Originally Posted by
Marrilaife
I bet you're one of those that always attends farm runs but when the wipefest progress night is coming suddenly it's grandma's cousin's birthday, can't come. Or one of those that is always lucky with tfs and then gets bored / burnt out / suddenly interested in rerolling class once he has everything and it would be his turn to trade loot to others. Loyalty has value to guild stability, selfishness has none yet it's basically what personal loot rewards.
For every person that was in the past under ML getting extra loot due to asslicking the GM (happens) I've seen easily 20-30 people who get what they wanted (curve, cutting edge, trinket, mount, weapon) and insta stop playing, jump to a better guild, take a break, reroll or w/e else that ends up harming the guild's progress and stability.
But yeah, Blizzard wants to reward these people more and more and generally strip guilds of anything that differentiated them from pugs. Btw there's a reason pugs don't kill mythic Azshara or w/e other cutting edge boss. You know why? Because pug mentality is always grab what you can easily get, then bail. Nobody sticks through 300 wipes in a pug. So people who stick through should be rewarded otherwise progress becomes more and more impossible as the atmosphere closes to the pug one.
Nothing kills progression and therefore guilds more than attendance boss, and ML together with DKP and other systems were meant to ensure people kept their attendance up and weren't guild hopping / taking breaks as they pleased, killing the guild in the process.
And the season a lot of GMs were selfish people and loot whored was because there's absolutely no in-game reward for being a good GM while it's a massive headache to deal with roster issues especially in the age of "cyclical players" and mercenary / pug attitudes. Not only that, but in mid to low tier mythic guilds you have players who have to be spoonfed strats and handheld by a living boss mod in form of a "raid leader" otherwise bosses won't die. No wonder the amount of good Samaritans as GMs was dwarfed by the amount of GMs that accepted that hassle in exchange for "extra benefits".
People want all the loot, but they aren't willing to help with recruitment, raid leading, prepping strats or anything. Often they cba bringing their own consumables and expect the guild to provide that too. In the end they often even cba notifying they won't be present in the raid but if guild takes precautions and recruits few extras and they get benched, they cry rivers about unfair treatment because they got benched when someone has to.
Anyway for me it's kinda talking in hindsight because I no longer raid, my guild stopped, GM cba'd dealing with people anymore and the core of the guild quit or went to play classic because the general consensus was that retail raiding is too demanding for how little rewarding it is.
I spent 13 years in various raiding guilds less or more progressed, never been any officer / gm / loot handler so I always looked at it from a side perspective, and in the end I've dealt with shitty GMs but the worst people were always recruits not GMs. And as years progressed, all I saw is growing entitlement and desire of instant gratification in the playerbase. Since start of Legion I've been in 5 different guilds and they all crumbled, mostly due to recruitment / roster issues, not even "drama" or anything. Lack of reward for loyalty and putting effort into making the guild work is the prime reason guilds don't last and GMs just burn out and one day just call it.
I fully expect than in a couple of expansions mythic raiding will be abandoned and either not exist or be some "e-sport" for 20 guilds worldwide, and everything else will devolve into pugging because that's what Blizzard seems to promote.
And yes, I'm 100% sure they made push for PL just to make all loot dispute tickets invalid by definition so they can have less load on GMs and no, not to provide better service to everyone else, but to cut costs and do mass layoffs like they did in early 2019. The name of the game isn't how do we create the best product but how do we invest less so the profit margins increase.
There's been tons of things GMs helped with in the past and got pushed into automated self-service: character unstuck, item restoration, character undelete, even report spam and chat mute. It's always said it's for user convenience but it's mostly for their internal bean counting purposes. Things like report / silence system have been proven to be abusable and just handled by a robot instead of a thinking human. So PL exists not to help us, but to help them.