wow Method Reddit AMA Highlights

[Starym 3,800]

 

Method just finished up on their Ask Me Anything over on reddit and they had some interesting answers to offer, including another dip into the Serenity split drama. Let's take a look at some of the more interesting questions and answers and you can check out the whole thing here.

We've anticipated that this will be a popular question, so we'd like to get it out there now: would you like to explain your side of the story regarding the Serenity split? What steps did Method take to recover from losing so many core raiders?

Sco: There was a motivation low after the hype of world first Archimonde had died down. Method had achieved world first on Lei Shen, Garrosh, Blackhand and Archimonde which had spanned over multiple years. There were different camps in Method at this point and different reasons why people were playing the game. Long story short there were some pretty big ego’s in Method and rather than talk things out and get ourselves back on track the split happened. The majority of players followed a few ring leaders who had influence in the guild and the rest is history.

What happened after that was very difficult on a general level but also on a personal level – I had created the guild at the start of vanilla (~11 years ago) and obviously didn’t want it to end this way. I felt ‘betrayed’ in many ways and the whole situation followed me around, in the back of my head for a long long time. There was a lot of misinformation and rumours going around over the space of a year between Warlords and Legion and they didn’t paint Method in a very positive light. This was fuelled mostly by a few of the ring leaders who had left taking the opportunity to bad mouth Method on multiple occasions, stating the guild was dead and that they would have no competition in future races.

In the background to this, myself and a few of Method’s oldest members worked extremely hard to rebuild the guild. We had a lot of options we were considering, but decided the best way forward would be to combine forces with another raiding guild that was already doing extremely well. This guild was REM and coincidentally, just as I was about to reach out to them and discuss a merge I met one of the officers Pehmil in Copenhagen airport. We discussed what a merge might look like and then shortly after we took a call with me, Rogerbrown and the REM officers. I was really impressed with the REM offices at this point as they had a motivation and drive that I felt had been lacking in Method for quite a while. What happened after this was a lot of hard work and preparation as we formed a new guild together. I am hugely proud and thankful that this hard work has been shown off in Legion so far with some great raiding results.
 

How many weekly hours of /played go into being a world first guild?

Sco: Normally I would say not that many due to the content being on farm = a few raids a week to clear the raids. However Legion has been crazy so far due to the AP grind. You could say that the hour requirement is almost a full time job until Nighthold (so for the first 4-5 months of release). Gearing multiple alt characters for Nighthold split clears also adds up the time requirement. I would say roughly 20-40 hours a week right now just on maintenance and AP farm mode.
 

Have you benched a person for not having certain/good enough legendaries during legion?

Rogerbrown: We haven't benched people due to legendaries, but we have had people switch to one of their alts, when they got good legendaries on them, and weren't lucky to get any on their mains. But that was mainly for Emerald Nigthmare, since by now most of the players in Method have good legendaries on their mains.

 

What kind of jobs do you have, to fit in free time to progress? I know sco works on method only, and some may study but how does it work for them?

Sco: We have people in Method working all kinds of different jobs, from the finance sector to the butcher trade (hi Cayna!). I would say the core of most top guilds though is mostly students.Me personally I did 7 years of Uni while playing WoW and then worked in finance for 4 years. It has only been this last year that I have changed that focus onto Method growth + streaming.
 

How many melee DPS and ranged DPS do you run in progression? What do you think of the current state of melee?

Sco: Legion from beta was basically as follows; Melee DPS had the edge in 5man Mythic+ Ranged DPS had the edge in Mythic raids. So far this has been true. We bring approx double ranged DPS.


Ghostcrawler mentioned that he sees potential in competitive PvE. Don't you guys think that it's time to talk to Blizzard and advertise the idea of competitive, profitable PvE?

Rogerbrown: First of all in terms of the World First Race, the problem has always been that if there are guilds who want to do whatever it takes for the number 1 spot, they will not want to stream their progression live, which is the only real way to make a profitable PvE scene.

Now for the PvE races outside of progression. This has been an idea which we have discussed a lot in the past. And there have been some PvE races which were quite popular. Unfortunately it is really hard to organize such events, as it involves a lot of people (at least 40 if it is just 2 guilds racing), and you see in other esports how things go wrong when it is just 10 players with constant pauses due to technical failures. Now apart from that, it also is hard to have set rules that would make the race fair since gear is a big factor. Ideally it would be nice from Blizzard to have some form of server, like the tournament one they had in the past, where people would have access to the same gear. We are of course hoping that Blizzard will help making these races easier for the community, or even better organize some themselves like they did for Blizzcon in the past, but sadly it seems like it isn't something they focus on right now.

 

How much gold does progression wiping incur?

Sco: A LOT. However the main cost this time around (well as with most expansion starts I guess - just that this time the garrison farming had exploded the prices) was consumables. The cost of consumables for EN was disgusting :D

Each augment rune was several thousand gold and you have world quests rewarding less than 100 gold... We provided everyone in the guild with 700k gold at the start of the expansion to help out their personal preperation.

[PatrickHenry 293]

14 hours ago, Starym said:

We provided everyone in the guild with 700k gold at the start of the expansion to help out their personal preperation.

:o

[Valks 2,375]

3 hours ago, PatrickHenry said:

:o

So like, where do I sign up?

[Dawnblade 4]

Didn't they try "competitive raiding" years ago?  I think there was a Blizzcon or something where they had one top guild from NA and EU race through Heroic Firelands - 1st group to down Rag won.  Even as someone who was pushing that content at the time, it was just boring to watch.  The only memorable thing that happened was, after a wipe, they went to the US guild's (Blood-something; Blood Legion maybe?) PoV including their voice comms.  Their raid leader was in the middle of a tirade laden with foul language and racial slurs.  As far as I know it was a massive failure and hasn't been attempted since.

[Valks 2,375]

21 hours ago, Dawnblade said:

Didn't they try "competitive raiding" years ago?

I agree that something like this isn't the most exciting, but I do think more support towards the high-tier guilds would be great. At the moment, they are kind of in limbo. M+ is getting the leaderboards, CMs had leaderboards, it allowed people to compare, stay up-to-date with the race etc.

There is coverage provided by sites like Manaflask, the sites of the guilds, but it'd be great if there was more input for the guilds from Blizzard. The problems with the exploiting in the current race is a perfect example. A very simple, easy to follow list of rules that any guild can look at, just stuff like that.