Crusade, only we all regrouped in May and then formed Apotheosis on June 1st, 2007.

Here, I thought, was my chance to raid with some people whose company I really enjoyed and we’d do it better than we ever did back in Fated Heroes. We formed with the goal to kill Illidan. And, eventually, we did.

While we fell apart in Wrath of the Lich King, we reformed for “Apotheosis 2.0” for Cataclysm and we put the old Apotheosis to shame by doing 7/13 HM in T11, 6/7 HM and Glory of the Firelands raider in T12 and following it up with 8/8 HM in T13 Soul along with Glory of the Dragon Soul Raider. These were unprecedented levels of raiding success for our guild. So many people had grown with the guild and had come back to play with us and it was really amazing to see this mix of old and new together, working as a team and succeeding.

Having said all of that, I play the game to raid. I LOVED learning Lucifron in Molten Core. It was such an epic fight to me back then. I remember this one moment where I realized I was about to die, because I had Impending Doom on me. I had used my healthstone. My health potion was on cooldown. My bandages were on cooldown. In fact, here… Since I knew I was going to die, I took a screenshot of it. This was taken on July 22nd, 2006.

So I did die after that Impending Doom. And yet, that ended up being the winning attempt. Lucifron down! And I got the Tome of Tranquilizing Shot. Then we played with Gehennas a bit (Magmadar with just 1 Tranq Shot? HAH.) and called it a night.

I loved the teamwork we showed in this instance. I loved setting up my hunter rotations for Tranq Shot — there was me, Toga, Kaiu, Sharpbow and a few others over the course of the next few months. We never missed a single rotation. We nailed it. Because we worked together as a team.

Now, you may be wondering, Kurn, don’t you still have to work as a team to defeat raid encounters?

Yes. But only to an extent. Why only to an extent? Well, dear reader, if you wait long enough, Blizzard will nerf the encounters.

In their ongoing goal to make raid content “accessible”, their design choices have changed drastically from what they did in Vanilla to what they do now.

TO ENTER MOLTEN CORE IN VANILLA:

– Attunement quest at Level 55, requiring you to defeat most of the bosses in Blackrock Depths in order to get your core fragment. This often required you actually knowing how to play your class well enough to be part of a successful core attunement run. (Or for you to be carried by friends/guildies/etc. Or summoned by a warlock.)

TO ENTER DRAGON SOUL IN CATACLYSM:

– Ding 85.

It’s not exactly even. And don’t get me started on Onyxia attunement. (Dammit, Maj, I still cannot believe YOU DIED on Jailbreak, dude. ;))

Now, and this is where I think a lot of people misunderstand me, I want to make it clear that I don’t much like jumping through arbitrary hoops, despite my admiration of attunements. I think a lot of things they’ve changed about raiding through the years have been quality of life changes.

In Burning Crusade, they introduced the “1 flask or 1 Guardian elixir and 1 Battle elixir” rule. They also changed food buffs so you could only have one on you at a time.

Lots of people cried “NERF OMG” but I was one of many others who were like “oh thank God, I don’t need to have a flask, plus another 5 elixirs on me.” I mean, look up at that screenshot again — I don’t even have an Elixir of the Mongoose on. (Bad Kurn.)

The change made sense. It allowed the devs to assume everyone would have one flask OR two elixirs and one food buff and they would build the encounters with that in mind and it allowed people who wanted to raid to not, you know, farm for the 20 hours a day they didn’t raid. ;) I was a fan of this. (Less of a fan of them nerfing holy paladins and Illumination, but ANYWAY.)

Later in BC, Blizz lifted the attunement requirements to Serpentshrine Cavern, Tempest Keep, The Battle for Mount Hyjal and Black Temple. While we didn’t do the attunements for SSC and TK in Apotheosis back then, we did do the Hyjal and BT attunements just by virtue of progressing through T5 and we also wanted the shadow resist necks for the Mother fight in BT, so we got just about everyone that attunement.

While I wasn’t, shall we say, thrilled by the change, my guild benefitted from it. So I can’t really complain too much. And we did the “important” attunements anyhow, getting most everyone Hand of A’dal and their BT necks.

One month before Wrath of the Lich King was to be released, Patch 3.0 dropped. With new talents and abilities and such came a 30% nerf to all raid bosses. Unchangeable, couldn’t turn it on or off. If you were raiding, you were dealing with a 30% nerf to everything. More, it was initially undocumented.

This was the first really big nerf that Blizzard implemented.

Again, my guild benefitted from it. We were 4/5 Hyjal and 5/9 BT at that point. We knew we would get Archimonde down without the nerf, but didn’t have the opportunity to prove it. Then again, without the nerf, we probably wouldn’t have gotten through the rest of BT and wouldn’t have achieved our goal of killing Illidan.

I never thought this would become a trend.

The next time we saw huge buffs/nerfs like that was in Icecrown Citadel, with a stacking “buff” to make players more powerful in increments of 5% all the way up to 30%. I first killed Heroic 25-man Sindragosa at the 15% buff and later, repeated 11/12 HM progression on 25-man mode (with another guild) at the 25-30% buff level. It was still difficult, because fights like Heroic Putricide and Heroic Sindragosa were more about coordination than raw power.

I was okay with the buff, for the most part. It got pretty silly by the 30% point, but I told myself it was just because the instance was going to be the last major one (please, who counts Ruby Sanctum? Screw you and your boots, Halion!) of the expansion and it was going to last a while. And it did last a while. It lasted a year. A YEAR.

Then Tier 11 showed up in Cataclysm and, well, chunks of it were really difficult. Apotheosis went 7/13 HM before Firelands came out and we were like “SEEYA” to Blackwing Descent, Bastion of Twilight and Throne of the Four Winds.

They nerfed T11 normal modes when Firelands came out. They did not touch the heroic modes.

I felt that nerfing T11 normals was a bad plan. My guild’s alt run carried me through T11 normals on my hunter post-nerf and it was ridiculous. In a single night, Kurn got Defender of a Shattered World, a title that had taken Madrana several weeks (three months?) to earn.

Still, they hadn’t nerfed the heroics and we weren’t touching T11 content anyhow, so I thought, well, that’s fine. I guess.

And then came the Firelands nerf. This is where I became acutely aware that Blizzard’s ideas on raiding were now significantly different from mine.

What had previously been end-of-expansion nerfs or buffs, what had previously been “last tier of content” stuff, was now hitting my CURRENT normal and heroic raid content.

That’s when it stopped being okay for me.

“We want raids to be more accessible,” Blizzard told us.

Fine, okay, I get it. And then we got LFR. And I thought “hey, there might be a bright side here. ANYONE can see raids through LFR. Now they’ll leave our normals and heroics alone!”

But I was wrong. They continued to nerf the crap out of both normal and heroic Dragon Soul, ultimately reaching a 35% blanket nerf on all encounters.

This was basically my breaking point.

I had started raiding back when it was a pretty punishing hobby. I enjoy many of the quality of life changes we’ve seen since then (don’t get me started on how they’ve now removed cauldrons and made feasts inferior to 300 stat food) and have enjoyed how raiding has absolutely gotten more accessible. However, when I started, people worked and worked to get bosses down. There was nothing on the horizon that was coming soon to help you get over that hump. All you had to work with was your raid team and all you could do was keep bashing your head against the boss, until you suddenly had a breakthrough and got the boss down.

These are the epic moments I remember best. People didn’t rely on just waiting until they became more powerful or the boss became weaker due to some developer tweaks, they worked hard to improve themselves — farming gear, using consumables appropriately, researching their class. Gruul did not just fall over for us one day, he finally died because we realized we needed this thing called “hit rating”. Lady Vashj was over 100 pulls of over 35 different raiders and a variety of strats before we got her down.

That’s the challenge I like, knowing that I am stuck on this boss until I down it, knowing that the boss will behave in exactly the same fashion time and time again until such time as I work out what it is we’re doing wrong.

When Blizzard buffs the players or nerfs the encounters, that changes and it infuriates me. I feel like they’re saying “oh, you aren’t progressing fast enough, so here, let us help” and then they drag that finish line closer to us by about 10 meters. That ruins the kill for me.

Let’s look at when Apotheosis first killed Heroic Ultraxion, shall we?

It was Tuesday, February 28th. We had had a crushing 0% wipe on Heroic Ultraxion on Sunday, the 26th. We had spent pretty much all night on Ultraxion by that point, but because we wanted to clear the rest of the instance that night, we had decided that our last pull on Ultraxion would be around 11pm, leaving us an hour to finish up the rest of the instance on normal. The date is important. Why? Because on Tuesday, February 28th, the 10% nerf to Dragon Soul went into effect. This made a huge impact on our decision for Sunday’s raid. “Well,” we said to ourselves, “if we don’t get it tonight, at least we’ll get it on Tuesday with the nerf.”

That’s my problem. Even though I have serious issues with Blizzard nerfing the instances, I had to take it into account. What was more important to us? To kill Heroic Ultraxion and maybe miss out on Madness loot (which was still a bit new to us) or to ensure a full clear and know, with total certainty, that we would kill Ultraxion on the next reset?

Logistically, it made more sense for our raiders to get new trinkets and weapons from Spine and Madness, so that’s what we did. Had we not had the nerf incoming, I think I would have continued to work on Ultraxion until he died, because that kind of “he will die next reset” certainty wouldn’t have been there.

The very presence of the nerfs altered the way I ran my raid. That isn’t a concession I’m happy to make. I do miss the old days where if you were stuck on a boss, you were stuck on the boss and all you could do was farm previous bosses and improve your own performance to get through it. Now, you just wait for the nerf. Even my raid group did it, although I’m not pleased about it, because it made sense for us at the time.

Of course, not everyone misses those old days of being stuck on a boss for weeks, months at a time. That’s a great segue to my next point. My next post will discuss the disconnect between other people’s thinking and my own as a reason for my deciding to quit.

(As always, please remember there is a comment policy in place. Thanks!)

Raider Time Sinks: Dailies, Cooking, Fishing and More

Kurn / / mists of pandaria, ramblings

I’ve been wanting to post this for a few days, now, but felt I really should post now after having read Anafielle’s excellent post, Mists of Farm-daria.

Let’s be super-clear about this: I am no longer a raider. As such, I have a lot of latitude in being able to do what I want to do. But I’m in a raiding guild and I read blogs by raiders and follow many raiders on Twitter. The biggest concern I keep seeing, over and over again, is how much time people are spending doing all the non-raid stuff they feel they “should” do as a responsible raider.

At Level 90, I gather that there are a few dailies a raider “needs” to do for rep with various factions. Here’s what those factions give you:

– Golden Lotus: Tailors and LWs particularly due to the patterns available at honored, plus VP rings at honored. At Revered, Shoulders and Chests become available with VP.

– Klaxxi: Blacksmiths get their plans here at honored. There are also VP necks here at honored. VP legs and belts are available at Revered. Exalted has some blue-quality (ilvl 463) weapons available.

– Shado-Pan: VP cloaks at honored, VP trinkets and helms at Revered.

– August Celestials: Enchanting patterns at Revered, as well as VP boots, gloves and bracers.

Of course, “needing” to do the dailies is a very subjective term. From my perspective, a raider should probably maximize his or her gear in order to perform better in raids. As such, since VP gear is available from ALL of those factions (and I’m not even talking about how you had to earn rep with factions for JUSTICE point gear until recently!), raiders should likely rep up to at least revered with most of these factions.

I feel that a raider should maximize his or her gear within reason. (And bear in mind that my thoughts no longer necessarily reflect the mindset of Apotheosis!) That means I feel that you shouldn’t need to drop 200k on a heroic drop at the Black Market Auction House. It means you shouldn’t need to craft something worth 60k (possible exception for the Darkmoon Faire trinkets).

At the same time, it means that I feel one needs to do LFR weekly for upgrades, rep up for upgrades, cap VP for upgrades.

Not everyone will agree with me. Raiders who fall on the more casual side of things than Apotheosis will think I’m insane. Raiders who fall on the more hardcore side of things than Apotheosis will be more likely to say “of course, duh, PLUS you need to get those BMAH items AND craft all the things”.

The fact remains that in order to improve your performance in a raid, your gear needs to be upgraded. How you do it and how dedicated you are to doing it is all that’s in question.

That brings us to cooking.

In brief, fuck cooking.

I say that as someone who has ALWAYS had at least one max-level cook. In Cataclysm, I had 3 max-level cooks. I own three Chef’s Hats. In short, I enjoy cooking.

Whoever decided to fuck with cooking in this expansion needs a smack upside the head.

Don’t get me wrong, the farm thing is cute. I like being able to grow things. My problems with cooking are not problems with farming, although they are tangentially related. No, my problems with cooking consist primarily of the fact that it takes an incredible amount of materials to max yourself in one single Way of cooking and that unless you max all the Ways, you can’t drop a 275 stat food feast. Plus, 275 stat food feasts aren’t even as good as the 300 stat foods that are single-use! What the eff happened here?

If we look at my personal feelings about gear, doesn’t that mean I think everyone should use personal 300 stat foods? Sure. Until you look at what’s REQUIRED for 300 stat food. Say I want to make the 300 Agility food for Kurn. That’s Sea Mist Rice Noodles.

Ingredients for 5:

– 1 Rice Flour (Ironpaw Token)
– 25 Scallions (farm or 1 Ironpaw Token for 25)
– 5 Tiger Gourami (fishing or 1 Ironpaw Token for 5)
– 5 Raw Turtle Meat (farming mobs or 1 Ironpaw Token for 5)

At minimum, for a stack (20) of 300 stat food, you’re looking at 4 Ironpaw Tokens, 4 days of farming on a farm that is at least 5 plots, finding 4-5 Tiger Gourami schools and fishing them, possibly two, then killing some turtles for the meat. Or spending 16 Ironpaw Tokens for all the mats. Or mixing and matching and supplementing with the Auction House.

Imagine a typical progression raid guild can wipe 30 times in a single night. You now want at least 30 foods. Add another 2 tokens, minimum, up to another 8. For a single night of raiding.

I’m pretty sure many people will agree with me when I say “fuck THAT right in the ear”.

There are different swaps to be made, of course, something about Bundles of Groceries and trades with Spirits of Harmony and the like, but that’s still pretty rough, particularly the farming of mobs and the fishing up of fish.

Now, I happen to enjoy fishing. Prior to Mists’ launch, I had ALL the fishing achievements. I like it. But a lot of people don’t. And a lot of people may feel pressed into fishing to get that “best food”. Plus, the fact that there are SO MANY ingredients means that the AH is not a great source. There may be hundreds of carrots up, but not hundreds of Tiger Gouramis. Which leads back to tokens or farming/fishing yourself.

Now multiply that by 10 or 25, depending on your raid size. Gah.

So in terms of effort vs. gain, having the guild bank handle banquets is probably your best bet. After all, it’s “only” 25 stats. But, and I don’t know about you, it would drive me crazy not to have the 300 stat food on me. (Have I mentioned I’m glad I’m not raiding? No? I AM VERY GLAD TO NOT BE RAIDING.)

Say you want the 300 stat food and want to rep up with, oh, everything. That is a stupid amount of time investment. Plus, you still may run dungeons and LFR in addition to raiding…

I’ll be honest with you. I’ve been doing Golden Lotus dailies, Tiller dailies and Anglers dailies on Kurn. I’m a hunter. Pure DPS. It still takes me ~90 minutes to do all my dailies and tend to my farm. And I’m not even doing Klaxxi dailies because, well, ew, gross. Add in another 20-30 minutes for Klaxxi, then another 20-30 minutes for other factions as they become available and you are looking at 90 minutes to 2 hours for a not-particularly-geared DPS to earn rep EVERY DAY in order to get better gear. God forbid you’re a healer.

Then there’s flasks. Gone are cauldrons entirely. And each flask requires a Golden Lotus. Do you know I haven’t ever PICKED a Golden Lotus on my herbalist? Haven’t seen any. As such, the most reliable method of getting a Golden Lotus is trading in a Spirit of Harmony for three of the herbs. Whee, that’s one night of flasks in my guild, but hey, that doesn’t even include the herbs. Thankfully, the other herbs are only 4 of a single type, in conjunction with the Golden Lotus, so it’s no longer 8 of 2 separate herbs, it’s just 4 of one herb. Feel bad for the Strength users who pay out the wazoo for Fool’s Cap, but anyhow.

This seems as though it’s overkill. In their effort to give more, diverse things for people to do, Blizzard has only succeeded in making a lot of the things “mandatory” for many of the raiders in their game. When, then, do raiders have the time to do Challenge dungeons? Scenarios? Hunt down those rares? Level alts?

Blizzard has, in my opinion, screwed up and needs to rectify certain things ASAP:

– Banquets should be 300 stat food (450 stam for tanks)
– Cauldrons should be re-integrated into the game at a similar cost as last expansion: 3 of each flask (int/str/agi/stam) (I still think we’ll outgrow Spirit flasks, so I don’t think that’s necessary to include in the Cauldrons)
– Cooking should not be quite as brutal in terms of materials required
– Dailies should NOT be taking 90 minutes every single day

And, as was pointed out on Twitter by Rades and Vosskah, why the reversion back to a DAILY heroic dungeon for VP instead of just capping at 7 heroic dungeons a week?

Blizzard has done a lot of things right this expansion (I love a LOT of little things) but these “wrong” things are things that would drive me to quit if I weren’t already planning to do so.

Kurn's First Pandaren Experiences

Kurn / / mists of pandaria

So, I’ve been in Italy for the last couple of weeks. I left home on Monday, September 24th, landed in Rome at about 10am local time on Tuesday, September 25th. That’s right, I was in Italy for launch. And most of the first couple of weeks. I got back home on Friday, October 5th.

Since I am not planning to raid this expansion and since I am, in fact, probably quitting WoW shortly after my current subscription expires (after the Annual Pass expires), I have not been in a rush to level. I’ve logged on to just about all my toons to get them rested, of course, but I’m just chilling. Kurn just hit 86 last night and I’m, again, in no rush to level more quickly. I’ve been raising professions — all three of my alchemists, my JC, my scribe, plus my herbalist/miner. Poor Kurn’s professions are not very high at the moment (540-550 range) but I’ll get there eventually. (Must make use of the DMF profession things for +5 to various professions.) The biggest issue I’d encountered is that I had, for some reason, never levelled my enchanter on Eldre’Thalas to 525 enchanting. Nope, she was stuck at 450(!) so I had to get her to 475 to start DEing Mists stuff. She’s sitting around 525 enchanting now, I think.

What’s absolutely astounding to me is that, for the first time since Vanilla, I am totally lost when it comes to stuff. People in guild chat are talking about locations and mobs and instances and I am completely lost. I am saving all these cooking ingredients I have because I don’t know what I need to use yet and I don’t know what isn’t needed by me.

Of course, nothing is really “needed” since I’m not raiding, but you get what I mean.

It’s so very strange to take a couple of weeks off and be THIS lost.

At the same time, it’s kind of a good thing, I think.

Anyhow, time to go enjoy myself doing whatever I want (including making a lot of gold). I’m sure I’ll chime in about things once I’ve hit 90 on some toon. In the meantime, you should look at some of the pics I took in Italy:

http://twitpic.com/photos/kurnmogh

Invisible Mode: Too Little, Too Late (for me)

Kurn / / ramblings, real id

It was announced today that Blizzard will be implementing an “Appear Offline” mode (aka Invisible Mode) to BattleNet “in the coming months”.

Let me be clear, this is a great thing and is long overdue.

However…

The RealID/BattleTag chat system is still clunky, clumsy and inelegant and “Appear Offline” is going to add to the clunkiness of it all, not remove the clunkiness.

It is a great thing that people will be able to go invisible, don’t get me wrong. I’ve very excited for everyone who will make use of it. However, rather than look at the system in a critical way, I feel as though Blizzard is using “Appear Offline” as a band-aid to the underlying problems inherent in the system.

With the information we’ve been given (which is, to be blunt, not a lot), it can be understood that people will be able to be seen as “offline” with this option, to RealID/BattleNet/character friends.

To begin, here are some of the immediate questions that came to mind concerning how this will work in World of Warcraft:

1) Will you have this option before logging in to a character? As it stands, you have to log in to WoW first (thus becoming “visible”) before you can edit your BattleNet settings.

2) Will the Appear Offline mode persist through different logins? Say I log in to Kurn and I set myself as offline. If I log out as Kurn and log back in (on Kurn or any other character, for that matter), will the mode persist in the same way announcements do?

3) What implications are there for guild listings? I presume I’ll still show up as online in my guild, which I think is fine — that’s part of the deal when you join a guild, really. But what if someone on my realm (with whom I am character friends) does /who Apotheosis and sees Kurnmogh online? Would they see me? Would they not see me? How would that work? Could they still whisper me?

Now, while you’re all chewing on that, let me re-iterate a point I’ve made in my previous RealID-related posts:

– Social interaction between people is complex. The ongoing lack of any kind of personalized contact system for one’s RealID/BattleTag friends is antiquated. We are firmly in the era of social media and social networks. If Blizzard is intent on creating/using their own social networking system, they need to recognize that social interactions and relationships are extremely complex in nature and one-size-fits-all does not, in fact, fit the needs of most communities. Is it better than nothing? Maybe. But it can be a LOT better.

So how is it clunky? How is it antiquated? Aside from the points I’ve brought up (versus other solutions) in my other posts, let’s look at BattleTags. BattleTags are also “always on”, just the way RealID is and, worse, you have to have one if you want to play Diablo III. So I have a BattleTag, because I played D3 for approximately eight minutes. (Okay, level 50 or something.) And it’s always on, despite the fact that I have RealID turned off. I don’t share that information with anyone, but the fact remains that BattleTags are something we are forced to use (as in we are automatically logged in) in other games if we’ve played Diablo III. Really? How is that okay? And there’s no off switch, either. There’s an enable Real ID option, but nothing about enabling or disabling BattleTags. Why not? Let me turn off being able to communicate with me via BattleTag in a game that doesn’t currently require BattleTag use. Especially if I’ve already turned off RealID. (Follow-up question, why require BattleTags for D3 in the first place?) What if I wanted to chat with people in D3 but not in WoW? Why not be able to have an option to turn on BattleTags for each individual Blizzard game, rather than just opt us in without a choice?

Do you see how it’s inelegant? It could be so much better. It should have been so much better. And I would have been its staunchest supporter.

As it stands, the RealID/BattleTag system is, in my opinion, deeply flawed in a variety of ways. The “Appear Offline” option is definitely a step in the right direction, but it’s not the panacea for the system. At best, it’s a quick-fix solution for a system that is invasive, persistent and not even as smart as a system that was built in 1996, namely ICQ.

16 years after ICQ, this is the best Blizzard has to offer?

Too little, Blizzard. Far too little for your customers and way too late for me.

An End and a Beginning

Kurn / / apotheosis, mists of pandaria, ramblings

Months ago, I came to the conclusion I would not be raiding in Mists of Pandaria. In fact, I may not even be playing after my Annual Pass paid subscription runs out. As such, it was important to me to make sure to give my officers the heads up and ensure replacements would be found for the vacant positions. Once replacements were found for me, it also became important to have a timeline of the changeover of power.

September 18th, two weeks after our last raid, one week ahead of Mists of Pandaria, seemed like a good date to give GM to Jasyla, who was the chosen replacement for me as GM. It also seemed like a good date to demote Majik to Member from Officer.

So as of this writing, I am no longer the guild master of Apotheosis.

It’s a weird thing.

When we started Apotheosis in 2007, Majik was the GM to begin, but that was quickly given to Toga after a vote. It was in January of 2008 that Toga had to step down from raiding and so I became the GM.

In March of 2009, I gave GM to Majik. We had lost too many raiders in late BC/early Wrath to continue, so Maj held on to GM for a while and I headed to Bronzebeard on my pally and to Proudmoore on my hunter.

It wasn’t long before Majik chose to let his subscription lapse so my level five hunter, whom I was using primarily to save the name Kurnmogh on Eldre’Thalas, became GM of Apotheosis again. The guild still existed and people were still in it, but most had stopped playing or had moved on. There was very little GMing to do, really.

In September of 2010, I brought Kurn back from Proudmoore and regained GM on that character. And Apotheosis 2.0 was born.

Two years later, for the first time since Majik briefly was GM in 2009, someone else is the GM of Apotheosis.

It’s weird, in a way, how people choose to identify themselves. For 14 months, I was Kurn, GM of Apotheosis. Then, I was Kurn of Kurn’s Corner, while I was simultaneously Madrana of Bronzebeard, Proudmoore and Skywall. Then back to Kurn, GM of Apotheosis.

Now what?

Being Kurn has been a huge part of my identity for over three years of my life. I have ALWAYS been an officer of the guild, since June 1, 2007.

That is a long time.

Soon, not only will I no longer be the GM, but I won’t be an officer. I won’t be raiding. I might not even be playing.

It’s a very odd thing to be saying goodbye to these identities I’ve constructed over the years. Officer. GM. Raid leader. Healing lead. Raider. Player.

It’s happening at a time in my life when I’ve finally finished university, too, so at the same time, I’m also shedding the identity of student, which is actually a lot harder than I thought it would be.

Change abounds. Adventures await. And while my adventures in the World of Warcraft have been unforgettable and awesome, occasionally annoying and disappointing, but ultimately rewarding, it’ll be good to explore the new adventures that await me without being tied to my email, the forums, the game, the raid times.

It’s a good change. The guild is in good hands.

None of that makes things any easier, though. How do you stop a seven year habit? How do you stop identifying yourself as what you’ve been for the last several years? How do you say goodbye to those who followed you on your various adventures?

For me, I guess the answer is to find something else about which I’m passionate and create a new identity, perhaps one relating to finding a full-time job or actually finding the time to have a relationship.

As to saying goodbye, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to say something as final as “goodbye” to my guildies. I will always keep up to date with Apotheosis happenings, boss kills, server firsts and the like. But as time goes by, it will certainly be from the sidelines and it will definitely be from the perspective of having helped to create the guild that is now kicking ass, kind of like how I imagine a parent looks at their child as the child grows into a fine, upstanding young adult.

Once again, I am honoured and humbled to have played any kind of role in the history of Apotheosis. The guild has been my baby for the last two years and though it’s difficult to give it up, I know they will be in good hands and I know they will kick some serious ass going forward. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is really what any GM wants their guild to be able to do without them at the helm. Mission accomplished. :)

How to Prepare a Raiding Guild for Mists of Pandaria: Steps 5 & 6

Kurn / / apotheosis, guide, guild, mists of pandaria, raiding

I know, I’ve been slack with these posts, for which I truly apologize. Hopefully we’re not too late with this final post. Please do read Steps 1 & 2 and Steps 3 & 4 before you move on. :)

STEP 5: Roster Confirmation

My last post shared this spreadsheet with you. Here’s an updated version.

As you can see, we’ve lost a couple of other people from the current roster. Cinder, Majik and myself, but also Innerbite (which is a whole other story on its own) and Miurne, along with confirmation from Hitoku that he will not be raiding in Mists. We never did hear from Delandruss (and we hope he’s okay!). Walks decided to go monk, while Dayden elected to remain an enhancement shaman, not wanting to add to the glut of tanks. Kripptic went from being a hunter to being a DPS warrior in our raids and that’s what he’ll be playing in Mists.

We also added:

Ghostlore, Ilumi, Mabriam, Reax, Smmoke and Sturm (of which, Mabs and Sturm had previously raided with us)

We also went recruiting specifically for Mists! So we have the following who will be starting (mostly) their trials in MoP:

Grumdy and Zazii (zomg warlocks!), Leenewton (moonkin), Jacii (holy paladin), Poz (will be a windwalker monk) and Stariian (rogue who had maybe two raids with us before we stopped raiding for the expansion).

Current count:

23 DPS (10 melee, 13 ranged)
3 tanks (brewmaster, guardian, prot pally)
8 healers (2 resto druids, 2 mistweaver monks, 2 healing priests, 1 resto shaman, 1 holy paladin)

Honestly, I’m pretty happy with that. 34 people confirmed, although one must always prepare for the unexpected. The officers anticipate somewhere in the realm of 20% attrition, but some of that has already happened, so we were at 37 people before Inner bailed and Miurne and Hitoku wouldn’t be continuing. and 20% of 37 is 7.4. That means I estimate another 4 people will either bail, won’t be ready for raiding on October 9th or won’t pass their trials.

So Apotheosis is pretty set moving into Mists, although we could still use a shadow priest to keep Srsbusiness company, would consider another elemental shaman, another hunter and even another moonkin.

At this point in time, your roster should be more or less set. You should have confirmed everyone’s role with everyone and given them a bit of time to change their minds or even make up their minds. You should have a good idea of what you need to recruit and you should be exploring those options.

What’s left?

STEP 6: Paperwork & Policies

If you follow me on Twitter, you have doubtlessly seen tweets of mine wherein I complain about “paperwork”. Welcome to running a guild. Even if it’s virtual paperwork, you still have a crapton of it to do if you want to be organized about stuff.

Apotheosis is a guild where 100% of our information that is important to the running of the guild is found on our guild forums. There are two major reasons for this.

1) To share the information with our players. As a raider in Apotheosis, you are expected to check the forums regularly. All policies, strategies and announcements are posted on the forums, all feedback is done back and forth on the forums via private message and all guild bank requests are done on the forums. It means there is a central place for information and if the officers have posted the appropriate information, the onus is then on the players to make sure they’ve done their reading. This is also important for the sake of transparency. If it’s on the forums, we stick to it. There are no surprises.

2) So we don’t have to remember it all. Human memory is a funny thing in that sometimes, we don’t remember things. Or we remember them wrong. Having it all written down in a centralized location means not only that I don’t need to remember that, for example, normal-version shoulders cost 750 GP, but the person in charge of loot isn’t completely irreplaceable in case of emergency. Having all our EPGP values posted on the forums means that any officer can do loot (in theory). It means that anyone can read or re-read our various policies or strats. I know I referred to our H DS strats even going into our last couple of raids. It’s just not viable to expect everyone to remember everything with perfect clarity. Writing it down saves you the trouble.

Of course, the downside here is that we need to keep these various posts and documents updated.

Jasyla, who is the incoming GM of Apotheosis, spent several hours updating and re-writing and re-organizing several of our policy posts, many of which hadn’t been updated since, oh, the start of Cataclysm… Oops. ;) With feedback from the officers, Jasyla meticulously updated these posts and started posting them to our new guild forums. We elected to move to a new set of forums to have a fresh start without thousands of posts already. We took the opportunity to change how permissions worked on the new forums so it’s a lot easier to keep track of who can see what on the forums, plus it’s easier to know which permissions to give to which members. We also asked people to register for the forums using their new names, so Kaleri (our disc priest who’s going to be a guardian druid for us) changed her name to Kalbeari, which is her druid’s name. This makes things a million times easier for people to know who is who and avoid the dreaded “user not found” error when you try to write to someone only to remember, belatedly, that their toon name is not their forum name.

Essentially, assuming your roster is set, you’ll want to update your policies and expectations, start getting raid strats out there and then you’ll want to tackle something else that can be pretty overwhelming: the guild bank.

Tikari, in addition to being our melee lead again, will be handling the guild bank stuff. By “stuff”, I mean, he’s basically in charge of cleaning out the bank of stuff that won’t be useful and managing our 678,000 gold. This is not the time to be a packrat. This is the time to get rid of 90% of the crap in your guild bank and save your gold.

Right now, Apotheosis has 8 bank tabs and we require anyone who is a Raider or above to have an authenticator on their account. Here’s how we used the tabs in Cata and I expect they’ll be used similarly going forward.

1) Guild Trade: Anyone can deposit/withdraw junk here. We get a lot of AQ idols and scarabs, a lot of DMF quest items and other junk.

2) Glyphs/Enchants: Anyone can deposit/withdraw some glyphs here (as well as some enchants on scrolls).

3) Enchanting/Tailoring/LW/Vol: This was a tab for all our enchanting mats as well as cloth, raid drops (Essences of Destruction), leatherworking stuff and volatile storage. Anyone could deposit, only officers could withdraw.

4) Gems/Ore: This was where, not surprisingly, we kept all our gems and ore during the expansion. Anyone could deposit, only officers could withdraw.

5) Food: This was where we stored fish for the fish feasts. Anyone could deposit, only officers could withdraw.

6) Flasks: Also unsurprisingly, this was where we stored all our flasks that we used for raids. Anyone could deposit, only officers could withdraw.

7) Herbs: We had a small store of herbs once we moved to a system where people would donate flasks for cauldrons, but kept using it for various potions and elixirs and the like. Anyone could deposit, only officers could withdraw.

8) Secured: Patterns and BOEs made their way here. No one but officers could deposit and only the bank admin or GM could withdraw.

So what you need to do is clean out your bank and organize your tabs for efficient use.

Yet another thing to check out is guild ranks.

Apotheosis currently makes use of all 10 guild ranks.

Guild Leader is the rank for the GM, obviously. Bank Officer is the rank for the main character of the bank administrator as well as our “Apothbank” toon. Officer is for the other officers, Officer Alt is for the alts of officers, so they don’t have to swap over to throw out invites to the guild and such. Veteran is a new rank we brought in as a test (which has worked very nicely) that currently is for any non-officer who joined us before Cata dropped without pausing in their raiding with us. Going forward, this will be anyone who has raided with us for a full year without a break. Officers and Veterans are considered “Raiders” for loot purposes, but get slightly more repair ability and can invite people to the guild. Raiders are those who raid with the guild and have passed their trials. We’ll come back to Member in a minute, but Initiates are for our trialists, which typically lasts 3 weeks (9 full raids), or if content’s on farm and we’re doing 1 night a week clears, 4 weeks is the duration. Friends are friends of raiding-ranked people (or Members) and Alt is for everyone’s alt, except the officers.

Members are a little strange — they’re basically retired raiders from any point in time in Apotheosis’ history and, yes, I’ll be there soon enough. But a lot of our members who raided with us in BC are in this spot. You only ever get DEMOTED to Member after you’ve stopped raiding. They are important people to us who made it possible for us to get to where we are today and we like to recognize that by giving them their own rank and privileges that are more than what Initiates get but not quite what Raiders get. We are, after all, a raiding guild.

Speaking of being a raiding guild, one other thing our officers have hammered out is a good feedback system. Time and again, the biggest complaint we had as an officer group was a lack of feedback for the raiders, but to be honest, we didn’t have a group that had the time to give a lot of feedback. Our unofficial policy was “no news is good news”. We worked to change that in the last few months of Dragon Soul and the officers will be doing much more extensive feedback going forward. That was a major problem area for us and we worked to fix it, so raiders (and initiates) in Apotheosis will have a better idea of various expectations and will have more communication with their officers. We’ve added that to their roles as officers and, due to the fact that there are four people doing my jobs (GM, RL, recruitment, guild bank), we’ve had to specify what each role is responsible for.

Finally, THE LEGENDARY. Or legendaries.

Chances are, the moment you kill a boss in a raid instance in T14, something associated with the various legendaries out there will drop. What you need to do WELL before you walk into a raid instance is figure out who’s getting a legendary and in which order. Apotheosis is not prepared for this (yet), but I’m sure the officers will get that organized soon enough. (That said, I am selfishly REALLY GLAD I don’t have to make decisions about this.) Still, this is something any raiding guild will need to deal with and so you need to be clear about it before you start raiding.

CONCLUSION

Obviously, the most challenging thing is making sure your roster is settled, but once that’s done, it’s time to deal with the administrative side of things.

– policy updating/rewriting
– website/forum cleanup
– guild bank cleanup
– ranks/roster cleanup
– role duties for officers
– legendary

Once you’ve taken care of that stuff, you are pretty much good to go and ready to embark upon a new adventure in Pandaria! Don’t forget to keep your policies and such updated; review your policies every couple of months and make sure you’re still adhering to them or that they’re still reflective of what you’re actually doing.

Best of luck to you all in Pandaria! And feel free to let me know what other things you’ve done to help prepare your guild!

It’s Tuesday night, let’s do this raid!

Kurn / / ramblings

It’s Tuesday night, let’s do this raid!

Or not.

It took me a long time to realize that Tuesdays were the “Mondays” of the World of Warcraft week. Everything reset on Tuesdays (barring raids with a 3-day reset, like old-school ZG and AQ20). Thus, it was when a lot of people went in to do their raids. Once it sunk in, though, it really sunk in. I spent all of BC raiding on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Sundays and, later, we added Mondays. I spent chunks of Wrath raiding on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, then my schedules shifted, but I’m pretty sure I kept raiding on Tuesdays for the majority of that expansion, with just Choice not raiding on Tuesdays.

And then, back to Apotheosis and our Tuesday/Thursday/Sunday grind. Although we haven’t needed to raid on Thursday or Sunday in months (the Thursday after 5.0.4 excepted), we’ve continued to raid on Tuesdays, doing full 8/8 HM clears in Dragon Soul.

So, here it is. Tuesday night. 8:17pm.

And I don’t have a raid.

In the last 21 months, I have missed two scheduled Tuesday night raids, both due to exams. We have rarely cancelled Tuesday raids, maybe just a couple over the Christmas holidays.

Basically, I don’t even know what to do with myself.

The guild has ceased raiding for now, but will go right back to the grind on October 9th. And I won’t be part of it. I’m not even going to be in town for the launch of Mists of Pandaria, I’m going to be in Italy with one of my best friends. It’s a sort of graduation present from my parents for having, finally, finished my university degree.

But it’s Tuesday.

And I’m not raiding.

I think that, more than anything else, has really hammered home to me that my time as a serious raider, as a serious player, is over. Last night, I almost sent Serrath a PM, asking him if he was going to do tonight’s roster or if I should do it. I stopped myself midway through my first sentence.

Today, I feel as though I’m forgetting something. All day long, my brain has been nagging me to do SOMETHING. Like, to look over our logs or prep for tonight. Anything.

While there are a couple of final tasks I do have to do, that’s not the buzzing in my brain.

Nope. The buzzing in my brain is like, “Kurn, it’s Tuesday. You’re supposed to RAID on Tuesday.” It’s this thing I have done for so long, so regularly, for so many years, that my brain actually cannot grasp the idea that “no, you don’t raid tonight”. Perhaps more accurately, it cannot grasp the idea that “no, you don’t raid tonight… or again.”

Going to Italy will be great for me. It’ll be a wonderful trip. And because it’ll happen right during the launch of Mists of Pandaria, I will be completely distracted and unavailable to deal with WoW. Hopefully, that’ll do a lot to break the habits that are entirely ingrained in me at this point. Hell, last time I was in Italy, in 2006, I WENT TO A ZG RAID. I am not even kidding. And we got Mar’li down (guild first!), too.

So it’ll be good for me to get away, particularly on the dates I’m going, to help me not get all caught up in expansion fever. And maybe, just maybe, it’ll remind me that there are so many other things to enjoy on Tuesday nights.

First 5.0.4 Raid as a Holy Paladin

Kurn / / apotheosis, dragon soul, healing, mists of pandaria, patch 5.0

All right, I’ve had a night in Heroic 25-man Dragon Soul. I’ve also redone some of my testing and updated some numbers and such in my 5.0.4 guide.

The first thing I did after I recovered from the addon explosion in my UI was try to do an LFR. I zoned in and died on Ultraxion trash because, oh look, my addons were still exploding. (TipTac seems to have been my primary culprit, your mileage may vary.)

Once I got that sorted, I went back into LFR and zoned in for Spine and Madness. Apart from a wee bit of lag whenever the Burning Tendons popped up, things went fairly well. However, I realized two things:

1) Holy crap, I was burning mana FAST.

2) My UI was still insanely unhelpful.

So I did the following before my real raid:

– swapped to Heartsong on my Heroic Maw
– took out my 3x 67 intellect JC-only gems, replaced them with epic reds
– since I wasn’t getting the socket bonus on my pants anyhow, I gemmed all three sockets in my pants with the 67 spirit gems

Without Heartsong active and without any external buffs, that’s 4006 mp5 in combat, according to my character sheet.

With 10 stacks of Heart of Unliving and Heartsong active, that goes up to 4698 mp5 in combat.

I figured I was good to go.

Wrong. I still felt the pinch when I healed a bit too aggressively on Heroic Hagara (frost phase) and Heroic Blackhorn, not to mention Heroic Spine. We didn’t actually kill Heroic Madness last night, although we’ll be finishing that up tomorrow, but on our longest attempt, I felt the pinch on the fourth platform and into P2.

Part of it, at least on Madness, may have been our comp. We didn’t have a disc priest in the raid, so no barrier means more overall damage done since we had fewer people with damage-reduction CDs. (We could have bothered our rets or our prot to use more Aura Mastery Devotion Aura, but I know I didn’t think of it.)

Speaking of Devotion Aura, it’s better than Aura Mastery was, although we pay for that with an extra minute on the cooldown (DA is 3m vs. AM’s 2m). Why is it better? It works on Watery Entrenchment on Hagara. It works on Hour of Twilight on Ultraxion. These are two areas where Aura Mastery did zip.

Back to the instance… I think that it was more challenging than I suspected it would be, to be constrained to 100k mana (102k with the meta gem that grants you 2% extra mana) and to be careful not to overextend myself. I found myself in trouble a number of times. Thank goodness for Hymn of Hope sticking around as well as Mana Tide Totem!

Of note, with the redesign to Blessing of Might, I think all pallies need to bear in mind that we have a crazy amount of mastery just by virtue of being fully raid-buffed now. Illuminated Healing did a LOT of healing/absorption. Part of that might also be because I was making great use of Eternal Flame, which contributes to Illuminated Healing on each tick. (Remember not to overwrite a stronger Eternal Flame with a weaker one!)

I forgot, several times, that Light of Dawn is now a circle around you, not a cone, and I still have Judgment (new spelling) on my bars, although I should throw it away at some point. I’m not sure what I’d put in its spot, though!

So those were my experiences — I loaded up on more Spirit (but maintained an intellect flask with intellect food) and had a couple of sticky situations. I would recommend people be conservative to start their regularly scheduled content until they get the “feel” of the new size of their mana pools, too.

How was your first experience raiding in 5.0.4?

Raiding in 5.0.4

Kurn / / apotheosis, dragon soul, patch 5.0, raiding, ramblings

Apotheosis raids on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Lately, we’ve been clearing in about 2.5 hours, at most, on Tuesday nights. I stopped putting signups up for Sunday AGES ago and stopped putting up signups for Thursdays weeks ago.

This week, I knew there would be issues, so I put up signups for both Tuesday AND Thursday.

As such, Tuesday’s raid, post-5.0.4, was probably one of the longest three hours of the entire expansion, to be honest.

– UI issues
– Addon problems
– Connection issues
– Latency/frame rate issues
– Mechanic issues

All of these plagued us in one form or another.

Yet, we actually got through Spine. YAY!

Morchok was okay.

Yor’sahj was okay.

Zon’ozz was craptastic, issues with soaking.

Hagara was fine.

Ultraxion was craptastic, until everyone made sure their DBM was working so that they could appropriately hit Heroic Will when they had Fading Light.

Blackhorn was okay.

Spine was okay, even though someone fat-fingered Heroism randomly early on and even though we had a different tank configuration.

Madness was rough — issues with impales and then P2 bloods.

But I feel good about walking in there, pwning 7 bosses and leaving just one left with another 3 hours scheduled this week.

The most hilarious thing of the night quickly turned sour when we wiped on Madness and were ported to the top of Wyrmrest, then had to take the portal back DOWN to the bottom of Wyrmrest, then had to take a portal to the Skyfire, then a portal to the Maelstrom. I mean, really? Portal boss, hello! We got REAL tired of that.

I don’t have a lot to say about being a holy paladin during 5.0.4 yet, but I’m sure I’ll post soon. I really am loving Clemency and Eternal Flame, though. After running a couple of fights in the back half of LFR, I also removed my 3×67 int gems and put in 3×67 spirit gems and switched to Heartsong. I still felt the crunch here and there, particularly on H Spine and H Madness.

I expect a lot of things to fix themselves in the next couple of days, though, so I’ll post more comprehensively later on.

Overall, a long, but successful raid night for Apotheosis. Still seeking various classes for Mists of Pandaria, so check us out!

A Dramatic Day Without Red Haterade

Kurn / / apotheosis, facepalm, guild, mists of pandaria, ramblings

On Tuesday, August 21st, I participated in my third-to-last Apotheosis raid. I went to bed satisfied with the raid, happy with my guild and certain that the guild is well on the way to a wonderful future in Mists of Pandaria, even without me there. It’s gratifying to be at this stage of the expansion, with most of the “i”s dotted and most of the “t”s crossed. Plans are in place, officers are promoted and, soon, I’ll be a fond memory (or a tedious one, if people remember my speechifying and my lengthy forum posts).

I woke up on Wednesday to find the most dramatic thing to do with my guild in the last two years had been discovered while I had been asleep. I woke up to private messages from outraged guildies, to the officer forums exploding, to the general forum exploding, to tweets and DMs…

“Holy shit, who died?” was my first thought.

As it turns out, no one died and the drama was not related to any current raiding member of the guild. There was no issue with loot, no problems with our plans for the expansion, not a peep about our officers, new or old. So what caused this reaction?

For that, ladies and gentlemen, I am going to have to tell you a story. This story is somewhat lengthy and I am not feeling as kind as Jasyla was feeling when she wrote her post, so I’m going to name names.

Once upon a time, we had a kick-ass raider with us by the name of Huntertoga. Yes, he played a hunter. ;) Toga was an officer and a great guy and a great player. Unfortunately, Toga decided to step down. He was tired of the game, burnt out and gave us a ton of notice. So we went recruiting.

We got an application from someone by the name of Innersight, whose name changed to Innerbite, but everyone called him “Inner” and most (all?) of his alts’ names started with “Inner”. Inner was a good app, if a little undergeared, but his performance was pretty great. He had a couple of problems fitting in to the guild on a social level during his trial, so I wrote to him and asked him to tone it down and he did. He was promoted to Raider on February 23rd, 2012, after participating in the guild-first kills of Heroic Yor’sahj and Heroic Zon’ozz.

Inner was a very good player. He took on some of the crappy jobs that others either couldn’t or wouldn’t do, such as focusing the mana void on H Yor’sahj or making sure to break badly-timed grips on Heroic Spine. He made mistakes, just like anyone does, but for the most part, Inner was a solid player that you could count on.

Possibly the first indication that there was a problem with Inner (after his trial period) was when Diablo III came out. He was clearly tabbed out of WoW, playing Diablo III, during raids. I didn’t care if you tabbed out to play if you were on the bench, but not while you were in the raid group. I wrote to him about it, post-raid, and he blamed his inattention on his daughter (despite the fact that we could HEAR D3 fighting noises through Mumble!) and the like. Anyhow.

The next possible indication of “trouble” was that Inner was not remotely compromising about the fact he wanted to play a monk healer in the expansion. It looked as though Apotheosis might have too many healers on the roster at the start of Mists, so I wrote to the DPS who were looking to swap to healers with a private message that included this:

“If there aren’t enough healer slots to accomodate your swapping from DPS to healing, what would you play at that point?”

His response was firm:

“Because I am as set as I am to go back to healing I guess I would go on a bench/waiting list or find another place to raid…=/”

Due to my own plans to leave the raiding scene and the fact we’ll be losing another healer, we dropped this line of discussion because it would be fine if Inner were a healer in terms of group composition.

The next time I had some kind of concern about Inner came shortly after I announced my decision to step down from GM and RL, when we put out a call to the guild to see who might be interested in being an officer. Inner was one of the people who expressed interest. He expressed interest in being the raid leader and if that didn’t work, maybe the new healing lead (assuming Jasyla wouldn’t be retaining that position) and potentially lootmaster, though bank admin would be out for him, due to a lack of organization he felt he could bring to the position.

We thanked him for his interest (as we had with everyone who approached us) and we retired to the officer forums to discuss who we thought would make the strongest leadership team. That leadership team did not include Inner as an officer.

I again had concerns about Inner shortly after we announced the new officers, when Inner let me know that he needed to step down from raiding due to his new job which required a 2+ hour commute. He then changed his mind and said that he could be available for the first half of the raid (from 9pm-10:30pm or so) until he planned to move in early September, then should have full availability again. The officers discussed it and we accepted that, so long as he kept us up to date on the move and such. So Inner continued raiding with us, leaving around 10:30 or 11pm, since we were down to 1-night clears.

The next moment that included concerns about Inner came on Tuesday, July 31st, when Inner received the Heroic Vial of Shadows and was now 100% “best-in-slot”. I’m always a little uneasy whenever anyone gets their “best-in-slot” pieces completed because a lot of people’s motivation comes from loot. Still, nothing really happened at this point, but Inner was definitely excited about no longer needing anything from Heroic Dragon Soul.

The next time I had concerns, though, came a week later. Inner was now suddenly interested in running a GDKP run on Eldre’Thalas. He wanted permission to use the guild name/etc and basically have the support of the guild. We said sure and he sent me a really, really long document he’d written with rules/etc, but it read more like a pitch to our guild to participate, rather than rules of conduct for a GDKP run. I was concerned because I thought that Inner would start up this idea and then bail when he had no more interest in it, leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths about our guild. Still, I was going to edit this document and give him advice/etc about how to organize it, but had a lot of time due to the fact that it would only be happening way after Mists of Pandaria had launched.

Finally, on Tuesday, August 14th, Inner had signed up for that night’s raid, but was a no-show. What we call a no-show is someone who signs up as “Accepted” on the guild calendar event for the raid, but then doesn’t show up at all, without letting us know via forums, PMs, twitter, email, text, etc. I kind of figured he was done (BiS and all, you know?) but I wrote to him anyhow:

“Hi Inner,

You missed the raid tonight, Tuesday, August 14th. Serrath had let me know that you had told him in Mumble that you would be available tonight, yet you never logged on, from what I saw.

You were last on the forums today at 5:10pm ET, which would have been plenty of time to let us know you were unable to make it. There were no PMs sent, nor any emails or anything of the sort that I am currently aware of (as of 12:15am ET on Wednesday).

While emergencies do happen, and I hope nothing of that nature has happened, it really needs to be underlined that we need to hear from you as soon as you know you can’t make it. While we certainly had enough people to sit virtually anyone we wanted, not showing up is not acceptable, as people are relying on you, a raider-ranked member of the team, to adhere to your commitments towards the team.

I’ve CCed Serrath (incoming raid leader) and Slout (incoming ranged lead) on this note. Please use the reply to all link to respond to all of us when you do so in order to let us all know what your circumstances were with regards to missing tonight’s raid.

Again, I hope everything is okay, but I also hope you recognize that you’re an important part of the team and we need to know ASAP if you’re going to be unable to make it.

Thanks,

Kurn”

This was his response on the afternoon of Wednesday, August 15th.

“Hey all,

My life has gone almost beyond control at this point.

Reason for missing raid without notification:
Last night on the way home I got rear ended (and might I add how amazingly this indiviual fit a driving stereotype…lol) and I made impact with 2 other vehicles… no one seriously injured but my car is totaled. I ended up with bumbs and scrapes….and needing new pants.

Unfortunately I am going to be stepping down as a raider from Apotheosis. If you need me to leave with my toons, I understand as well. Just a few reason below:
We just found out child #2 is now on his/her way into this world.
My job is starting to cost me nearly 80 hours a week and I simply cannot sustain.

I still am very interested in Mists… but will likely not be on any normal scheduled raiding team (hopefully this will change over time). I am going to try to contact some old work buddies and RL friends and see if they are still running one night a week raids back on blackhorn. If this is the case I may be leaving ET in pursuit of a 1 weekend night a week raid schedule.

I will await a response before posting anything publicly to the guild. I just want to make sure you don’t mind me posting. I would like to say my goodbyes and thanks.”

Serrath, our incoming raid leader for Mists, replied:

“Oh my gosh – first off – I’m glad that you’re ok! Secondly, congratulations on the incoming baby!!!

I understand that you will need to step down from your current raider position. Regarding Mists, I apologize, but we will not be able to accommodate an unreliable raid schedule. Once details are hammered out and you’re in a more comfortable situation we would love to have you back in the community.

If you’d like to say goodbyes in your own thread, you are welcome to do this. At some point in the coming days we will bump down your rank in the guild to Member where you’re welcome to stay. Please let me know if there’s any questions you have or if you need anything.

Thanks,

Serrath”

Literally half an hour later, Inner posted this on our guild forums:

“Hey all,

Unfortunately I am going to be stepping down from Raider in Apotheosis. My RL responsibilities are tipping the free time scales. Working nearly 80 hours a week now and we just found out baby #2 is on the way!!! =)

I do want to say that I have learned an amazing amount during my time in Apotheosis and I hope for nothing but the best for you all in the future. I have no doubts you will continue to be as successul as ever.

As for Mists… I will have to wait and see how things go in RL go. In the begining of Mists I will most likely be trying to find a 1 weekend night run as I cannot reliably commit any more than that (an old RL friend led an alt run on saturday nights…going to try there). I may or may not stay on server due to this…=/

All in all… a true thank you for everything you all have helped me achieve and bringing me into the Apotheosis team. I will still exist and am always willing to help with anything I can.

Thanks again… and I will most definitely miss all the fun and success that is Apotheosis raiding.”

Several people chimed in on his thread, wishing him the best of luck and congratulating him on his forthcoming second child. No one was upset, no one was angry. We genuinely wished him well.

Exceedingly short and simplistic form of above: Inner was never the most reliable of raiders, though he was a great player. Still, a lot of us had felt strongly that he would flake out at some point. We certainly had a lot of reason to think he wouldn’t continue raiding us for the long haul, based on the variety of moments that I’ve touched on above.

So the history segment of this is now over.

Here’s what happened today…

I woke up to several private messages and a few forum posts, as  well as many tweets, all indicating something had happened with Inner.

Just hours after his post on Wednesday afternoon, he transferred off the server and Wowprogress notes his departure as of August 17th. That was fine, he had said he might go back to a 1-night weekend schedule. So what?

Turns out it was much more than that.

Inner is now the guild master of a guild named Mercury on Greymane (although, for reasons that will become clear very shortly, better names might have been “Acopyosis”, “Bpotheosis” and “Uranus” — thanks to Rades, Ash and Jasyla for those suggestions).

Inner being the GM of Mercury is not a problem. You don’t want to be part of Apotheosis, that’s fine. He stepped down. He took off. That’s okay. Good luck to you in whatever you do, no skin off my nose.

What presents a problem is the fact that Inner ripped off just about all of Apotheosis’ policies, as well as our application, our raid requirements for Mists and, as if that weren’t bad enough, our recruitment post. You doubt this? Check out this screenshot that still has the Apotheosis guild name in it (first sentence, last paragraph).

As Jasyla said in her post, just about all of our policies, including our application form, were taken just about word-for-word. I’d encourage you to go read Jasyla’s post now if you haven’t already.

Even though this guy has ripped off my words, Jasyla’s words and Serrath’s words, this is not actually what I’m most upset about. I’m not even all that upset by this gem of plagiarism…

I’m angry about the plagiarism, don’t get me wrong, but I think what’s really gotten me wound up is the entire package.

1) Inner tells us he has to step down; work is 80 hours a week, his wife is pregnant, cannot sustain 3 nights a week.

2) Inner leaves, returns to his former guild, becomes GM, aims to start raiding as a 25-man guild in Mists of Pandaria.

3) New version of Mercury has the exact same application and almost the same policies as Apotheosis, most of them taken word-for-word.

4) New version of Mercury has the exact same raid nights and times as Apotheosis — Tuesday/Thursday/Sunday from 9pm ET until 12am ET, with invites at 8:45pm.

5) New version of Mercury even has the exact same recruitment post and is, obviously, searching for every class.

6) As such, our recruitment officer (hi Sara!) can’t very well post right after Inner has in a prospective applicant’s thread — it’s the same post! Much re-writing needs to occur before posting in someone’s thread.

We were all pretty outraged by at least one of these happenings. (People reacted differently to the separate issues.)

On the one hand, the plagiarism is a compliment: We (primarily me, Jasyla, Serrath and Sara) wrote good posts and good policies, good enough for someone to steal. On the other hand, what the fuck, dude? He’s going to continue to raid 3 nights a week in a guild he’s going to run, based on how our guild is run. Why not just stay in Apotheosis? Psycho.

Hence, the suggested names of “Acopyosis” and “Bpotheosis”. (And “Uranus” comes from Jasyla’s post because she’s nice, but picked a planet that basically indicates Inner is an ass. I laughed.)

He had the nerve to come slithering back to our forums and was met with, well,  not the best reception:

Meanwhile, I was asleep. I woke up, found out all this was happening, posted a courtesy post in the officer forum saying “so, yeah, I’m gonna kick his remaining toons and lock him out of the forums, okay?” (to which the responses were a resounding DO IT DO IT DO IT) and did just that. Threw his remaining toons out and banned him from the forums.

Sadly, I had an appointment this afternoon, so I wasn’t able to really get my hate and anger on before I left… and by the time I started composing this monster of a post, things had settled down a bit. Why? Mercury’s website is now gone. The whole domain has been deleted.

I’m almost disappointed.

That said, the recruitment posts are still littered throughout the official recruitment forums. 63 of them. Sara’s going to see if she can’t get a GM to go delete them all before she continues our recruitment efforts, but I’m not optimistic.

They have, however, edited their “main” recruitment post to remove all the plagiarized stuff. Some people posted amusing things in the thread.

Overall, I think the biggest thing here is the “why”? Why would someone say that their schedule no longer permits them to raid, then go head up a raiding guild that plans to raid on that exact same schedule? Why would someone use the exact same application form and policies (except, of course, the important parts about the use of various words that we don’t appreciate in our guild community)? Is it just extraordinary laziness? Stupidity? Insanity?

Of course, finding out “why” would mean talking to Inner. That’s not something I’m prepared to do. He’s dead to me, as many people who have left my guild on bad terms have been, over many years. We’ve blacklisted him in our forums, meaning that even if Apotheosis is still around in ten years and new officers have taken over who have no idea who Inner is, he will never again be a part of Apotheosis.

I think the best thing that came out of this, though, was that it’s a bonding experience for the guild. “Remember that jackass who left and then became GM of his own guild and COPIED EVERYTHING WE HAD?” That’ll be remembered for years, by the Friends, the Initiates, the Members, the Raiders and Officers alike. So much outrage, so much /facepalming and so much disgust.

It’s nice to see that kind of loyalty from the guild. It shows me that the last two years have meant something to others, too, that our community is important to others in our guild.

To the members of Apotheosis: you rock. <3

And to those who have left us… you don’t know what you’re missing. :)

(If you’re interested in joining Apotheosis, as we are recruiting for Mists of Pandaria, head over to our guild website: http://www.apotheosis-now.com/main)

(PS: We could use a great holy paladin app!)