If you actually mean, how do you become a game master which is the customer support people that Blizzard hires to handle issues players have in-game.. well, I imagine you’d have to apply for the job.

I suppose a third possibility is that you’re asking how to page a GM in-game if you have a problem. There is a button down near the Options button for you to do that…

heh.

Human subjects note:  posting this paper to my blog… making it transparent and then inviting comments thus making it so that people who comment are not anonymous might be iffy in terms of my school's policies on research with human subjects… on the other hand, screw academia! this is a frikken blog! but anyway, post if you want your name out there, otherwise email me if you want to remain anonymous (though, technically, email isn't guaranteed confidential…pfft)

 Nothing like a couple of hours of yardwork to concentrate the mind. Warning: Wall of Text Inbound.

The main point of thog's paper is that camraderie and trust can overcome poor performance when it was temporarily lost. That's a good point, but I think it needs a bit more punch. Specifically, what makes the RL raid different from other raids, and why is this important (vis a vis WoW and other groups).

Yes, RL is different than most raids. I would like to see more about why. This may make for a longer paper than thog had in mind, but let me just outline some of my thoughts on the subject. Some of these are self evident.

WoW, like most other MMORPGs, has a level cap, which means the only 'end game' progression is to improve itemization.

WoW, unlike some other MMORPGs, has very limited ways of improving 'end game' itemization: you raid, or you do PvP. The best items in the game cannot be purchased, they must be earned in game. (Caveat: a sufficiently wealthy person could potentially 'buy' a raid or pay a service to level their character to High Warlord, but for the vast majority of us, this isn't going to work.)

Therefore if a player wishes to materially improve their character (a natural state for most players, tho by no means all), they must either self organize into raids, or self organize into smaller PvP groups (as it's very difficult to make HWL/GM solo). This is the main reason most people raid (beyond the initial curiosity of seeing new content). After you've killed Rags a couple of times, you've 'done' MC. You keep doing it either for more loot (Full Tier 1, T2 pants, other class-useful drops), because it's a stepping stone to more content (BWL), because you enjoy doing MC, or because you enjoy being with the people who you're doing MC with.

Again, the general case (IMHO) is that people mostly do it for the loot, or because it's a stepping stone for more content. The upshot is that most raids are organized around loot and content, and wind up run in a very regimented way: DKP, set class roles, guild-only raids (which allows a raid to 'control' a given member more tightly than a mixed-guild raid, as leaving the raid or failure to perform can mean being booted from the guild as well as from their position in the raid, losing access to the raid bank and other services), required specifications, etc. I would really like thog to do some research here and outline a couple of different types. I also think that Leftovers would be a fascinating study here because they are so very different (and successful) than any other raiding structure I'm familiar with. Contrast them with the huge Death and Taxes thread from the Guild Forum, where you have a small (~50-55 raider), end-game-focused guild which is a combination of very regimented, but also very tight knit.

Unlike Leftovers (which has a structure where anyone can Raid so long as they show up, do their job, don't cause drama, etc., and which seems to be loot and content oriented), and unlike a 'traditional' guild structure, RL is very different.

The raid is cross-guild, which reduces the 'sticks' the raid leaders have to keep raiders focused on the job at hand. The raid is open to new members, not requiring particular specs, gear minimums, auditions, interface mods, vent capability, or much beyond a good attitude. Entree into the raid is informal, and the raid has fairly high week-to-week turnover, but it is effectively by invitation, particularly after the first time. In order to fit into the raid, you need to be both minimally competent at your role, but also be able to fit into the RL raid environment socially. The loot system, the single biggest general point of contention in most raids, is very informal. Thog brings this up but I don't think he spends enough time discussing why this is important.

Let's consider that the RL raid can do six bosses in a 4 hour MC run. This is a minimum of 8 BoP epics (probably closer to 10), plus associated BoEs, greens, mats, etc. Let's call it a total of 12 epics, plus 500g worth of materials (cores, essences, etc.) and another 400g in flat cash. The greens, mats, etc. are effectively the property of the raid (and go for repairs, potions, enchants, or improved raiding gear). The 400g means each raider gets about 10 gold per run (seems high but I'm basing it on getting about 1.4g per boss plus trash cash), which doesn't quite cover the cost of raiding.

This means that each epic takes 3.33 people 4 hours of work. At an assigned cost of $10 per person per hour, an epic is worth $133 in labor alone. This doesn't include raid leader time, guild officer time, farming time outside the raid for materials, etc. This is with a mature raid that normally one shots bosses and is looking at being able to condense all of MC into a 5-7 hour run. The labor cost per epic in a new raid is much, much higher. Thus, loot drama, and the reason for DKP and any number of other loot distribution systems that concentrate very hard on being 'fair', or oriented toward 'raid efficiency'; priests don't get +DAM caster gear, druids don't get melee gear, other gear restricted to the main tanks until they're equipped, and so on. (Consider that the next time we melt something for a nexus crystal, too.)

Despite all of these things, the RL raid is successful (as in having longevity and a certain amount of success) where a lot of loosely built raids have fallen apart, and they do tend to fall apart. We hand these epics, which have a significant real world dollar figure attached, around with pretty minimal drama despite a fairly informal loot system. Why? That's the question I think thog is addressing, and I'd like to see it addressed in more detail. His example, of a raid gone wrong, is relevant because of how the RL raid handled a challenge faced by any raid. Nights like that can break a raid if people get disgusted and walk away. In a 'loot and content' raid, it pretty much falls to the raid officers to enforce discipline and keep people focused. In the case of the RL raid, you wound up with what bordered on a bottom-up response to a bad situation (coupled with a purposely built-in leadership redundancy, but that was more in addressing the mechanics of the boss fights, and not in enforcing raid discipline).

There is a side issue regarding just how complex these raids are that he's discussing, and the fact that a good raid can get to be pretty much self-organizing. I think there's a lot of interesting study to be done here as well.

There is another side issue regarding guilds and their purpose within WoW. It's pretty clear that the history of guilds in MMORPGs is built around high end raiding. In WoW, particularly on RP servers, they've become something different, and RL is yet again a good example of this, despite being (partly) a raiding guild. The fate of Afterlight would be a good study here.

Okay, enough blathering. 

Way better feedback than I had in a PM Zarrah, nicely done. Thog, I think a lot of your audience is giong to be MMO-familiar, at least.. the appendix/glossary idea is great.

Your explanations are good, but they way they are interspersed, made it hard for me to stay on track and read through the whole thing, breaks up the flow of the prose a lot. And I’m interested as one of the subjects and someone who cared about your take on events described!

Compare and contrast what you see different with the RL raid as suggested by Zarrah would be interesting if delved into more as well.

So really, just posting to say “I second Zarrah.” Might be a different approach in a different version of the paper – e.g., for scholarly submission vs. more general web audience. Though if submission is to a ludological journal (are there any yet? I hope?) then for specialized audience probably also can drop a lot of the background explanation.

Very cool to start seeing you write stuff up!

A good chunk of the paper is spent laying out the principles of a WoW raid. Presumably you're going to get multiple papers out of this. You might want to create a standard appendix you can just attach rather than laying out how a raid works for every paper. This would also allow you to explain your naming terminology and other conventions, and provide a glossary.

This would also let you expound more on the interaction of our raid (and perhaps generalize about raiding in general), which is the interesting part. It would also let you discuss the motivation of our raid, as compared to other raids (some of which are loot orinted, held together with very strict rules, and highly regimented in order to keep people focused and possibly to minimize loot drama, and others of which are focused on the competitive nature of server- and world-firsts). Boss strategies can enter into this. For example, I know of at least one Silver Hand MC raid which puts everyone on the rune for Geddon. This means if a single person fails to run out when they are the bomb, they can wipe the entire raid, leaving almost no room for error. I personally believe they do this as a wakefulness check to make sure people are paying attention.

Firefox gives a few errors in the formatting of the end notes, and I couldn't find end note #2.

You may wish to discuss the level of interaction some people take. Some listen to vent but only communicate by speech. Some are primarily speech. Some start on typing, and listen, but eventually bother to become more involved by getting buying or making their microphones work, more fully integrating them into the raid, etc.