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Your WoWJutsu rank

The folks at WoWJutsu provide a great little competitive tool that ranks guilds according to the PvE raid content they've completed. The site is pretty popular, and a lot of guilds use it in their advertising over at the Guild Recruitment Forums. My guild has been known to pay pretty close attention to the number. I have to admit that about once a week I find myself checking our ranking against those of other guilds my friends are in.


This got me thinking... what good does basing your progress against other guilds do? Sure, there are the ultra competitive guilds like Death and Taxes and Nihilum. However they approach the game in a way that leads them to needing to care about how close the guild behind them is doing. For most of us, competing against other guilds is only going to lead to unforeseen frustrations. Most guilds have a boss or two that they get hung up on. Back in the days when BWL was hard, my guild spent a long time defeating Razorgore, and after he was gone the rest of the instance fell within a month. This kind of common hurdle in WoW is not reflected in WoWJutsu; all you get to know is that a guild is stuck on a boss, not that they're going to have amazing progress after it.



The other negative aspect of a guilds ranking comes into play with guild morale. Our weekly Officers' Quarters column often deals with this subject in one way or another, and it is always on the mind of a guild leader. Those guild leaders of ours have a hard enough time with making sure the majority of folks are happy, and the last thing they need is another distraction based on a number assigned by a website.

How that number is assigned is often a point of contention as well. Every four days, WoWJutsu trolls the armory and updates a guild's ranking based what everyone is wearing at the time. Okay, sound fair enough. But consider what happens if you don't log off in the gear you've just got form the latest boss kill. Opps, you'll have to wait another four days for the update. And then there is the times when the armory goes does, and WoWJutsu doesn't update for weeks. This happened back in December, and was only fixed recently.

On the flip side to all of this is the benefits provided by WoWJutsu. It does give a snapshot of where a guild stands, within a boss or two. For instance, this can be quite useful in cases where someone is looking for a guild that's downed Vashj but not Kael. That kind of information can save someone months worth of work on a boss they've already killed.

When WoWJutsu does update via the armory, the information it provides can be pretty useful. Seeing how the gear is spread across the guild, if the main tank is geared up well enough, etc..., can provide a keen observer with that bit of extra crucial information before joining the guild. Of course, this leaves out the subjective side of things that can be gained by talking to the guild leader, or that might be reported in our weekly Guildwatch column.

What do you think of WoWJutsu? What does your guild do with its rank?