390 possible points

Note: In this subsection I am going to use the term "relatability" in nearly every section. This simply means that based on the level we believe the player is we "relate" it to other possible or exsisting players. For example: If we feel Player A is around an 8/10 for their Self Knowledge we then think. "Are there two "steps" of people above Player A in terms of self-knowledge? If I asked this person a question relating to their class would I feel I am getting the absolute best answer possible or a step or two below?"

* Execution. Performance in raids as the played class. For example, a healer's ability to heal or a DPS's ability to DPS. When we rate this we look at it in two ways. Firstly we set a number to the player itself. Say an 8. Then we take the relatability and base it to other players we know who play that class. Achieving a 10 on a DPS or Healer essentially means you are a ranking player in World of Logs for your spec in most cases. For tanks it applies to their ability to tank as a whole.

* Consistency. Being reliable and consistent is key to being a great raider. Doing great DPS doesn't mean much if you aren't always pulling good numbers or tend to fall off the charts when the fight stops becoming a tank and spank. If we assign the player a intterrupt or specific role do we feel they would do it reliably? Achieving a 10 means the player goes above and beyond the call of duty by trying to keep the shit at bay in anyway they can.

* Awareness. Raids are made and broken by players ability to stay focused and aware to all that is happening. Wipes are generally not caused by lack of class ability but random strokes of ADD when a major mechanic is going off. If a player is known to fuck up on basic mechanics reguarly, this is where they will take hits. Achieving a 10 requires the player to very, very rarely screw up, if ever.

* Game knowledge. Being able to mash a rotation of 1234 is only a portion of being good at your class. At the end of the day in order to receive high marks the player needs to be able to understand why certain things work better than others, or why they are doing what they are doing. This rolls into how the player gears or reforges, their playstyle and overall knowledge of the class. Achieving a 10 means the player is more than likely the go-to guy for many players if they had any questions relating to that spec. While we expect everyone to know everything about their class, this rating is only given based on the players knowledge of the spec they raid in.

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350 points possible

* If you are online but aren't in the raid you'll still be counted as showing up.

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90 points possible

* Attentiveness (Derp). For most players this is an easy 3/3. While I tried to avoid sectios that would easily be maxed for players I think this one is critical. Pulled that boss early and wiped the raid? Do something supremely stupid that delayed the raid? Did anything really that delayed the raid at all? Not getting 3/3.

* Raiding Attitude. Being online isn't enough. We want the player to raid and hopefully enjoy themself. We want players to study up on fights not because they should, but because it's makes them better at this game. Most players are going to be a 2/3 and those who are 3/3 are pretty obvious as they are constantly doing things at a hardcore level. 2/3 is fine and is only 10 points below a 3/3.

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180 points possible

* Boss Preparation. Coming into a boss clueless is nearly as volatile as an unstable internet connection due to the massive learning curve some fights have. Studying up and learning everything possible about each fight is required for a maximum 3/3 rating here. If we don't get the vibe that a player isn't well versed with every fight then we will start docking points.

* Gear Preparation. At this level of raiding not being fully stacked with enchants and gems is stupid. Min-maxing a characters stats is key to being the best player possible. If any enchant or gem is missing or wrong 3/3 is instantly lost. If a few are missing it's 1/3 and anything above that is 0. It's an easy 60 points every raider should have by default for being called a "raider".

* Buffs and Comsumables. There are 3 kinds of consumables a top end raider uses. Flasks, Combat Potions and Combat Food. If the player uses all 3 when expected they will recieve full marks. Otherwise they lose a point per buff not used. Essentially, farm up some god damn food.

* Punctuality. Being online on time and not delaying the raid during ready checks is important. Those who do will get docked. A nice break is handed out every raid to allow everyone to refresh up and finish up the night of raiding. The worst thing to do here is go AFK unannounced. If nothing else let us know beforehand so we have an ETA.

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Since these numbers are a fairly accurate description of our players, I can take the total of every players rating in the raid and add it together to lay out a raid strength so we can see a number of things.

* How well we have improved as a raid over the months and use it as a visual graph to show that we are indeed getting better.
* If we barely managed a first boss kill then later on we should be able to look at and have this type of scenario: "Well we barely killed this hard mode initially with a raid score of 3450. Right now we have a raid score of 3820 so this should be a joke!" It provides a nice confidence boost that our players are better than they were before and we should in theory, destroy the boss.

Now obviously gear plays a major factor into that and I might add in gear score purely as a raid tool to figure out the raids pure strength but that's a complexity I'll be adding later than sooner.

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Using the rating we can lock down and open up specific features to players. For example the Veteran Rank now requires 850 Rating on top of at least 4 weeks of raiding within the guild. Since Veteran's have guild repairs on 24/7 along with larger access to the guild bank this is a fairly desirable rank to have. Not only that once I have the database end of this tied into the site I can lock down the Recruitment forum so that only those with certain ratings can post in recruitment threads. These are just two things that will be implemented and I'm certain I'll come up with more interesting things to apply the rating to as time goes on.

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With the system in place I can add a new section to the application that asks the recruit to fill out how good they think they are based on the above categories. It gives us a "OK" idea on where the player stands because part of being a great player is knowing what you're good at and what you are awful at. If they low ball themselves then we obviously are going to question the recruit but if they rate themselves too high then well, we know that this player is either amazing or one of the sources of the reason this entire system was created to begin with.

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Talking to each and every player and explaining their strengths and weaknesses has always been something I've always wanted to do but frankly, it is extremely difficult to do. There simply isn't enough time to sit down with all 40+ players in the guild every couple weeks and talk to them about their play. However with this system it replicates doing just that by allowing us to leave numbers each bi-week for the players to look at and base against their previous weeks to see where they're going right/wrong. It allows us to also post notes if we have a specific comment on a particular branch. For example if a player tends to have difficult on one particular fight we would let them know "Hey if you want to boost your DPS a bit hop over to this thread and do some reading on some tips and tricks." Or something along those lines. We would provide ways to improve the scores that we feel are fairly improvable with a bit of work/time. Again this is why Preparation and Attitude are given such a low % but are nearly as important as your skill/attendance, they're just easier to fix.

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In a loot council this point system makes it very clear who is on good terms with the leadership core and who isn't. If an item drops and a players rating is sitting at a low 700 compared to another players of the same class at 850 then it's fairly obvious who we would prefer to have the item in most cases. While the system won't be the backbone or a used exclusively for loot distrubution, it will be a nice referencing tool.

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Since we would be putting everyone in the guild under a microscope, it's only fair for us to extend the same hand to everyone who isn't already voting. So we would let players anonymously or openly suggest improvements for each officer or the leadership as a whole. Now this wouldn't happen as frequently as it does for the player core, not even close, but I'm thinking right before every major patch should be enough. Ideally I should have picked my core well enough that there isn't a drastic amount of things that need to be changed every couple months. I encourage everyone to constantly be giving recommendations and critiques to us, this would be more of a formal version that gets everyone involved every couple months. On top of this simple going through the roster and determining the strengths and weaknesses in our raid improves our ability to lead signifigantly.

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Ideally we want to have a nice amount of players sitting on standby so that we can get players adjusted to fights in bits and pieces without holding back our raid. With the rating system it'll make it very clear what player we should remove to cause the least amount of damage to our raid. So if the replacement had a rating of 750, then we would want to pull out a healer whose buffs aren't taken with them and has a rating of around 750. Obliviously it's fairly easy to eyeball these types of things like we all have in the past, but this just makes it very obvious who has to leave and who should come in based on numbers. Pretty sweet, right?

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Again, banking on the fact that we have more than we need online like we should, we would have specific raid requirements for certain bosses. We'd layout which buffs we needed and didn't need, and what type of classes we needed and based on that sort the player rankings and invite through the list. There would be some exceptions, obviously. But if we were going to target a new hard mode then we would ideally want to take the top 25 that fit the requirements for the fight.

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If there is a huge amount of drama behind the system from the players, then it's not going to succeed. Everyone needs to see the benefits of the rankings and realize the amount of potential there is to be had with it in place. The major factor in avoiding this is entirely based on my Officer core, which I believe to be extremely solid compared to my guilds in the past. I have taken a lot of time and gone through many revisions of the system to try to make as much of the ratings as easy and logical as possible. The only true "opinionated" section is Playstyle and maybe Outlook. Everything else has hard data to reference to.

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If an Officer I promoted is unable to fufill their duties and rate properly this will cause issues within the system. However since I am averaging all eventual 5 ratings together even a huge screwup won't sway the rating too much. In the past I've had Officers fill roles for certain tasks and let that be. This time around if a player cannot at least decently rate players in the guild they won't last long in the top position.

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