I took a gander at the roster spreadsheet. Lot's of really cool information. I caution that numbers can be sliced and diced to say anything you want. Just be careful when doing stats not to assume a perfect world with perfect distributions of participation when making projections. If your models and assumptions do not account for the real world, your estimates are going to be wrong. I think the best example of that is the "contribution per person" on the roster's stats tab. That number doesn't account for the distribution of peoples actual play times over the week and assumes that 100 people are present for 100% of all guild quests completed throughout the week which is impossible. That seems more like the max possible contribution if someone is present for all the quests and gets credit for all the kills and won't be the norm. Keep in my that we do have other objectives for the guild that pulls people away from guild quests (i.e., level grinding, gear grinding, group pvp training). Considering that 46% of the people are below 230 gear score and 78% of us are below level 53 it seems like it is in our collective best interest to prioritize and rather than saying someone must meet all three measured goals, maybe 1 or 2 out of the 3 is showing good activity. If someone spends all their time on guild quests and cannot level grind or gear grind because of that, the guild still benefits. If guild quests trump all other objectives you're still not going to have 100 people on 100% of the time guild quests happen. It's unrealistic. Many quests can be completed with far fewer than 100 people so the contribution distribution will never be even and some may never get close to an ideal max contribution. Some will have tons while others are just getting the minimum targets while they work on other things that they need to catch up on. What would be really interesting is if we could put the number of hours people actually spent playing per day and per week on the spreadsheet so we can see what type of game time is really needed in order to get to certain levels and gear scores. I know we that these objectives are still largely "soft goals" and considered "minimal" when compared to other top 25 guilds. It would be helpful to have a target number of hours that is believed should be able to meet those minimal goals. I know that the people at the top of the food chain in the guild are frustrated that everyone cannot be like them. Just tonight we had someone in team speak say they've been gone for 2 weeks and was shocked that he was still higher level (54) and better geared than most of the people in the guild. I posit that that is more a statement of how much more that person plays than the average member than it is a damning statement of the majority of the rest of us. It's not really a big deal but the reason I mention it is because these kinds of digs happen practically every day in team speak. I'd really like to know just how much time people are actually pouring into this game to be weeks or months ahead of what I am able to do with the time I have available. Also one last thing. Don't take any of this to be me belly aching. I am actually just trying to have a conversation about this stuff. I'd talk about it more in team speak but team speak is largely dominated by people talking about random stuff non-stop and the medium just doesn't lend itself well to talking about things in an open way. I have been playing games with the Lethality community for a few years and I decided to play BDO specifically to play with this community with the main guild. I don't intend to go anywhere and I am hoping to just keep things transparent and open.
I may be wrong in this assumption, but I was under the impression that the sister guild was for those members who for whatever reason were either unable or unwilling to follow through with the requirements of the PVP guild. I think the problem might be that whoever is not meeting the requirements and not participating in guild quests might be in the wrong branch of Lethality in BDO. If you or any other player is unable to put the time in to reach those goals or simply doesn't want to, it's not that big a deal to just drop into the other guild. We are all ONE guild. We are just different branches of the same guild. One is semi-hardcore with higher requirements and one is more relaxed with lower requirements. I heard someone make a comment the other day that some folks were unhappy with the requirements of the PVP branch but were unwilling to switch to the casual branch. I think maybe some have the idea that the sister guild is a lesser guild somehow. I assure you were are not the lesser branch. We are the CASUAL BRANCH of the same guild. Will we do PVP when node wars start? More than probable. I don't think we'll have much choice. We do guild quests here as well, and we are able to group up with members from the PVP guild to do scrolls and other things. However, in this branch we can do so more at our leisure. If you are unwilling to switch guilds, I would have to challenge you to ask yourself why. If you feel it is sitting at the 'kids' table', let me assure you that it is not. I don't think adding work to the keepers of the spreadsheet is really fair, though. Asking someone to add the hours played in addition to what they already do is asking a bit much. It takes time away from our game play to do the little bit we do now, and I feel that the hours played information is totally unnecessary. Each individual needs to monitor their own play time and determine their personal goals. If your goals and play time do not match the PVP guild, again I feel the answer is to switch guilds. Adding more complications to the situation will not help out the PVP guild or the players at all, but may in fact be the cause of drama that creates an unhealthy gaming environment.
I think you may have missed a rather important fact here.....each and every person was specifically asked what night they could/would do guild quests. Based on the responses, they were placed on nights of the week and into groups with the same availability targeting around 20 players to each group. The total number of players participating reduces the amount of time it takes to accomplish the quests, reducing the time burden of each individual player. The reasoning behind this approach was that for 6 days a week that person would be free to do anything they wanted and the guild quests would still be accomplished each day by a willing and available group. Not to mention 'buy in' is key when doing things like guild quests.....the best way to have that is to just simply ask each person what days they are available for those activities. Overly complicated methods would be a time sink with no discernible benefits. So, projections ect are out the window as the individual verified availability and willingness to participate on said night. Estimates of failure rates and non participation only come into play if you assume you can not take people at their word when asked. This would be a cynical assumption at worst and at best just non productive. Not something a guild should waste time on in my opinion, there are much more productive things to do with that time. As for the gearing and leveling of players, active participation is what makes the greatest impact. If you are not in TS, you miss a tremendous amount of time saving while gearing up. Other players experiences often save time and money for guild members. Don't group up and play, levels come much slower as does money. Don't group up for scrolls, much slower progression with armor and weapon stones. The aforementioned perks are big assets the player has to being in a guild...failure to utilize these to their full potential falls directly on the player. Another perk for the player is the passive benefits from the guild points and buff distribution. These points passively increase the strength/gearing capability/money gain/leveling potential of every player. So, the quests themselves are part of the individual players development even when they forget what it is the quests do for them on an individual level.
We have and always Advertised that we are a Guild that will get into Castle and Node Wars. We the Officers have figured out the types of things this will take, and are adjusting the Guild according. We are going to be raising the bar on Every Member in the Guild in Terms of their Contribution to the Guild and the Gear they are required to have. We have been, and will keep on replacing members who do not meet these goals. We can give members a week here and there due to real life, but if players Keep not making the goals, they can go to the Sister Guild. There is no more food for thought on any of this. The officers make the goals for players, and they hit or miss. As for someone being gone for 2 weeks and still having a higher Gear Score then others, does in fact boil down to the amount of time they can spend. People could in fact go with something other then Grunil, and have 280+ gear score No problem and it being very cheap. But with Grunil, getting past 230 is time and money consuming, hence why we are asking for 230 for the time being. We will start hounding players to get their gear up very soon, as we have given more then enough time for players to do this.
I guess I just look at guilds a little differently. I don't consider it no big deal to switch guilds at all. Creating the second guild fragmented the community in order to appease players that joined us for the first time for this game and many of those player left us already. This game is exactly my kind of MMO and I can see myself playing it for years. The last games that were this satisfying to play for me were EQ which I played in the same guild for 5 years and WOW with I played in the same guild for 6 years. Guilds are not throw always in my book. In 4 years I want to see join date 3/6/2016 by my name on the roster. The question that I was asked was which night, Monday through Thursday, was best for me to work on guild quests. It wasn't phrased as "which night can you devote 3-4 hours to complete 4 extra large kill quests". I am really trying to be helpful when I suggest you express things in terms of expected hours to complete. It's project management 101 stuff. I'm a resource and I'm willing to put in a bunch of time to be active with the guild so please respect my time by expressing how much of it you think you need to get guild stuff done. Will doing 3-4 extra large quests yield 11000 contribution? Maybe it is supposed to, but this week I've spent more than 1 night and way more than 3 hours doing guild quests and don't have 11000 for the week yet. I am in team speak all the time when I am playing so I hear all sorts of random chatter all the time. It's hard to get a word in edgewise with all the off topic banter but this weekend I was able to get in to a scroll group that helped my gear a ton. I have been able to pick up 1 imp scroll a night since then and I have several relics to turn into scrolls as well so hopefully this weekend I'll make more progress. My observation is that we have several clicks of similarly geared people who play a bunch together and it's not always easy to just get a grind or scroll group. So many times I hear this or that person talking about when their grind/scroll group is going to start and it's already full with standing members of the group. There is competition within the guild to get spots in random groups that do form. That makes it harder for the guild to get even one more uniformity in levels and gear. I end up soloing most from missed opportunity. I'm comfortable soloing it's just a slower go. This was a bit meandering but again please do not take these words personally or as an attack. We are all here to help the guild succeed. Keep that in mind when talking about this stuff.
I'm not sure how it Fragmented the Community, Players are still coming into TeamSpeak all the time in the Sister Guild. Players who have left, have left the Game who went to the Sister Guild, or they just don't play a lot. Each night we do One Large, and 2 extra Large Quests. this is around 15,500 mobs, that gives 155,000 Contribution for those 3 Quests for that night. If we have all 20 people show up for that night and everyone does the same amount of work, each player should have around 7,000 Contribution. Now granted if players dont show up, that time gets longer, and each persons contribution will be slightly higher. On a normal night the 3 quests should be done in under 3 hours, leaving time to do a small boss scroll. Being in TeamSpeak can be hard sometimes with 20+ people, but you need to just Speak up, and just ask your question, 90% the time people will be silent when question comes though so players can answer it. Also Every night I see people asking for 1-2 more for Scrolls group, or they announce they have extra spot in grind group, and NO ONE answers them. Those clicks form, because they don't like hearing all the TeamSpeak Chatter, and they play the same hours, this is going to happen, and no one to prevent this, also same point I made in the last paragraph.
Daph, a business can declare that they are going to go into the meat packing business but unless they qualify what they plan to do in that business it is very ambiguous. Yes we said we wanted to do node and guild wars, but we never said where we planned to stake our ground. We've been crystalizing that as we go. Right now we're saying that we are semi-hard and want to be somewhat-competitive. Those are vague terms. And given that you are boiling a frog alive with ever increasing requirements and saying conform or get out you are really moving the guild to hardcore which is what is really needed in order to be competitive in this particular game in node and guild wars. Again that's okay. Just state the goal. We want to be hardcore for node and castle wars. That's much more meaningful and informative to people who want to be here but might not be able to donate the equivalent of a full-time job to the guild. My concern is that we've been making these changes and increasing requirements in order to keep the more hard core players and many of them still have left for harder core guilds. In the end it's hard to please everyone in a guild with 100 people and that's where it may make more sense to make sure that we keep the kind of people we want to be part of the community even it it means we lose highly productive people who are just not okay with what the guild is actually capable of doing in the game.
To be fair I did look up the invitation email you sent out to the community for BDO back in February: I should have revisited that email earlier. Yes we stated up front that we were going to be focusing on the PvP and that is a big reason why I joined the game. But realize that goal of being both semi-hard and hard is not very clear since those are significantly different things. Just to be clear, I do put a bunch of time into this game and I am okay with having more than minimal requirements however I do expect to have my time respected as well. We are all humans and should treat each other as such. Monday through Friday there are 120 total hours possible. When you consider 40 hours should be spent sleeping (for good health) and a working adult is putting 60 hours for work/travel (assuming fulltime professional) that gives 20 hours to fit in home life and gaming. What percentage of a working adults available time during the week do you expect members to devote to the game in order to support guild goals of taking over a town and castle. Do you expect 100%? 50%? Or is there no place for a working adult that can give at most 20 hours during the week? Saturday and Sunday there are 48 total hours possible. Figure 16 hours for sleep on the weekend and that leaves 32 hours for home life and gaming assuming that a person doesn't also have to work on weekends if they worked during the week. Lots of people like to do other things besides playing BDO on the weekends but if more than 20 hours are needed to keep up with an ever increasing set of guild requirements, a working adult is going to need to put time in on the weekend to make up for lack of time during the week. Believe me I have such a great time when I am playing BDO that I wish that I could be retired or back in high school/college with tons of free time and still get the bills and food paid for. I'm just stuck as a 45 year old working professional with 20+ years left to go before I can retire.
The Guild is Not a Business, If i was to Run it like one, it would be more Strict, hence so much slack I've given people. You play Semi Hardcore with the amount I see you on. The problem is getting the bottom 20 people who are not close to Semi Hardcore out of the Guild and replace with people who are Semi, or fully hardcore in this game. I'm not sure what you want me to do, so Flat out SAY what you're expecting, I don't want to keep beating around the bush. In the Past MMO's i was not Strict Enough with players, and the Guilds slowly went down Hill, I promised not to do that with This Game, as it has the potential for Years to come. If you want Hours needed to play this game and be in the Guild I would say 15+ hours a week, is Semi Hardcore. That gives you 3 hours to do Guild Quests, and 12 hours to grind Gear and Level and maybe Craft.
Flat out: I have been trying to get a stance on how many hours per week was considered appropriate to ask semi-hard players to spend each week towards guild goals for a few weeks. Thank you for that information. If it seemed like I was beating around the bush, I apologize as that was not my intent. I just have a tendency to use allegories in conversations. I chose to have this discussion on the forums as that is a much easier medium for me to communicate through. I have heard plenty of discussions dance around this topic in team speak with no clear answer or where non-officers voice their own opinions on these topics with many folks having very pro-hardcore opinions. It helps me a great deal to get some clarity on this but maybe I am the only one that was frustrated by what I perceived to be an unexpressed requirement.
Meant to add that I agree that a guild is not a business but it is a human organization which means you get all the head aches of human resource issues without any pay as a guild leadership and most times guild officers are chosen for their zeal for the game rather than their pedigree for being good people managers (this happens in business too, many times do you see the most productive guy in a department made the team lead whether he'd make a good leader or not). So what I am saying is that I do understand that it's not a business, and I completely appreciate that it is an actual job to run a successful guild. I hope that you are open to these types of conversations when questions come up rather than take them as a drag on your otherwise busy life. I do appreciate people taking time to respond to this thread.
Sigh. It was better to just leave it as 15 hours a week. That really isn't a simple answer at all because time is not unlimited and the rate of progression towards goals are not uniform. From a human resource point of view you want to see your resources making progress within the expected amount of time available in a week. If the "work week" is 15 hours, then someone making progress and putting in that kind of time should be doing enough to stave off a meeting with the Bob's. The absolute worst bosses set expectations that are not realistic or achievable and doing things like that actually demotivates people from working harder or trying to get better. I would also add that the worst bosses to work with aren't able to quantify how much time is actually required to do the things they want done so when things don't go as they want, they blame the resource when a non-SMART objective was the real problem.
Therik, I realize this is non-scientific "flash poll" type of survey so don't take this in the wrong way. If you are looking to get honest feedback I do wish that there was a "none of the above" option to express when the options for a question are not applicable. The questions are fine but many questions have options that leave no room to disagree with how things are going without saying that things are horribly off. For instance I don't think requirements should be raised or lowered immediately but I don't agree with the third and final option either. I can't answer that question and some of the other questions are in a simalar situation. So you're not going to get an honest set of feedback from this poll and the way the answers are worded will likely result in a positive feedback loop as few people are going to want to tip the apple cart and say that things are totally upside down which some of those options imply unless the respondent picks the answer that tells officers that they are doing the right thing. Things aren't upside down but that doesn't mean there is not room for improvement and a poll like this could be an opportunity to explore where improvement can be made.
So a poll of entire guild will not be acceptable because a single player thinks its not scientific enough....How about you post what you would have used to answer those questions so we can look at it and put it out to the guild? I am curious now, you have something to add to every single post where people have tried to help you with what you say is not acceptable but have offered NOTHING but argumentative analysis of any effort put forth by anyone thus far. What is it you are doing or have done or are waiting to offer? As was posted earlier, stop beating around the bush. I am sure you have heard that if you find yourself constantly at odds with people, at some point you have to stop claiming its "them" and embrace the concept the only thing that is consistent across the conflicts is "you". Ergo, you are the problem, not "them". Of course I say this knowing you want honest feedback and would not view it as an attack or anything other than constructive criticism. (disclaimers don't really excuse the content of a post, no matter how many times you put them up. Offensive and combative posts are still offensive and combative regardless of disclaimers)
Valhas I do not understand your over reaction to questions or how an attempt to openly approach the guild with questions or concerns are viewed as either offensive or combative. I've posted questions over the past few days and have been in this community for years. How is that remotely being constantly at odds with anyone? Your assessment of the situation really seems unusual to me. You don't even know me and I don't really know most of the officers or new community members playing BDO. Look, I am not personally attacking anyone and have only positive intentions for doing any of this. Being in a guild requires thick skin and being in guild leadership requires thicker skin. That said I am very mindful of how others feel and would never intentionally attack or seek to offend anyone. Also I have not said that anything is "not acceptable". That accusation is particularly odd. This seems like an unnecessary escalation of rhetoric on your part. Is your intent to be hostile towards me? I respectfully suggest you take some time to cool off before you blast (or troll) someone for trying to communicate. You are an officer and your reaction certainly can be interpreted as a warning that any questions will not be tolerated, or go unpunished, which seems so contrary to what this community has stood for. I ask you to take a step back and consider that I am not a bad guy or bad actor in the guild. Regarding the poll there is a scientific method to survey design. It is an established field (link) and I specifically mentioned that so you folks knew that I was not blasting the survey for not being scientific. Indeed I was not blasting it at all. Most people will use survey monkey or some other flash poll site for fun. I am fine with that. I'm not sure why it is offensive to note a bug in the questions. I make surveys from time to time and don't lose my shit when someone mentions that a question or answers could be worded differently to improve information collected. Why can't that feedback just be accepted? I don't understand why it has to be viewed so personally, it's not personal at all. Lastly I want to make it clear that I don't have a problem with anyone in the guild or with the officers. I get along with everyone just fine and help folks whenever I am able to. I hope that this open hostility is just a misunderstanding. If you would rather talk than type things out, I am always in team speak when I am playing.
guys, this is just a game, why so serious? if you can make the guild requirements, good for you, if you cant, let officers know the reason. if the reason is stupid, get booted or go to the sister guild. simple no?
