My casual/raiding guild is starting to build up to 25-man content. They’re raiding with a bunch of ex-guildies who have drifted through a handful of other guilds before running out of options and trying to start their own. This splinter guild doesn’t have enough people to raid even Kara, never mind their goal of beginning 25-man content, so they proposed an alliance to start the 25-man track.

There’s enthusiasm in my guild. New content! For many people in the guild, this will be their first big raid ever. For others, this would be a way to relive the glory days (cough) of Molten Core/Onyxia. The 25-man track is the big boy raid track! Whee!

There are a few problems, though.

Many of these ex-guildies kind of need their own definition. They’re drifters who have swept through other guilds, convincing people that the current leadership wasn’t treating them right, that coming with them will bring the resolution to whatever problem. “I’m leaving! Who’s with me?!” Unfortunately, the people who left quickly learn that all they did was trade their friends and problems for a new set of problems with people who weren’t friends, and now they’re out in the cold wilderness of general chat. Some even learn that leadership in the game-space is difficult and it’s impossible to keep everyone happy. So the new recruits slink back to their old guilds, or are turned away and have to start fresh somewhere else. Meanwhile, the drifters keep doing their drifting thing through guilds, not understanding how drama follows them at every turn. They’re a handful of perpetually disaffected people.

So on a personal level, I think it’s not good to group with them since all they do is try to grab people to their perpetually outcast nation. They’re poison to a good system, and the only antidote is being awesome enough that you resist their attack.

Never mind that in a big raid, you have 25 chances to lose. The choice for these evenings with these raid events is between:

1. Hanging out with 24 people with whom all the reasons raiding isn’t fun are magnified (more chances for no-shows, more chances for late, more chances for afk, more chances for poor personality, more chances for sphos, more chances that some of these people won’t be friends and it will be some big anonymous bukkake event and not a journey/triumph with friends).
2. A guaranteed good time spending the evening with my daughter.

Not the hardest choice I’ve ever been faced with.

I like teamwork and group games as much as (or more than) the next person, but guild alliances either don’t work and waste a lot of effort or end in a merge, and I could put a lot of time and effort into fending off their approach, but honestly who am I to stop my guild from trying something new? Never mind that the roster is 70/30 in our favor, so it’s basically just working hard to raid with the people who were a load the first time around and tried to wreck the guild on their way out.

But rather than cause a scene and try to orchestrate this thing failing, I’m just going to fade from that effort and wish happiness to everyone there. Although it pains me to not participate. I was GM of this guild, I did a good job with it. Now it’s leaving me behind to try something that I know is going to end badly.

I guess I could take all this to be a (muted, far less emotional) preview of what seeing my daughter leave for college is going to be like. It’s just par for the course that things like this happen. People have different goals in these games, and frankly Blizzard hasn’t given us non-large-raid types much to do if you don’t like arena. I’ve got a Kara-equipped healer, a Kara-equipped tank, a pve mage with gear good enough to swap in for early raiding, and an effective battleground hunter. I’ve completely drank this level of content dry.

So have many of my guildies. We steamrolled Magister’s Terrace. The second time there was relaxing, not challenging. (Going back in heroic is still on my todo list.) My friend told me that he just logs in due to inertia, but he’s desperate for new content. Where the guild goes for it, he’ll go. I know how he feels. I want new content too.

But instead of holding my nose, I’ll be sitting this phase out.

So let’s say you have a guild. Some of the people are good friends, you’ve known them for a long time. You know what they do in their lives, you know a little of their family life. You know about their pets! They raid with you, quest with you, arena with you.

Then there are other people who have been in the guild for a long time, but never make the list of people you think of when you want to explore new stuff. They don’t particularly care about knocking over challenges, but are glad to come along to raid or pvp as long as their real-life connection is going to be there. These people are the other half of a “package deal”. They have played enough to get to the max level, and they do like the sight of zomg epics. Who doesn’t? So they volunteer to come with you, whether it’s for your new arena team, or your raid. Some of these people evolve into actual gamers, people who get good at their role in a group, who understand the game and what they can do in it, and who socialize with the others. The others become SPHOs: sub-performing hangers-on. (Pronounced how it looks, rhymes with show.)

If you’re in a friendly guild, you almost certainly have some of these. The guildmaster’s boyfriend/girlfriend. An officer’s uncle. The guy who works a few cubicles over from one of your core healers. It’s like the tax that comes from being in a friendly guild with players who accumulate good karma. That karma gets spent quietly over time.

A SPHO’s core skills are being friendly and trying hard. Their ties usually don’t extend too far beyond the RL-tie that brought them to this guild, but sometimes they’re fully vested members who are good at everything except the game you’re all playing together.

In terms of playing the game effectively, you can think of people in your guild who are 50% to 100% more effective than they are, and not because they have better gear. SPHOs raid or pvp frequently enough to have great gear. There’s simply a problem between chair and keyboard that prevents this amazing toon with great gear from dominating their chosen role the way you’d expect.

A small selection of SPHOs:

The healing priest who only uses flash heal.
The rogue who never has slice and dice up.
The hunter who can’t break the habit of using multishot to break CC at the wrong time.
The warlock who insists on fearing in every encounter, no matter how close the next group is to you.

These players have no idea how hard the people around them are working to cover their playstyle. They take full credit for everything that happens in their presence, because hey, they were there and pushing buttons too. You’ll never be able to explain that if they are one healer out of three, they shouldn’t be doing 8% of the healing while doing no damage. If they’re a damage-dealer, they’ll cheer that they got a huge crit, but won’t notice that they do less than half the total damage of the next person over. If you swap them out for a random person, you’re likely to have the same or better success. They don’t understand that.

SPHOs make group leading difficult because the leader always has to watch what that person is doing. While a SPHO will never learn the game, they can obey simple instructions like “stand behind this boss when in melee” or “gank the healer first”. And those frequent reminders have to be gentle, because they’re friends with someone who make take it personally.

SPHOs make group management difficult because the easiest reason to turn someone away is because they’re not geared enough. But what happens when they are geared enough, and they just don’t play well? It’s difficult to have the conversation whose theme is “you can’t come because we’ll die more and find less success less with you than with someone else.” Because you are, in essence, telling your friend in the guild to solve the problem, and most of the time, that person does not want to.

World of Warcraft isn’t serious business. But it is a team activity. And just like you shouldn’t invite an unathletic, uncoordinated person to play halfback on your soccer team, you shouldn’t invite someone who isn’t good at the game to your groups without clearly explaining why they are there: namely, that they’re filling an otherwise empty spot and are liable to be replaced. Sometimes you just need someone who can fog a mirror or else the group doesn’t move, that’s fine. But you have to set expectations accordingly. Otherwise, you’re giving birth to a SPHO who is going to feel like they got in once and contributed, so they’ll get in again. And again. And once that SPHO is in, it’s really hard to get them out without a conversation whose subject is: “It’s not that we don’t like you, it’s that you suck at this game and when you’re around we lose more often than what we consider normal.”

Or, you can just resign yourself to groups with less success. That works too. Honestly, that’s what my guild does. I just dream about the alternative every now and then.