Vent

Other
Jan 31, 2011
3 Comments

I logged onto an old server that I used to haunt this morning and caught up with a couple of old friends. One old friend, we’ll call him Steve, was complaining about the vent situation in his current guild. His raiding guild has a policy of allowing all players to openly chat on vent while raiding. Steve hates it.

Steve’s argument basically looked like this. Vent is great for fooling around and chatting while in five mans or battle grounds. Vent is not great for fooling around and chatting when you need a clear voice of command telling players what to do during complex raid encounters. Steve’s raid often finds themselves confused rather than informed by the conversation that occurs during raids. Timers are being announced by several different people, players that aren’t officers are calling other players out for poor play and raid nights usually end with a confused thud.

Steve’s preference (which was also the policy of a previous raiding guild that we were both in) is to keep vent silent during raid. The only players that would be allowed to speak are officers. This policy has some strengths: players clearly know from one authoritative voice what is going on in the fight and players have the ability to focus on the fight. The disadvantage to this system is that you lose some of the horsing around and fun that can come from a lively vent conversation.

I’ve seen all kinds of vent policies during my time in WOW and my response to Steve was that the policy you have on vent has to be tailored to the specific dynamics of the guild that you’re in. What do you all think? Should vent be more of a laid back affair to release pressure from intense raid situations or should it be a soapbox for your officers to help call the fight?

http://vimeo.com/fondrewow FondreBound

It is up to the officers on what vent policy is during raid times. It could be an open soapbox but the collateral damage is less time killing bosses.

Most guildies have placed enough faith in the officers of the guild to not want this and for them to call the shots for the raid. This is my personal preference too, when raiding 25 mans everyone has their opinion. If all were allowed to air their opinions for 30secs between wipes,we would be looking at almost 15 minutes between attempts. Which is not acceptable. The good thing is that most raiders realize this and want to maximize up time on attempts.

As the recruiting officer for Bound, we want people to feel free to express their advice but it is important that we allocate other ways to voice them. Mainly through role channels, guild forums and whispers to officers.

Pretty interesting article because I was interviewing new recruits last night and one of their first comments after watching our live raid (http://bound-staghelm.com/live-raids/) was ‘I was impressed with how vent was so quiet while you guys raid.’.

This is something that our guild has worked for without stamping out opinions and thoughts.
Plectical

I also feel like Bound has a nice balance going. There is time for open discussion and critique of current strategy that leads to better attempts on the boss. I remember a couple of quick conversations that we had when we were working on Atramedes that lead to an eventual kill.

In a former guild that I was in with Steve, we often found that there was a lot of pent up communication that simply didn’t happen as a result of our silent vent policy. This lead to the same mistakes being repeated over and over again and a disgruntled guild that felt that their opinion wasn’t valued.
http://vimeo.com/fondrewow FondreBound

Yea and that is the thin line that you never want to cross. People need to know their opinion is wanted and needed at crucial times.

Chit chat during raid is a whole different beast when working on a boss. Once that door is open, it’s hard to close. The best way to get past this is raid chat, class channel chat and whispers. This chat could be things to help beat a boss or something to lighten up the atmosphere during sessions of wipes with a ridiculous lol cat post.