On Networking

In not-so-funny news today, apparently Blizzard accidentally deleted my realm from the battlegroup, so we could not

*raid
*do dungeons
*do arenas
*do BGs

This led to a lot of bored people city raiding and counter-raiding...I doubt many faction bosses were actually killed, for which reason I declined to participate in the offensives (though I enjoyed stomping horde raids in defense). But that is not the subject for today's post.

Today I would like to mention that from 0 guilds on server we've apparently mushroomed into 3 pvp guilds gunning for the same people. I am unhappy, to say the least. One of them is run by our server celebrity pvp-er, who has much negative PR associated with him to the point where asking to join forces with him is repellent to me; the other started his guild today and apparently named it "Obamanation Healthcare", which also puts up red flags to me. I mean, putting politics into your guild name? Why would you voluntarily antagonize half your recruiting pool?

I have readjusted my recruiting tactics in lieu of abysmal failure on Saturday, the busiest /trade day of the week (2 nibbles, no joins). It seems to me from the nibbles that the scare-off was that the guild was just starting. This leads me to think that maybe trade recruiting is an ineffective use of my time until the guild is actually established. Instead I am going to lie low for a week or two and play BGs extensively (NO DON'T MAKE ME PLEASE LOLTH HAVE MERCY) and try to network other people on Draenor. Then I will seduce them into my guild once I have a network of people built up.

The weird thing is this kind of parrots what I'm doing in real life to get a job...not spamming the want ads, and building a network in the industry instead. I think I'm going to write an article about it, see what my employment coach thinks about THAT :-).

Tomorrow, guild's first event : premades at 7:30, assuming that Draenor has returned to the Cyclone fold by then and such things are possible *sigh*. That should hopefully be a good time to network some people in with trade advertisements. I'm still going to do that, just shifting tone from "LF PvP fans to join guild" to "LF PvP fans to run some [x/y/z bg]" which is a lot less threatening to people who may be in a nice guild already that they're leery of leaving. *crosses fingers*

Tis Official!

No, not Glory of the Hero...though Moorabi finally gave up his mammoth dreams and got me that this morning as well.

Yesterday Ihra /gquit in the middle of the afternoon, and in the evening became GM of Esoterica. Time to fulfill all my happy fantasies about how great this will be, and ignore the tiny warning bells about how much work and suffering will be involved!

What's in an honorable kill?

Pending me not being lazy and turning on the floating combat text that tells you what an honorable kill is worth, I am resorting to old-fashioned math. The gods at Blizzard have told us that in 3.3.3 our honor from killing someone (and, associated thereto, the battleground objectives which have a straight conversion) is being doubled. From what to what, though? Traditional wisdom says, 20.9 honor per kill. I have my doubts about that though, having run some figures, and that just leaves me more confused. Though I will say that 20.9 x 3 = 62.7 = 63, which is the honor I see from burning towers in AV so maybe that's not a TOTAL bunch of hogwash.

BUT. Questions remain. In WSG, you gain honor three ways : killing people, capping flags, and winning. Now, I have more than three winning games of WSG recorded, and because I'm anal like that I recorded the caps in those games, so ostensibly you should be able to set up a system of equations that reduces you out to solving what each of those things is worth. Three lines, in 3-dimensional space, which should converge at a perfect (x,y,z) point. But they don't. And if you add more lines (=games), it gets worse.

So, ok, let's take something simpler. Arathi Basin gives you honor in only two ways, at least according to the general info site : killing people, and the amount of points you have at the end converts directly into your bonus honor. Linearly, I would assume, but that may be in error. So you can set up a two-dimensional system of equations, theoretically.

(HKs)*(value of HK=x) + (End Resource Count)*(Value of One Resource = Y) = Total honor gained in match

So I did that for all 18 non-holiday AB games that I have written down. A picture is worth a thousand words; here's the result :



Notice how those lines DO NOT CONVERGE ON A SINGLE GLORIOUS POINT. Moreover, even if you wanted to draw a really big Dot Of Best Fit...the x-value -- an honorable kill, remember -- there hovers somewhere (roughly) between 9 and 12...NOT 20.9, the standard accepted answer. Y is in the 0.3-0.5 region but that's not really relevant to my point here.

I'm not being given correct information here and as an engineer I am extremely distressed by this. Seriously, I was in bed trying to go to sleep with my wife and this idea SO UNNERVED me that I had to come down to my computer, play with graphs and desperately attempt to fit some sense into it, and then write a blog post about how annoyed I was when the data would not be forced. Note to the public at large : if you ever want to explode an engineer's brain, feed him bad data and watch the fireworks.

*sigh*

*tries to go back to bed*

Ihrayeep, Guildmaster

"Tired of feeling like a misfit in your social raiding guild, just because you enjoy killing horde? If you're a dedicated player with a passion for PvP, Esoterica wants to talk to you!"

Ihra's taking the plunge and starting his own guild. Why? Ehh...a variety of reasons, but mostly because I feel like the ground seems ripe (on my limited research) to maybe finally get a working PvP guild going on Draenor. For those not in the know, Draenor is a "Normal" realm, ie one where "pvp" said in trade chat has the impact of saying a word with one more letter than it actually has, so it could be challenging. On the other hand, I know there are people who PvP, and LIKE to PvP, despite that. And you know what? There is no pvp guild worth speaking of on the server. Trust me. I've looked, hard. I'm getting much encouragement from spousal figure and my 3s team, so that moral support helps give me the large brass objects necessary to engage in a pursuit of this kind. I've told one of my best buddas in the guild that I'm leaving (I guess now I'm committed to doing that!), but not formally till our GM comes back from hiatus sometime at the end of the week. I think I'll leave most of my alts in my original guild -- what they do doesn't conflict with what my new pretty guild will be doing, and that will let me keep in touch with my old guildies if the idea of a joint chat channel doesn't fly with our GuildMomma as I have some hints it may not.

So I've stealth-created the guild on an alt and started working through guild ranks and organisational things...Now it is a shadow-organisation just waiting for Ihra to formally abandon ship and take over as The Chief. Yes, I renamed the Guildmaster rank, "The Chief". Because I'm the boss, and I get to do that. Says the Simpsons,

"Sir, I'm afraid you've gone mad with power."
"Of course I have! Have you ever tried going mad without power? It's boring, nobody listens."

I'm not going to blog too much about guild stuff I don't think, except in a theoretical light, discussing what I think good organizing choices are -- because let me tell you, looking for resources for people who want to start pvp guilds, I found a lot of people asking that question but not a lot of good answers -- and so on, but in light of Tam's not-so-pleasant guild drama recently, I suspect that's the best route to take.

And in a side note jumping on the bandwagon, I created a character over on Argent Dawn-US to join up with the blogging guild over there. I didn't ACTUALLY get up the nerve to ask someone for a guild invite but I look forward to actually maybe meeting (in real time!) some of the people I read on a daily basis!