TB is apparently no more

Azelma · **Posted:** Fri Feb 11, 2011 11:16 pm

myrrar wrote:

The recruitment issue is a very real thing at the top tier of raiding right now. With 10 man content offering the exact same rewards as 25, people are more apt to form up in 10 man guilds locally, rather than server transfer/faction change to take a shot being an app at a major guild like ours. Again, we would have been fine if we didnt lose so many people. I realize a lot of your guilds are getting apps, but please don't take this as an arrogant jab or anything like that, but I would assume most of those players weren't capable, or skilled enough to raid on a US/World competative level for whatever reason. Its a bit different when you're a hardcore progression guild; the skill level required for recruits is much much higher.

A lot of people hated us on this server, and are glad to see us gone.. and I personally don't care. Sure, some TB players were arrogant fucks, and dicks a lot of the time, but not all of us were. I dunno, I may be pretty mean sometimes but if any resto druid messaged me asking for gemming/gearing/spec advice, I'd gladly give it. Either way, the few of you I've had the pleasure of interacting with, its been fun.

TL;DR
Peace.

The thing I don't understand is how you could miss so badly with recruits that you did get (as evidenced by the farewell post placing loads of blame on "bad recruits")?

I refuse to believe that there is such a void of talent on this server, or in the entire pool of WoW players, that a top end raiding guild could no longer exist.

With gear, and a friendly, but focused environment, most players who are competent can achieve, even over-achieve. The fact that the demise was partly blamed on "no good recruits" seems like a cop-out to me.

This is why I wonder about the culture of your guild...perhaps new recruits never felt welcome? Perhaps the spirit of elitism wasn't embraced by all? The fact that other top guilds still remain with WoW's current player base leads me to believe that there was something wrong at the core of TB.

What happened with these recruits? They obviously had decent gear. They obviously had promising applications and performed well in their vent interviews....then what? They just all of a sudden sucked? Didn't you guys do trial runs with them? They must have done well in those runs in order for them to get a spot in the guild? Right?

It's like head coaching...if you hire an assistant, and then the team fails to perform, a quick fix is to fire that assistant. To me, I think you are the one who should be fired, because YOU were the one who decided that the assistant was good and would be a good fit. To blame all the teams' issues on bad assistants is disingenuous at best. Likewise with blaming the death of a guild on a "lack of recruits" or "bad recruits."

TL;DR

Attitude (and achievement) reflects leadership.

Aestu · **Posted:** Fri Feb 11, 2011 11:20 pm

myrrar wrote:

The LK lockout thing had absolutely nothing to do with it. Our morale was just fine all the way through wrath and into cata. Monique left months before cata even launched. Beaten left because he got an E-girlfriend and moved to live with her when we refused to recruit her because she was bad. Lubricate left because beaten was a douche and convinced him to quit, hoping that if he left, his E-GF would get the raid spot.

Yeah, TB surely had some douches in it, but most guilds to. Sarcasm was never an officer of the guild, though Iapeto was. ANd yea, peto can be a HUGE dick. Thats just the kind of guy he is.
I could buy your argument that TB was a victim of some "bad image", but its not just us. Deus Vox crumbled. Phoenix crumbled. FL is gone. Many many top tier guilds are falling by the wayside. And when I said TB was special, I didn't mean that we had the most skilled players in the world. I ment that our core was really good friends, and it was a unique guild environment. Dagr was a mistake, but he did decent damage.. he was removed from guild before TB crumbled though. Whael also turned out to be a flake... that happens. I have no reason to lie about this stuff, and I'm telling you what happened with the guild that led up to its demise.

I didn't actually know Dagr had been removed from guild. For a while I thought of him as something like a friend before his character gradually came into clearer focus. Shortly before he was (apparently) removed from guild he inquired about raiding with my guild and I blew him off because I knew exactly what his angle was; he's a user. Again as Boredalt said - judging character is key...you recruited and retained him because of his very real skill, but didn't look past that to see his character and the implications of intergrating someone like him or Whael into your guild structure. And then again TB turned me down at a time my skills could have made a difference...because of a similar misjudgement.

The point I'm making is that you're blaming externalities such as conditions in WoW or bad luck with apps and internal drama, or claiming it couldn't be helped or that TB was in some way special and unique. None of that is the case. TB died because of a long history of bad decisions and offensive behavior.

Eturnalshift · **Posted:** Fri Feb 11, 2011 11:28 pm

Aestu wrote:

...died because of a long history of bad decisions and offensive behavior.

Patiently waiting...

Aestu · **Posted:** Fri Feb 11, 2011 11:31 pm

Azelma wrote:

The thing I don't understand is how you could miss so badly with recruits that you did get (as evidenced by the farewell post placing loads of blame on "bad recruits")?

I refuse to believe that there is such a void of talent on this server, or in the entire pool of WoW players, that a top end raiding guild could no longer exist.

With gear, and a friendly, but focused environment, most players who are competent can achieve, even over-achieve. The fact that the demise was partly blamed on "no good recruits" seems like a cop-out to me.

This is why I wonder about the culture of your guild...perhaps new recruits never felt welcome? Perhaps the spirit of elitism wasn't embraced by all? The fact that other top guilds still remain with WoW's current player base leads me to believe that there was something wrong at the core of TB.

What happened with these recruits? They obviously had decent gear. They obviously had promising applications and performed well in their vent interviews....then what? They just all of a sudden sucked? Didn't you guys do trial runs with them? They must have done well in those runs in order for them to get a spot in the guild? Right?

It's like head coaching...if you hire an assistant, and then the team fails to perform, a quick fix is to fire that assistant. To me, I think you are the one who should be fired, because YOU were the one who decided that the assistant was good and would be a good fit. To blame all the teams' issues on bad assistants is disingenuous at best. Likewise with blaming the death of a guild on a "lack of recruits" or "bad recruits."

This isn't completely fair either. There's more to a good raider than just gear, and although attitude is a decent indicator, what is most significant is general raid awareness and behavioral reliability. It's easy enough to say "be aware of where the fire is", but what separates a good player from an amazing player is making an error 5% of the time versus making an error .5% of the time. Many of the most challenging encounters ultimately consist of nothing more than repeated error checks; guilds with error-prone players will not progress, and the best guilds have players that make errors most rarely.

RM, BA, and WotLK-EI are really good negative examples in this regards.

That kind of perfection cannot be easily taught nor judged without knowing the player for a very long time - if at all - but again, character - simply caring enough to excel - is a major factor. That, at least, was one criteria TB clearly failed to judge applicants on. I definitely know that many of their long-time raiders were seriously faulty in this regards.

Joklem · **Posted:** Fri Feb 11, 2011 11:35 pm

Laelia wrote:

Joklem wrote:

Laelia wrote:

dek wrote:

Laelia wrote:

Blizzard may be a bit generous in how they count subscribers, but I doubt they are actually making the numbers up. They are a publicly traded company and would get in real trouble if they were fraudulently inflating the number of subscribers (not that corporations never break the rules, but it's not the most parsimonious explanation). Cataclysm apparently sold 4.7 million copies in the first month of release, and it's not available in mainland China, so that's probably a decent estimate of the number of active subscribers outside China.

They are probably entirely accurate in the number of subscriptions they have, which is what matters from a business standpoint. From a gameplay standpoint, it's not.

Maybe, but then you start to get in differing definitions of what an "active" player is. For the purposes of this thread, we're probably only looking at people who play regularly and are interested in raiding (and thus are in or applying to raid guilds). That's only one chunk of the playerbase, and the people who don't fall under that definition may be very active by other standards.

The shareholders care to know about the amount of money-generating subscriptions. Aestu used some variables to demonstrate that the number of actual active players is probably much less and give an estimation.

As an analogy, just like you can demonstrate that "we're most likely not alone in the universe" using a similar process.

depending on how you define activity.

His definition looks like "a single human on North American servers using his main subscription at any frequency for the purpose of playing the game". Separate that between the multitude of servers. If you break that down to players who are interested in and ready for raiding, the estimated figure would be abysmally low compared to the figure of active subscriptions. Take away players already in a guild from that estimate, and you've got almost nothing.

The result is: recruitment meaning someone changed guilds most of the time, recruitment meaning someone changed servers some of the time, nearly no raid-ready players not in a guild or awaiting acceptance, progression-oriented guilds taking any raid-ready players who appear good that they can, thus progression is favoured over community, some better guilds fall in part due to member migration to even better guilds, in part because some members stop playing, so on and so forth that's been discussed here including a missing sense of community being a factor amongst others. Then there's the blame game, cliques, players unable to stand corrected when in error, and other human factors. (edit: and the fallacy of thinking that the 25 best players will make the best guild without accounting for how well they work together in the long term)

A prediction of the number of active players that also seems to agree with the observations.

I hadn't really thought about this before (and I no longer play) and I'm probably wrong on some accounts, I'm just backing up his logic.

Azelma · **Posted:** Fri Feb 11, 2011 11:40 pm

Aestu wrote:

This isn't completely fair either. There's more to a good raider than just gear, and although attitude is a decent indicator, what is most significant is general raid awareness and behavioral reliability. It's easy enough to say "be aware of where the fire is", but what separates a good player from an amazing player is making an error 5% of the time versus making an error .5% of the time. Many of the most challenging encounters ultimately consist of nothing more than repeated error checks; guilds with error-prone players will not progress, and the best guilds have players that make errors most rarely.

RM, BA, and WotLK-EI are really good negative examples in this regards.

That kind of perfection cannot be easily taught nor judged without knowing the player for a very long time - if at all - but again, character - simply caring enough to excel - is a major factor. That, at least, was one criteria TB clearly failed to judge applicants on. I definitely know that many of their long-time raiders were seriously faulty in this regards.

I definitely see your point, and I wasn't trying to imply that gear=good raider. My point is that TB blaming a significant portion of their demise on bad recruits makes me go "ehhhh...." because, after all THEY chose to ginvite the recruits, THEY review the applications, THEY conduct the interviews, THEY observe performance in trial runs.

I think what you are saying about their character judgement abilities certainly has some merit, and supports my feelings that rather than blaming "bad recruits" it was the leadership, or recruiting officers that were making bad decisions.

You'd think a guild of such amazing players would be able to hit home-runs when it comes to recruiting...guess not.

Aestu · **Posted:** Fri Feb 11, 2011 11:47 pm

Azelma, the issue isn't approving the right applications, it's doing what it takes to get those applications up there in the first place.

TB doesn't get the apps they want when they want any more than any other guild at any level. Even the best guilds struggle to get the best; the "keeper" apps for any guild relative to their level of progression are always blue moons. So what you do, is try to stack the cards in your favor, and that's where rep and retention comes in.

myrrar · **Posted:** Sat Feb 12, 2011 12:43 am

While bad apps didn't kill us, they certainly prevented us from being able to pull ourself out of hte rut we ended up in.

Bad apps:
Moonkin who didn't realize you could use barkskin to prevent your tranquility from being interrupted by AOE pulsing damage

Warlock who swore up and down that it was too difficult to AOE adds because he couldn't click on him. This warlock didn't use V-bars or anything of the sort.

Shadow priest who did 40,000 damage to vile swill and the abberations on H maloriak throughout the whole encounter

Hunter who stood in magmaw's fire pillers over and over and over and over and over and over.

Feral druid tank who didn't use cooldowns until he was at like 10% HP, ALL THE TIME.

I mean.. their gear was fine.. they were just.. bad players. Due to the leavings when cata hit we needed people to fill raid spots. These people were hardly worth their spot, and brought down the morale of the whole group. Kicking them leaves us in the situation where we are undermanning content, but keeping them is almost as bad.

Again, recruitment is AWFUL for 25 man guilds right now. Its not just us. We aren't unique in that regard... unfortunely we're joining a growing list of progression guild who have folded. Some flaky people jumped ship, sure.. but 20 or so of us stuck with it till the bitter end. Yeah, progression is what hte guild was about, but it was also about friends, and playing with people you like. If we didn't have a sold bond as a core, then so many of us wouldn't have stuck around this long.

Aestu · **Posted:** Sat Feb 12, 2011 1:31 am

Again the question is why your roster crumbled, why you didn't get better apps...and why DU WL's half a raid a night.

Mns · **Posted:** Sat Feb 12, 2011 1:45 am

myrrar wrote:

The LK lockout thing had absolutely nothing to do with it. Our morale was just fine all the way through wrath and into cata.

Yeah, your morale was fine. The point was that you literally became a laughing stock of the entire community of super-srs raiders (read: your recruitment pool).

Quote:

Yeah, TB surely had some douches in it, but most guilds to.

I'm a great example of this. I was a core raider in Bucket in my high times of trolling, back when I had the entire mage class board under my thumb. Allow me to speak from personal experience.

I was pretty much a one-man band. Bucket (and Respec before it) were Bleeding Hollow institutions and had server legends (ex. Srmoocow, Dugla, etc), all of which were the true faces on the guild. As soon as you guys came to a server where nobody knew who you were, a select core of your raiders started pissing on Tempest, which was the cream of BH horde and was a well-respected institution hosting many of BH's most well-recognized people outside of RM. There was no voice of reason in TB and nobody made any attempt to shut Sarcasm up. As soon as people started making hate threads, your guild members (mainly some paladin officer, I forget her name) started reporting all of those threads and getting them disappeared. I mean, if you guys actually established yourselves and then had people shittalk, I don't think it wouldn't be as bad. However, you guys went guns-a-blazin.

Nobody could give less of a fuck if you all were playing limp biscuit or giving dutch rudders like a happy West Virginian family. As soon as you came on the server your people went out of their way to piss off the establishment and the rep stuck.

Also, you can get the same gear from 10-mans and not have to ride the coattails of a guild that's universally hated. Is it a coincidence that your guild blew up? Absolutely not.

PS: I really wish I was still on alliance, mainly because the people you pissed off are your only chance of having some semblance of the only thing people respected you for.

Aestu · **Posted:** Sat Feb 12, 2011 1:55 am

lol "cream of BH horde"

Typically grandiose Mayo-speak...no-one cared what Tempest or any other "institution" thought, tho to blame Sarcasm forum behavior is probably fair. The issue wasn't that their big talk pissed off guilds, it was that TB discouraged individuals - a lot of them - while their core crumbled.

Usdk · **Posted:** Sat Feb 12, 2011 2:41 am

at the time they were the best pve horde had to offer, so yeah it works.

still, TB had a countdown to meltdown clock going from the second they jumped servers, and we all knew it.

server transfers destroy guilds. (and lets face it, if they were doing just fine where they were at, they would never have transferred. BH only sustained them this long.)

Mns · **Posted:** Sat Feb 12, 2011 3:52 am

Aestu wrote:

lol "cream of BH horde"

Typically grandiose Mayo-speak...no-one cared what Tempest or any other "institution" thought

I'd call them a pretty good guild, considering they were the top horde guild on the server for the better part of two expansions and iirc were the furthest progressed horde guild in Naxx. They were a good guild and Rabid not putting up with you doesn't change any of that.

Also, especially on BH, most recruitment I've seen of quality players isn't fresh players but rather mass poaching of top players from dying guilds. Hell, I remember Rabid even asking for a list of people from Bucket I'd vouch for the day after we announced raiding so he could get them into Tempest. Pissing on Tempest and, indirectly, Dissension ruffled feathers on both sides of the aisle. Considering the people in these guilds were the only real recruitment pool TB had on this server, making them hate you isn't really a good idea.

Necrachilles · **Posted:** Sat Feb 12, 2011 4:01 am

I'm an awesome raider apparently.

Seribus · **Posted:** Sat Feb 12, 2011 4:20 am

is this a good time to let you guys know on March 1st, Tempest will be coming back to Bh, but on alliance

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