more suggestions to pick from…

general consensus is ‘black’ – have not rec’d any screenshot suggestions

hmm…

changing tabbard up – taking suggestions

It is not final – yet. Bounced options off a couple of guildies, and have looked at the black background that so many people asked for.

If you have design ideas you like better, take a screenshot and share it with me at ironfather A T gmail D O T com. I’ll take a look at what you come up with.

Don’t wait too long to send those in!

wait – what changed?

We have a whole new set of ranks with different permissions. The rules and regs have not yet been updated (but they will be this weekend); however, the summary is below:

• Guild Leader – no change.
• Knight-Captain – able to /ginvite, /gkick, promote, demote, change MOTD
• Captain – able to /ginvite, promote, demote
• Raid Boss – able to /ginvite, promote, demote
• Core Raider
• Veteran
• Sergeant – able to /ginvite, promote, demote
• Member
• Stockades – *cannot* speak in guildchat
• Recruit

Only the five officer ranks (Guild Leader, Knight-Captain, Captain, Raid Boss and Sergeant) can invite people into the guild.

Only the Guild Leader and Knight-Captain ranks can remove someone from the guild.

All officers can promote (not higher than their own rank) and demote (cannot demote ranks higher than yours).

Knight-Captain can change the message of the day.

Stockades rank is to be used by officers to relegate people that need to go into a ‘penalty box’ until a Knight-Captain or the Guild Leader can address the situation. Do not use this lightly nor over use it. It is there to give the officers a tool to address problem children instantly. From that rank, they can be reinstated back into guild or removed.

Raid Boss is a raid leader. (That was simple.)

Core Raider is a rank we may not fill for a lil bit. It will be based on reliability in regards to guild raiding and raiding readiness. (So for example, Veterans can raid and so can Members or Recruits; however, if you have distinguished yourself by demonstrated commitment to raiding, you will be promoted to Core Raider – exact benefits to be announced as we get closer to it, but don’t be surprised if the Core Raiders are in the first pick drafts for progression raids!)

Ranks re-assigned. In the mechanic that Blizz gives us or ranks and adding ranks, it includes the ‘gift’ of messing up where everyone is in the rank structure, so there were a lot of changes I made (the log is full of them).

Finally, I looked at our roster and removed a lot of deadwood. You know, level 5 druid recruits that have not logged on in 2 months.

changes to ranks

the ranks are getting some re-visiting – don’t mind them too much until we finish moving things around. it is part of the renovations and getting us better aligned for our Lich King set up.

“Pardon Our Renovations!”

Pasternak hacked/sold and kicked many guildies

If you find yourself not in our guild, it is likely due to a mass kicking that Pasternak (main is Agaguk) did. He has not played in a long, long time and I presume it was a hack of his account or that it was sold.

Contact guild members in game for an invite back and our apologies in advance. Speak with Iron to get re-instated at your normal rank if it was higher than Initiate.

Pasternak has been removed from the guild, a ticket logged, and Officer privileges to kick have been temporarily suspended.

wrath of the lich king – release date

getting this question a lot lately; figures! anyways, stores plan to have it avail November 13th. they shifted their dates this morning from 3rd to 13th. might be due to a Blizz extension or mebbe to take into account shipping – who knows?

point is, get your T6 by end of Oct or be Green!

you can pre-order now… however, have not yet found the Collector’s Edition to pre-order, so I am holding off a bit.

accomodating both our hardcore and casual players

How do you accomodate both the hardcore and casual players in our guild in a manner that is healthy for our guild’s growth, culture and interpersonal dynamics?

Good question. With ‘common sense’ – our usual approach! As always, we put out a recommendation and if it needs to be changed or tweaked, we do that.

We have found that we have players that want to raid or do heroics every day and we have players that do not have gaming time every day or do not want to raid every day. It injects turbulence – especially if raids are conducted when casual players are not online.

One approach might be to poll the casual players as to when most of them can raid and schedule the raids for only those time slots; however, that leaves the hardcore players wanting.

A second approach might be to schedule raiding when best suits the hardcore raiders; however, that could easily exclude the casual players.

Well it would seem that the obvious answer is to schedule the raids when the casual players *and* the hardcore players can BOTH raid. Pretty damn obvious. Pity it is the wrong answer!

Hardcore players will quickly gather a lot of badge-purchased gear by doing Heroics. (If they do Heroic dailies on a daily basis, they can likely earn twice (or more) badges a week as the casual players.) Very quickly, the hardcore players are carrying the casual players in the raids – or worse, the hardcore players’ progression is hindered by the lack of more players that are geared at their level.

It is not a ‘guild commitent’ problem. It is not a ‘desire to get geared’ problem. It is an ‘available time’ problem.

To accomodate both our hardcore players and our casual players, we are changing gears and taking advantage of some mechanics (Heroics) and common sense outcomes.

First, we all need to ‘let go’ of the insanity that ‘everyone’ has to be geared and ‘in the raid group’. There are level 70s that do not want to raid – they want to pvp — they have raiding toons, but they also have pvp toon(s). They are a good example that shows not all end level characters need to be geared and in a raid group. Instead, lets replace it with filling and gearing our raid groups the best we can. If we have a hardcore group working on Naxx in the expansion and a casual group working on BT – that is fine! Sure, casual raiders would be delighted to come on a raid that is way above their gear grade – who wouldn’t?! However, letting go of the pressure on casual raiders to ‘be there’ and freeing the hardcore raiders to progress beyond the reach of the casual raiders isn’t just a good idea, it is simply reality. We just need to stop artificially fighting reality.

Second, we will add Heroics to our line up of ‘events’ – and of course, they are ‘on the schedule’ daily! It helps to have a ‘regular’ time slot for people to plan for to reduce conflicts with their RL and hence be available more often. Going forward, we will institutionalize 9pm server time as the time to do Heroics. That way, if you have an itch to do some tough content and get some badges, you know others are likely going to be online to do the daily Heroic starting at 9pm server time. If 9pm does not work for you, put something in GroupCalendar and see if others want to do it at the same time you want to (note: check whether you are posting things in server time or local time.) Daily heroics and other heroics every day helps scratch the hardcore player’s itch daily. It also allows casual players ‘to get in on the action’ regardless of when a 10-man or 25-man occured. Finally, it also lets players (hardcore or casual) that do not have time for a 3 hour raid to still get some tough content in – so it even addresses those players who simply cannot lock in a huge chunk of time that night for gaming.

Now, how do we fill those raids/heroics?

Heh. Fun.

Starts with us getting into some habits. Like using GroupCalendar to schedule an instance or sign up for a raid/instance. Means we need to get into the habit of showing up early enough to add the members and then get some pugs in if needed to fill some seats. (Note: lets develop a pool of pugs we like to run with and if we stick to regular schedule, it is likely they will hook into it making it easier to start on time every time.)

Recruiting. That really never stops. Rather than complain that someone is doing something else (RL, in game, whatever) other than raiding with you, recruit enough people that we do not have single points of failures on given nights. A quick note about recruiting: we *do* have open recruiting in the guild *right now*. The purpose of that is for you to have the ability to FIRST assess someone as a good quality addition to our guild and SECOND to be able to invite them into our guild. It is not open so that you can drift net fish and haul in all kinds of garbage without any care to the impact to the guild. Make good decisions on who *you are recommending* when you invite them in. It is very soon going to affect you if you build a track record of inviting garbage in.

Reward reliability. We will put in place ‘karma points’ that amongst other things rewards players for signing up for raids/instances and for being there on time and through to the end. It is relatively simple with GroupCalendar and Wowwebstats.com – either you did or did not sign up in advance, and either you did or did not show up on the combat report for 100% of the report! Reliability also plays into resolving who gets priority for the raid seat should there be a conflict that cannot be resolved easily amongst the raiders – people that are highly unreliable take a back seat to those that are highly reliable. It’s bloody obvious! Karma points are coming!

Finally, lets get those raids back on GroupCalendar so that people can choose which ones they want to do and sign up. We will put up raids for Kara, ZA, Gruul’s & Mags – Badge runs and regular runs for Kara to give geared players a chance to clear Kara quickly in a badge run while keeping a regular run open for everyone that meets at least the min requirements (posted on the Raiding page).

It should be expected that raiding will start out shaky while we get back up and running. We are going to need to pug in to fill empty seats. Raids may get cancelled if we cannot fill them. Patience. Heroic instances! If after we post scheduled events, and if folks publish raids that suit them better and we still find we cannot fill a raid, then we have to accept that the upcoming expansion is basically reducing interest in raiding until it comes out. At this point, I see a low leve of interest in raiding and a greater interest in ‘getting ready for the expansion’ coupled with a driving interest to do Heroics.

Heroics are very much within reach for us all at end level – and both hardcore and casual players can optimize to them without too much turbulence. 9pm server time. Every day. Easy. It will take a while to turn this into a habit. All the while, inviting quality new members to join us.

That is how we are approaching accomodating both our hardcore and casual players.

See you in the Heroics.

how to understand WOTLK effects on gear

i encourage you to reach out to the information coming out of the Beta of the upcoming expansion. sure, you can spend hours reading and digesting the information being pumped out in Wowhead.com etc; however, there are some great class niche level authors that are doing that for you and if you can trust the sources or the hosts, you can get some great information.

for example, i’ve heard through sources that the level gear at T4 and ZA is replaced early in the expansion; however, i have also heard that the T6 gear in many slots will be great for starting to raid at level 80 and only replaced once you get drops from Naxx.

from my perspective for Ironhelm’s gear, i use resources like:

http://www.tankspot.com/forums/gear-lists-rankings/39462-wotlk-tanking-gear-list.html

to help me put gearing into perspective and to understand how the expansion’s changes to my class are shaping up.

it is helping me decide to keep Blacksmithing which for the most part has been wholly useless in TBC. the only BS items I used, were BOE that I bought from someone else. however, that tanking gear list is a good resource to help me understand the impacts of class and profession changes as known now in the Beta.

if you do not yet have some ‘often read’ sources that you rely on for class/wow information, i encourage you to ask others – both in guild and outside – what resources they read. if there is one thing that differentiates a n00b from a veteran, it is knowledge — gained either from experience or research. for many of us that are not experiencing the Beta, research is the best way to make informed decisions.