I was once considered a hardcore raider. I played a warrior tank in vanilla WoW. The guild in which I was a member was the number 1 guild on my server. However, raiding back then was a lot different than it is now. Hardcore raiding involved 40 people. We spent weeks learning and adapting our playstyles to down a single boss. It took a couple of months to clear Molten Core and Black Wing Lair.
Since my time as a raider the game changed considerably. When I raided, the level cap was 60, now it’s 110. The character abilities are more streamlined and simplified. The competition between guilds and servers is more intense. Because of this competition I often think raiding is harder than it used to be.
There were things you had to get used to as a raider. For starters, it consumed a lot of time. I eventually grew tired of the time needed to tackle end-game raid content. It was easy to spend 40+ hours a week raiding. Aside from the time commitment there was a steep learning curve that had to be mastered. This is where team adaptation comes in. It was common for the raid to wipe mere seconds into a boss battle. The high amount of experimentation was taxing.
I remember when my guild and I were trying to kill C’Thun. C’Thun was the hardest boss in the game. We struggled to kill him for months. It took several hours to battle through the halls of Ahn’Qiraj to his lair. It took about 3 seconds for the raid to die when starting the encounter. I wish I was kidding about the 3 seconds. I’m not. Surviving 10 seconds was a milestone. Then we survived 20 seconds. Then it was 1 minute. We raided 6 to 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. It took us about 5 months to kill C’thun.
During the time it takes to master a boss fight, each player struggles to learn their place in the encounter. If you die, you make it more difficult for the other raiders. Hardware issues, lag, timing, etc are all variables in downing a boss.
I remember a time in Black Wing Lair (BWL) when the raid wiped because of a single player’s hardware malfunction. The second boss in BWL is Vaelastrasz. Vaelastrasz is a dragon. To start the boss battle, one player must talk to Vaelastrasz. After a brief dialog event, the battle begins. The battle is a DPS race. One of our tanks, a dwarven warrior named Meatwad, initiated the boss battle. The raid was ready to go. Meatwad started the encounter. 39 people had no idea that the guy who played Meatwad was just booted from the game. We all watched Vaelastrasz go through the dialog event. Lightning struck the raid, signaling the start of the battle, and the raid started fighting. All of us were fighting, except for Meatwad. The little dwarf just stood there. The raid leader screamed over Ventrilo for ‘Wad to fight. With Meatwad just standing there he wasn’t building aggro. Everybody else was building aggro. Vaelstrasz stopped attacking Meatwad and turned on the raid. Priests and mages died. Pandemonium, and swearing, filled the raid. Eventually Meatwad turned as if to look around. Meatwad’s player was back online and in the game. Over Ventrilo Meatwad said, “Oh no. That’s not good.” But it was too late. Over half the raid was killed and that attempt was over.
Meatwad, or the player who controlled Meatwad, suffered a computer crash. We didn’t know about it at the time. A hardware issue is a type of disruption that a raid group can suffer. Meatwad’s hardware crash forced us to change our tactics on that fight. It became standard practice, part of our team mental model, for other tanks to start building aggro just in case the primary tank died, or was disconnected, prematurely.
Raiders are good players. They each have a lot of experience playing the game, and playing their respective character class. Many have hundreds of hours clocked in the game as their main character class. They know the little nuances of their class. They balance these nuances with the nuances of their hardware and the layout of their UI.
When a raid guild first attempts a boss they’ve never battled before, each player brings their wealth of knowledge, experience, and ability to the encounter. However, what raiders do not understand, is their job for that encounter. The raid must work together to create a new mental model specific to that new encounter. This process, in the case of raiding, can take weeks. A lot of raiders may know what their job is conceptually, but they need to experience the battle first hand to fully understand the contextual variables of that battle. Raiders need to learn a new set of nuances and adapt those nuances to their gameplay and other mental models.
The raid must experiment, which means they will spend days trying and failing. Over, and over, and over again. Each new attempt brings new feedback. As the raid is able to go longer in the boss fight, new contextual variables are discovered and more adaptation is required to advance further.
Work, in this context, is experimental. The work of the raid is exploratory. The raid tries new things and finds ways to last longer than the try that preceded it. The team is focused on try-fail-adapt-try-fail-adapt. With each new try, the raid hopes progress can be made, no matter how small that progress may be. Raiders measure progress in inches gained, not in miles traveled.
The team adaptation model assumes that work is routine. A trigger disrupts routine work and the team must find a way to adapt to the trigger. I believe that the model in its current form strives to return to routine work, but when I think about raiding, the work is anything but routine.
Raiding is about establishing work as routine. Eventually the mental models, roles, and job functions align and downing the boss becomes easy. At that point raiding is routine, but not before. Given that there are different definitions for team adaptation, and differences between routine work and exploratory work, I think there should be a topology of team adaptation.