How to improve making of PUG raid groups

[Deleted]

I raid on my shaman with the guild but as with many raiders I have a second very well geared character which I PUG with.

Last week I made a PUG with calendar invites. Took about 2 hours of my time to get the group together and it turned out to be a great group and we did 3 heroics and 5 normals which for a PUG where you know no one is quite a success.

What I was thinking though is that it took me 2 hours of my time setting up just to do a 3 and a bit hour raid. I would probably not bother doing it again and as many feel that way there are rarely decent PUGs going.

I was thinking how about instead of that useless raidfinder (not the LFR but the one no one uses) they could have a system where you put in a Calendar event people could click on and the requirements would be in the decription of the event and people could sign up to these events.

They would have to implement a few things for this to work really well.

1) Have a Green / Orange / Red light for all people signing which would check that they have the achievements required on ANY character. The person making the raid could specify certain achievments required that this would check against and the raid leader would have to have the achieves himself on one of his characters to demand them.

2) Have a seperate button you could press on in the Calendar that would bring up characters character sheet so you can check gear etc without needing to inspect them on armory.

3) Have a 'Reliability rating'. Basically anyone signing up and then not turning up (by being online within 10 mins of raid start if confirmed would get a -1 to their reliability rating and a +1 if they do turn up). If they unsign before raid start of course they wouldn't incur this. You could have it hidden till it gets to -3 in case someone genuinely couldn't unsign a couple of times in a row. I have yet to think how you could stop abuse by making fake raids but I will have a think about that. This would also apply to raid leader if he doesn't show.
This bit is necessary to stop habitual signers who then don't show up.

4) Have raid leader ratings based on if 50%+ of raid approved of raid leader after said raid. Again this is optional and would need some work to avoid abuse.

5) Players who sign set their roles (main and offspec)

6) Players can see and unsign from all calendar invites through wow armory so they can do it from work etc.

So how would this work in practice?

Well someone who raid leads who has done heroic Zon ozz, Morchok and Ultrax decides to make a raid to do Zon'ozz and Morchok heroic and rest normal. He makes the requirements for the raid as achieve Morchok Heroic and Madness of Deathwing and puts it in the raid finder tool as a calendar event people can sign up to for 8 pm on Fri.

Up until that time anyone can go in and look for events to sign to. There would be a listing of all raid leaders events on there.

So a Warlock who has Heroic Morchok and Madness achieves signs up and puts in comment that he has done tries on Zon Ozz too. Because the Raid leader put just Morchok and madness as requirements he has a green light against him.

Then mage signs but he hasn't done any heroics. He writes know tacts in comments and I'm 396 ilvl. He has madness achieve so he has some of requirements and he gets an orange light.

Anyway Thursday night the raid leader sees 15 people have signed up and he can make a group out of it so he scrolls down using the char sheet showing tool to check peoples gear and confirms his team.

At 8pm on Friday he presses invite all and people get invited. [EDIT] In fact it should just automatically invite people from 10 mins before time to 10 mins after time once per minute. That way if raid leader doesn't show someone else can find a last person to replace him.

Would be a much more civilised raiding experience in my opinion. Many additional features could be added as time goes on.

[Ethes]

Seems like an interesting idea! I kinda think it would work as well =).

The only thing I don't completely agree with is the achievement at any character business. As different fights require different skills and knowledge for different roles. If you haven't healed Chimaeron, Baleroc or spine before you're going to be in for quite a shock. Therefore I would just leave it with character. Maybe an option to link to your main character in case you want to come on an alt.

[Stiffkittens]

Very interesting idea indeed, i would love to have a system in place like this for weekend alt runs.

[Deleted]

this is basically the idea behind openraid.eu/us, only difference its not ingame.

[Raxxed]

Sir/Madam that is an awesome idea. You should really post this on the official forums!

[Deleted]

Seems like an interesting idea! I kinda think it would work as well =).

The only thing I don't completely agree with is the achievement at any character business. As different fights require different skills and knowledge for different roles. If you haven't healed Chimaeron, Baleroc or spine before you're going to be in for quite a shock. Therefore I would just leave it with character. Maybe an option to link to your main character in case you want to come on an alt.

Well you could have 2 lights. One for character and one for account.

I do think it's important to show account experience. I agree that tanking is completely different to healing a fight but if you have 6/8 Heroic and your alt wants to join a 8/8 normal run and he's geared enough then clearly you have more than enough exp to do it and it's up to the raid leader to decide whether he wants you or not.

Has anyone got any ideas to fine tune the reliability rating? Otherwise people could make invites, join and get the rating repeatedly. Maybe add it to raid lock outs but then if you did a raid on 3 different days you would only get it for one. Maybe make it that you can only gain one rating per day and must down a boss but even then it's possible to abuse. There must be a good way of making a system fairly abuse proof.

Same goes for leader rating.

I guess there doesn't have to be a system for this but ideally there should be some way penalise people for joining and then not turning up repeatedly.

[wanderkiel]

Yeah this is already in place at http://openraid.us , check them out!

You have communities growing within Openraid like PUGJobs at http://pugjobs.com and multiple others.

[Deleted]

Yeah this is already in place at http://openraid.us , check them out!

You have communities growing within Openraid like PUGJobs at http://pugjobs.com and multiple others.

Yes great site no doubt but not the same. It's not in game and you can't do current content and need to give real id for three. It is a great site especially if they get round to allowing current content but doesn't mean that they shouldn't put something in game to help organise proper raids which aren't in guilds.

[Halicia]

Yes great site no doubt but not the same. It's not in game and you can't do current content and need to give real id for three. It is a great site especially if they get round to allowing current content but doesn't mean that they shouldn't put something in game to help organise proper raids which aren't in guilds.

you cant do current content crossrealms, period. talk to blizzard about that.

if you want to do current content, you have take the cross-server option off.

[Deleted]

you cant do current content crossrealms, period. talk to blizzard about that.

if you want to do current content, you have take the cross-server option off.

When I said 'they' I meant blizzard. Yes I know Blizzard has to enable this.

[Deleted]

You my dear wow friend should apply for Blizzard Organisation, best idea I have read here.. ever I think
Thumbs up for you gashpanda

[Lecan]

It's an excellent idea. Many of our current in-house UI features started as addons that Blizzard then added. Why not something with great functionality like this?

[Deleted]

Hopefully if it worked then it would mean more people would raid too. LFR was hugely popular but suffers from the fact that it's very zergy with not much team play. Not that LFR is bad but it's not the last solution to PUG raiding.

Blizzard has a problem. A lot of the people who started in vanilla and TBC as students or teenagers are now working and having families and raid schedules are hard to keep. Doing the hard content in PUGs is very hard to organise currently so you have to do it with your guild or other set groups which although great and although it will always be the best way of raiding it doesn't suit people's ad-hoc schedules where you can't be sure that you're on the same times every single week.

I think many people are frustrated that they know they have a night free to play wow in a couple of days but then they get on there's nothing to do. Nothing challenging to sink their teeth into because their guild only raids set days. I think it would be great to be able to sign up to a challenging raid (and maybe do same for RBG groups) and then know that they can come on at a set time and be sure to do some proper raiding. Not as currently happens where you come on spend half an hour trying to get in a raid, then another half hour finding a tank, then 2 wipes and 3 people leave and group disbands.