Haha, certainly not trying to rip on any teenagers. Just the adults who still act like they are kids.
I’ve met tons of really great people in this game, that’s why I keep playing. It’s certainly funny when I occasionally cross paths with these keyboard warriors though.
Man, I was 100% on your side till you got this part. You want to bench the guy? Go ahead. He wants to leave for a different guild where he’s guaranteed a raid spot? Let him. Messaging his GM with all the stuff you just said… that’s really immature.
It’s not like the guy was a ninja - all he did was tell you that he’s leaving for another guild that’s not benching him. If you think that’s worth messaging his GM with all the details of his “performance issues”, that just makes you sound vindictive and insecure.
The only thing I want to say in response is that communication could have definitely been better.
It’s interesting to hear a run down of every negative thing that’s occurred over the course of three months. I can admit that my performance was poor with you guys compared to my time with other groups. I still wonder why my parses dropped so much with your guild and part of me figured it was just due to too little damage and too many healers, and never really being assigned to tank heal.
At the same time, no one really ever pulled me aside and said my numbers needed to be improved or that various issues needed to be corrected. Like I said, better communication would have been appreciated.
I think the best example is your statement about the healer discord message.
Except, on the day in question, here’s what you stated to me:
"Hey, FYI i’m not upset with your post in the healer channel… but also please dont take anything personally that is said in there. The timing of your response is really unfortunate though, because I was going to ask you to sit tonight.
I really hope you understand I’m not mad or doing this in retaliation or out of anger. I don’t want you upset, I think you’ve fit in really well with the guild and think you’re a valuable member of our raid team. Just wanted you to know that"
It’s a real contrast compared to everything you have now stated and said to my GM.
When I asked why I was being sat, nothing was said about patchwerk, or my performance issues, or that you were going with the people who you felt were best, but I didn’t make the cut. Instead, I was just told that all healers and DPS would be sitting, like it was my turn.
Like your original statement to me about the healer comment, it felt hollow. I strongly suspected you didn’t view me as more than filler, but it was only after I left, and posted here, that all the truth started to pour out. You basically left me with the impression that things were fine and the mistakes I made weren’t big deals, which is why messaging my GM afterwards being negative left me quite confused and led to me posting here. You were telling the GM all these reasons why I shouldn’t be with them, yet you were ready to have me there next raid night and next week.
When people told me my performance was likely bad, I told them to assume it was, without seeing parses, because the issue for me is ultimately the lack of communication and mixed messaging.
i’ll be honest, when i led my guild, if a newer recruit had come to me and announced they were leaving because they were benched once on one of the highest attendance nights, id have said ‘alright, bye’ as well.
i wouldnt bother to message their new guild, but people performing dramatic exits over being benched one time and making the already horrible task of having to bench people even worse than before rather than making an effort to ask what they can do to earn a spot just leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth. No officer or gm enjoys having to bench people, and behavior like this is why. But it has to happen sometimes. Very few guilds have a consistent 40 with 100% attendance.
TL;DR but my short answer the problem with your guild drama is probably you.
Why? Because you bring it to a public forum so that you can feel good about it. You love drama and you know it.
The end.
There’s nothing wrong with benching people, but there’s also nothing wrong with people wanting to be in a guild where they have a guaranteed raid spot. I agree that a “dramatic exit” is in poor taste, but a gracious exit is totally cool. We’re all playing this game to have fun - never stay in a guild that you’re not having fun with.
But whatever, the real reason I made this post is to say this. Your guild name totally rocks.
The answer to all your questions is in your post. Sweaties are trashpeople and you shouldn’t expect anything less than trashperson behavior from them.
Then this honestly surprises me that they even mentioned you not getting world buffs. They have so much less impact on healers, and if none of the healers got them, they’d be totally fine. People are just so weird about world buffs man.
Not for paladins. Spell crit is huge for them. The extra mana pool and regen is nice too. Its good for all healers, but paladins get mana refund on crit, so its a huge boost to them.
I mean I guess current Naxx might be different, but pretty much no fight in classic lasted long enough for them to run oom with just the mana return from their base crit. Up to AQ40 at least, world buffs were pretty much totally unnecessary for a Paladin.
Yea, but with more spell crit you can use higher ranks of heals, and mix in holy lights without going oom, pushing more HPS. Its always possible to force yourself to run oom healing, but you pace yourself based on what you know your mana can handle.
Rentro - Why even make this post? This looks like a continuation of knee jerk reactions that are really not going to be productive. I can understand venting about the situation to friends and new (old?) guildmates, but putting it out there in public seems more like a cry for attention from strangers and not serving any real purpose. At least doing this on the server discord would gain you some sympathy from the people that actually interact with us all.
As I told you yesterday after you quit the guild, you had other options. I know for a fact that at least one other healer would have been glade to sit out, which would have allowed you a chance to raid.
Throwing a public tantrum about it before quitting the guild should not have been your first option to take. In the time you have been with the guild, I have probably sat 4+ times. I have been with the guild since launch, been a class leader, and an officer but I still sit a lot. In a “Hard Core” raiding guild, your A-team players never sit. The bench players get brought in to fill in for the A-team when they need to go to bed, or are sick. Our guild is at best a semi-hard core Dad raiding guild. Imaging a bunch of Dads playing competitive softball and that is pretty much the atmosphere. Sure in our prime, some of us may have been really great top notch players, but most of us are reliving past glory and playing for nostalgia. (More than one is also playing while holding a baby or otherwise trying to keep an eye on their kids, which has lead to at least a few wipes, but the kids are adorable so who cares!)
As for the “guild” doing things, they didn’t. Individuals in the guild may have reached out to members of your new guild, but the vast majority of the guild probably didn’t care one way or another. I am sorry but you are not the first person we have had leave because they had to sit one time and you probably won’t be the last. i did enjoy having you around, but if you can’t handle sitting once in awhile you don’t belong in this guild because everybody does sit at some point.
As for not pointing out what you could have done to improve your performance, I would start by asking did you ever ask? Again, Dad guild, we are all busy with our own lives outside of the game to hold people’s hands. I know for a fact that if you looked at your performance logs and asked the healing officer for suggestions, he would have spent hours helping you out. You said in an earlier post that you DID look at your performance in the logs and saw that it was low. If you didn’t reach out for help to fix that, it is your fault. Raids that are on farm are pretty much auto-pilot for a lot of us. We take under geared players and bad players through farm content all the time. If we can do a 40 man with 30 people, it doesn’t matter if 5 are under-performing and we are not a**holes that will just kick under-performing players from the guild. (Logs and parses never tell the fully story. Some times you need to take one for the team and do the crappy jobs that don’t help your parses, but that is what being a team is about. It is about all of us achieving a shared goal, not 1 person getting a pink parse.)
On the very first night of a progression raid in the instance that brought most of us back to classic in the first place, things are different. Naxx is an instance few of us got to raid when it was truly new content. Many of us have put in a lot of time and effort outside of the normal raids to prepare for the instance and clear it as soon as possible. The consumable list you said was just posted was late in coming, but it was known for months (years?) what types of consumables you would need. Months ago we were stocking up on mats for things like frost protection portions. Needing to bring 10 per raid should not be that hard to accomplish if months ago your were told you would need a lot of frost protection potions. You are also leaving out the part where the “a**hole GM” told everybody in the raid for the past month that he would buy or help farm them the consumables they needed for the first week if they could not get them. Man, what a total jerk! Offering to potentially pay out of pocket for the consumables for up to 40 raiders.
For Naxx, not all healers are created equally. Sorry, but I don’t believe a paladin can mind control effectively and repeatedly. As you pointed out, we had a lot of paladins in the raid, so if the choice was between a paladin that you admit was under performing, or a priest with a similar performance level, the priest would probably be chosen for the extra mind control if it was needed. All of that is moot though, because you could have made a case to the officer in charge of the healers for why they should take you instead. They may not agree with you, but they might. You won’t know until you try it. And again, I know of a healer that actually wanted to sit, and pretty sure the officers would have gone along with it if given the chance.
I know that in a lot of guilds the GM’s word is law. That is not exactly how it works in this guild. (I am sure the GM would like it to work that way, but he has to deal with people disagreeing every decision he makes. More than once he had back tracked on a decision because of push back from the guild. I am sure it is frustrating for him, but he is a reasonable guy if you give him a chance.) If you have ever seen the movie “Saving Private Ryan”, they have a scene where they explain how to grip. They showed the right and the wrong way to grip.
Threatening to leave the guild because you have to sit out on the first night of Naxx (we wiped a lot of only got 6 bosses cause Dad guild - not hard core) is the wrong way to grip.
Explaining to the officers that you know everybody needs to sit, but that a specific healer, lets call her Red, is more than willing to sit out. Since Red does not actually want to go, is a really casual raider, and does not know the mechanics of the fights that well, it could give the guild a better chance at victory if you went instead, since you had everything prepared and knew all the mechanics by heart. Plus, Red said she didn’t want to go until the instance was on farm status anyway and there was less pressure to perform well.
One of those arguments will universally be received poorly, no matter what guild you are in.
The other may not get you into Naxx night 1, but would at least give you a chance for it and cause significantly less drama if things did not go your way.
You could have gone with either option, but you chose to go with the first one. Everything else that happened flowed from that decision.
Hopefully you find some sort of closure in this public discussion and can move on. I wish you well in Naxx and hope it is as fun and rewarding for you as it has been for us.
I think that’s bit of an exaggeration. I literally said one sentence in guild chat, which from memory was “Between sitting tonight and raiding, I’m going to go raid” and then gquit. I didn’t scream over discord, write a long paragraph, swear, or even disparage anyone while doing it. I stated why I was leaving and left. One sentence, which I thought was better than simply saying nothing.
Why did I post this? I wanted to get some perspective while maintaining some anonymity. I haven’t mentioned anyone or the guild by name, even posted on my retail alt to avoid server association, and I honestly wanted to have an 'outsider perspective." I also often read these forums, post here, and seen similar threads, so thought it would be interesting to post my own. I’m a fan of Preach’s drama stories, for example, and wanted to share my story and hear what people thought about it. As you can see, different people have provided their reactions and I’ve actually found it an interesting learning experience. The general conclusion I’ve heard is that being sat once shouldn’t be very upsetting, and a GM contacting another GM because one of their players decided to leave isn’t a great move either.
As for people reaching out to my current guild, the GM admitted he did, and rather quickly. One guildmate told me he was getting “a ton” of whispers only a few second after leaving, and my current GM, who wasn’t even online at the time, was contacted less than two hours after I had left. It’s not an argument regarding my importance, it’s simply a fact that after leaving there was an effort to speak negatively about me to my current guild. I can believe that the vast majority didn’t do that, nor even cared, but when one of them is the GM, seeking out my current GM, that’s fairly significant. I also imagine it was done simply to make things worse for me with my current guild.
Regarding performance, it was actually generally good before joining your guild. I had to show parses in the first place before joining after all. Looking over them again, I do find some are low, but others are also high, and to a great extent, I attributed the low ones to it being a particular boss, having things be on farm (i.e., little damage), and the assignments I had been given. Yes, there were dumb mistakes made, like forgetting to change my gear, or putting salv on at the wrong time, but the content was so easily beat that I didn’t think it was taken too seriously. I was also told I was considered a valuable member of the raid team, so I generally thought things were ok. You even state that you enjoyed having me around. That’s why the follow-up to my current guild really surprised me, it seemed like a lot of hate had been hidden from me.
I think it should be made clear that I really wasn’t threatening to leave the guild. I was explaining why I was leaving the guild. I never said “if I can’t raid, I’m leaving”, I stated that I had the ability to go raid with another guild that was asking me to return rather than sit, so I was going with them, and the response was “sounds good.” It was a very short conversation. I could easily paste it here, but the GM knows it’s true.
My current guild is the guild I’ve been with since the launch of classic pretty much and only left them at the beginning of the AQ tier because I wanted to experience a more hardcore environment. I was well liked, wished well when I left, and told I would be welcome to return if I ever did. Saying my current guild was ‘begging me to come back’ is an exaggeration, but they were asking me in recent weeks if I would come back to the guild. I was choosing against it because it felt unfair to you guys. I knew I had obtained some significant pieces of gear and I thought I was considered valuable enough that I would be letting you down if I left. However, when I was sat opening night, the message I perceived was: “No, you aren’t valuable and they don’t really care if you are there”, so I decided to leave. Any other night, I would have sat without concern, but when it was done opening night, I took it as a message about my value to the team. I had been debating for a while whether to stay or go, and had chosen to stay, but when you sat me opening night, it pushed me in the opposite direction. When I then heard that guildmates and my GM were receiving messages about me, it basically reaffirmed that I had made the right decision. Not only wasn’t I considered valuable, there was some actual dislike against me.
In contrast, when I raided last night with my current guild, many told me they were happy to see me back, and that I shouldn’t let what you guys had said bother me. But I couldn’t get it off my mind, so I thought discussing it with anonymously with strangers would allow for some catharsis and closure.
I can appreciate how it looked from your perspective like a threat or a temper tamtrum. I hear you tell me how I should have approached people about still raiding that night, but honestly, if I could do things over again, what I should have done is told the the GM I really missed raiding with my former guild, was still friends with them, but didn’t feel I should return because I made a commitment to be with your guild. When I was sat, the message I received was “there is no commitment, don’t care if you leave”, so I did.
There are a few questions I’d like to ask in hopes of gaining better understanding.
Was the raid roster more than 40 people? If so was the decision of benching communicated clearly?
A guild’s management is not much different in any given organization’s administration. People are involved and therefore people dynamics are involved. Some managers are ‘hammer and chisel’ type. Some prefer subordinates that have initiative.
Having said that your performance was under par, which would have been the most likely steps to remedy?
A, Class lead to pull you aside and talk privately
B. You having the initiative to ask
Bear in mind cultural aspects are in play here too. In the West, the squeaky wheel gets the oil but in the East, the nail that sticks out gets the hammer.
Yes.
We were told people would sit, but I only learned the day the raid opened that I would be sitting. When I asked why, I was told they have to sit people, wouldn’t be sat the next time or next week, and that all healers and dps would be sitting.
I responded by saying I had another guild asking me to go with them, so between sitting and going with them, I would go with them. What I failed to explain is that it was my former guild that I actually missed raiding with, so part of it was a desire to return with them.
I would have preferred A: Class lead to pull you aside and talk privately.
I was once in a guild where the class leader gave me feedback reports every two weeks and I really enjoyed it. Made some changes and the class lead was happy to see my improvement. With this previous guild, what I mostly noticed is that I was being outhealed by others and felt the main issue was a lack of damage and a lack of tank assignments that led to worse parses.
If this is how people feel then why play the version of the game where this actually happens?
People don’t get benched in retail because raid sizes are flexible.
Also, raiding is actually fun and challenging.
So I was right in my assumption it was based off skill.
It’s ok to not perform well, there’s room to get better.
So partially the guild (meaning those in leadership) did not inform early who was going to be raiding and who was to be benched was at fault.
The second part of my clarification unfortunately is a mismatch of expectations.
In short summary I would say both parties have a lesson to take away from this. Firstly ‘the guild’ should be more diligent in updating their members. We’re in an information technology where there are too many tools to use for communication.
The other one is your good self OP. Be it work environment or play when having people dynamics one good habit is to always adopt ‘the ball is in their court’. This way when things don’t turn out according to plan due to miscommunication such as this, you can safely say:
A. You have done everything you could in the past (in this case, reached out first to an authoritative figure with regards to performance review)
B. Also ask about roster assigments.
^ This.
Also, I am going to assume you are not a warrior.
What class are you? And what build?
You’d have to define what you mean by “are bad.” Here. People are often capable of improving.