Leadership Failure

Happy Shattering, all!

In celebration of WoW 2 dropping into Azeroth today, I am not going to write about it.  Instead, I am going to pop up a post I wrote on MMOLeader about how you can deal with leaders that are not performing up to your standards.
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What happens when a leader is not up to the task? Not only does your sanity as the leadership team suffer, but the group being led will almost certainly be suffering as a whole. You will often observe this with a drop in performance of the group and socially, morale will start to plummet. Perhaps people will start griping at each other, there might be some infighting or the most disastrous one, your group will start hemorrhaging members. If it is moved to the latter stages, you might be too late. That said, it is never too late to stop, regroup and rebuild.

Failure Behaviour
So, what are some of the things a leader might be doing which could be identified as an issue?

The first, most damaging and usually most obvious one is mutiny. They openly and actively go against what the leadership team agrees to be doing. This may be publicly, or it might be in the privacy of the leadership team communication channels, or it might be subtle undermining of the leader, the level of mutiny can vary.

A loss in time available to play the game can be another way that a leader can be identified as an issue. Being a leader is taking on responsibility above and beyond just gameplay, and in order to be an effective leader, that leader needs to have the time to do what needs to be done. If circumstances change, it is quite valid to mark a leader as having to be replaced simply because the work is not getting done.

Making the wrong decision to promote someone to the leadership team is another reason to remove them. Everyone makes mistakes, and some people just don't fit what is required to be a leader. Perhaps they didn't realise what was entailed in the job and are simply not up to the mark. Perhaps you didn't realise that the person was missing a trait you consider vital to being a leader in your group. Perhaps they just don't gel with the established leadership team.

The last reason I will mention is attitude. A change in attitude from the leader in question can trigger a removal of an officer. They might be doing everything else right, but if their personal morale has dropped for any reason, this will negatively impact your team. Or simply, your group doesn't like this person's style.

Incident Management
The very first thing you should do after you have identified an issue is take reasonable steps to try to rectify the situation without making any changes. Identify the issue and take immediate steps to minimise the impact of the actions. This can be enough to buy you some time to deal with the leader in question. Talk to your other leaders and see if you can get them to cover any responsibilities that are missing, or patch up any relationship problems in the group as they see them (which, really, they should be doing anyway. Sometimes people need a little prod to get moving as they worry about stepping on other peoples' toes in situations like these).

Problem Management
Talking to the leader in question about why they are behaving the way they are is leadership 101. Communication is always key. Take the leader aside and have a chat, find out what is going on with them to cause the problem. Talk to your fellow leaders and not only inform them of the problem, but see if they can help resolve the issue or perhaps shed some light on why the leader is behaving the way they are. Do your best to figure out what can be done to help the leader in question. Support, redistribution of duties, argument mediation... all of these things and more could be used to try to keep your officer in place and functioning again.

Problem Resolution
From all this you will have 3 likely outcomes, which could be the following

Leader stays
Structure changes are best kept to a minimum, so if you can negotiate a way for the leader to stay, then this is the best outcome. Giving them a chance to rectify the issues, work on them and grow as a leader is a good chance to develop not only your own management skills, but the leadership team's skills as well. Make sure that feedback is given to the leader and support is maintained during this probationary period. Everyone should be given a chance to show they can rise to the occasion in my opinion. Make sure that the entire team is supported if there has been any strain on the team relationships and especially if there has been a redistribution of responsibilities or changes in positions to accommodate new working parameters.

Leader leaves by choice
It might be that, after all the negotiations, it becomes apparent that the leader in question doesn't think they can stay in the job or doesn't want to stay. This should be relatively easy to have a transition period in which they stay in their job until a suitable replacement can be found. The leader can then drop back to whatever they feel they can do at this stage in time and the group can move forward together and clearly with no hard feelings.

Leader needs to be removed
During negotiations it might become apparent that the leader needs to be removed, but is not willing to step down of their own volition. This is the most tricky situation to mediate and will require super-amazing communication skills in order to execute without causing too much upset to the team. Try to keep everything as transparent as possible, and be as reasonable as possible. The leader's personal relationships will become a sticking point in all this, especially if there are some strong loyalties or friendship ties within the group to this person. More especially if those ties are to you. Be careful - there is no easy way to do this. You have my sympathy if it has come to this point.

At the end of the day, don't forget that you are playing a game. If it is no longer fun you are doing something wrong.

I have had to remove leaders before, and demoting friends who decided that leadership was no longer their thing is easily the hardest thing (emotionally) I have ever had to do. Even declaring that I was done leading and thus the team stopped functioning was easier than removing friends from office (especially when those friends then drifted out of your life). This is emotional, and anyone that tells you different is not a good leader.

An example of excellent leadership

There are still awesome leaders in this world, one of them is named Blacksen.

Blacksen and his guild, Imperative, took it upon themselves to thank "Red Shirt Guy" in a way that the rest of us would never be able to - took him on a 12/12 ICC HM run.  They gave him offspec shinies he might not otherwise get, and the winner of the roll for Arthas' horse, Invincible, gave up his shot at the mount in favour of donating it to Red Shirt Guy (who was quoted as saying that Arthas' "... loved that horse more than he loved Jaina Proudmore", yeah I think that was worth it).

Red Shirt Guy has had to deal with a lot of internet tough guys taunting him and attacking him.  The video in question was brought to my attention by my partner (a reddit addict, and not a WoWer.  He plays minecraft, and I don't ever want him to play Eve as I would never see him again).  We both watched the video, and came to 2 conclusions - that the guy had a touch of aspergers (which red shirt guy later confirmed... I mean, his passion and attention to lore detail was amazing!) and that Red Shirt Guy had never used a PA system where there is a delay on hearing yourself talk.  If you are not used to it, your automatically Slllloooowww dooownnn youuurrr talkinnnngg because your brain wants you to finish hearing yourself before going onto the next sound.  If course, in your own head, this works just fine.  On a PA system with a delay?  Well, you just start talking slower and slower as the delay will never catch up and you quite often sound like you have a speech impediment of some kind (and sound pretty much exactly like Red Shirt Guy). 

This delay technique is being used in a scientific manner as well.  People with stutters find almost immediate relief from a lot of their stuttering as soon as you feedback their own speech with a slight delay into their ear.  Why is that?  For the exact same reason Red Shirt Guy sounded like he had a problem with talking - it slows you down, it tricks your brain into waiting.  Stuttering is often caused by your brain going too quickly and getting stuck (of course it is vastly more complicated than that, but I am not a neuroscientist!).

I made my thanks known to Blacksen personally, but I think he and his guild deserve a public shout out.  Thanks from all of us who didn't hate, who quietly admired Red Shirt Guy for getting up and asking the question in front of literally thousands of people, for putting up with the ridicule, who understood what happened on that day to his voice and who are the silent majority who noted the event and moved on.

Leaders are not just people who can lead their group, but they lead the way within the community as well.  Blacksen has shown that he is not just a good leader within the context of competetive PvE content (Imperative are one of the best PvE guilds in the world, a piece of notable leadership in and of itself) but the guild and ALL its members are leaders within the WoW community at large by extension of this position.  What they do is what everyone else will try to emulate.  Their behaviour is watched and it is counted - every single member of that guild (and guilds in similar positions) are leaders. 

This single act of kindness shows me that Imperative are the kind of leaders I want to be at the top of the game, showing the rest of the world that not only can you be badass (as Blacksen puts it) but you can be AWESOME and still be kicking butt and taking names. 

So, thanks Blacksen and Imperative for being non elitist, hardcore PvE leaders.

There's movement at the station...

...for the word has FINALLY passed around!

I have been working on a SuperSecretProject for a few weeks now. 

One day, I was hanging out on the pwnwear leadership forum and thought... "If I wanted advice as a leader, where would I go?"  After a quick internet search, I came up with a few blogs, but no real home or place to go for advice or just a good old whinge.

It seems that I was not the only one with this thought.  Gravity from Pwnwear was thinking similar things.  One quick conversation later and we were embarking upon a brave new world of leadership community building.  This world was named


MMOLeader

We busily worked on what it would look like, how it would feel, what was the purpose.  Along the way, we invited some people to join us in creating this new corner of the internet.  Karatheya from Cold Comfort, Kasgrin from the Pwnwear forums and Blacksen of Blacksen's End all thought this was a mighty fine idea and agreed to be contributing authors.

Together we worked hard to create a space that... for a new home looks pretty good, if a bit utilitarian at the front end.  We are hoping that as we grow and develop, so will our forums and more especially, our front page (I have cemented my realisation that "pretty" is for other people, however cool back end crazy coding, yeah, that's more like me!).

So please, if you are a leader or you enjoy reading about leadership and want somewhere that you can call home, join us at MMOLeader.  We are not just about WoW, we are looking at all kinds of gaming leadership.  We even have a section for professional development, because so much of the theory and ideas presented to keep an online group running is used in the workplace as well!

It is easy to become a member.  You can login with your facebook or twitter accounts, or just comment anonymously if you wish, but to get the most out of the forums come and make an account.

The most important thing I have left till last - this is a community first and foremost.  While a few of us will be authors, admins and moderators, if you wish to become an author, start posting!  If the article you write is good enough, you will make it to the front page as a featured topic.  No commitment, no responsibility, no strings attached.  If you don't want to be put up front on the front page, just let us know in the post.

If you have enjoyed reading this blog at all, I hope you will come give MMOLeader a try.

Now, all that said - I will still be posting here.  Much of my content will be cross posted if it relates to leadership in any way shape or form, but my strategy posts will still be finding a home here.  In fact, come cata, this blog will undergo a slight content shift as I will be documenting my adventures in Pastafarian.

So Big News!  Please pass the word around, it is going to be hard to generate the initial buzz, but I am hoping that all you wonderful people out there will help me achieve that!

Loot as a Skinner box

Last night, my fellow officer was explaining our guild concept to a new guildie.  He is studying psychology and he mentioned Skinner boxes in the explanation.  No, I don't mean you skin a mob called a "box" and get epic loot from it.  I mean, a something called a "skinner box", but not a REAL skinner box, a software one.  One of the most famous skinner box conditioned mammals are Pavlov's dogs - who were conditioned to slobber at the ring of a bell.  I realised that I had not explained why our guild is doing what it is doing on this blog.  So, here is why.

Disclaimer - I am not a psychologist.  I am a trained scientist and I am using my skills learned within that to apply critical thinking and research to something I think leaders should understand at some level, or at least be aware of. I am sure that the below article will be contentious, and please comment if you have opinions or experiences to share!  There are a list of links to read if you are interested in more information at the end of the article.  If you read nothing else, read the one from cracked.com.


How is loot a software Skinner Box?
So the basics of the skinner box experiment are thus (I am going to assume you read the link above): Rat A in the skinner box is rewarded every time they press the button.  Rat B in another skinner box is rewarded randomly when they press the button.  Rat B will press that button more and more in hopes of gaining a reward, eventually just pressing that button continuously regardless of how much reward they actually have.

According to Skinner, Rat B displayed behaviors similar to a gambler.  The next press might give them the thing they are after.  It becomes less about the reward itself and more about obtaining the reward.  I can easily see how this would extend to WoW and loot.  Clearly, the lever is killing the boss and the reward is the Phat Lewtz we gain from the boss. 

Reinforcement

There are many levels of reinforcement within WoW (and other games and MMO's) to keep us coming back for more.  There is simple randomness "Will my item drop?" then to compound that once it does drop, "Will I win that loot?".  That is one nasty lever!  Not only are you being conditioned by a random drop, you can SEE that random drop (which proves that the drop exists) but then that random drop is randomly allocated within the raid. 

Now let's take it one step further, I assumed that the boss died every time - it may not.  So, not only are your random elements "Will my loot drop?" and "Will I win it?" but also "Will we kill the boss?".  And one more element to that "Was I there when the boss was killed this week?" because perhaps you were unavailable that night, perhaps you were benched or perhaps the leadership team decided to not kill that boss that week.

Just think about all those variables for a moment.  All of those things that can affect whether or not you get the reward.  To use the schedule terminology, WoW raiding loot is a mixture of Fixed interval (ie weekly resets), variable interval (which bosses are killed a week, whether or not that boss has loot you want), variable ratio (who is in the group that week and your loot drops at a fixed percentage), and continuous ratio (raid loot drops every time, BADGES oh the Badges!).  It has several levels of reward abstraction (ie after the loot drops, it is still some ratio as to whether you get it or not).  It has multiple levels of concurrency and complexity.  Simply put, it is the most complex and amazing skinner box I have ever seen and I was completely sucked in by it for some time.  It is even incorporated into our jargon - Farming anyone?

Breaking Bad Boxes
There are many things that are done to break parts of the skinner box.  The main reason to break parts of it is that the skinner box makes you feel slightly out of control (well it did to me).  You don't know when the next "fix" is coming, when that next big win will happen.  This causes friction and frustration between guild members.  Good guild leaders understand this at some level, even if they don't understand why it is happening.  There are a few basic methods to break the mechanisms to keep your guild ticking along smoother than the average guild.

The first and most prevalent one is (obviously) be in a guild.  Reducing the number of people competing for the loot fixes the variable nature of allocating loot.  LFG system actually exponentially increases this variable.  If you want to gain an item, fix the group that you are going to be pressing that level.  Randomising the people you go with will increase the randomness of you gaining the item, and increasing the effectiveness of the skinner box around you.

Following on from fixing the group of people around you, comes using a loot allocation system (like DKP).  Making it clear when you will get that next piece of loot relative to other guild members removes a level of complexity to the system and calms people down.  It changes the Variable Ratio loot allocation to an Interval Ratio (In random kills, but x drops, I will get item y).  It would not have been hard to implement a DKP system within WoW, but they didn't.  They chose to keep the two level variable ratio.

Further to that is planning ahead - letting people know what your raiding schedule is.  What are you planning to kill when?  Who needs to kill which boss for their push at the reward lever?  How many badges do they need to upgrade an item?

The hardest thing to do is to create a culture where loot is no longer a reward, but a tool.  Loot is what you need to kill the next boss and the reward is working together as a team to overcome a challenge.  WotLK has made this VERY difficult to do, as they have created an environment that causes this challenge to have been removed placing emphasis back on loot as a reward and reinforcing the loot skinner box.  I think this last point sums up why I enjoyed TBC vastly more than WotLK.

Using the Skinner Box for your own reasons
Having tools to break the box and the knowledge that the box exists means you can manipulate these tools to create or break morale in your guild.  If you need people to turn up to raid nights? take away the predictability of what bosses you are doing when - add that element back into the skinner box of raiding and condition your guild to respond to that.  You can take it away at will and put up schedules again, but as soon as the members start slacking off, add it back in and they will be pre-conditioned to respond and turn up to raids again.

This is not as nasty as it sounds.

Understanding how this works is a wonderful way to break the conditioning on yourself.  Once you can break it on yourself you will be much more objective and strategic in how you run your raids and how you run your guild.  It also allows you to break the subscription model the skinner box promotes and ensure you have a good balance of gaming versus Real Life.  It is another tool in your guild leader arsenal to use, or to leave in place.  It is your choice. 

Given how well constructed this skinner box is, I am not surprised that there has been very little written on the topic.  Here is a quick link spam to articles I have read in the past (and could still find links to) on the topic.

Mecha the Slag - from July 2010
Tobold from 2007!
Moose Bites from 2009
Nick Yee on the EQ skinner box
Gamasutra from back in 2001!
Cracked.com from this year with some great links I recommend you read including some I already had read and linked above.

Updating your Guild Site is Important

Guild websites have 2 important functions - promoting communication within and without the guild.  This is achieved generally with having a members and non members section.

For the non members section, having a front page blog is a great way to advertise your guild.  It can show your achievements, and highlight the great things about your guild.  The most important thing it shows is that your guild is organised and active.  Your website is the portal to your guild when not in game.  It will be doing all the things that you cant do ingame.

Within the guild, one of the main things a website is for is to get people together and the best way to do that is making sure they have a way to communicate out of game.  It is a great place for announcing upcoming guild events, getting people to organise things to do, more especially it is used for keeping track of DKP, putting up a raid calendar (to schedule raids and check peoples availability), a place to hold screenshots and mayhaps even a chat feature.

This article will list the things that are important to people who are not members yet, and are based on my own experience and the feedback I have had over the years about guild web site construction.


Customised Domain Name
Something that shows you are a serious guild is a custom domain name.  These days they are not very expensive, and often come with redirection services.  If you are not very web savvy, it is almost certain that someone in your guild or someone you know is; ask them for help.  If you can get your domain name registered and redirected to your guild site, then do it, even if you are using a bulk guild hosting service.

Recuitment status
Having a current recruitment status on your front page is a wonderous thing.  It is vitally important that the status be updated regularly (preferably with some kind of date on it).  I have received much feedback asking about recruitment statuses in my time. By making it clear that they were current on the page, the number of questions I received on the topic diminished significantly.  I would then receive positive feedback that the website was active and up to date.


Blogging
Having someone(s) who are willing to write about your guild on your front page can be a great way to show the world what life could be like if they were a member.  Writing about things guildies say in gchat, adventures you go on, acknowledging achievements, screenshots and things like that can make your guild members feel included.  Having more than one contributor is a fantastic thing, but often difficult to find.  It can also serve as a history for your guild in years to come.


Pictures
Some guilds like to include member galleries in their websites, where members can upload their photos and screenshots for other guild members to see.  Putting them on your front page with a "random photo of the day" application, or linking them in blog posts can keep the guild active and show everyone what your guild looks like and what you value together.  Obviously, separating out private, guild only shots from publically viewable ones should be the order of the day there.

Forums
Clearly forums are important, as often application processes are done via forums.  Some guilds have a public section to their forums (for example Elitist Jerks has a rather extensive publicly accessible section of their forums) and some don't.  Making it clear on your website that you have forums is a good idea, no matter how publicly accessible they are.

About Us
Never forget to put on your website a section that describes your guild.  Who are you? What do you do? What are your goals? Who are your members? Armory Links? Where did you come from and where are you going?  This is your advertisement to the world.  "Come read about how great a guild we are!!"

DKP standings
Some guilds like to show off their DKP standings and the latest shinies that guild members have acquired.  Personally, I would not do this so I don't have a lot to say about it, but it is a perfectly valid thing to show on your site to promote your guild.

Keep it Simple, Stupid
With all of that information on your front page, try and keep that front page as easy to navigate as you can.  Menus and drop downs are a great aid to the new user, highlighting of important things like Applications Sections.  Links to important places.  Remember that most of the people coming to your site will be new users, try to remember what it was like to be new somewhere - what did you want to know about a guild?  Go look at other guild websites and don't be afraid to take their ideas and use them on your own website.  Use effective graphics and colour schemes; be consistent within that.

Copping it sweet: taking criticism as a leader

It has been a long day at work or school.  You get home, ready to organise your guild into what is going to be the most epic adventure of their pixelated lives, because tonight you are going to finish that raid instance.  Last night went really well and your team is all prepped and ready to go.  But for some reason, it's not coming together; people are standing in fires, adds are not being managed, people are pulling aggro and there are a lot of people dying to dumb stuff.... and you lose your cool.  You were so sure that you were going to get that boss down and so was the rest of the guild.  Tempers start to flare and people start criticising each other, both fairly and unfairly, and then someone finally turns their criticism to you.  A flood of blame comes your way as everyone unloads all the pent up frustrations in a full blown attack fest at you.

What did you do to deserve that and how do you deal with it?


I am making a few generalisations in here, please remember that they are exactly that - generalisations.  There will always be exceptions!

How did it get to this point?
Well, you probably didn't do anything much at all.  The thing is, being "in charge" means that people are much more loathe to approach you with issues about you.  You might hear whisperings that you are unapproachable, or that things are not well, or general disquiet.  Most people don't feel comfortable going straight to the person they have the issue with, they will prefer a third party to talk to for validation of their feelings.  In just about every other case, that third person will be within the leadership group.  When the issue is about the leadership group, it is much more likely that the person will ask their fellow what they think about the leaders.  This will start to spread dissent in the ranks.  People will swallow those thoughts because on the whole, you are probably a good person and working hard for the guild and trying to do your best by everyone.  So, they won't say anything.  The thoughts build up until some event snaps someone and it all comes pouring out - either in a raid, on the forums, in guild chat, in vent... something will open the flood gates.  It can be overwhelming to endure and it will hurt, no matter how much you think this is just a game.  It might be one person unloading or might be more than one.  It doesn't matter, the effect is still the same.

What on earth is happening?
Ok, you had a bad day, so you are possibly overreacting.  The hardest thing right now is the thing you have to do - don't take it personally.  Don't yell back, don't name call, don't do anything negative.  Let them have a vent at you, because they need it.  One thing about this being an online game is that you can not respond and no one will know that you are actually out the back punching a tree (yep, one of my guild mates does that, it is quite hilarious).  You can shoot steam out your ears, get it ALL out of your system and then take a deep breath and talk calmly, nicely and politely to the person going apeshit at you.  You must not take them personally, I cannot over state this enough.  You need to be ready to listen to them - no matter if they are being reasonable or not.  If they are name calling, let them finish, but you cannot react in kind.  They need to say the things they are saying and they need to be heard by you.  Give them respect and time.

Handle with care
This situation is an opportunity to really shine with leadership, to really cement that you are the right person for the job.  These people who are upset and angry with you are presenting you with a chance to really make them loyal to you and the guild.  How you deal with the situation could make or break your time as a leader, because this will not only affect those criticising you, but those who are not criticising you will be judging you silently. 

Batter up!
The first thing you need to do is identify within yourself the problems they are expressing - There is no easy way to explain this other than to try to put yourself in the other person's shoes.  How might you be perceived?  Get yourself in a receptive mode for criticism (hopefully it will be constructive, but don't bet on it)  Really get them to open up and explain what they are talking about if you are at all unsure about it.   Remember, whether they were right or wrong about your intentions, you need to understand how they perceive you.  Be prepared to hear some hard things - this is not going to be easy.  Taking criticism, let alone criticism not necessarily delivered in the best way, is hard at the best of times.  Give yourself credit for getting this far without resorting to gkicking everyone who is dissenting!  And don't forget, you have emotional and tactical support in ochat or in whispers to a fellow sympathetic officer.  Use them to get another view and to get a sanity check.

You pitch...
Get examples from them about what you have done and what they thought about that.  If they cant give an example, get them to talk in general terms about the general issue.  It is completely ok for them not to have an example, but to be caught up in an impression of someone as this impression colours every interaction you have with them.  Once you have established the boundary of their grievance, you need to very quickly assess whether or not you intended. There are 2 major outcomes to this situation, either the guildie is suffering from miscommunication in some way, or they are out of line.  The former means you need to do some work on your communication skills, the latter means they might not be suitable for you guild.

They swing....

Are the examples and impression they have of you not what you want from your guild members?  Are they misinterpreting things you are saying and doing? Once they are a bit calmer, talk to them about their impression and what you actually meant.  Listen to them and try to understand how they came to the conclusion they did. 

Outcome 1: Home Run!
Ask them how you can improve your communication to help them enjoy their time in your guild.  Give them the opportunity and the power to make a change in guild culture.  Make sure you are humble, and apologise for not realising the frustration you are causing.  Take the faults back onto yourself, but also don't let them get away with walking all over you.  If they resorted to name calling, say something like "I didn't deserve to be called a so-and-so, that was unfair".  A little bit of shaming is not a bad thing if you felt a line was crossed.  Just make it clear where that line is, politely.  Try to nail down what the miscommunication was and get both parties working on the solution.


From my experience, some of the best solutions to problems have come from situations like this.  The guild member has been incensed at some decision that was made in the past.  When it happens for the third or fourth time, they went hell for leather at me on the forums in a PM.  For me, it came completely out of the blue, I had no idea that there was this problem in the guild.  I let them rant, I talked to them to figure out what the actual problem was - and they were right, it was an issue that I simply was not aware of.  We worked together and we put together some new policies in the guild that were enacted at the next raid, and I gave credit to that guild member for pointing it out and making the corrections.  Not everyone was of the same opinion as this guild member, but not because they didn't care, but because the situation didn't apply to them, so they didn't mention it.  The new policy was enacted and a guild member who was on the verge of gquitting came around and stayed an active and strong member of the team, contributing excellent ideas and keeping my decisions in line with the guild aims and the team needs.

Outcome 2: You're OUT!
After discussing with them what they think and finding the root cause of your issue, you both find that it comes down to a clash of goals or ideals or even personality.   They simply do not agree with your choices or style but actually understand them, it is ok to part ways.  Not everyone is going to suit your guild, and you shouldn't always keep someone in the team because they are a really good player.  Sometimes ideals will never mesh and the person(s) need to leave for the good of the morale of the team and most importantly their own enjoyment of the game.  What counts, however, is how you deal with this.  You need to maintain reasonableness and approachability not just for the exiting person (although that will help your reputation in the wider community) but for the people staying put.  The last thing you need is to be seen as some crazed lunatic with a gkick macro bound to your spacebar because someone dared to contradict you.  That is not good for anybody.

Again, from my personal store of experiences, this can be seen out in 2 ways - the mutual respect/parting of ways.  The person leaving has been calmed down and you both agree that you don't suit each other, and you pass on a recommendation to their next raiding guild.  They continue to be an advocate for your guild, even while in a competing guild.  They have a very good idea of the type of person that would suit your guild and will certainly recommend you to people who they think would fit.  They bump your recruitment threads, and might even stay in touch on the forums.  This really is the idea outcome for this situation.

There is a less positive outcome for the exiting person, and that is the raging gquit with crazy yelling and screaming in whatever medium they have access to.  In this situation, you need to make sure that your other guild mates are on your side and that you communicate with them to ensure they understand that you did everything you reasonably could to keep the situation under control. The exiting person may try to exact revenge so it would be prudent to perhaps change some passwords (eg vent passwords or lock forum accounts) and be prepared for them to trash talk you in general chats on server and on the blizzard forums.  As long as you don't rise to the bait, they will eventually run out of puff and stop bothering you and your guildies.  Be professional, be polite and do not engage their trash talking game.  Keep that moral high ground!

WHEW!
This is a complex topic; I keep rereading this post and being dissatisfied with what I put in there, but honestly, I think this is as good as it gets in terms of clarity.  If I edit anymore it will just get confusing and lose what little coherence there is.  The above are my experiences and opinions on how to deal with this, but since this is such a subjective topic, I am very interested to hear other people's anecdotes and stories on how they dealt with situations like this - leader or not, this is a common thing to deal with.  If we share some stories, we will increase our arsenal of tools at our disposal in future situations.

Raidleading Phrases during a fight

Ok, so I had closed my edit page on my blog and started reading and came across this guest post on World of Matticus.  I started writing a reply, then decided to write my own post instead! (Edit: I looked at the guest poster's blog and found the original post.  I feel this is a much better description than the summary on World of Matticus.  I recommend reading it)

As a raid leader, the way you give instructions to your team during a fight is very important.  You need to be concise, timely and sounding like you are in control.  It is assumed everyone is gathered on some kind of voice service for the purposes of this discussion.

What to say
Something I learned in childcare many moons ago was this: Tell a child what they can do, not what they can't do.  For example "Don't stand in the sprinkler" leaves a child confused as to whether that order applied to them, and if it did what they should be doing instead.  Compare this to "Childsname, go to sit on the step",  which has the trigger word of the name, so the child knows to pay attention to the next phrase, and has something they can do which happens to have the flow of effect of removing small child from the sprinkler and thus you not having to deal with a cold, wet, soggy child when you are out and about. It also has the added benefit of being a positive instruction, not a negative one.  Which means the child will feel good about completing the instruction as opposed to bad for being told they are doing something wrong.

In WoW terms: "Don't stand in the bad" vs "Brang, run to the star"

Directions
Use absolute terms when instructing directions, never relative terms.  A great example of relative terms is saying "Move to the right" when you are the tank, facing the raid.  So, which right?  "NO, NO! MY RIGHT NOT YOUR RIGHT!!"  Even using compass points are not fixed enough, how many fights are in round, enclosed rooms?  How many times have you been turned around and not realised it?

Absolutes are things which are fixed no matter which way you are facing.  Things like doors, patterns on the floor, stairs, engineering smoke flares even raid markings are absolute.  You will note I have pointed out all things that are visible on the screen, that you can do a quick spin around and easily see.  Someone with a raidmarker on their head might move around, but the marker itself is unique and very visible - which makes it an absolute direction when called. For example "Stack on star", "Run to the stairs".

Instruction Construction
Promoting a guild jargon will also help.  For example, before the fight, set up trigger words which mean something in each fight.  "Brang, DS!" when called by the tank to me means use my Divine Sacrifice cooldown now. I also like to your catchy phrases (as you may have noticed in my strat pages).  No one cares that the name of the debuff on the tank is Curse of Torpor, they only care about this "MageB, Decurse!"  Prior to the fight, you will have allocated MageA the job of decursing the tank, but they ate floor dust so quick reprioritization needs to occur.  The actual process has already been assigned, the call is just that - a trigger to cause an action.  The shorter the trigger, the faster the reaction.

A really good example of this is in BQL, organising bites is a nightmare, but a quick call like this "Biting Brang" makes it clear to all that someone (it doesn't matter who) has decided to give the Essence of the Blood Queen to me and no one else should try to do the same thing due to mechanics.  But saying all that is a mouthful when all you need is 2 words!  It's a vampire, vampires bite people and suck their blood!  So, of course you are going to use the term "bite".

Using pithy descriptions of things on screen helps too.  Trying to find one syllable descriptive terms will help shorten your calls on vent and make them punchier. For example "ADDS!" or "WHELPS!" or "BALLS!" or "WORMS" or "FIRE" or "RUN!"  or "STACK" They are all trigger words for a more complex action defined by circumstance, and you will have told everyone what that complex action is before the raid.  Your call is just to make sure it happens when you expect it to.  The classic line everyone quotes, but is actually a very good example of this is "Many whelps, left side, handle it"  While I don't like the use of the term "left" the rest is short punchy and tells the raid what needs to be done.  The task had been allocated prior to the raid, people knew who were supposed to be handling whelps.  The call went out, they did their job.  It was short, and to the point and used pre-set key words to trigger a more complex action.

Instruction vs Warning
Now that you have some idea on how to generate your calls, we need to look at differentiating the two major types of calls used in raids Instructions and Warnings.

Clearly, instructions are imperatives "Do this" "Run there".  Imperatives are usually used to either make changes or adapt to mistakes with the strategy.

Warnings are phrases you use to get people in the right frame of mind to action something in the future.  "Ability in 10s", "Get ready", "Incoming", "Pulling"

Some phrases you use as a raid leader are combinations of the two. "aaaaaaAAAAAAAND GO!" The first word is a warning, in combination with a imperative "go".  A warning combo strike like this is used generally to ensure that no one else is talking on vent at the time, and everyone needs to pay attention - that the action indicated by "go" is the single most important thing that needs to be done at that time.

Most raid leaders will use a warning phrase in combination with an instruction phrase at the time the action needs to occur.  "Ability in 10s" ... "ready to run" ... "RUN!"

Vocal Tone
You can have all the theory in the world, but if you yell instructions like a drill sergeant, or are soft and timid like a mouse on vent, don't expect people to always follow your lead.  Your voice is your whip, chain and carrot.  With your voice you can cajole, order, beg and prepare people just with inflection.

The one thing you want to be as a raid leader is Calm.  You need to appear in control even when everything has turned to shit.  Never "yell".  Talk loudly and firmly.  If you keep instructing people and using imperatives, people will continue to do what you say.  Don't ask questions, don't have discussions.  Have a wide vocal range - use every inch of your range.  Don't be a monotone.  Be reasonable, listen to feedback, but stick to your decisions.  Once you make a call, stick to it, right or wrong and be confident.  All you have is your voice and you have a lot to convey in it.

Smile.  No really, smile.  You will sound different when you talk with a smile on your face to talking with a frown and the human ear is well attuned to hear this difference.  Different muscles are activated and the shape of your throat and mouth is different as well as a whole bunch of brain chemistry that happens.  Try it!  Your mood will affect your team.  So, force a smile onto your face while raid leading even if you want to reach your hand through the screen and murder each and every one of your guildmates.

Vent has a record and playback facility.  If you want to experiment, I recommend recording yourself and playing it back.  Play around with saying the same phrase in multiple ways and see how you feel.

Well, that should be plenty for you to be going on with.  Always always always ask for feedback from your minions guildmates about what you can improve.  What they like as well as what they dislike about the way you control your raids.  Actively work on improving your style as this will be directly linked to your success as a guild progressing through content.

Leadership Style

I have a confession to make: I am a regular at pwnwear.com. 

For those that don't know, Gravity has created a great community for DKs of all flavours over there.  But within that DK space, lurking in a corner, is a rather active leadership forum filled with excellent posts and comments from leaders of all kinds. 

One in particular recently has caught my eye so much so that a) I didn't have a lot to add to it because it was a fantastic summary of the two major styles of leadership and b) it was so self explanatory I could just link spam it on my front page here.

For The Horde!

I had my last raid with my previous guild.  Last Thursday (ie one week ago) I made the transfer to horde and my new cataclysm 10man guild.  I decided to do it then as the night before the 25man barely ran and that night had been called.  My new guild were on my case saying "Come raid with us!!".

So, I was torn.  I sat there thinking "I should stay and help my 25s, they need me, they put effort into me" And then I caught myself.  No, I had earned everything I had via DKP, I didn't owe the guild anything for my gear, if anything they owed me at this point.  I had turned up, put up with complaining and bitching.  Put up with a culture I had enjoyed less and less as time went on.  The more I thought about it, the more I wondered why I was still there staying with a guild that I wasn't overall comfortable with and denying the people who actually wanted to play with me (and not just because of my shiny mace).  RealID meant I had everyone I wanted to keep in touch with on my friends list already and I could talk across faction with them.  There really was no downside to my leaving except personal guilt.  And personal guilt, in this case, was very silly!  So, I said bye to the 11 people online, the 3 people left in my vent channel (not including all the people in passworded channels - I really hate passworded channels) after the 25man failure and hit "continue" on the transfer webpage of my battle.net account.

This is (slightly abridged, but) what I posted to the guild:

This has been coming for some time, you all know what I am going to be saying. I'm not retiring, however.

I am moving early to the 10man guild I am starting horde side. The transfer is currently in process. I was going to see out this raiding week, but given the dogging I decided to add to the shitness and move earlier rather than later. 4 holy paladins last night is not great for raid balance at the best of times, and when one is the goo queen [NER: That's me, I keep getting hit by malleable goo no matter what I do!], it's even more sheeite.

I wanted to say that I have honestly enjoyed my time [here]. It was a big thing for me to do, move to [this guild]. Not sure how many of you will understand how big a deal it was, some might, but there you go.
...

I do feel awful about leaving, but I am a guild leader at heart. I have spent most of my wow time running guilds, and to be honest, I miss it a lot more than I thought I would.

But this is what I am going to be going to do:
(it happens to be horde because people wanted it)
I am running a 10man focussed guild... This guild will be special in that come cataclysm when we start raiding, none of us will research anything. No boss mods, no clues. We will walk in there cold. We will take off our clothes and run into the boss and see what happens.

We want to recapture the magic that we used to have learning new bosses, working together, strategising and NUDIE PULLS! FD pulls with pets, remember them? I do, and I miss that feeling of walking into a new boss and looking around in awe and not knowing what was in store. More and more I feel like raiding is simply going through the motions - everyone knows what to do before we walk in there, you get yelled at if you ask a stupid question.

Here is a guild who has been doing it for a while if you are interested in more information:
http://www.converge-dh.com/website/z...ncetactics.php [NER: Oh for the love of the light, I cant find the post with the comment in it from a guildy of that guild to credit them!!]

Yes, this will mean we are not competing for server firsts, but I don't care about that anymore. For me, there are 2 things to playing wow. The satisfaction of defeating a boss by the skin of my teeth with cunning and luck, and having fun with friends.

For me, 25s progression raiding is not magical anymore. I don't care if I kill LK HM, because that first LK kill we did was everything I could have wanted.

So, that was that.  Mostly I got sarcasm and bitterness from the people who bothered to reply to me (there were a couple of nice answers) which sealed the deal completely for me.

Since that time, I have raided twice in my new guild.  And I never realised that going backward in content could be so much fun.  We were wiping on LDW ICC10 normal (because, despite all my raiding time, I have never killed LK in 10man mode) and I was enjoying it.  People were learning, they were improving, criticism was constructive and people never took it personally.  I got to talk about balls to the face, and horizontal and vertical balls when explaining princes (which was hilarious to all involved).

In short; new guild good, old guild broken.  Looks like I will have things to write about soon enough!

Voip culture

There are many ways that your voip service can affect your guild culture. You have complete control over this, believe it or not. Your voip service (either teamspeak or vent, generally. I don't know anyone that uses the in game voip client) is the place where your guild members really get to know each other, where friendships are made, tempers flare, fights and love affairs occur. It is where you all come together to raid, and often where people choose to hang out when gaming in other games to WoW as well.

As a guild leader, you can really influence the way your guild glues together with the way you set up your channels in vent (I am going to use the term vent l from now on, because it is the server I use. Feel free to substitute your server in wherever I use the term vent).

First of all, I would actively encourage everyone to be using some kind of vent in their guild. One of the real basics of good raiding is a good guild friendships, and one of the fastest ways to build friendships is by talking to one and other. Welcome new members into vent as soon as you can. But more on that later. First, the dos and don'ts of creating vent channels.

Keep channels to a minimum.
The more channels you have, the more fragmented groups of people can be. You want your team to coalesce as a whole, giving the team opportunity to segment into cliques is not necessarily something you want to encourage. That said, you probably want to have channels for different purposes: arena teams, 10man teams, battleground teams etc. Having multiple channels with a purpose is fine, because you are imposing a reason upon being in those channels.

Having social channels is also a very good idea. Letting people know there is a place to chill and chat is encouraging of team building. Jus be wary not to have too many social channels.

You will probably need an officers channel. Sometimes you need to deal with guild matters that are of a sensitive nature. For example, how trials are going, dealing with guild drama, setting up the raiding teams for the night. This should not be done in front of everyone in the guild unless you have a very special type of guild or you are fostering a very specific type of guild culture. Talking about sensitive guild topics brings me to...

Channel passwords
There are some very good reasons to password channels. The first one that comes to mind is simply the server password to stop non guild members coming into your vent server and grieving your guild. That one is a no brainer.

The next clear candidate is the officers' channel. Putting a password on this is probably a wise idea. The last thing you need while discussing a sensitive guild drama issue is the person you are talking about to come barging in and hearing what is going on. Why cause more trouble than is going on in the guild already?

It starts getting murky after this.

The next thing I would recommend is divining your vent space up into public and guild members only sections. In the public area, create sections for pugs run by your guild members, pvp, raids, anything. Personally, I had a policy that as long as a guild member was in the channel, they could bring anyone they liked in. This allowed guild members to spontaneously create pug raids, do pvp with friends in other guilds, that kind of thing.

In the guild members only section - password the root of the tree and make sure your guild members know it. Put your main raiding channels in there and keep onto of enforcing the guild members only rule.

I would never password channels as that creates segregation of the guild base. For example, never let guild members create channels and password them. What happens is that cliques form. Once cliques start forming they start excluding people within a team where you are trying to promote wholeness and harmony to create a solid team.

I can probably pinpoint exactly who and what caused the first fractures in the raiding team in my old guild. There was a member who actively promoted his 10mans and ran them in passworded channels that were not handed out to the guild. Those people then sat in these channels socially as well. The 25man team was then split into 3 groups - the officers and close friends, this group and the rest of us. Slowly, the rest of us are quitting as we are left out of the "good" groups for everything. Why would we stay when things are lonely and not fun? But I digress.

Phantoms and binds
Phantom is a function that allows people in other channels to eaves drop on conversations in channels they are not in. Binds are like push to talk keys that allow the user to transmit only to configured receivers. Allowing these two functions on your server again creates segregation in your team. The worst use I have seen of binds is within a raid group, during raids, people taking the piss out of other raid and someone accidentally didn't bind and the whole raid heard. The other bad example is the officers talking in binds, leaving the raid wondering what was going on with no direction. Binds are something I find to be worse than passworded channels, as they are user configurable and usable during times when you want people to be working together.

So, what does this all mean?
The tl;dr version of all this is that you, as the guild leader, have a lot of control over your guild culture in ways you perhaps don't even realize. You have control over HOW your guild interacts with each other. This is true for other mediums like web pages as well, but I will talk about that in another post. How you set up your vent server, how you let your guild members use it will directly affect how your guild morale progresses, and you had better be prepared for that and set your vent up in accordance with the way you want your guild to function! Better to be in your control than to inadvertently contribute to your guilds demise in these times of stress.

Err... so Holidays! and Motivation

The promised PP strat hasn't come because I randomly ended up going to FEEEJEEE for a much needed holiday away from the Cold of South East Australia and off to the warmer climes of the South(ish) Pacific!  I just returned last weekend and, you know when you go away from work how other people are supposed to cover the slack of the time you take away because you are a team and ... well ... I got back to a massive pile of work.

I really must dust off that HM PP strat from my files and start writing it again.  But motivation is at rock bottom.

Motivation issue?  You NER? What's going on??
Yeah, me.  ICC has been out for about 8 months now, Cata isn't looking like release till at least the end of the year.  Frustation with raiding is at an all time high.  I don't know about you guys, but I am seeing people retire for cataclysm left right and centre.  What does that mean for guilds?  I means that possibly more and more guilds are moving backwards.  They are having to recruit people who are not necessarily the best fit in order to keep raiding.  This will annoy and upset the longer term members who are watching what they consider their hard earned gear leave the guild.  For example, we have had 2 Shadowmournes vanish almost as soon as they were acquired - one quit (then came back, then quit again) and the other converted to tanking to cover off a loss of MTs.  The guild's only earned Valan'yr is gone, Mine is still there, however it was earned with my original guild.

I feel that this slump is worse than the TBC slump.  This is because of incredibly poor planning of WotLK.  8 months of the same instance (Ruby Sanctum was barely a blip on the raiding surface) with the "challenge" being do the same fights but harder.  There is only so much repetition people will stand for, and I think those limits are being tested right now.

This lack of motivation is expressed in multiple ways: retiring as mentioned, emoing, and rage quitting to name a few.

Retiring I can understand, people stop wanting to play and that's fine. You let us all know, we wish you well and you are welcome back when you feel the need to raid come up again in your life. We all know we can always use good players, and especially ones that we have already trialed and said "youse gud enuff dude". Good luck to everyone that has done this recently - I hope we see you again in Cata!!


But this brings me to the negatively expressed versions of tension and frustration. Namely "emoing" (inc emo quitting). Now, emoing comes in several flavours, but the one that is most destructive is yelling at each other.  I just can't see how screaming at someone that they are shit, or that they are wasting your time is at all constructive.

Last night, we had 2 emo rage quits in one night.  TWO.  One came back, the other didn't.  But the one who came back complained that he was sick of idiots wasting his time.  Um, huh?  Honestly, if you are worried about having your time wasted, then why on earth are you playing a computer game? That IS kind of the point... to waste your time... or have I got this whole thing completely arse about?

Yelling at each other just makes the rest of us not want to play which exacerbates an issue we are already struggling with; Numbers and Dogging (Dogging is a term which I don't know how wide spread it could be.  Within our guild jargon it means simply not showing up to something because you can't be bothered or have a last minute commitment) . When what we have going for us at the moment is "fun" why would people want to turn up to raids if everyone is depressed, negative and at each others' throats for dumb things?

So, why are you still raiding, NER?
I raid with people, it is the people that bring me back, it is the people that make me laugh, it is the people that create my raiding fun.  I have 2 main purposes in playing WoW and raiding - smooshing pixels into the ground and having a laugh with my friends.  The latter is far more important to me than the former.  If I am enjoying myself, I can put up with a lot of dumb stuff happening in raids, I can deal with nuffers standing in fires - Explaining and creating strategies for those nuffers is where this blog came from!! Creating explanations that everyone could understand using terms that were amusing and simple and not complicating things with technical details of the mechanics of the fight.

Recently, everyone that I am having fun with is leaving the guild I am in; retiring or simply changing their game faces and not being the people they used to be.  This is very sad.  I am not one for transient friendships, I collect people and I keep them.  When people I consider "collected" drift away, that makes me really sad.  This has happened to me with a couple of people in the last 6 months.  So why am I still raiding? I very much doubt I will be for much longer in the form it currently takes.


My Cataclysm guild is looking more attractive as an early start than ever.  And you know what? That is both wonderful and depressing.

Guild updates in cataclysm

I generally tend to avoid talking about "What's to come" in the future releases.  Not because I am not interested, but because everyone else talks about them.  I don't actually see a need to add more noise to the signal.

HOWEVER, recently, Blizz let some bloggers onsite and gave them a few press releases.  If you have seen comments about path of the titans, and guild changes but cant find reference on the forums, that would be why.  They were never released on the blizz website. You can go look up all the links to the posts on the topic at the official forums, The best summary being on WorldofRaids or take a squiz at mmo-champion.

In this case, guild changes are kind of a bit core to the purpose of this blog.  Everyman and their worg has commented on whether they like the changes, or hate them.  I have one very big question when I saw this comment:

The guild UI has received an overhaul

What kind of overhaul? The details are depressingly sketchy.  They have told us the bits that NON GUILD LEADERS would care about.  But what about functionality that guild leaders would want?  Most notably, mass guild member functions.  For example, have you ever decided to restructure you guild ranks and then have to manually, one at a time, move each and every guild member from one rank to another?  For small guilds, not an issue, but for LARGE guilds?  It is a nightmare.  It generally involves something along these lines:  Officers decide on a new guild structure, GM implements it, all officers then pitch in moving members one at a time and covering the guild in yellow chat spam.  All officers then claim damages for RSI for the multiple clicking.  And then you find that you missed people and it is all stuffed up anyway.

We all know that the guild interface at guild leader level is an atrocity to use.  Fingers crossed that we can get something in cataclysm vaguely resembling something a guild leader can open and not despair at every time they see it.

Once upon a time I went looking for a mod to do this for me and gave up in frustration.  Did I completely miss one that people use?  Does anyone out there know of a better way of dealing with the menial tasks involved in being a guild leader?

When more details of exactly how all these guild changes come to light, I will have a look at what could be a good possible way of dealing with any potential guild relations' issues I foresee.  But until I see this played out and have a chance to actually look at what all this shiny new guild levelling and rep grinding is actually all about, I will let the rumours run rampant in other blogs.

The importance of communication

Right about now, I would suspect that there is a lot of burnout and frustration in ICC progression raiding teams.  There certainly is in mine.  People making simple mistakes are causing massive explosions of arguments, and fingers are getting pointed. People taking breaks, recruiting people well behind the curve, necessarily dropping standards; this is all leading to a slight backwards step in progression.

This is frustrating.

As people are generally frustrated, they take it out on each other.  Small arguments get blown out of proportion, and things start getting said to your face in not the most pleasant way.  I was a victim of this last week.

For some reason, people think I am unapproachable - this could be because I a) talk back and b) require evidence of theorycrafting and the math to back it up.  If a minor change is minor, don't expect me to toe the line if my personal preference is for something else.  If you are going to tell me "You are wrong, you should be doing this" I will question you, I will ask for proof, I will not just take it on your word that you are right. So, don't sidle up to me and subtly try to change my mind.  I don't take kindly to manipulation, mostly because I do a lot of manipulating myself and zomg icwotududther HAHA.


I am a unique and special snowflake as a holy paladin, and DON'T forget it.

For 4 years my healing style as a paladin was hybrid, as a GL, and healing leader, I was generally doing all the jobs and covering people's arses.  I was paranoid about mana usage (still am) and my goal was to have the lowest % overheal I could possibly manage and still beat the boss or have my healing assignment still standing.

Now, new guild has a new way of doing things.  Fine, I will try to fit in.  I ask questions in the healing channel and get radio silence in response.  I ask more questions, again nothing.  In the end, I give up asking questions.  I just keep the tanks alive in the method I have grown accustomed to - minimal mana usage, minimal overheal.  I am not in the "healer group" in the raid, I am not getting innervates or mana tides benefits, I have to tank heal and manage myself solo.  I am also not getting communication because all the healer communication was occurring in party chat in the "healer group".

OK, got that set up?

Now, fast forward to last week.  I had an inkling that there was resentment towards me, to the point that I was about ready to quit raiding.  I was sick of the snide half remarks and bollocks pointed at my healing style.  Not a single person would outright talk to me about anything.  It was all "why don't you..."s or "You should..." without a shred of evidence or reason as to why I should.  So, I would always counter with logical sound arguments: "I have to mana manage on my own, so I use flash a lot more...", "If I do that this will happen and that's bad" and so on and so forth.  No one countered my arguments to my satisfaction, no one convinced me with good reasons to change my style.  All I got were other classes QQing that I was flashing, to which my response was "Are tanks dying? No."

This all came to a head last week when the GL said "Can you please just use HL all the time on the tanks?"
...
Uh... Where did that come from?  Are tanks dying?
No, but people are complaining that you are using Flash too much.
So, why don't they tell me that?
Apparently they are?
No, not in so many words.
Can you just do it?
FINE! I will be an OOM meter whore for you then, but this is silly and a waste. 

I then proceeded to come in the first 1,2 of effective healing done on the meters, and ran dry early on in the fights.  I played dumb, not smart, and that shut people up.  It was ridiculous. 

After the raid, I was pulled aside for "a chat".  I was told that I needed to tank heal more.  I proceeded to tell the GL what happened from my pov, the issue wasn't that I was healing wrong, I was healing right with the complete lack of information I had about my healing team and given zero communication to me about what my role was and how I fitted into the team.  No one tells me, raid to raid, what people are doing in our healing team, who is healing tanks with me, what I am supposed to do in special circumstance fights (ie heroic saurfang) - because I am not in the healing group in raid.  Those guys all talk about that stuff within party chat, they bitch moan complain, work out healing strat all that stuff, each and every time forgetting that I am not psychic and have no idea that they have changed what they are doing.  I have to watch tanks die, or key assignments die, get blamed, then work out from looking at meters that people had changed their roles, and that I needed to adapt.

It was never a healing "fault" on my part, I could always do what they wanted me to do - it was a communications fail on their part, and to some extent mine for giving up on trying.  The last time I had a long chat with officers and healers, I completely changed my spec (to a style I didn't really like) to cover off short falls in our raid team!  I am not adverse to doing things differently, but you need to back it up, give me a good reason to be running myself dry, that blah has your back, tell me that blah is your go to person for innervates, and they will save them for you.  That you are tank healing with this person, to give you someone to bounce off when there are issues with tanks.  They finally explained how everything worked and where I fitted into that, I finally got through to them how alienated I always felt and the next raid, you know what?  I didn't have to try to be psychic, I was told what was happening, in the healing channel, and strangely enough everyone else noticed the difference.  I was no longer a mushroom, sitting in the corner of the healing channel in the dark second guessing what I had to do.

Half the reason I was miserable raiding was that I was an island, and I was in quarantine, no one talked to me.  It was quite demoralising.  I felt isolated and on the outer - all because I was the 6th healer, placed in the tank group and no one on my team talked to me about the important things, like being a team member.

This guild does not have specific "section leaders" and I tell you what, I am REALLY noticing that not having them makes for isolation within the raiding team.  I very strongly recommend that you have officers with jobs - section leaders - who make sure each section is looked after and communicated with.  It is so very, very important.  Talk to each other... now more than ever.  The thing that is going to get you through the frustration is communication and a feeling of belonging, because right now, progression is hard to come by.

Hardmodes

There are a few hardmode I have under my belt and deserve a delta writeup.
I just have not had the time to do it!  Work has me under the pump at the moment, and I need to get that under control before I write too much more.

That said, there is not a lot of change between normal mode and hard modes.  The general idea is "hard modes hit harder" and that's about it really!

I wont even BOTHER with heroic loot boat because., honestly, if you can do normal loot boat, heroic is just a bit slower.

I think my favourite hard modes thus far are marrowgar (which actually requires skill) and Valithria (which is just plain fun as a healer).  The other hard modes are pretty much business as usual with 264 loot.  They feel a lot like normal modes did when we walked into ICC the first time.

Which leads me to a quick commentry on how this all works. 

Hardmodes are not new content. I don't get the excited feeling walking up to a hardmode boss, because I have done it before, you know? I have killed these pixels already!  Let me walk up to hard mode cold - give me uldar hardmodes!  I still believe ulduar was how it should be done.  Dont force me to run normal before I am allowed to make things hard, let me be the judge of that.  If I think I can turn up the pressure and not boil, then I should be able to do that.  Forced gating/attunements are a silly idea in this capacity when we only have "current content" to be done.

When there is more raid content available than we are able to achieve, sure, put on a simple attunemet (ie in order to get to Tier N+1 you need to have defeated the end boss of Tier N) but note I say tier content.  Hard modes are not new tier content, they are increase difficulty on CURRENT tier content - don't gate them.

But I am coming down with a cold and my brain is wafting around on the winds.  Looking at the ideas with cataclysm, I am not convinced that it will work the way we all hope. 

I have 2 happiness quotients out of it though: 1 ID per instance no matter the size, 2 emblem levels, this content and that content.  I hope this will sort out much of the problems of burnout and gear gaps for newer players.  The ID should force people to make a decision about what content they enjoy doing.  This I can only see as a positive thing.

Anyway, ramble over.  Expect new strats in the coming week for hardmodes.

10mans in a 25 focussed guild

10mans are great for a 25 progression guild.

Because of the smaller format, you can grab a bunch of people with more gear than the raid is tuned for and learn the fights coming up in 25s.  I cannot stress how invaluable that experience is in making sure every moment in your 25 man run counts.  I have run a lot of 25s, and as a raid leader and as a raid member, it becomes very obvious very quickly who has and who has not run a 10 prior to the main raid.  I have also noticed it very distinctly in my own ability to adapt to the craziness of 25s if I have had a crack in 10s beforehand.

10s are easier to put together, you can do them in downtime and have fun with your little group of friends in the guild.

But what happens when a group of people in the guild form a 10man and they start progressing, and they kill the endboss and start on hardmodes while another group is struggling to get people together?  What happens when the group of people are all the officers?  What happens if the officers are split between 2 competetive groups unevenly and they end up having fights in officers down those lines over 25man content and stuff "for the good of the guild"?

In short, 10mans can be a very divisive situation in your guild.  They necessarily isolate people into little groups and those little groups form very tight knit circles of friends.  This in and of itself is not a bad thing.  Circles of people will happen wherever you go.  What makes this situation different is that new people will find it hard to join in, they may feel alienated and unwelcome on top of feeling unsure in a new guild.  This, of course, probably isn't the case, but how you spend you non raiding time is really important.  It should be encouraged for people to mix and form friendships understandings and trust so that their 25man behaviour is more accommodating and overall raid performance improves.

How often have you thought so and so was an idiot only to find out maybe 2 months later, that, no they are not?  And the only way you found that out was by running chain heroics with them one day because you had a spot free and they came along?  All this time you thought they were an elitist snob because they were the RL of that 10man that ran on sundays and never included anyone new.  After that, you may have trusted them more in raids to do their job, or when they said that blah blah happened instead of thinking the worst, you might give them the benefit of the doubt.  Then maybe a week or two later, you start enjoying raiding again and your OWN performance improves.

Don't underestimate the impact that fracturing your guild members can have on your morale, and therefore, raid performance.  Not everyone has a robust personality and wont take being told "no, we dont need blah class for our run" to heart or even more unintentionally hurtfully hear "We worked for weeks to get this group together, and we enjoy running together, we don't have room for everyone".  Ouch.  Yeah, I head that said recently in my guild.  While very true and factual, it was really very upsetting to the poor person on the receiving end (and no, it wasn't me).

Lastly, 10s should always take a second place to 25s in a 25 progression guild.  If the officers need another 25 night for a recruitment alt run, and the best time they can find is at the same time as your 10man, don't emo out at everyone saying how unfair it all is.  Talk to your officers about the situation!  It might be that the 25 is completely optional and you can continue your 10man while another alt 25 is running.  But at the end of the day, if the 25 run is "official" (ie a recruitment run offering all the perks of a normal guild run, or a new progression night) then, no matter how put out you feel, you are there to raid 25s, not 10s and you should support the guild in that endeavour.  If you are questioning this, mayhaps this guild isn't for you after all.  And you know what, that's ok too.

As officers and guild leaders, you should be sensitive to all the things I have spoken about above.  Be aware of which officers are attending which 10s.  Try and find out from those not attending 10s how they feel about the situation, how they have been treated.  Make damn sure that no divisions spring up within your guild based on who goes to what 10man.  If you can, as officers, mix up where you attend.  Be "busy" one week for your regular 10 with your officer friends and see if you can sit in on another one.  You might not think it immediately, but morale and raid performance is greatly affected by this out of raid stuff, because no matter what happens, people are people and you need people to defeat the game and earn purple (and sometimes orange) pixels!

Recruitment

Probably the hardest thing about running a guild is turnover.  How to minimise churn is another post entirely, but every guild has churn, natural lulls in activity and morale, and the only way to deal with it is to recruit.  So, what are some of the more effective ways to recruit?

Trade Advertising
If your trade is anything like my trade, it is full of trolls and people LFG and general spam.  I actually have a separate window for trade spam that is tabbed behind my gchat window.  Trade chat advertising has a reputation, I am unsure why, of being beneath serious raiding guilds.  If you have a solid recruitment process to weed idiots out, then this should not be an issue for you and a carefully worded 255 character ad placed in trade every so often will drive traffic to your website and your application process.

Yes, you might have a higher turnover of idiots but there are diamonds in that rough, including new transfers (either people with alts on the server looking or just plain random server transfers) or people from guilds already running who are not happy there.

WoW Forums
Having a posts here means you can get into more detail about your guild, what you are after and basically pimp yourselves a bit more.  I recommend an officer or the guild leader post the thread so that the initial inquiries and checks are of that person.  Transfers may dismiss or question a recruitment thread posted by someone other than an officer.  Make sure your guild members are aware of the thread and get them actively bumping it and updating it.  The WoW forums show how many views there are of a thread, the more view you get, the more people will view it.  So, get your guildies bumping up those views as much as they can.  Standard rules for trolls apply.  Remember, this thread is an ad for your guild, and the way you deal with trolling is indicative of the type of people who think you are cool.

There are several places your threads can go: Your realm's forum, the recruitment forums (horde or alliance), oceanic realm forums.  These links are to the US forums.  I am an Aussie, so they are the ones I am familiar with.  Anyone on EU forums, this applies to you as well, but just on your forums.  Go look for places that are relevant but perhaps not immediately on the top of your mind for recruitment threads.

External/Progression Websites
Often the websites keeping track of progression will allow guilds to have recruitment on their guilds.  A good example is on wowprogress.com.  Find your guild on there and update your recruitment regularly. EJ also has a recruitment section on their forums, and this may suit you as well.

Your website
The front public face of your website is the first place people will probably be coming to see your guild.  I cannot recommend enough to keep this updated and indicative of the culture of your guild (whatever you choose that to be).  Have a recruitment section on the front page with information on the classes you are recruiting.  Put up your current progression on the front page as well, and if you are into that sort of thing, victory screenshots!  And keep it current and updated.  Something with a date on it so people can see immediately that the site is active and the information is up to date.  Make the application process immediately obvious and clear for anyone new coming to the site.

Alt runs
Getting up a second 10/25 run with alts is fun, but not everyone's cup of tea.  If you have people interested in gearing up and playing alts, then organising a guild alt run is a great way to suss out new recruits.  Fill your alt run with pugs, and run it the way you would your main raids.  If you find anyone who is decent then encourage them to apply on their mains.  You may also find that mains from other guild who come along on an alt may like the way you run your raids better than their own, and you may be able to poach some disgruntled players from other guilds.  Specifically running an alt run as a recuitment tool is something you need to start the raid with as a goal. 

Word of mouth/friends of friends
Ultimately, the best way you are going to get people is by your reputation and word of mouth.  So make sure your reputation is one you approve of.  Ask people about your reputation in your application process, find out why they are applying to you and how they found out to apply.  Ask your guild mates to be on the lookout for people who would be appropriate for your guild, and to talk to people.

Encourage guild members to be active in recruitment.  Recruiting is a hard job and quite demoralising for officers.  If everyone in the guild took part and was active, the pressure is off the officers to keep the stiff upper lip.  Also, more diversity in recruiting can only be a good thing.  Just make sure that your guildies are not recruiting in a way you disapprove of - give them some guidelines to be running with, if you don't want them posting in the forum thread, say so.  If you are not happy with trade chat, then tell people so, but also give them something they can do as well.

Recruitment - the story

Something that has cropped up recently as a topic in my guild is recruitment.  But first, a story of how I got into the next more factual post.

I was out doing some trade spam to garner some new recruitment through our application process, I got a couple of bites and I had a chat to them.  They seemed like nice people but possibly not up to the technical standard we were looking for.  I told them to apply on our forums anyway, as the officers of the guild told me to.

I then mentioned in vent that a few new apps were up and could the appropriate class peoples eyeball them.

This elicited a rather interesting response behind my back, and not one I am entirely comfortable with as a guild member.  I have come to realise that in my attempts to try to help out, that people are polarising with my efforts.  Many people know I ran a guild for a long time - and I have a lot if information and experience on how to do things.  What works? what doesn't work?  And I am vocal in passing on my opinion and experience in the guild forums, but always trying to make it clear that the officers are the ones who make the decisions and it is up to them.  I am also active in trying to get people into the guild in whatever way the officers say I am allowed to.  At the moment, I have permission to trade spam.  So, since I don't get time to get into a lot of pugs, I have been doing said trade spam to help out with recruitment.  I also bump our realm recruitment thread and keep it active.  I do this because I want to raid, not for any ulterior motive.  The more guild members help out, the better the guild becomes.  It really is very easy to sit back, do nothing, then complain when people don't show up or numbers are low or whatever.  WoW is an MMORPG - that means dealing with people as well as pixels.

But back to the story, one of the class peoples I mentioned above obviously started talking after I left vent last night about my trade spamming activities.  They then posted in our forums their displeasure at trade spam in general (leaving my name out of it, but it was very clearly a direct result of my actions) saying that trade spam for a 12/12 ICC guild was effectively beneath us, and by extension, my behaviour was almost out of line with his vision of the guild.  In fact, it seems that they were almost inciting a backlash to what I was doing deliberately, but passive aggressively.  I hate passive aggressive so I said that I was the trade spammer in the thread and that I had officer approval (which I did).

This has been compounded by the fact that the officers are talking about "a shakeup" and inviting new officers into their team for some new blood up there.  Quick piece of advice to officers out there? NEVER say there is going to be a "shakeup coming" and "new officers" until you know who they are and promote them straight away or are immediately ready to put the officer selection process in place.  The bitching and disquiet created by people thinking they are the one in mind is not worth it.


Unfortunately, there has been one person who has been saying out loud that they think I am the person that they should take.  I have told him to STFU but... it's not working.  Person complaining about trade spam is quite active in the guild, is reasonably new, and could quite possibly be thinking that they are a candidate for that position and sees me as a threat.  That last bit is complete speculation on my part, I could be completely wrong and it is based in my paranoia.

*sigh*

If I were offered the position, I would actually suggest someone else instead and not me, but I am getting off topic.

There are a lot of strong personalities in this guild (including me!), it is very interesting to see them posture around each other.  I am also learning a lot about how important communication is within a guild.

My Webmaster is awesome

Even though my raiding guild has all but bitten the dust, I still have an alt as a GM and there are still a lot of old guildies that hang out on our forums.

So, it's april fools, and my webmaster contacts me on MSN:

 10:00:59 AM Webmaster: hey i really didn't have time to do it. but you might get a laff anyway.  i had a plan for april 1st this year to put a clickthrough page on [our front page] that portayed HoS as a FarmVille guild.
10:01:10 AM Brangwen: ahaha
10:01:33 AM Webmaster: come harvest with us on facebook, etc.
10:02:48 AM Brangwen: lol
10:02:51 AM Webmaster: i made notes about it in february. but ran out of time.
10:02:55 AM Brangwen: oh damn
10:02:59 AM Brangwen: that woulda been cool
10:03:06 AM Brangwen: woudld have freaked me out for sure

 So, with that small amount of encouragement, he wanders off and creates a front Farmville page anyway:
--
Thursday, 01 April 2010
Folks, it has recently become apparent that more of our members are spending time on Facebook, in fact, a lot of time on Facebook, more than playing WoW.
As a result, Harvesters of Sorrow is changing to a FarmVille guild.

Come join us, search for Harvesters after you log into FarmVille and send an officer a message for an invite.
Lets get those piggies squealing and work towards the biggest land grab FarmVille has ever seen.

Forum thread for discussion is here.
--

10:25:56 AM Webmaster: try the front page.
10:26:03 AM Webmaster: published it.
10:26:55 AM Branwen: LOL!
10:27:25 AM Webmaster: was going to put a link to a forum thread for discussion.
10:34:54 AM Webmaster: "hey Brang, have you unlocked the sheepdog trials yet? "
bit much perhaps... maybe i should delete it from shoutbox.
10:35:12 AM Brangwen: lol nah leave it haha
10:37:01 AM Webmaster: seany appears to be at the site atm too.
10:37:20 AM Brangwen: orly I guessed good then

Over the course of the next couple of hours, a few more guildies get wind of this prank, and being the awesome lovable people they are, generally BELIEVE IT in the forum thread:
--
Webmaster: As mentioned on the front page here, Harvesters goes Facebook, Harvesters of Sorrow has a new direction.
Discuss!

Brangwen: about time too
I know we have all been in the closet about this great game, now we can all come out and be proud.

Dunte: i dont want get addicted to an online game again! noooooooooooooooo!
Can you grow epics?

Seany: Most embarrassing front page story ever.
YOURE ALL CASUALS
EDIT: Just realised what day it is. You got me!
« Last Edit: April 01, 2010, 01:18:21 PM by Seany »

Keaper: Oh thank fuck lol

Hairyhippy: Read this after midday, so no fair in fooling me.

Webmaster:  Quote from: Hairyhippy on April 01, 2010, 02:52:00 PM

Read this after midday, so no fair in fooling me.

I was going to take it down after QLD midday. Got told to put it back.

Seany: It's too good to take down.

Gnoob: hahaha good work!
i read the post before the front page though =[
lol
--
And myself and my awesome sauce webmaster continued to lol at our friends:

1:21:43 PM Webmaster: i should pull the joke now. after noon.
1:22:27 PM Webmaster: oh dear. we actually got seany.
1:22:59 PM Brangwen: LOL poor bastard
1:24:45 PM Brangwen: leave it for a sec - sic wants to look
1:24:46 PM Webmaster: ok, forum post is still there, article has "p.s. april fool" added to it and is no longer front page, but still reachable by the link.
1:25:49 PM Webmaster: it's still there.
1:25:59 PM Webmaster: just not front page
1:26:10 PM Brangwen: put it back up  seany is sad
1:26:46 PM Webmaster: ok, is back
1:30:59 PM Brangwen: YAY!
1:34:06 PM Webmaster: um, we got keaper too?
1:34:31 PM Webmaster: his forum post expressing relief.
1:39:56 PM Brangwen: yeah they are both guillable

--
Thanks guys, We still love HoS!

For the Love of the Light!

I had my chance to face palm against Sindragosa 25 last night.
Not only was I wholly unprepared to be invited at short notice, but I was also extremely unprepared.  I think this point is so important, I had to make it twice.

So, I crammed as much wowhead/tankspot as I could in the 10mins I had to play with before getting summoned into the instance.


WHOA THERE NER! Didn't you say that your guild had stopped 25s?
Well, yes we have.

I had to make a tough call last week.  I had to decide what I wanted to do more - run a guild or run 25man content.  And this is what I wrote on my guild site about it (with a few edits for it to make sense here):

This is not easy for me to say. 
I am going to be moving Brangwen to another guild to continue raiding 25s. 

All I have ever really wanted to do is raid.  When I couldn't find a guild to do that in originally the way I wanted it done, I made my own place with the support of a group of people to run a guild with.

When those people left, I found another group of people to run a guild with to continue raiding.  And now, after 2.5 years, that group of people has finally dwindled down to 2.

There are many reasons why I decided to call a halt to 25s.  I was also very aware that it was probably the end of us as we knew it irrevocably.  And yes, it broke my heart.  And yes, I feel like I am deserting those who chose to stay.  And yes, I have been uncommunicative about this decision, because I have been struggling with even admitting it to myself.  But, I find that I want more than this guild can provide.

I want to kill the Lich King on 25 mode, and I want to do 25man hardmodes.  I am also no longer in a position to be able to do this as a guild leader.  I am burned out, for reasons outside WoW as well as inside WoW.

I will stay on as GL for the moment - but mostly as a figure head.  I am going to talk to people who are most keen to get us going as a serious 10man guild.  You know who you are, and I will try to support you in your ambition to make this happen.  So, there will be a period of transition and negotiation coming up.

I will also be leaving my alts here for as long as is feasible.

But the long and short of it is that I need to step down, but I want to raid, this necessarily leads me to other pastures.
 
Thank you for all your support and time over the years.  It really has been one of the most rewarding things I have ever done with my time.  We have achieved a lot, and I am sure we will again - but differently.

 
I and my wow buddy decided last week that we really did want to run 25s and we wanted to see the content and defeat it.  He had some solid contacts in another guild and we both applied privately and talked to the guild leaders before we made a move, before we said anything to our guild.

Yes, it felt a bit like deception.  But I wanted to be sure that I was actually going before I said anything to anyone. And these guys do things very differently!  It will be interesting to make comparisons about the way we used to do things to the way they actually do them now.

TANGENT NER? What about Sindragosa?
As a holy pally, sindragosa is really a terrible fight.  The damage output is minimal, and evenly distributed if everyone does their job in Phases 1 and 2.  But you know what REALLY makes you look bad first night in? 3% of the total healing.  Yeah, that looks bad.  But if you break it down, it really isnt as bad as all that.

Comparing myself to the other holy pally in the raid, over 40% of his healing came from Judgement of light.  There really is nothing I can do to compete with that!  Why waste a GCD when he is maintaining the judgement?  Sure, it makes the new girl look BAD but any healer worth their salt will see the break downs and realise what was happening.

The other mechanic that made my wow buddy gag when I pointed out to him how poorly it looked like I was performing, was the actual fight itself.  There are 3 mechanics that forcibly stop you from casting as a holy pally.  One is a debuff that stacks when you cast/melee hit the boss with it on.  So, you stop casting.  Awesome!  The second is running around like an idiot.  Because pallies are so GOOD at moving and casting at the same time.  This fight has a lot of movement in it.  The third is being turned into an iceblock and being stunned.

Guess which paladin was well and truly loved by Sindragosa last night?  Yeah, this one.  On the upside I got very good at positioning my iceblock exactly so!

When we get Phase 3 more under control, I think holy pallies will be looking a bit better on the meters, but it is still a really mobile fight... we may not catch the chain hax and HoTy goodness of the other classes in time.