Reflections From The Pond

I don’t like rules.

I think we have way too many rules in our lives, detailing every petty little thing of what you can or cannot do, trying to cover every eventuality. But as we all know, you can’t cover every little shade of grey, you will encounter new situations and unknown events and the rules won’t be there to tell you what to do.

So, I try to live my life by one simple rule:

My right to swing my fist ends at your nose.
Your right to swing yours ends at mine.

(Thank you Oriniwen at Artisan Level for reminding me of the original quote, which describes my way of looking at things so neatly.)

I don’t care what colour your skin is, I don’t care if you prefer men or women, I don’t care if you want to spend your life stoned and numbed and never able to feel true love’s first kiss when sober. (Well, I do care about that last thing but I am not gonna preach. Well, not preach too much anyways.)

You live your life the way you feel is right for you and as long as you don’t hurt anyone doing it I am going to be happy for you and treat you as good as I can.

I am going to swing my fist as much (or as little) as I want but I am not going to hit your nose. I am not gonna put my own interests before yours, my desire is not going to outrank your suffering and my gratification will not matter more to me than whatever distress or anguish may be caused to you and yours by my actions.

And I expect the same from you.

Real easy one, is it not?  (Living by it is a bit harder though, sometimes you can’t stop the momentum of your swing, sometimes you really don’t want to, and sometimes you fuck up, but I am not going into that now.) 

So why do we always end up with so many rules? It’s like most people have a natural tendency to spout rules whenever possible.

I think it’s because rules can be a great help in our every day life. Call them rules, guide lines, agreements, whatever you please, but they help to organise our daily doings and our responses to our surroundings. We don’t have to sit down and think about how we are going to react to something every time we encounter it, we will react automatically because “this is the way we have always done it”. For good or bad.

Rules are handy when there are several people in charge of running something as well, because it negates the need to discuss every incident to find a proper response and they give consistency in the responses.

Like in a guild. Having guild rules will let the members know what will happen in certain stages or events in the guild.

“You start out as an Initiate and are eligible for Member after 30 days”, “Members can sign up for the Raid Core and withdraw mats from the Guild Bank”, “Loot that drops in a guild raid will be distributed according to a /roll”.

These kinds of rules makes it easier to run the guild because you don’t need to make individual decisions for every person who joins the guild, or who wants to go raid, or who should get the shiny peppix that just dropped.

But it can easily go astray and the rules will become more of a hindrance than a help.

It’s like drinking beer, if you’re having so much fun and get this good-looking and smart and sexy by having drunk four beers, you should be absolutely god-like if you have one more, right? Or two, or three, or maybe even four more! And before you know it you are on your knees throwing up with your wallet stolen or waking up next to a stranger with a throbbing headache and no idea how to get home.

Let’s not go down that path with the rules, shall we?

For example, in my guild we used to have a simple loot rule in all of our pre-Ulduar raids.

“Roll if you need it, mainspec before offspec, if you have already gotten a shiny today the next top roller gets it.”

Easy as pie. Only thing you needed to keep track of was who had gotten what and there are handy addons for that with a paper and pen backup.

The (perceived) trouble with this rule was that since we run pretty open raids people could come in and snag a drop one of our regular core raiders had been wanting for ages just by a lucky roll.

So after some discussions in the guild we decided to go for a simple DKP system with fixed values, and drops would go to the one with the highest DKP, thus favouring the regualr raiders who had had a chance to pile that DKP up.

Well, I say simple because it seemed simple. Turned out it was a lot of work to keep track of the dkp values, especially for benched people, people not staying for the whole run,  and for the different extras for being late, bosskills and such. 

For me, the work associated with DKP clearly outweighs the possible benefits of it (after all, one of the rules of raiding is: It will drop again).

So, “Howdy stranger, who are you and how did I get here?”

One of my math teachers in University always said “Simplify, simplify, simplify” and he was right. Finding the lowest common denominator makes any math problem so much easier to calculate.

Or to quote Albert E himself,

Everything should be made as simple as possible,
but not simpler.

This is actually a vital thing if the rules are supposed to make your decision maker easier and faster and not mire you in endless discussions about interpretation or or if something constitutes an exception and needs special examining.

You will want as few and as simple and as all-encompassing rules as possible if you want to run the guild as smoothly and easily as possible. The more rules, the more discussions there will be and the more time will you spend in discussions and arguments than playing and having fun!

Skip honorary ranks, throw the detailed guild bank access rules out the door, leave the DKP-allotting mired in its on bog far behind you, and go for as simple rules as you can find! You don’t need to specify loot rules for armor proficiencies and you don’t need to have to have a rule saying “don’t abuse the common chat channels” if you have one saying “be nice to each other”.

And with too many rules there is always the risk you forget one of them, which will lead to you know what, yep, that’s right, people complaining, officers getting annoyed and spending a lot of time discussing and rectifying or making amends.

If you look up Political Corruption on Wikipedia, you will see a map detailing something called Corruption Perception Index, which is a (debated) telltale of how much corruption (abuse of entrusted power for private gain) is perceived to exist among public officials and politicians in different countries. A top score on this index means very little corruption among officials, and the lower the index the more corruption there exists.

There are three countries sharing the top spot on this list, and I come from one of them, so you will not be surprised when I say this:

The last but actually the most important thing about rules is:

They need to be followed by everyone within their scope.
They need to be applied to everyone that falls under them.

Be it a rule for Initiates, for Members, for Officers, for people who leave the guild or for people who come back, the rule must apply to every single person in whatever cathegory it addresses.

You can’t suddenly just ignore a rule to give a piece of loot to someone you like instead of someone you don’t like. You can’t suddenly just pick another person for your raid groups because you don’t like the one that signed up first. You can’t suddenly just promote someone because you like them and refrain from promoting others because you don’t like them.

If you do this, the officers will lose the trust and respect of the guild members for what will be (correctly) perceived as favouritism and nepotism, and the officers themselves will be uncertain on how to act, if rules sometimes apply and sometimes don’t.

If you start making exceptions, this will lead to discussions among guildies and officers and a lot of time will be spent on this which could have been spent elsewhere, looking at airplanes, cooking dinner, playing WoW or whatever you fancy.

Of course, exceptions can be made if you think it is a special case and you are following the spirit of the rule if not the letter, but if you can’t be arsed following a rule that you and your fellow officer decided upon, if exceptions becomes the rule rather than the, eh, exception, you seriously need to rethink the rule and the need for it.

Note: I am not talking about the fairness of the rule itself, you are perfectly free to have rules that says “Every piece of loot that drops goes to the GM” but then you will need to obey by that rule. If you start handing out loot to someone else this will be perceived as unfair, and it is this un/fairness I am talking about.

A good tip here is to not make any special rules for friends in special circumstances, because sure as hell that rule will come back to bite you in the behind one day when it is someone you may not particularly fancy who happens to be in that very same circumstances and you will be up shit creek without a paddle. You’ll have to bite down and give those special circumstance boons to everyone if you want to keep the trust and respect of your guild.

Would have been easier to just stick with a simple rule for everyone, eh?

So all officers need to present a united front, you can’t have someone giving friends special treats when officering and other officers taking their job seriously and putting their feelings of friendship or animosity aside when officering to be able to treat all guildies equally and impartially.

I know its a game we play and we don’t play about life-or-death, but your action defines who you are, be it in-game with pixelated friends and guildies, or out of game with flesh and blood ones.

All animals are equal,
but some animals are more equal than others.

 You don’t want to end up on the farm of the above quote, do you?

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