How can one assess a players performance in the most objective way?

[Deleted]

Hello friends!

First, lets start with some backstory.
I'm a officer, but not raidleader, of a mostly casual guild. I have a more hardcore background and want to make progress.
I also dont want to kill the casual and inclusive spirit of the guild. We currently run two 10mans with one of the having some alts from the other.

With the flex changes comming in WoD the argument "We can only bring 10 people" dissapears. My idea for setup in WoD is to start the week with a raid where you bring everyone who wants to and then later in the week start focus on progress.

This means we, the officers, need a motivation for for not bringing people. A motivation better than "You cant come because i say so". Im far from a perfect player and, probably, play another class and spec.

What kind of 'measurement' can one use to assess the abilities of another player?
What kind of motivation can you have to not bring someone?
Are there any rules one can use to show how commited people are?

The idea of including everyone in the first raid gives people the chance to prove themselves for the later, more progression oriented, raids.

I know im asking for a objective answer on a subjective matter

[moveth]

World of Logs / Warcraft logs are literally as objective as you can get. You can look at uptimes, buffs, debuffs, cooldown usage, rotations, where their damage is coming from, what they are taking damage from, if they are target swapping. Everything. Start using logs and learn how to pick them apart. It takes some time to learn how to use them efficiently, but they are 100% objective at showing the skill of a player.

[Deleted]

That's a very good idea.. Maybe i should write a guide about it if there's isn't any

[ryklin]

how many times they caused a wipe or died or got someone else killed as well as their ability to do their job and make use of class abilities and handle stuff well

of course dps and hps is nice too, but I'd still rather have some guy pulling 200k that does shit correctly than a guy of the same class that does 300k, but is dead or gets other people killed too

other notable things are eating b-rezzes, which sucks, especially in 10man

you could log, then look at each attempt and tally who the first 2 deaths are, of course this isn't always accurate, because it could be a healer issue or an interrupt/cc issue, rather than a standing in shit issue

this is another post on the subject that's fairly well thought out

http://iam.yellingontheinternet.com/...acticed-skill/

[Deja Thoris]

World of Logs / Warcraft logs are literally as objective as you can get. You can look at uptimes, buffs, debuffs, cooldown usage, rotations, where their damage is coming from, what they are taking damage from, if they are target swapping. Everything. Start using logs and learn how to pick them apart. It takes some time to learn how to use them efficiently, but they are 100% objective at showing the skill of a player.

This basically. warcraftlogs is newer, supported and better by almost any objective measure. The information is easier to analyse because most of it is graphical. A few examples
1) Someone died. You can view the events leading up to their death. It also tells you when they last used defensives.
2) You can view damage taken by ability so its easy to see who stood in " big obvious puddle of shit" for 20 seconds.
3) You can view buff uptimes so you know if people are sitting on 50% uptimes on critical buffs or never using their dps cooldowns.
4) Theres even a graph of damage by target so you can see if people are hitting the right things are the right time (or shamelessly padding so they don't look shit)

A final caution, make sure your goals align with the team. Theres nothing worse than some ex-hardcore dude going Nazi on the guy that thinks hes there for shiggles :P

[Deleted]

A final caution, make sure your goals align with the team. Theres nothing worse than some ex-hardcore dude going Nazi on the guy that thinks hes there for shiggles :P

Ah, yes! I'm very aware of that, hence the idea of starting without any kind of selection and have maybe one day that focus on progress.
I very much like the atmosphere and friendliness and dont want to mess with that.

[trystero]

Make sure you know how to evaluate data on the logs. I can't even number the amount of fallacies and all-around wrongheaded conclusions I've seen on this forum and elsewhere from players who don't know how to analyze data. Let me throw out some examples to illustrate what I mean.

You hear on the forums about having good uptimes on key buffs/debuffs. So let's take Eternal Flame for a prot paladin. Someone might look at an EF uptime on a log and comment that it's only 64%. Wow, what an atrocious EF uptime. After all you heard it should be almost 100%. But a proper analysis looks at WHEN Eternal Flame is being applied and how strong it is. When not actively tanking, there's no reason to maintain EF outside of, say, the marginal DPS boost from the Glyph of Word of Glory. So criticizing someone for having a marginal EF uptime would be misguided. In my case, though, where I use the 4P/WoG glyph on our farm fights, my EF uptime should be almost 100% because there's absolutely no reason for me to NOT use it free at 3+ BoG stacks.

Other players want to determine how frequently someone uses an ability, with good reason. Some analysts will look at the time of an encounter, determine how often an ability could've been used, and then make a judgment. Take another Prot paladin ability, Divine Protection. "The fight was 8 minutes long, which means you could've used Divine Protection 16 times; you used it only 6 times, clearly suboptimal play." Again, not at all. There's no advantage to using Divine Protection when not tanking the boss (again, outside of something unusual like heavy raidwide damage), nor is there a particular advantage to using it "just because." Take Siegecrafter, where a player may save DP (glyphed) for the boss's temporary enrage, or (unglyphed) in preparation of an electrostatic charge. That's what an expression editor (called pins in Warcraftlogs) is for: looking at what happened in the combat log and seeing WHEN abilities were used. Not to mention, sometimes you'll see excellent usage times and know something's wrong. A few weeks ago some logs were posted and a player used Divine Protection basically on cooldown. I looked at his logs in detail and, sure enough, he had macro'd it to some ability of his, so it was activating when he wasn't actively tanking. Terrible.

Even something simple, like analyzing a wipe where you might want to know "who stood in the bad?", is not that simple, either. After a wipe's called then players will try to be accommodating and may stand in the very fire you're about to investigate. So you'd have to look at who stood in the fire prior to the wipe's announcement and/or when the players realized it would be a wipe. An easy shortcut to doing this is seeing who the first 1-3 players to die were. In all honesty, that's usually the problem. You can tell then if they used defensives/healthstones or whatever.

A common data set players like to look at is "damage taken" for a tank. They'll try and make some conclusion about the skill of a tank by the amount of damage he took over an encounter. There are several problems with this reasoning, though I'll list two: 1) class mechanics; all tanks handle damage intake differently, and some will take more or less damage naturally due to their design, and 2) tanking order; whoever tanks the boss first will very obviously take more damage than the co-tank unless the co-tank is tanking during a heavy-damage phase.

Once you know what to do in a log, the possibilities are endless. Don't make the beginner mistake, though, by calling people out for stuff they're not actually at fault for.

[Illana]

There's a few simple steps to take.

1. Are you killing the boss? If yes you don't have a problem.
2. Are you dying to enrage timer?

if yes then that means something is causing you to not do enough dps. This can be because: someone is not pulling their weight, encounter is not being managed properly or people are dying.

If someone is far below the others in terms of dps and he is not assigned a special task that is a detriment to his dps, tell him to improve or bench him

if the encounter is not being managed correctly then that's down to the raid leader

if people are dying its a similar situation to low dps. Find the culprits tell them to improve or else.

You could even do this: boot the guy for one attempt, see if it goes better or not. Nothing wrong with practical attempts

[Krazzorx]

Add onto that: tell people when wiping to die without standing in bad, or at least bad no one ever dies to. Makes logs way easier if you don't have people purposely blowing up mines on Siegecrafter for example. Much better to just jump off the edge.

[Alroxas]

Ra'sha's Sacrificial Dagger -> Best way to die for wiping.

[Adhemar]

Ra'sha's Sacrificial Dagger -> Best way to die for wiping.

Assuming you never wipe more than once per 30 minutes, sure.

To the original question ... log analysis should not ever be done objectively. You have to understand everyone's job for the encounter and factor that in subjectively. You can't just say, "Joe pulled 250k while taking 10% less damage than Bill who only did 240k, so Joe is better than Bill." There are always subjective factors involved, like the fact that Bill was the person assigned to stand in the purple puddles and soak the damage, causing him to move frequently during the encounter and take a lot of extra damage. How well did Bill do his job? Did Joe have to cover for Bill when Bill screwed up? Does Joe have better gear than Bill? Is Joe's class capable of more output than Bill's?

To properly evaluate how someone performs in a specific circumstance, you have to fully understand that circumstance and there are some things you just can't put a number on. The guy who always gets his interrupt where it's needed, who takes appropriate action to correct other mistakes and who handles the "personal responsibility" jobs is more important than the guy who does 10% more DPS and is always the first to die. For anyone who doesn't have a very broad mastery of the game, that means the only option is to get help and have a conversation with your raiders about performance issues. And feelers will get stepped on during this process, because there's always people who think they're better than Joe even though they don't have a clue what Joe does for the raid.

[Deleted]

Even in HC guilds its always obvious who the weakest links are, I doubt you will have any problem identifying them.....the only reason you would use logs would be to create the illusion of some objective process being followed.

[Odina]

The best way is logs and there is no real way around that. for the above posters commenting on how people take things out of context when looking at logs... well this is true and is why you need to compare more than just one variable however you can compare others of the same class / spec doing the same job.

Here is a good example Player A that is considered good and does what he wants has a dmg breakdown of ABC, yet the guy in your raid doing about 25% less dmg has cab as his breakdown. There is a pretty good chance that Player B could benefit from doing what player A did. Logs at lower level raiding is more for finding errors mostly in rotations, or low CD usage / uptime. I get the EF argument above however needless to say if you should have 100% uptime on something and others better than you are keeping 100% uptime on a buff and your sitting at 50% while doing the same job then you are probably in the wrong. As for the "yea but they may do more things for the group than just dps" as a raid leader you know who those people are and you know what you expect out of them dps wise even taking there "other job" into consideration. chances are if you trust some one with a mechanic that needs to be done properly you are not having issues with them doing there basic role anyways!

Another good way is to use the MMO champ class forums and ask those that tend to post amazing information and are listened to and respected if they could provide feedback. These players tend to want to see logs to see what is happening so even I you are going for outside help you will need to log your fights.

[kamuimac]

Ah, yes! I'm very aware of that, hence the idea of starting without any kind of selection and have maybe one day that focus on progress.
I very much like the atmosphere and friendliness and dont want to mess with that.

u still need some basic selection else ull start loosing ur better performing raiders to better progressed guilds when they will realise that u carry to many slackers just for the nice atmosphere. friendliness is supper important but people are people once they will get irritated about weak performance and they will feel its slowing the progression they wanted to have they will leave without regrets.

[Mini]

Logs can help, but really it's pretty obvious who can't follow mechanics and is the one causing wipes. Logs help you fix dps problems or identify padding, but really you just need to bring people who do decent damage and can reliably do their jobs. Especially in Normal/Flex. Minimum drama is also nice if your group has any personality conflicts.

[Deleted]

I think that gameplay can be explained and teached.. but manners, dedication and patience are more rare and should be the focus when building a good team.

[striderZA]

That's a very good idea.. Maybe i should write a guide about it if there's isn't any

http://www.icy-veins.com/forums/topi...hensive-guide/

[ambermist]

This isn't a direct answer to your question but it's something that, in my experience, is an important part of this process: set your expectations early, clearly, and publicly (for the guild).

In other words, explain your intentions in detail. Decide which things will cause someone to not get invited. And you know what, feel free to tag on "at the officers' discretion."

And do this on your guild forums/website, so that everyone knows what the expectations are. "This night is our fun raid night--it's a free for all for everyone to come. For those looking for a little more difficulty, challenge, and progress, we'll be raiding on this night. Raiders who come to the progression raid are expected to [yada yada yada].

One of the biggest drama-inducers in a guild with varying levels of raids and raiders is people not understanding the purposes of the raids or what they're actually expected to do. Well, that, and loot, but that's a whole different discussion!

[Tramzh]

There's a few simple steps to take.

1. Are you killing the boss? If yes you don't have a problem.
2. Are you dying to enrage timer?

Yeah because as long as you killed the boss everyone played perfect. *cough*

[Deja Thoris]

Yeah because as long as you killed the boss everyone played perfect. *cough*

Don't reply to stupidity, you might just encourage it.