The USS Quad Damage

Like Harpy and Nathan.

Anyway I thought I’d add something to the reason. Every guild I join uses a DKP system where the person whom has the highest dkp gets the first pick at items that drop and it costs them basically nothing. Then the next highest and so on.

I remember a while back Sunny said that on Good Game they looked at the difference between the way guilds function on the USA servers vs the European servers. One of the differences was that the guilds on the USA servers acted alot like guilds in Asia.

Anyway what I’ve found is that guilds have created in effect senority systems much like the way the Japanese ran their economy leading up 2000 and possibly still now. The longer you’ve been at a company the more you get paid. They’d recruit people right out of collage and you’d have a job for life within the company ending way up in upper management with a large pay packet if you stayed long enough.

The problem is that your pay is not linked in anyway to your ability or anything you’d bring to the company when hired. It becomes next to impossible to recruit people into anything but a starter role and having to pay a bloated middle management section of the company. Meaning that companies were just not performing as they should.

A nice article I found called Jobs for Life and Seniority Traditions Are Dropped for Western Models : Rules Change as Japan Inc. Downsizes illustrates the point.

The reason I bring it up is because thats exactly how these guilds are functioning. Not only that but they have the whole us and them mentality of gangs much like I sterotypically see Japanese businesses as having. If you leave or question the status quo then your dishonoring the company/gang and must be vilified as an example to anyone else whom thinks of following your example. Doubly so if your point is valid.

Anyway the reason I’m leaving WoW is because I’ve already leveled up so many characters to 60+, spent a ton of time in BGs and don’t really feel like paying $15 a month to PvP for gear when I could buy a full priced game which is specifically tailored to PvP such as an FPS shooter which doesn’t require me to spend days and days worth of time farming gear to become competitive vs other players.

But probably most importantly if I buy a PvE game such as Oblivion or NWN I don’t have to enter some sort of politcal PvP ring in order to see the end of the game which is how WoW is done now via raiding guilds at the moment.

I think Joel is a boring dude. In my feedreader his stuff is always left till last. Contrast with Coding Horror which I fear and loathe which still only ever has 2 or 3 posts unread. It looks like I prefer fear and loathing to boredom.

I don’t think it’s the fact that he’s a boring writer. Well, then again, maybe he is, but it could also be that the content doesn’t really click with me. The only reason I subscribe to his blog is that sometimes it does. In many ways I hate his software, FogBugz, because he does nothing but talk about it all the time. It’s as bad as a dude talking about his kid: “oh she took her first steps” “he called me ‘dada’”; FUCKING SHUT UP ABOUT YOUR KID ALREADY. HE DID A SHIT, HE DID NOT CURE FUCKING CANCER!

err… anyway, the thing about his software is that it’s actually pretty good. FogBugz is meant to be a project management application par excellence. It also contains the features of an issue tracking system, a wiki, collaboration, and maybe a couple of other things to tie it down. The main selling point, from what I can see, is regarding Evidence Based Scheduling, which is as reasonable as it is decent. If I was going to spend a bunch of time making some “project management” software (it’s really more just the estimates tracking portions of software project management) it would be something similar to FogBugz. If I had my own decent sized company and it wasn’t writing a competitor to FogBugz (even if it was), I would probably use it. I don’t, and I can’t, and due to where I work it would take some effort to get some project to use it, I can’t even make my company use it, but that’s another thing.

It has it’s downsides, though. One is it’s “kitchen sink” approach. In many ways, the dudes it’s marketed towards (small or medium businesses with some flexibility in how projects are managed) want the kitchen sink. They don’t want to buy 5 pieces of tiny software, just one that does everything. However, if you’re already using a wiki and bug tracking software, and have some email / forumey software already set up, the inability of FogBugz to automagically interact with that stuff is a bit gay. I also wish they had a tiny desktop app which sat in my system tray and acted a bit like MusikCube instead of forcing me to have a browser constantly open.

I guess the other thing is that it doesn’t offer assurances to larger businesses which have processes already in place (gating, ISO, etc.) that it’s somewhat compatible with them. Depending on what processes they have exactly (esp. proj management related ones) it’s actually not that compatible. That’s a hard thing to sell to a company unless you do it straight to the CIO or CTO.

Still, good luck to him, and I hope he talks about something else once in a while.