Behavior in raids – progressing or regressing as a group
There are two side to this take on group dynamics, one positive and one negative. One set the stage for increased performance of the group members. As the result of internal competition and performance tracking or just that the presence of others help facilitate their own ability to perform. The other involves ‘hiding in plain sight’ while letting the rest of the team do the job. Positive tracking seems to be the key to make sure that all pull their weight with emphasis on the positive. Its ok to have a bad day, just not every day there is a raid planned.
Personally I subscribe to the Pareto Principle (80/20) for analyzing raid performances, and in more ways than one. Lets look at some examples of how this might be useful;
1. No matter how awesome your raid group is you will always have a someone that is having a less than perfect day. Or you can turn it around and saying that there will always be a few that are having a great day and performing above and beyond what they normally would. No matter which version of the Pareto Principle you make use of its all about expecting the balance of your group to be different from raid to raid. The number one DPS might always top the DPS trackers, but gap to the number two is likely to be different, and sometimes this has nothing to do with the game itself. Being able to identify variations like this will help you adjust strategies accordingly.
2. When given the choice for multiple strategies it is always difficult to decide if one should spend five wipes on the most promising of them or try out five different strategies and see how they pan out and then chose the one that worked best. Or test two strategies two times. There are three parts to this way of deciding on strategies. First is researching and analyzing different strategies, both the ones you can find online and those you draw up yourself. Second is about knowing your team and understanding which of these strategies are likely to work or fail. And finally how many wipes before you change strategy. The combination of these will ensure that wiping does not feel like you are running constantly into a wall hoping it will fall over due to some miracle of random luck…
3. The final example that I find important to mention is when everything is going wrong. Often when things seem to be failing all over the place there are a very few reasons for it; 20% of the errors being made are resulting in 80% of what is going wrong. The trick is to identify and fixing those key errors or if this is not an option its time to change the chosen strategy itself.
In an earlier post we touched on the topic of conformation in groups, and so far it seems that high performance creates better players as much as a low performance results in massive slacking and crappy performances. I have to admit to being a ‘victim’ of both; if a raid has set my mood on a negative curve I am more likely to be counter productive and at the same time I see that high performance encourages me to push myself harder and increase my game awareness.
So to make some conclusions; raiding is rarely WYSIWYG, and as much as there are no real clear black and white there is no pure gray either. The Pareto Principle mainly tries to focus on the fact that there is always a balance, but that it is rarely 1:1. Some things you can track with addOns, some can be tracked by just knowing your players, but some things are left open to pure intuition or even clairvoyance if you are a believer in such. And the more present something good or bad is in any given raid the more likely it is to breed more of the same.
Behavior in raids – leadership
Becoming a raid leader is not role one can just ‘take’, its a role that first requires you to conform. Just like the players will conform to their roles and their personality type the leader must first find his place in the group to be able to lead.
In a LFR the time needed to ‘hold’ a leading role is short, but for a guild raid group a leader will need time to be able to have the group work together as a team. The difference primarily based on the level of ‘facerolling’ (lack of complexity) that is possible in a LFR where mistakes are much easily ‘forgiven’ and the boss mechanics can be ‘ignored’ by some and have the raid still come out victorious. From the next level and onward such mistakes have much ‘deadlier’ consequences, and when you reach the Heroic level you also face additional mechanics that do not exist in the other levels and where there is no room for ‘mistakes’.
Even if the basic mechanics of an encounter is more or less the same for all, it becomes unique for each combination of players that take it on. And its up to the raid leader to ‘mold’ his team into a team that is ready and able to succeed. Overcoming these challenges is not just a combination of individual efforts, it is just as much how they are able to work as a team and counter any flaws or assist in enhancing positive abilities that each individual player might display during different challenges. Where each player must understand both the game mechanics for the encounter as well as those for their characters role, its the leaders role to puzzle all of this together on both a game and social level and bring the victory home.
So make sure you groom your aspiring leaders – they are a rare breed, and the good ones even more so. At the same time it seems that good leaders always bring with them a set of flaws. So the question becomes this; does the raids successes outweigh the flaws of the leader?
Behavior in raids – play your role
At the absolute most basic level raids operate with three roles; the tanks, the healers and the DPS (damage pr. second; the damage dealers). In a game like WoW the balance between these roles is critical for a raids success, but how a raid chooses to balance between them can be different depending on play style and level of progress and/or skill of the individual players.
One of the famous psychological experiments concerning the adoption of roles in the Stanford Prison Experiment which took the conformation the participants to the roles they had been given to the extreme. Interestingly you find the similar effects when it comes to players conforming to their raid roles, and this includes both their player role as well as their perceived social role. Tanks are leaders, damage dealers are superstars and the healers are the caretakers. Of course these are my own personal generalizations and when we come down to specific experiences its rarely this simple. You will find that any role can lead, the superstar is all about how ego a player boasts and anyone with a kind word and encouraging attitude can become the social glue a good raid group needs.
When you take the step deeper into the actual game play roles in a raid you will discover additional nuances; there are different tanking styles, damage dealers will be able to excel on different raid challenges and healers will differ in how they use their abilities. For a good group you need the right diversity where all the roles come together and creating a ‘well oiled machinery’. A good raid leader will be able to identify how his teams individual players perform and create tactics that match their play style.
Moving from the game to the social relations between the players you will find similar behaviors as you would in most groups. There are a multitude of descriptions of such personality types, but as an example these 7 personality types might be a place to start if you want to check how your own raid is made up; the leader, the team player, the researcher, the expert, the planner, the creative and the communicator. Optimally most of your raiders will take on more than one role, but the key to success here is to find a good balance covering several such personality types.
Behavior in raids – obeying the rules
There are rules in the game. Some of them are coded into the game and breaking them will be considered cheating and some are policies and might get you into trouble with the game company if you decide to ‘play’ with them. Then there are the ‘unwritten’ rules of the social gaming community. They are based on a certain level of consensus meaning that what might be allowed in one raid might get you kicked in another. All though nobody has taken the time to list them like ‘The Rules of Fight Club’, there are definitely a set of rules for raiding. It is more a problem of knowing exactly which interpretation or version of the rules that are active for any given raid experience. One of the positive elements of joining a raid guild or community is the fact that these rules will remain more or less the same over time, but there is also less flexibility when it comes to breaking or bending them.
I have found a few rules to be more ‘common’ than others and I have tried to make a quick list of them with a few comments as they are not always self explanatory to non-gamers:
1 – do not stand in crap
This is the rule that covers the mutual understanding that you have some idea of what this boss fight is about and that you will be able to act accordingly. This simplified version basically refers to the understanding that you should not let your avatar stand in stuff on the ground that will kill it, but is often meant more broadly and refers to having an understanding of how a certain boss fight works and that you have either already successfully mastered this or you have a decent understanding of how you might be able to.
2 – play your role
A carpenter is not a neurosurgeon, and a tank is not a healer. When signing up for a LFR you will also select a role to play and people expect you to be able to perform accordingly. When it is questionable if you are ‘playing your role’ people will most of the time ignore it, but if you blatantly take on a different role than the one you have signed up with the raid will kick you quite quickly – even if you might be able to sneak in a wipe or two first…
3 – be prepared
Directly relates to rule 1 and 2, but includes an expanded level of preparedness through having brought with you virtual goods as well as making use of add-ons and/or other 3rd party software that will enhance your ability to perform in the game.
4 – be nice
Do not be an ass, try to be friendly and polite when ever possible and avoid name-calling and abusive behavior. Even if cyber bullying is all too common these days I find that most raids have a tolerance level that only stretches so far. Emotional outbreaks will happen, but unless your actions could in any way have any positive effect you are better off rage-quitting than ‘infecting’ other raid members with your ‘social vileness’ . Same goes for handling failures and mistakes; stating the obvious will not make ‘obvious’ go away and a little kindness will always get you farther than calling someone ‘a retard’.
That last rule also seems to be the one that a random group could be more ignorant about than what you would see in a raid guild. On any account; the more rules you break the quicker you will get yourself kicked. Add to this that the more rules that are broken the more likely the raid will perform poorly it seems like a good idea to follow them.
Behavior in raids – conformation
Raids and guilds are like ‘The Borg’:
From psychology this phenomena represents almost ‘magical’ properties, and I am uncertain as to how to evaluate it beyond the questions it poses. Would a low performance gamer become hardcore by joining a hardcore raid community? Would an awesome PvP-gamer totally loose his ‘mojo’ if she/he continually helps out newbies?
At the same time there is also a social aspect to it that I am much more comfortable talking about as I constantly see this when playing. The moment a group goes social in a positive way the players will immediately try to find common ground. How are we alike? With the positive attitude comes the wish to get along. And once common ground is found there is no stopping the possibilities, and I have on several occasions taken my relations out of the game and into a bar or cafe and actually met the person. Some relationships I still have and nurture and some fade into history, not unlike in real life. But once a good connection is made you will rarely loose it.
On the negative side a good social foundation might also get the same raid group wiping for hours on the same boss even if they should have accepted the fact that there is ‘no way in hell’ they are going to be able to succeed with the present team. All you need is a few blindly positive players along with some insanely hopeful loot-junkies and the conformity can convince the rest of the players to keep at it for hours. Over time I have come to accept that I can get entrapped this way as well, and I usually try to operate with a 3-wipe rule before I give up, possibly pushing it to five if I feel lucky. Problem is that with the LFR-tool in WoW you will always have someone leaving when there is a wipe, and that means you get new members that might be just the ones you need to succeed and thus making it harder to leave if the group has conformed to a certain point.
In general the consensus seems to be that we all want to have fun and we are desperately willing to conform if this makes the fun more likely to happen. Of course ‘fun’ can be different from player to player, but for most gamers these days its about mastering the ‘toon’ you have chosen, to overcome tough game challenges, to win some awesome epic items and to have some fun while doing it.
Behavior in raids – initiation rites
The first part of this series of post covered the forming of groups; both the actual raid as well as smaller groups within the raid group itself. Now that the existence of the groups is established it follows to look a little closer on some of the initiation rites I have encountered will exploring Azeroth in the World of Warcraft.
First of all the game itself has several such rites included as part of the game. It can be quests related to your class or challenges to gaining access to certain places. Most of these can be completed alone, but sometimes you need the help of a group to be able to complete such missions in the game. These are all part of your characters story and progression in the game, and they have often given me some extra satisfaction to complete. Especially the ones that in themselves can be shown off as ‘proof of skill’.
Once we leave the game world we enter into the second arena for such initiation rites. Here we find rites from game play abilities to social compatibility. From my experience the game play rites exist in two variations; those you need to go through BEFORE you gain acceptance into a group and those you face AFTER. Both have their own pro’s and con’s and can be used to test players in different ways. In short both are a kind of ‘show us what you got’, but either you are performing to gain entry or you perform to avoid getting thrown out. As the game plays out today BEFORE is mostly related to gaining access to raiding communities and AFTER to keeping your spot as part of the active raiding group.
Social rites come in many forms and may not always be obvious or even consciously enforced, but in general they are relevant for conforming with your fellow raiders. From having similar interests, same type of humor or having a similar cultural background. As mentioned earlier a silent raid seems more likely to ‘suffer’ more when ‘the going gets tough’, and even if verbal abuse might work as a tool for the leadership to keep people in order it rarely helps the raids ability to perform to have one or more individuals harassing other raid members. In short what it comes down to is if ‘the others’ feel that you fit in, and as part of deciding there are multiple different rites of initiation coming from individuals, groups or ‘clicks’. All which brings us to the next part; once you are part of ‘the tribe’ you will be ‘assimilated’.
Behavior in raids – group forming
As my Master thesis is about collaboration the behavior and success of raid activity in any given MMORPG is one of the success criteria I am trying to duplicate. The field of psychology was an interesting choice for analyzing this, and to just have an initial reference I found a simple web site describing ’10 Rules That Govern Groups’ as place to start. For game reference I have been tracking raid behavior in Word of Warcraft from 01.05.2014 to 01.07.2014.
Raids used to be events accessible only through belonging to a ‘guild’ or ‘raid community’, but at this point their creation is more diverse. The most loosely created raids at this time are a result of Word of Warcrafts ‘looking for raid’ tool that is part of the game. You sign up with a role and what raid event you want to partake in and then wait until enough players are signed up for the needed roles and then thrown into a largely random group of 25 players. Another option is for one or more individuals to gather up a group on their own by recruiting these in one of the game chat channels or some outside source (several of these exist today where OQueue and OpenRaid are good examples). Such groups are less random as the creators control the recruitment process. The groups can be generated on the fly with the goal of starting a raid even as soon as possible or they can be set up for a specific time and date, where Word of Warcraft also has a Calendar tool to help organizers set them up. And finally the old school ‘guilds’ and ‘communities’ that are preferred for facing the more challenging raiding content, and that work with the fixed team setups of 10 or 25 players.
In addition to this ‘established’ group setup I continually experience the development of smaller groups within a raid. As mentioned in an earlier post the leadership represents such a group. Roles also tend to group up (tanks, dps and healers). Finally there are situational and social groups. Situational groups are usually a result of events occurring during the raid and social groups can randomly appear and disappear as players socialize in the raid chat channel. And groups can arise from any existence of common identity.
I found that becoming part of one or more of the groups that appear during a raid event both makes the event more engaging as well as secures my position as part of the team. Due to the socially volatile behaviors certain players have it is wise to make sure you have some friends around when the rage hits the fan.
To be able to face the more difficult challenges you are wise to establish contact with more permanent groups that will often require to interact in social channels outside the game interface such as online forums, web applications and audio chat software such as Ventrilo or TeamSpeak. Most such permanent raid teams require you to submit an application for their evaluation before accepting you. This brings up the topic of ‘initiation rites’ which is the topic of my next diary post.
Gunnar Øyvin Fredrikson 