Rebelogic

Why you had your authenticator on your ipod, I have no idea, lol. Oh well, be back when you can. Try to be a little more responsible, I have heard you disappear from the raid schedule at random due to these types of incidents.

I flasked to read Glitters post. Thanks for all your input guys. I like the idea of doing standby DKP, I will look into getting it implemented. We will have to put some standards on it and designate specific people to getting it before the raid however. This will prevent people who don't raid from getting any sort of DKP. Since these standbys won't be here for any boss killings, I assume it would be only for hours spent on the wait list.

I haven't done this in a while so I thought it would be a god idea to post and get people up to speed on what the officers are thinking. Bare with me, this will be a long one. The overall topic of this post will be the concept of stress. We set up processes and rules in the guild to relieve stress on everyone. If things are more cut and dry, there is no wondering and therefore stress is reduced. People ask me a million times where other people are when they are late or don't show for a raid. Now, I usually end up knowing, often ten minutes before the raid begins, why people are missing and end up frantically trying to fill the raid and keep with the plans of the evening. Now this issue is blanketed all over, not just our Group 1 25M run. It occurs in our ten mans, and our group 2 25M also. We will schedule a raid, be it 25M or 10M, and we will have everyone we expected online one week and the next week we will not be able to go or at the least get as far because we are missing people. Now, here is where we insert the classic false reasoning that always follows a statement like that: "No one shows up for progression nights". I have heard that so many times it is unbelievable. Here are some reasons why that statement is false. First of all, people who cannot make a certain raid day vary each time. "Replace the people who don't show up", not easy if it is different people every time. If it was the same people, they would be sat but that isn't the case. Secondly, people have real lives. I will give you yesterday for example, Unholyfaith had gotten into a car accident and had to deal with life/car issues yesterday so he couldn't raid. I can't remember the last time that he has missed a raid. I want someone to tell him to his face that he doesn't show up for progression nights. Ultimately, the problem is not that sometimes people don't show up, the problem is that we rely too much on a select few for raids to get anything done. If we have a list of 27 possible raiders that I would bring to LK and 5 cannot show up for various reasons, we can't do it. Therefore, my simple solution to this entire problem is a concept of putting the guild before individuals. I want to recruit 6-10 more people to the guild of various classes and specs. The recruiting for raid spots should have harsher criticism than in the past. If we get you in and you suck, we are going to tell you and you better fix it or you are gone. Now the purpose of these 6-10 raiders will be for both group 1 and group 2. On Tuesday, we should be able to clear the first 11 bosses in one day and be on LK if we don't do non-farm hardmodes. People who show up all the time won't need that much gear so let's just toss it to recommended new recruits who have proven that they are dedicated. No more rolling on Offspec gear if you know you will never use it; know that you are helping a guildy who can not only put it to good use but will ultimately help you achieve the ultimate goal. That of course being the downing of progression content. If we clear to LK on a Tuesday, and Wednesday rolls around and someone cannot make it, they can be replaced with someone who we have proven works well with our system and now also has the gear to do so. Recruit well, gear the dedicated, and have good replacements for real life issues = simple concept. Now, here comes a problem some might foresee: What happens when more than 25 good riaders show up for a raid? To be honest, I would love for that problem to happen, I yearn for that problem to happen. It beats the shit out of waiting an hour and a half on 2 people to do a LK attempt and being forced to call it. That will be a first come first serve issue basically. Like I have said said before, if you have issues getting to a raid for any reason, you shouldn't be upset if we replace you for the night and keep going. Now, if we suddenly out of the blue have the same consistent raiders who show up all the time everyday, the plan will not only be a success but the consistent people will have a chance to take a break on farm content if they choose too. For example, we have a lot of people who don't need gear off of the first 8 bosses on normal mode. If we have a new guy who is proving himself, I would be glad to sit for him so he can get some gear and I am sure that others would be willing to do that as well. The reason we would do this is because we understand that when we arrive at progression content, we will be able to rely on a new guy who has proven himself to not only skill-wise replace someone who can't be there for some real life issue, but they also have the gear to do so. Ultimately, we are putting the guild over the individual because the faster the guild progresses, each individual raider also progresses in gear as a result. In this way, we are not wasting time waiting on people who "are running late" for some reason, or "had an emergency" or whatever. It is not that you are being replaced forever, you simply could not make it on time so you are not in the raid for that night. This will make people less antsy and prevent me from having to call and whisper a million people to find out if people can make it. So, all in all, it makes the stress level of people who can't make it, the officers, and the consistent raiders, all go down. No matter what we know what we are doing for a particular night and no one has to wait. This will all pay off when we get to progression content. As far as ten mans are concerned, we have to clean up their rosters. The new recruiting will help this in terms of filling some bodies but we have to be careful to not spread ourselves too thin when it comes to having too many ten mans going. We have an alt ten man which should go on Friday, we have 2 group 2-run ten mans on Tuesday, the Proxy team goes on the weekend, and Team Oh Man runs whenever it can. That is a lot of 10-mans, lol. As far as I am concerned, in Team Oh Man, I am mainly concerned about downing content that can get us our drake. We used to raid Wednesday/Thursday night for an hour after our 25-man to get a head start on our hardmodes because we wanted the gear from there. Sunday was our main day but I want to make it basically our only day. I will schedule the run to concentrate on a specific achievement every week and go only on Sunday to spend all our time on it. I would even save the ID just so we wouldn't have to do the farm bosses and waste time. Once we get our drake, we can always go back and get the few upgrades we need from there. As far as the people who need badges/gear from normal modes in ten man, please inform an officer so we can get you into some runs if others don't need any gear. People who need gear/badges out of ten mans and have proven that they want to be good raiders in either of the two raid groups will get priority in the ten mans over casuals who just show up whenever. Also, aside from groups who have already done it, lets get some more kingslayers out of ten mans. I know a few people, who have been downed a lot of hardmodes with various groups but haven't gotten their kingslayer yet. Now, one would mention that there isn't really all that good loot on LK 10M, why should we forgo hardmode 10M loot for a LK downing. To that I say the key reason is experience. If you have a lot of experience on the LK and have at least downed him in ten man, you will fully understand what is going on in 25M. Also, I am not saying that I am forcing you to down LK every week i ten mans after you have gotten a consisten group in which all members have done it repeatedly. I am simply saying, maybe throw a few new guys and some other people who have been there a while, the achievement. All this is an effort to ease the burden of consistently filling 25-mans with solid players. Solid players are built through experience, gear is peripheral. In terms of informing us of raid attendance, there are many who are good at it and many who are terrible at it. We have a website, phone, and the ability to be reached in game. If you cannot make a raid, please inform an officer as early as you can in some fashion. It makes us think that you are actually putting an effort. We all have things come up but only rare occurrences should result in you not being able to inform us through any of the aforementioned methods that you cannot come. Don't be afraid that I will yell at you or something. I will probably give my standard answer of "ok, np" and just find a replacement. Where I will be upset is if you don't show for a day and tell no one that you got called into work. Having reliable people to replace people in those situations will relieve that anger, but it is still irritating. Now that we have gotten that all out of the way, we can talk about some other things. I tried to upload a sample video blog of me to the officer forum to basically test what it would be like if I did a news blog for the guild. The video was done with a now-decently old camera. The audio was fine but the video was a little lower quality than I would have liked. I recently got the new iphone 4 so I am going to test out the video quality on that via sample blog and send it to Unholy so he can see what it would look like on the site. It should be good enough so be prepared to see my ugly face more often on the site. If people send in enough requests, I might even upload some video of Yacoub slaughtering a defenseless animal, or as he likes to call it, "me time". We had an incident recently with a guy who apped to the guild because he was a friend of a casual player who joined the guild. The casual player is a friend of Geedub and just wanted to hang out, so his friend decided to app as well. When he apped, he linked his armory and had the bare-bones information. After we had several people tell him that he needed to do things like fix his spec and get some t10 as well as ICC 10 experience at least to the first 4 bosses, he flipped out and started calling us "elitist". He yelled at everyone individually who commented on his app because apparently it is too much to ask to enchant your gear correctly and kill 4 bosses in ICC 10M. Running the daily and the weekly will get you to 5K GS pretty quick. Despite all that, if he simply explained the fact that he was a friend of someone and that he just wanted to come in as a casual and jump into a raid whenever, everything would have been fine. So, if you have a friend who wants to app to the guild, please make him include as much information about himself as he can. Most important though, make sure he s capable of taking basic criticism. Elitists, bah! Well, maybe Glitter, he flasks for sitting in Dalaran. Speaking of apping to the website, Prydain and Mastric are working on revamping the application. We are doing some research on what we really want to know from a player other than the obvious things. Mastric has also implemented a program that will research a players raid history which will give us a better idea about how much experience they really have. Other than that however, we would like to know things like whether they were officers in a guild previously etc. One guy said he had a dog named Spencer that was "mad Chill". Things like that are important damnit! Well, since my last Rebel's Logic Post, we have gotten a couple more people the RS 10M achievement. I plan to schedule a RS 25M soon, if not this week. It will probably be on the weekend when we are more free to do casual raids. I predict that place will turn into farm content really fast, it is not hard at all. In terms of ICC, a lot more people/alts have gotten to 10M 11/12 in one day which is really good. Now with the 30% buff, we should be seeing a lot more ten man kingslayers going out as well as hardmode 10 mans. In 25M, Group 2 is now 9/12 and will soon be at least 11/12 before long. In group 1, we downed 25M Rotface hardmode last week which is progression. A heroic DFO or Trauma would be really nice. I don't think Festergut will be too hard to manage as well as some other hardmodes but I want to focus on doing progression bosses only when we are fully confident and have the people. Which, if our recruiting goes well shouldn't be too far into the future. Well, for now if you are running with anyone who you think would be a good addition to our guild, tell them to apply. We need some more good raiders to fill our ranks. Please inform us if you are going to be gone to the best of your ability. If you want to be in a ten man and you are committed, inform an officer. As for me, I gotta create updates more often so I don't have to write so much in each one, lol. Later for now guys.

Wow, I cannot remember the last time Unholy missed a 25-man, it will feel so strange.

For Halion, I believe Tankspot has a written guide under their movie guide in their movie guides page. I didn't acknowledge Informant or Berms in my post, I apologize. As far as experience in the hardmodes, we have guildies who have seen 11/12 hardmodes. As far as merging groups, I would be cautious with that but if both groups are hurting for people to a great extent, I wouldn't mind.

Good morning Ladies and Gentlemen, I haven't written one of these in a while so I thought I would stop being lazy and do one. It has been an eventful couple weeks and a completely uneventful last 24 hours. As far as our 25M progression, Blizzard screwed us 2 weeks in a row by not bringing up servers till 10PM last Tuesday and not at all this Tuesday. However, we remained undaunted. Last week, we began on Wednesday and tried hard to make up some time. Despite having one day less to raid, we still decided to try a couple hard modes. We spent some time on Marrowgar and after a few wipes, we finally got him down. This made me happy for a few reasons. First, we have a chance at some hard mode loot off another boss besides Lootship. Second, it moved us from ranked 29th on the server to rank 24. We would be lower, but a couple guilds like Tempest and Enrage broke off from well ranked guilds and were automatically placed ahead of us. Lastly, the Marrowgar fight on heroic stresses one type of raid mechanic above all else, movement. People have to move away from ice sheets, bone storms, and towards spiked comrades. Accomplishing this under pressure has made me more confident when we tackle the Lich King next and have to deal with defiles. As far as ten man goes, we have seen a positive resurgence in interest, effort, and coordination. People from group 2 have slowly began forming some ten man runs which have gotten farther than they usually do in previous half alts/pug groups. The group 2 ten mans have been hampered by Blizzard not allowing them to raid on 2 Tuesdays in a row but they will make up for it sometime later this week. Varibash has began a ten man group of his own and is progressing. He went to a pug and got Kingslayer 10-Man this week, so now his squad can try some hard mode bosses on their way to their own Lich King kill. The Proxy guys have also reformed and have been getting to Lich King for the last 2 weeks. Vinji, Occorak, Chartul, have all come back. Lueki has joined our guild and together with Gump, that group is really strong and I am sure that they will progress. Team Oh man finally saw the downing of H-Princes and H-Dreamwalker. This makes our guild 9/12 heroic with our eyes on Sindragosa and Putricide. For all those people in either 25M who want a 10M group, please put something on the forums and we will get you into a group. I know many of you could still use some loot and extra badges, so please don't hesitate to ask. At the moment, Friday, Sunday, and Monday have no 25M raids scheduled, so if you would like to help organize a ten man, step up to the plate. In the last couple weeks, we have seen group 2 come into their own a little bit in 25 Man. Many of our new recruits have been stepping up and helping the group progress during a period where we had a good number of people in that group on vacation. We have basically come to the conclusion that Lyshani and Ambika have proven to be really good from our guild however, the other good healers we have in group 2 come from the Veritas et Aequitas guild (Kateness and Annaleii). That makes 4 good healers who are consistent. We need to either get some more people to step up or recruit some more who will. If you think you are a good healer and can consistently show up for this run, please inform Greatbadguy, Mastric, or Geedub. Go to them, don't wait till they come to you. This week, Ruby Sanctum comes out and I think it would be worth our time to try and down it in 25M. Please don't save yourself to 25M Halion, we will probably attempt it tonight. I want to do so because it will satiate everyones lust to down new content, it has good loot/badges, it will break the monotony of 25M ICC a little, and it is supposed to be easy. As far as ten man, we can make a few ten man groups throughout the week and go down it, not a big deal. Now, July 4th is this Sunday, however people will probably start celebrating early. Which translates into a relaxed raid attendance this week in all groups. On top of this, we lost Tuesday as a raid day. With all things considered, in 25M Group 1, I suggest we go into Ruby Sanctum today and down it. After which, or even tomorrow we can take whoever we can into 25M ICC and get as far as we can not stressing about the Lich King too much. As far as group 2, I believe they plan to get in their Wednesday raid day and will try to gather as many people as they can for Saturday. However, Saturday being in the middle of the July 4th weekend will probably yield the lowest attendance out of all our groups. However, you never know, they will play it by ear. All in all, I am writing this at work and by the time, I log into WOW this evening, it will be more than 36 hours since they released new content and I couldn't log on. Therefore, I am excited to log on later today and prepared for a fresh but relaxing new raid week. I hope everyone that is going on vacation this week/weekend has a great time! Well, that is all for this week. Before I finish, I would like to leave you all with the Prydain quote that was in one of my recently added Gallery images. Prydain: "I like to watch Girls Gone Wild Videos backwards so it looks like the girls learned their lesson."

Back by popular demand! Well, actually "popular" is a stretch of the word, but hey, I like to think I brighten the day of a few people here and there, haha. These last couple weeks have been very eventful and I am pleased to report that we are on track to making ourselves out of guild obscurity and make a decent name for ourselves. First off, I would like to address the efforts of our officers and technical staff (Unholy, Mastric, and Prydan). As you can see, we are using a new theme for our website along with many new fun things to explore throughout. The DKP tab is now a drop down under the RAID tab. Also in a drop down is a "members map" under the members tab. Here members can add your location and see where everyone else lives. Please don't visit me unannounced, you might get mauled by my attack Yacoub and he is always grumpy. Just the other day, I was on there and I discovered I lived relatively close to Cyianna Another feature to the website is pacman under the "click me" button. This is thanks to Prydain and his antics. We have always had a chat feature in addition to the shoutbox, but now we have expanded it to support many users at the same time in case the shoutbox traffic becomes heavy at any given time. Lastly, after long last, we have started to update the raid teams tab which is now under the "RAID" tab. We had been holding off for a long time on editing it, but with group 2 getting more solid every day, we got started on updating the tab. Speaking of group 2, the last raid weeks were a little lackluster however they taught us some very valuable things. We discovered that in addition to Mastric and Geedub leading it, Greatbadguy has stepped up to help add his leadership to the team. We commend him and are sure he will help out a lot. The run itself had a few snags this week, one being the attitude of the Veritas GM Roflstomper and his GF, both of whom were in group 2. Roflstomper brought up the point that no one should have a DKP advantage, and although we agreed to this and told him that people like Geedub (has over 900 DKP) would start over on his druid, he still hated the system. He is under the impression that DKP breeds selfishness despite the fact that throughout the group 2 runs, Geedub has passed on multiple pieces to him and only bid and won 1 piece over him. We discussed this forever with him, but could not reach any agreement, so he will most probably not run with us anymore, oh well everyone is entitled to their opinion of fairness. Anyway, after revamping the DKP system in group 2 to be more fair, we also fixed how bids were done. There were some concerns about people seeing each others bids, but we decided on a silent whisper bid system to Mastric like we do in group 1. If Mastric desires to bid on a piece, everyone will whisper bids to Geedub, Greatbadguy is also there as a default 3rd option. Just to make a quick summation of our theory behind the group 2 DKP system. We think that if we use DKP, people will be more apt to show up knowing that they have a consistent run going and that they will earn for time spent. More consistency = more downing = more loot. Also, more players = weeding out low geared/bad people from the ranks = consistency......=progression. Roflstomper brought up the point that what would happen if you are new and have no little DKP to start and that is a disadvantage. If you are new, it means we were forced to bring you in as a pug. By the time you get into the raid, the raid itself would have progressed enough with consistent (there is that word again) players to make the new guy basically be thrown some loot that no one needs. Therefore, if you are new, it isn't really a problem. Speaking of new people, the efforts of all the officers, as well as a certain hedgehog lover (Cyianna) have yielded some really positive recruiting results for us. Thebled (fury warrior), Psychosi (rogue), Armagetan (enhance shaman), Myntir (shadow preist), Ambika (Resto Shaman), TheBigl (ret pally), Gorondel (warlock), Mordechai/Vulkan (mage/warlock), are just some of the new faces, who have joined our ranks recently. Along with them, we have had a couple people come back into action to join up again. Bloodyredrum has brought his hunter over. RIzel has come back to tank or hunter it up for us. Huntinseason has come back also. Not to mention Avengedd who has showed up to a couple raids now. Since my last post, we have ramped up recruitment and have gotten a lot of great players! This makes me think of a pug I did with Onslaught yesterday on my priest. They were such assholes to all the pugs in there. From what I have heard, many other guilds are treating people horribly and that is what is making good raiders leave. It goes to show, people will work hard if they feel wanted and respected. Also this week, after long last, Yacoub finally got the Pirates to run him through 25M Sindragosa quest and a LK downing. For the last few weeks, he had been asking Censored but they seem to have the same members not showing up issue that many guilds are facing. Because of Yacoub, we can now work on some hard modes next week and Yacoub can start getting shadowfrost shards towards his Shadowmourne! Speaking of the coming week, I have a challenge for everyone. Let's try and down every farm boss in that stupid place in 1 night so we can have multiple days on LK! Last week, we did it in 2 days, but I believe we can do it in 1. Lastly, I am debating making a small video blog maybe weekly or bi-weekly of random guild news to be put on the website. I have gotten mixed reviews about the idea. Many like the idea but others mainly read my updates at work or at school where they cannot watch videos, lol. Oh well, I can always do both, a video blog for fun every once in a while and keep doing these written updates as well, lol. Tell me your thoughts about it in game or in a shout. Well, that's all for now, good evening fellas.

I thought that since I have been doing these for a couple of weeks now, I would just give it a name and stick with it. I chose "Rebel's Logic" obviously so you would be able to know they were from me (because so many other people write long winded summaries of raid weeks, great thinking Rebel, you moron). Anyway, good afternoon children! Time for a recap of an eventful couple raid weeks. First off, we came up with a plan to have 2 simultaneous 25M raids going and it has gotten off to a decent start. Keeping in mind that the weekend during this raid week had Memorial day in it, caused some people to be missing but we still soldiered on. From the implementation of the new raid, we began recruiting some new members to fill the ranks because we still had to pug a few people for the seconds run. So far, we have gotten a ret pally named Thebigl, a holy preist named Cyianna, a demo lock named Grondel, and last but not least Avengedd is back. Having these people and eventually adding more have proven to strengthen our entire guild as a whole. For example, this week Boredman had finals on the Tuesday/Wednesday so we grabbed Cyianna to help heal. Solidifying a symbiotic relationship between the two raids is essential for our continued success. In both runs we are cultivating progression oriented players who shouldn't care what run they are on because both will go far with a little hard work. In this way, it puts less pressure for raid leaders to fill raids if people are missing as well as put less pressure on individual raiders who have an off-schedule week and can't make it to their usual run. All in all, it was the implementation of this second raid that ultimately led to the downing of Sindragosa 25M this week! Last 2 weeks, we lost a combined 4 raid days because some people couldn't show up for progression on Sindragosa. However, this week, I owe the fact that we had the people to fill in that caused us to for the first time have 3 successful raids in a row. It will only get better from here on out with Prydain and I working together with the other officers to recruit some more key players to fill our ranks. Speaking of the second run. We have began a new relationship with a guild named Veritas et Aequitas which is the guild that Kateness and Starke are in. I and many other guildies have know Kateness and Starke for a long time and have enjoyed the opportunity to raid with them again as well as give them an opportunity to help us get our second run going. Around 6-8 different members of their guild have come to our second run and we are glad to have them. While we recruit more members to fill the second raid's ranks, it is nice to form a relationship with a good core of solid players outside of the guild who we can rely on to help. This week, I sat out on Deathwhisper to let Laristira get a shot at her bow since no one needs it at all. It dropped and was a huge upgrade for her. In the future, on a farm boss if someone is willing to frosake their ID for a possible single big upgrade, I would be glad to sit for them. This is part of the symbiotic relationship idea because Laristira can now help out Geedub in the second run without having to compete for the bow. This week marks the second week that Melodian has promissed to create me an upload of some good authentic island music and has not delivered yet. He is a music producer and I am dying to have some new jams to blast in my car. If anyone sees him online give him a hard time about it, lol. From now on guys, we are making it a formality that whenever you find someone that wants to join the guild, they have to fill out an app on the forums. It takes like 5 minutes and makes it easier for us to refer to when wondering who all the new people are. In the past, even if he was a random friend of someone, we let him in, we just want to make the process a little more formal, that's all. So guys, after long last, we are finally on Lich King 25M. Yesterday, we got some of the basics of phase 1 down and got into phase 2 a little sloppily. However, in the short time we spent on the fight (4 or so attempts), it appeared that we were improving. Please guys, come on time for raids next week and study the fight so we can have the maximum number of progressing attempts on him. If we have 3 solid raid days every week, we will down Lich King sooner than everyone thinks. As I happen to have a beer in my hand (office party), I will drink to that. Until next time kids, GI Joe says "Knowing is half the battle."