A battle hardened Knight once said, “…many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.” These are mine.

How many of an MMO’s player base actually participate in End Game Group Content?

Why don’t more players participate?

Keep reading to ponder with me.

A battle hardened Knight once said, “…many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.” These are mine.

The vocal minority is making sure the interweb hears how upset they are about SWTOR’s Cartel Market and so called broken promises about subscriptions from the Devs. It all surrounds this post from Jeff Hickman concerning the introduction of the F2P model.

Apparently he stated that subscribers would retain unlimited access to SWTOR content. Well comrades, unlimited depends on your point of view.

Along with that thought, I can’t help but think the vocal MMO minority doesn’t realize what type of genre we are playing these days. Read along for my point of view.

Tanks are expected to know all content and push the group forward without hesitation. Great Tanks have to start somewhere, this is one of those places. Here we’ll examine the ins and outs of being a Professional Tank.

Last week I tossed out an Endurance stat of ‘Over 40k’ in the Professional Tank column. This was in reference to augmenting for Fortitude only. I received some quick feedback on optimal Tank Gearing stats. Apparently the ‘correct’ way to gear does not include stacking HP.

I have four level 55 toons. Two are healers, the others are DPS.

With the exception of my “main”, I leveled those almost entirely through PVP. Hell, I haven’t even finished my Imperial Agent storyline and he’s healing HM Scum & Villainy.

The point is that I have pretty good experience with healing PVP. But something happened this weekend that really made me realize I forgot how rubbish it is to be a lowbie PVP healer early in that toon’s progression.

Players start or join a guild for many different reasons. Friends creating a guild together, an Elder Game player joins a progression guild or players band together for PvP. I’ve even seen one-player guilds just for the vault space. Whatever the reason, guilds can be the one thing that keeps a player coming back.

This morning I read a Guild Leadership focused blog with the title “Command Decisions”. Marjor Snarl’s posts are well thought out and parallel many of the same points I work on daily.

I disagree on his latest blog with his view of a Guild not being a ‘Business.’ In fact this is in direct opposition on how I run the SWTOR Zergadins. If I didn’t take a business man’s point of view to leading this group we wouldn’t be where we are today.

Tanks are expected to know all content and push the group forward without hesitation. Great Tanks have to start somewhere, this is one of those places. Here we’ll examine the ins and outs of being a Professional Tank.

With my work scheduled skewed toward late nights I’ve found myself tanking in the early mornings. These late night runs have reinforced what it means to be a Professional Tank. Level 55 Hard Mode flash points aren’t anything if not Tanking trainers. Every trash pull could use a cooldown and every boss can wipe you if not tanked correctly. While the gimmicks are basic, an unprepared tank will find themselves face down on the decking in an instant.

I hoard raid footage. Prior to cleaning out my hard drive I found clips going back to the first Eternity Vault HM clear and some stuff from when we were running flashpoints every day for Columi drops.

A look through my files revealed raid videos of every operation in SWTOR and multiple files of just about every boss.

There were tons of wipes, several boss kills, and a long list of really good people who I’ve since lost contact with.

Why, though, did I have so many videos? I tend to record most of my raids for both boss kill videos and for a critical look at how I did, regardless of the end result.

Players start or join a guild for many different reasons. Friends creating a guild together, an Elder Game player joins a progression guild or players band together for PvP. I’ve even seen one-player guilds just for the vault space. Whatever the reason, guilds can be the one thing that keeps a player coming back.

Lately the column I keep coming back to is Guild Guidance. This subject is on my mind more and more these days.

The guild and I have been run two days of 16 man OPS for this patch. We all take pride in our ability to execute the bigger and logistically more challenging OPS size. On that same note, it’s been a long time since I was just a Pug in another group. Both those facets of Operations were put to the test for me recently.

Keep reading for the reinforcing lessons learned.

Players start or join a guild for many different reasons. Friends creating a guild together, an Elder Game player joins a progression guild or players band together for PvP. I’ve even seen one-player guilds just for the vault space. Whatever the reason, guilds can be the one thing that keeps a player coming back.

As a member of an MMO guild, contributions to the community are a direct reflection on your value to the team. How, what and why you contribute to the group is seen by all members and distills into a single statement.

When you are not around do the members say:

“It would have been better if you were here.”

This is a undeniable indicator of your contributions.

To parse or not to parse. That is the question.

I was trolling on fleet the other night when the guild’s best healer starting chatting with me in gchat about my heal parses.  He wanted to me to start uploading my combat logs.

I kind of paused because I never really gave it much thought. Only once before had I even looked at TORParse and I used to run MOX when the raid leader would ask us to.

But finding out how many heals per second I put out during a raid is just something I’ve never really worried about. I’m confident in my heals and, to be honest, spend far more time worrying about the group’s performance and whether DPS in the group are quick enough on their feet.