I haven’t been in officership for a while (because I’ve been raiding more diapers than instances), but I was surprised to learn of Mark’s recent promotion to officer.

An officer friend chatted me up:

“Hey, how you doing?”

“Good. So what happened with Mark?”

<pause>

“What do you mean?”

“I couldn’t help but notice that he’s an officer now.”

“Yeah.”

“So, what happened?”

<pause>

“Well, he’s been here forever…”

Oh… crap.

You might think that saying that someone is flaky and self-centered is harsh. It isn’t. We’re not talking about how he is in guild chat, how fun he is to play with, or how much he loves his mother. We’re talking about his leadership abilities.

Does this make me a jerk? Eh, probably. It’d be nicer to just focus on why we like having him around and why everyone greets him when he logs on.

But leading a guild isn’t hanging out with someone, or reminiscing over the good times. It’s very much like running a business–it’s just that your guild’s business is Fun. You have to make sure that the leaders of the organization are actively pedaling the organization in the direction of that goal. If your goal was to make money, would you hire someone who caused you to lose money? If your goal was to hand out toys to kids, would you hire someone who broke half the toys?

Whatever the goal of your guild, whether it’s raiding, pvping, leveling, roleplaying, or anything else, being an officer is sharing the mechanical and social burden of running the guild. Nothing else. Being an officer is not a reward and it is not a way to retain guild members. Officers exist for no reason other than to help run the guild. Strong friendships often do grow from people sharing officer duties, but you can’t confuse this with the work that needs to be done. Two officers might end up being good friends, but two friends might not end up being good officers.

But what’s the downside? Sure, Mark might not really help that much, but what does it hurt to have him there?

If someone is an officer and does not reduce the amount of work, or worse, adds to the amount of work, then the eventual reaction of everyone actually doing the work is, and I quote:

“What the $#%@?”

Having Mark there means that the other officers are doing everything they had to do before while carrying Mark’s dead weight, and he happens to be running around with the same title that they are. Mark gets all of the pride of “being part” of running a successful guild and isn’t doing any of the work! This lowers morale for the working officers, whether they’re aware of this fact or not.

It might feel good or noble to ignore Mark’s downside as you promote him, but it’s choices like this that subtly weaken a guild and make it less resilient to the entropy and drama that is a long-term guild’s constant companion.

So when you think of adding to the guild leadership, ask the other officers: “What exactly will this person help us with? How is having this person promoted going to make us stronger as a group?” List those reasons. Be fair, be impartial, but be honest. Make sure that your prospective officer brings enough substance to the role.

Being in the guild forever?

Not even close.

But He’s Been Here Forever is from Groups of Words.

• Some GM Advice
• Guilds are not Businesses
• Return of the Mixed Blessing
• Overview of Loot Systems
• Officers should all have Tanks and Healers

When I was GM, a good friend of mine in the guild–we’ll call him Angus–was excellent at leading groups and raids. He wasn’t shy about grabbing a couple of our more passive guildmates and making good things happen like attunement requirements, gear upgrades, and all the rest. In real life, Angus is a confident leader who runs his own business, with employees. His company is successful! I thought, “Wow, he’d be a great officer, maybe even GM!” So he got the nod as officer, and while he was gruff at times, he proved a great asset to the guild.

Over time, I learned that Angus had really been eager to take a shot at leading the guild. We frequently had open conversations among the officers regarding whose turn to lead was coming. So eventually, Angus got the nod.

The problem–and it took months for us to learn this–is that his ability to lead a successful for-profit business involves a completely different skill set than leading a successful voluntary, at-will organization. Angus turned out to be a good boss, but not a great leader.

He wanted things done his way without fail and people who didn’t agree got on his crap list very quickly. He wasn’t much of a negotiator, and was really terrible about hearing other people’s point of view. I gather that at his business, Angus’s employees do what he says or he, you know, fires them. This can be a great way to run a business, because if you can get a group of people who believe that you’re the benevolent dictator, they’ll just do what you say… this can even work in guild leadership situations.

However, his leadership style was based on tangible rewards that came from his authoritative position, in the case of his business it was a job and benefits and pay. In the guild, it was raiding and zomgepics. In his eyes, it was fine that he was gruff and no-nonsense and all business all the time, because the guild was a raiding engine and you were either fuel or you were baggage.

The problem with that outlook is that everyone’s paying the same money to play, and so too-strong, demanding, unyielding personalities either become internet phenomenons (nsfw) or end up leading a guild of four alts who never log on. Every single time I play and spend any amount of time in a capital city, I see new guilds recruiting, usually one right after the other. Endgame raiding guilds, casual guilds, leveling guilds, pvp guilds, on and on. There are just too many other guilds out there, why waste time with a jerk?

So we had more and more discord with Angus at the helm, with an ever-increasing amount of social management being done by the other officers and veterans of the guild, trying to hold it all together. Finally, the guild’s leadership had a frank conversation, without him at first, and then again with him, about a change at the top. We never stopped liking him, we just didn’t like him at the helm. Someone else stepped up, and the guild moved on. Angus’s leadership brought about a Fall season for our guild.

(We followed this up with a Winter season and now a Spring/Summer, which I’ll relate another time. Two more articles!)

After a break from the game, Angus is now a happy and helpful officer and ocassional raid lead. We just don’t talk about his time at GM.

Guilds are not Businesses is from Groups of Words.

• Some GM Advice
• But He’s Been Here Forever
• Return of the Mixed Blessing
• Maximum Performance Isn’t Always Maximum Fun
• Officers should all have Tanks and Healers

There’s a class of player who feels that their status in the raiding game means that they’re Right. They label other people noobs, and the silly thing is that people believe them. “I have this awesome item, you don’t, therefore I know what I’m talking about and you don’t.” This frustrates me a great deal.

My guild recently brought in a new recruit. Her main is a holy priest, just like me! I’ll call her Mary. She was very personable, online a lot. She had raided a lot in the original WoW, all the way through AQ40, which I’ve never seen. She had taken over a year off from the game, and in her return was looking for a more relaxed playtime requirement while still playing at a high level. A perfect fit!

One of our top dps’ers had levelled a priest to maximum level and was looking for a rundown of how to heal as a holy priest. (He wanted to be able to fill out a heroic instance or raid in the case that we were short healing) He posted in our guild forums, asking how to manage mana, which spells were good where, the differences between instancing and raiding, and so on. The other primary holy priest in the guild and I posted a decent overview of general strategy and how to use the various tools in the priest’s toolbox.

Mary, still in her first week, posted a lengthy and emotional rebuttal to what we wrote. Her entire priest healing strategy is: Flash Heal. As far as she’s concerned, it is the only spell anyone needs as a holy priest. Her defenses were long, full of passionate and anecdotal evidence, and even had bad math to back her up. (I love bad math of all kinds) She was fully entrenched, she downright took offense to the thought of using other spells, and basically framed her argument such that to disagree with her was to start a fight. (I’m not going to go into details about why she’s wrong, just take my word for it.)

Needless to say, she didn’t stay long.

We chuckled about it, but I didn’t understand how she was going to find what she wanted. How was she going to even pass the application to a mid-tier raiding guild?

The answer: Mary could succeed in raiding, because her other healers could heal around her. I remember this in painful detail from the 40-man days. But there’s no reason that it couldn’t continue in 25-man or even 10-man raids. So Mary moved right up to a SSC mid-tier guild, where she’s no doubt the 25th person in some raid. They’re probably progressing, too. She’ll get overgeared and then be back to her elite flash healing self, and looking down at everyone who isn’t geared like she is.

The funniest part of this is that Mary could only ever find success in large raids. Not smaller group play, not ever small raids. And yet, raiding is supposedly a prestige environment. Raiders are serious business. They’re seen as elite players. I mean, these people have zomgepics that are simply inaccessible to most. They have to know the game, right?

Ah well.

Now don’t get me wrong–there is a tier of players who by definition of where they are must know what they’re doing. They’re the ones pushing new content as it’s released, who write the wowwiki articles, and write and tune the spreadsheets. The rest of us are, for lack of a better term, scrubs who execute well-defined strategies. I’m not saying that raiders don’t know what they’re doing, I’m just saying that their position in raiding guilds doesn’t mean that they do. They’re hit and miss, like everyone else.

(The title of this article really should have been “Mid-tier raiding and below does not necessarily mean Skilled”, but it wasn’t catchy.)

Raiding does not mean Skilled is from Groups of Words.

• Max level does not mean Skilled
• Second Magister’s Terrace run
• Polytoons can be Bad
• Fools, Silence, and Damage Reporting–supplemental
• The Downside of Endgame Guilds

World of Warcraft, and every game like it, is really two different games. I first read this thought at Penny Arcade (can’t find where because their search function is weak). Basically, you have the levelling game where you start at L1 and then play until max level (currently L70), and then the game that happens after the levelling game, which is filled with group activities of all sorts as you improve your max level character.

Which brings me to another iconic player, Lisa. I’m sure that all of you have met her before:

“I’m max level! I couldn’t have gotten here unless I knew something about my class. Let me tell you about why…”

“…my retribution paladin has a lot of defense.”

“…my hunter has a lot of spell damage.”

“…my holy priest only uses flash heal.”

“…my warrior tanks with a two-handed weapon.” (Note: reroll deathknight in a few months)

“…my mage loves to wand.”

Lisa feels like she knows what’s what, because all these super-raiding-types she sees in the common cities? They’re the same level as she is. Aside from their zomgepics, there’s no visual indicator that what they’ve done is any different than what she’s done… in her mind. And frankly, since anyone can get zomgepics in battlegrounds, even that is less of a clue than it once was.

The problem is that hitting maximum level in one of these grinding-type games has absolutely no relation to knowing anything about the game and how to play it. All it means is that you have been dedicated and persistent, and hopefully had fun along the way. Especially in World of Warcraft, the game is extremely forgiving and easy to solo play.

There’s no smooth transition between the first game (levelling/solo play) and the second game (endgame/group play). I’ve read a lot of intelligent suggestions on how to bridge that gap, but the reality is that as long as Blizzard sticks with their design choice of letting anyone get to maximum level, with no intermediate checks along the way relating to their skill of play, then the vast majority of players are going to go the easiest way possible, because people are fond of success. Also, Blizzard is fond of money, and this super-casual crowd is a decent chunk of their base.

When a hunter can level to max level by using only melee weapons and never once firing a ranged weapon… don’t get me wrong, I think that what Gweryc did is cool. He deliberately made the game challenging in the levelling process, which is an interesting turnabout for a hunter. What makes Gweryc notable is not that that he did it, it’s that he did it on purpose.

There are thousands of people making those same against-the-grain choices but not understanding that they’re doing so. I usually find them waiting for a battleground to begin, wondering aloud if their 20-game losing streak is ever going to end, and silently weeping for the 15–45 minutes I’m about to waste in the upcoming losing effort.

What makes Lisa so annoying isn’t that she’s max level, it’s that she doesn’t understand the difference between the levelling game and the endgame. She doesn’t understand that there’s more knowledge to be attained, so she dismisses any advice or criticism out of hand. After all, she’s been to the zones, done the quests and gotten the quest rewards, same as you. She doesn’t care or even really think about the fact she skipped every group quest and every instance.

You: “Hey Lisa the pally, what’s the cooldown on Divine Intervention?”

Lisa: “Divine Intervention?”

You: “Yeah, it’s a spell I heard about that you have.”

Lisa: “O rly? Let me check my spellbook.”

(time passes)

Lisa: “Pssh, I’ve never seen this spell before.”

Actually, she did. Lisa just instantly dismissed it when she saw that it killed her to cast it… which is opposite of the whole point of the game when you’re solo’ing. What possible use could it have?

Max level isn’t even a hint.

Max level does not mean Skilled is from Groups of Words.

• Playing Around
• Raiding does not mean Skilled
• Secret Design of WoW PvE: Solo Difficulty vs Group Difficulty
• The Downside of Endgame Guilds
• Maximum Performance Isn’t Always Maximum Fun

Then you somehow break it off. Whether you’ve extricated yourself via your own force of will or via external causes, you’re free of this person and you now have some ability to see this kind of situation coming again. When faced with future backsliding, eventually you either:

1. Realize that the number of seconds you have on this planet is finite, and perhaps regression sex-and-crazy this isn’t the best way to spend those seconds. You opt out from that person.
2. Let them back into your guild.

Big jump, but stay with me. I suspect that those of you who have walked both the dating road and the long-time guild member road see where I’m going with this.

You’ve got this guy, Bob, in your community who appears to be friendly/funny/talented and has learned to cleverly disguise his crazy. Bob knows how to sound aligned to the goals of your guild, because how hard is it to sound like that when said goals are likely written on your guild’s front page? Honestly, only the really thick people ever do anything stupid enough to warrant immediate kicking. Not Bob–he can seem like a good guild member… but at some point, you know from firsthand experience that he’ll will do one or more of the following:

• Feel justified in a broken give/take ratio
• Complain whenever they don’t get instantaneous service from guild resources, like officers and crafters
• Pick fights with people inside or outside the guild
• Beg for anything over /g, especially gold
• Be an embarrassment in public, like /trade, hurting your guild’s continuous recruitment efforts
• Make suggestions that involve a lot of work, not offer to help with execution, and then get pissed and complain
• Sow dissension
• Only participate when there’s a clear chance for personal reward/suggest large guild investments in their own personal improvement
• Speak in txtmsg like they’re not sitting at a keyboard (“y cant i come 2 ZA”)
• Link random people’s gear over /g with text-drool of how much they want that gear
• Tell Chuck Norris jokes or other completely played-out memes
• Freak out when they don’t get attention frequently enough

…or whatever it is that pushes your Button of Incompatibility. The fact that Bob is talented and/or funny and/or generous isn’t the question; it’s that he brings out the crazy in you. The experience of being in this Bob’s company makes the game unfun for you.

How do you personally deal with Bob? For me, a notice of silence followed by enforcement of silence works. “Bob, I wish you well but I’m going to do my best to avoid you.” No conversation after that is necessary. I’ve tried “having it out” and “an honest conversation”, but honestly an extended conversation about incompatibility, however you deliver it, isn’t necessary. You’re not going to enlighten this person. The equivalent of silence in MMORPGs is some variation of /ignore and refusal to group with this person. Do not break this silence for any reason. It works great!

If only it were that easy in MMORPGs.

The problem is that you’re in a guild. The pool of people around you on the server is mostly static and is certainly limited. Your friends in this guild–the ones whose company you seek out and that you’ve come to enjoy–are perfectly good people with the glaring exception that they don’t share your opinion on Bob. This person who you’ve concluded is a complete waste of your time, he doesn’t drive them nuts like he drives you nuts.

As long as Bob plays the game and you play the game, you’re going to exist in the same limited social circle. You’re going to be around him. You’re going to see him in the bank, he’ll be grouping with your friends. He might even still be in your guild! The only method of escape is server transfer, but that means leaving everything you enjoy about where you are. The vast majority of the time, this is an unacceptable solution.

So what happens? Drama, that’s what!

Now take this two way relationship that can happen between any two people and bring that to a group of ten people. Or forty! The odds of this happening between any two people is small, but the more people you add to the mix, the more likely you are that it’s going to happen. Add the variable of time and you can pretty much guarantee that it’s going not just happen to someone in your guild, but happen to you. No matter how good you try to be, drama happens.

This is why there’s always one thing you can count on in massively multiplayer games: Drama is Inevitable.

Drama is Inevitable is from Groups of Words.

• Guilds are not Businesses
• Officers should all have Tanks and Healers
• Return of the Mixed Blessing
• Everything is Always Moving
• Fools, Silence, and Damage Reporting–supplemental

For me, the most fun time in WoW is right after an expansion hits, when there’s limited collective endgame exploration. All the content is new and fresh, then I find myself grouping with not just my long-term guild friends, but also my friends who left to get on the progression roller coaster. It’s glorious! This is what the first two months of TBC was like.

Then, endgame progress starts to happen, and a tiered system begins to form.

Some guilds progress quickly while others progress slowly. Before long, you have some small percentage of guilds at the top level, a larger percentage slightly below them, and ultimately many at the bottom. Now let’s follow a person, Mike, through his ascent to the endgame.

First, Mike belongs to a leveling guild. He groups with and rides that guild up to the maximum level, but the guild doesn’t have the wherewithal to group up for the endgame content, for whatever reason. Ultimately, Mike decides that he wants to see some of this content, so he joins pick-up groups, and he finds that it’s fun. He does a little research and applies to an entry-level endgame guild. Mike is accepted! Wait, why is this endgame guild recruiting?

Entropy is constant in all guilds. A personal dispute can’t be resolved, or someone can’t afford to fix their computer, or they get divorced, or die, or become parents, or get sent to jail, or change jobs, or any number of other real-life reasons. Or they simply get bored with the game and never log in again. Regardless, even good people with no other issues leave the game. Every guild’s membership is never constant, and therefore every guild must constantly recruit.

At Mike’s first endgame guild, he learns to group, and the guild is sweeping through EndgameA content and is trying to get through EndgameB content. Mike is getting loot upgrades at a decent rate in EndgameA, because the guild has that under control. The goals of Mike and the guild are in perfect alignment for this time. Let’s define these goals. Endgame guilds are easy:

• The goal of an endgame guild is to raise the total level of gear of its members so that they can explore the next level of content. The ability to run endgame content is dependent on both the size of the group and the collective loot level of that group. This means that taking a slightly-underequipped person is acceptable, because it’s better than the empty spot you have that threatens to kill your guild’s basic ability to raid.

Players are harder. Each endgame player is a combination of the following three goals:

1. A loot-driven player wants loot upgrades. Zomgepics.
2. A socially-driven player wants to play with their friends.
3. An exploration-driven player wants to see all the content available.

(There are obviously more goals, but bear with me for the purposes of this article.)

Mike participates and gets all the gear available at EndgameA content. After some variable amount of time (due to the randomness of loot drops), Mike has nothing left to gain from EndgameA. He finds that his guild’s progression on EndgameB–where progression is not easy and where the guild is currently stuck–is simply painful and too slow. Unfortunately for Mike’s guild, Mike would rather see new content or get loot sooner without the struggle of doing it the hard way. His goal ranking is: loot/exploration first and social last. The people in his guild don’t matter as much.

Luckily for Mike, there is another guild on the server which is exactly one step up in progression; they have EndgameB conquered and are working on EndgameC. The minimum requirement for gear to be successful in EndgameB content is EndgameA gear. Thanks to the random loot system, most of this new guild is still gearing up in EndgameB, so it’s fine for a new applicant to simply be in EndgameA gear. Thanks to the effort of his current guild, Mike has EndgameA gear! The door to his second endgame guild is open.

After some amount of sweating, Mike leaves EndgameA guild to join the more-progressed one. The new guild gladly looks the other way at how the player came to them. Who can be certain what happened? The new guild is hoping for the best, so they welcome Mike with open arms and a big cheer. After all, this new guild is trying to get through EndgameC and needs active participants, because they keep getting poached by EndgameD guilds, who are getting poached to EndgameE guilds. And so on.

The problem is that the best situation for people who are loot driven is to be in a guild where the average level of gear of its members is higher than his own. This grants access to higher level content without the difficult part of sweating through it the hard way. Loot-driven people like coasting easily through content. They like getting rewards for minimal effort.

As you can see, this leads directly to guild-hopping. And endgame guilds, in their state of constant recruitment, make the problem worse with their constant poaching of each other. If they don’t recruit this player, then some other guild will, and increase their chances of progression, which is just another guild to poach from them.

Thus, soon after endgame is explored by some, a guild stratification system sets in. A clear path through guilds emerges. Start in guild 1, jump to guild 2, then guild 3, and so on. This continues until the ladder is reset at the next expansion.

Blizzard has taken steps to combat this: reputation levels with instances; attunements; badges of justice; tier set tokens; exchanges for pve to pvp gear. Each has helped, but the problem is still there. The individual gets all the rewards, regardless of the relative efforts involved.

So while people say that Tobold’s “loot belongs to the guild” idea is crap, that’s not the point. There has to be a better way. Any suggestion is better than no suggestion.

In the meantime, the system churns on and the socially driven players who are close friends in an endgame guild–like mine–end up bitter that they’ve helped so many people up and along their own personal ladder, while the guild progresses very slowly because they hang on to a fraction of the people who pass through. Remember, we socially-driven people aren’t purely social, we want to get upgrades for our characters and see the next endgame, and the one after that. But we won’t give up friends just for loot or to visit another part of the game. Our only options are: 1) continue to hope that we can find enough like-minded people to get momentum to clear our current hurdle and experience the joy as a group; 2) give up on the endgame altogether. Giving up isn’t a good solution because raiding is fun. Seeing new content is fun. Clearing obstacles with your friends is fun.

So we loyal ones stick together and keep recruiting, hoping to find the rare person who values camaraderie over loot, while we quietly look forward to the next reset (the next expansion). The ladder won’t exist for a little while, and we can play in ideal environment, briefly.

I’m cheering all of you on, Tobold and Potshot and the rest.

(edited on May 2 for some grammar flubs)

The Downside of Endgame Guilds is from Groups of Words.

• Small Group Raiding in WotLK
• There are Many Ways to Win
• Definition: Main vs Alt
• casual/raiding
• The lure of large-group raiding