For my long-time readers, do you recall when I lightly touched the subject of dealing with bad players in Have A Little Faith? In that post, I had said:

If I don’t belittle, kick, or replace people who aren’t meeting our standards, then what do I do? Fixing a problem isn’t always solved by brute force. You can’t will it to magically become better or remove the problem in order to find a solution. I’ve always been of a mindset that most of the best players weren’t born overnight. And in my experience, if I just watch how I handle it (no one likes being called bad, regardless of how nice and constructive you are), I’ve been able to turn flaky people and bad players into outstanding role models. And that takes time.

I got a lot of comments and e-mails from people asking me to elaborate on how I personally dealt with bad raiders. In a more indirect way, this post will hopefully answer that question and perhaps help similar guilds in similar positions. Please note that not all guilds are run the same way, which makes most of my advice a moot point. This method is simply what works for my own guild. It’s not meant to be taken as a guide, but rather an insight to the trials and tribulations I’ve experienced when it comes to dealing with bad players.

We Struggled, Too

When I first started my guild, I cared more about getting people with the right attitudes than I did experience or skill. And when I first chose my officers, I made it clear from the beginning that we would never drop our standards, regardless of how desperate we were to flesh out our raid roster. We promise to foster a mature and intelligent player-base, with an upbeat, positive raid environment. When people are bad, we don’t directly tell them they are bad, especially in front of others. We try not to single people out unless it’s a large group of people, and we never, ever insult, belittle, or yell at people.

Most of the time, admittedly, it’s difficult keeping that promise. There are times where I have to go afk on vent during raids, so I can calm down my boyfriend (who is the main raid leader), and remind him to not lose his temper. There are times where even I have to walk away from the computer before I break the rules I created, and it takes a lot to get me angry in raids. Is that exclusive to just our guild? Of course not. These are the normal, everyday issues that plague almost nearly every raiding guild. It’s how you handle it that defines your type of leadership.

Before I explain how we currently handle these problems, let me first explain to you our problems in BC so you can understand why we do things this way. We started out as a reroll guild with a special emphasis, as I mentioned earlier, on guild personality. Many times we would read through an application, find the person well written, intelligent, funny, and with a good attitude, and would insta-invite, not really ever asking raid-related questions to determine his/her attitude towards end-game. This was, inevitably, our downfall.

We eventually gathered enough people to successfully begin 25-man raids, and although the majority of our members were Karazhan/badge-geared and experienced, we zipped through the content with all the nerfs. To the inexperienced raiders with us- which was, in all honesty, the mass majority of our guild- we seemed pretty good. We were one-shotting all the bosses, AoEing the trash, and doing most of it with relative ease. When we got to t6 content, we started seeing a more apparent gap between the good and bad players. We had about 10 people who understood raiding and their respective classes, showed up reliably, and essentially carried the rest of the raiders who didn’t enchant new gear, no-showed raids, and did half the dps the top ten raiders did.

We also did an open-guild loot council, which was initially established as a means of making the guild more involved and close-knit. In 10-mans, it was a fantastic loot method, and was very successful. In 25-mans, especially with a large group of new players, both new to the guild and seriously raiding end-game? Not so much. In the end, as we encouraged people to be more involved, the least deserving players were getting the best drops over the ones who rarely got loot and deserved it the most. The good people were penalized because their “dps is already high enough, give it to someone who could use it more.” Players who upgraded their gear outside of raids via crafted or bagde gear were also penalized, because it was less of an upgrade for those in Karazhan or blue gear.

We were spiraling out of control. Many of our good players confided they didn’t like the path we were taking, and we agreed. After trying to snag control of the reigns, we realized at that point the only way to fix things was to change. At the release of Wrath, the officers discussed our issues and how we planned to fix them. We targeted our problems and knew we were going to have to either get rid of the bad players, or teach them to be good.

Give Them Motives

For a few people, they were just new to raiding, and with a little patience and instruction, we are able to turn into good players. But for many others, they were just lazy. If they didn’t want to show up, why should they? They raid when they want and how they want, and they still keep getting raid invites and loot, so why bother with silly things like adhering to raid rules and etiquette? Sure, we could kick all those people out, but when the mass majority of your roster is comprised with that type of player, it makes that a difficult decision to make. Besides, just like the new players, with a little subtle motivation and patience, you can turn a few of those people into reliable players, too!

We realized the biggest culprit of our BC problems was a lack of structure and motives. We had laid out our expectations pretty clearly, but because we didn’t have any direct penalties or benefits, people didn’t even try to adhere to them. So we instead implemented a strict ranking system where raiders got rewarded with first priority on loot, raid invites, and specific guild bank items (enchanting mats and gems, for example, when they were expensive and difficult to obtain), and you had to meet and maintain our expectations to be considered for such a rank.

Such a ranking system was our saving grace and while it didn’t happen overnight, helped us maintain a reliable, predictable raid roster and succeed in raids. But more than that, it helps us handle bad players while still being nice guys. We don’t have to worry about undeserving people getting loot and having to be passive-aggressive with invites. People don’t make it to core status if they don’t deserve to be there.

We try to be very upfront about core and casual ranks from the beginning. When we are interviewing new members, we always make it a priority to explain our rank system, and to also make it clear if he/she doesn’t meet our expectations, they won’t make it to core. That way, there are never any hurt feelings or surprises if it does happen. It’s easiest to have a recruit immediately go to casual after their trial period, as opposed to demoting an existing raider because he/she has gotten complacent or lazy. With that route, there’s almost always hurt feelings and, in rare cases, a gquit in following.

I’d like to say the most defining difference between our rank system and many of the hardcore guilds I’ve been a part of is how we handle it. When we notice somebody not performing at the expected level, we don’t just give it a raid to see if the problem fixes itself, nor do we immediately demote the member. Just like we like to pull members aside and recognize them for playing well, we always try to talk to our members and give them feedback when they aren’t, either. If it’s a skill/numbers issue, we will sit down with them and try to analyze and compare numbers to see where they’re going wrong. If it’s a class we don’t have experience with, we try to pair them up with patient people who are skillful at their respective classes.

There are always positive ways to motivate your raiders to play better. If you don’t want to actually penalize people, try to give them other goals and rewards for doing well, so the only penalty there is, is not being rewarded. Praise where praise is due. In conclusion, there was a fantastic post Rhaina made on the Guild Relations forums that had me nodding, and really states this point better than I ever could:

Before you start approaching individuals, make sure that the facts are out there.

Here’s a BC example .. .. ..

Right around the time we figured out the King Mulgar pull, we knew our next challenge was going to be mobile DPS for Gruul. We counted up the tanks and the healers, and figured out how many DPS that left us with. We looked at his health and at roughly how many growths we could heal through. We then calculated the amount of time that this left for the DPS to down him before he hit that many growths. Divide his hit points by the number of seconds to get raid DPS required. Divide raid DPS by number of DPS to get individual DPS minimum. Post this calculation along with the information that Gruul is a movement fight with DPS stoppages.

We told people that to give us a little wiggle room, we wanted every DPS to be able to produce that much individual DPS plus 10%, and to be able to do it in a movement fight. We took the raid back to Kara and told people “If you can produce that much DPS for the Aran fight, then we will go try Gruul.”

A lot of people who thought they were doing fine because they were 3rd or 4th on a 25-man DPS meter found out that they couldn’t sustain that DPS while moving and stopping and doing the other stuff they had to do in Aran.

One week later, we went back and tested again. All our DPS had improved, and most were now over the threshold. We then worked with the two people who were not to help them troubleshoot their issues, and three days later, we dropped Gruul for the first time.

It’s one thing to say “You have to do 4000 DPS in a tank and spank or we won’t let you raid.” It’s another to say Patchwerk has X health and Y enrage timer and so the entire raid must produce X/Y DPS, so since there are 17 of you, divide that number by 17 and see what you need to be doing to ensure that you are doing your share”. The latter demonstrates that you are not being arbitrary, but are looking at the actual fights and making requests that are reasonable if the raid is to down the boss.

So start there. Provide factual information about what DPS needs to do and why. Then give people a chance to hit that target, and then when you approach the ones who aren’t, you will be doing it in context, not out of nowhere.