Reflections From The Pond

Archive for the ‘Guild’ Category

Larísa tells the tale of the anniversary celebration of our guild Adrenaline with such joy and wonder and I can only agree. Go read it!

I have just a few points to add:

- Gnomes die all to easily!

- I suck horribly at pvp!

- Water breathing is a beautiful spell and should not be banned! Also, I had no idea how many crooks and nannies there are in the canals!

- Speaking Swedish with people you’ve only been speaking English to for many months suddenly reveals a lot about their origins when you hear their native dialects instead of slightly swedish-accented English.

- Gnomes die all to easily!

I have been in guilds previously where we have arranged fun events outside of raids, lots of events ranging from photo shoots to celebrations to pvp extravaganzas similar to the Turpster one (slightly down-scaled) to peace festivals and naked gnome races and other gnome marches. Actually, I still am in most of those guilds although I sadly I rarely have time to play those of my toons very much nowadays.

These events have all been fun and rewarding and most of the time the people participating were the usual suspects, you know those 5-10 people who turns up for anything and have a blast together.

Here almost the entire guild turned up and I think a part of the reason for us doing that was because this anniversary was set on a raid night, not on an off night. The anniversary and the celebrating of it was important enough for the guild to take a night off from progress raiding in ICC and spend some time together having fun in other ways.

I like that. Not only was it easier for me to be there since the raid nights are already negotiated as game nights, but it also showed that while the focus of the guild is raiding, the people in it is what is important – it gave me a feeling of being appreciated for who I am (me!) and not just for what I am (a slightly confused resto shammy chucking heals on everyone, an interchangeable cog in the raid machinery).

Already looking forward to the third one!

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It is about time the gnome community is given due recognition! To facilitate this, the Gnome Rights Party – represented here by the guild Single Abstract Gnoun – gathered up for a Gnome Pride march to Ironforge to present King Magni Bronzebeard with a Gnome Rights Charter!

To proceed through the wintry landscape of Dun Morogh with dignity we practised forming an orderly line,

but as orderly lines were not in the charter we soon abandoned that line of though, thus we could proceed any which way we wanted.

Ironforge is huge and there are muchos interesting things to see, to examine, to avoid falling into,

to be aghast at (stepladders to be provided free of charge is a demand in the charter).

Other areas if research included how many gnomes can fit into the skeleton jaws of an old beast.

But fear not, these interesting old fossils did not deter the Gnome Pride Party from accomplishing our mission! We had an audience with the king,

and although he did not say either aye nor neigh to our demands, he accepted the Scroll of Gnomes Rights Charter (sorta) gracefully and we went on about our other businesses!

Like, what to do when you hit the Big City? Take a refreshing dip in a public ablutionary facility of course!

And when we were all clean and fresh again, what was the question everyone asked? Well. where’s the booze, of course!

And luckily the nearest boozer was not very far away!

After downing a few refreshing beverages of your choice it was time for us to go our separate ways once again, but before that we were gonna show the world gnomes are not to be taken lightly anymore by demonstrating on the steps of the IF bank!

Sadly, a lot of the world seem to think gnome punting still is acceptable behaviour, and that parking your big fat elekk on top of us was a hilarious move.

But us gnomes are small resourceful to say the least, and cunningly we snuck into the bank where the big beasts could not follow!

Turns out the big people still can find ways to be rude and try to obstruct the gnomes’ fight for equal heights rights and lower doorknobs, though, like popping a fire elemental in the midst of our formation…

Anyway, the Gnomes Right Party will undoubtedly prevail and soon we will have our own beloved city back again!

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Added: For more coverage on the Gnome Rights March check out

- There ain’t no Gnome like a blogger Gnome at Blueberry Totem.

- The SAN campaign for Gnome Rights part 1 and part 2 at Stories of WoW.

- The Events which shape us at I can do alts, me.

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So of course I joined the train of bloggers and blog readers heading for Argent Dawn and the Single Abstract Noun guild.

My first char there was a troll shaman named Tesz, and she got as far as level 4 on that first night. I really wanted a druid, but I have this aversion against Taurens for some reason, so I settled for a shaman.

The more I thought about it though, the more I realised I really did want a druid, and a feral one to boot. Possibly my recent tanking epiphany had something to do with it, but I do have a deep fondness for furball tanks, they are just so incredibly cute, so I thought what the hell, I’m gonna spend most of the playtime shapeshifted anyway, I will roll a tauren druid!

I figured I could always race change to Troll of I will keep playing her in Cataclysm :P

And then I thought more about it and decided to roll a male tauren. That’s right, a male one! If I’m gonna be big and bulky, I’m gonna be REALLY big and bulky!

So I got me my first ever male toon, a coal black tauren with a broken horn and long braids.

Name-wise, I was a bit torn. Some of the people in the guild use their blogger nicks in some form of other, and I was thinking of using Tessy with some diacritic mark or other just for the ease of recognition (not that many people would know who I was anyway, backwater blogger as I am :-) but I have this thing with names and toons, you know.

My toons tend to take on a life of their own, and I can’t just indiscriminately give them all the same name. Tessy, that’s me! That’s one of my own names and my usual internet nick and it will forever be the name of my first WoW toon, Tessy the human rogue. I could justify creating Téssy the human Death Knight because I could see a story there, how the human rogue got lured into the Lich King’s forces and became a Death Knight, but a Tauren? There was no way I would ever gonna come up with a character sheet that enabled me to feel that a switch from human female to tauren male had some basis in reality without invoking dreadfully painful surgery or really mental magiccery, so I had to find a new name.

Argent Dawn is a role playing server, and the taurens do seem to be lightly based on native americans (to me at least, but I’m not an expert on either taurens or native americans and this should not to be taken for gospel!), so I googled for native american names starting with T – the T since I wanted to keep some connection to Tessy.

And I found Teetonka, which apparently means “he who talks too much” in Sioux, which rang true to a blogger like me (not that I talk that much, but still).

So Teetonka it was, this new huge black bull of mine, but it was not until after I’ve tanked the very first guild run into Ragefire Chasm (more on that later) as I realised how truly aptly named this bull was and how splendidly his name ties in with the Real Bear Tankatude.

To quote the Big Bear Butt,

Perhaps true Bear Tanking Attitude comes from the simple fact that, of all the classes in the game that can tank, we are the only ones that “go commando” into battle, waving our mighty wang in the enemies’ face and screaming “I’ve got a great big tonker and there ain’t a damn thing you can do about it!”

This is so true.

(On a side note, this being my first male tank because, as BBB says, the lady tanks like my beloved durid Joaquime have their own way of doing things so I have never actually waved a mighty wang in battle before, and given what I know about men, I would imagine it really takes balls of steel to wave such a precious body part around in the vicinity of sharp axes and plate clad knees. Bring it on!)

Teetonka – tauren tonk in Single Abstract Noun! That’s me!

And I levelled peacefully in Mulgore, meeting guildies all over the place, when the call went out in gchat for a Ragefire Chasm run.

I was lvl 10 at the time, doing my Bear Form quest, but due to the lack of other tanks or tanking pets of appropriate levels I actually had time to finish off this quest line and learn how to transform into a big horned brown-black bear.

Which is why I found myself outside RFC fifteen-ish minutes later, where I discovered remembered I was wearing trash gear. Not grey trash, but white trash, which was marginally better, but thanks to the skills of  a hot belf chick hunter (to be read a s hunter of the female persuasion and not hunter of chicks) and the generosity of the guildies who had put leathers in the gbank I was quickly outfitted in pretty green Embossed leatherwear, giving me a whopping 471 health and almost twice the armor!

And in we went, me and Chas the hunter (see above), our priest healer Conjaw, the mage Tahliana and the shaman Baksylyk hurrying in a bit belatedly but catching up.

Do you know that at level 10 a bear has two special spells? I had Attack, Growl and Maul on my actionbar, no way of getting up rage before a pull and I was half-convinced we were gonna wipe on the first pull and I’d be running aorund trying to hit things and people would die and people would yell at me and people would drop group.

But then I remembered that this was not a random group, this was a group of bloggers, people who seems to have their heads screwed on straight, simply put: nice people!

So we talked, we joked, we apologized when doing something silly, we worked together, I marked (I marked!) Tahliana sheeped, Chas’s pet offtanked, Conjaw healed us all, Baksylyk totemised, we all pewpewed and we progressed through this adorable pocket MC in the middle of Orgrimmar.

I either bodypulled by inching closer to the mobs – they are lvl 14! – or someone pulled for me and I Growled the mob away from them. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it did not and I had to run around to hit the mob. Sometimes the dps got a bit triggerhappy (or not, they were holding back as it was since I was lvl 10 and they were ranging from 10 to 15) or simply overggroed me and if I was lucky I had my Growl available for a bit of mob ping pong, if not it was a bit of a tank ping pong.

We wiped a couple of times but we cleared the entire place, finished off our quests and I had an absolute blast!

See that bear in the front? That’s me! Mah bear! (With his mighty wang well hidden, I might add,  since this blog is approved for all audiences!)

Looking forward to the next run already!

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I am a member of two different guilds on two different servers.

One of them, my Aerie Peak guild where I have most of my chars and where up until a month ago I was an officer, is a  casual raid guild filled with fun and friendly and nice people.

The other one, my Stormrage guild to which I applied and got invited with my shaman a month ago, is a raid guild filled with fun and friendly and nice people.

Real life constraints (raid end times vs my getting up in the morning times) had made me unable to raid seriously with my Aerie Peak guild for a long time and as I had been working on getting around this in a variety of ways without success and the only way untried was emo’ing my way to making the raids end earlier, I decided to not put my guildies through that since everyone seemed happy with things the way they were and applied to another guild where the raid hours suited me better.

I didn’t make a secret of this, I told my fellow officers about it and when I got accepted I retired as officer, telling everyone why and where I was going with my shaman and I kept all my other chars in the guild.

I retired because it would not feel right to still have a say in what the guild was doing and where it was going when I was raiding with another guild, and also because the months of trying to make things work for me had been rather draining my energy and I wanted to relax a little and not worry about every little thing.

I still play all my chars on Aerie Peak a lot, and I raid with my Aerie Peak guild too when I get the chance. Why shouldn’t I, they are all sweet and nice and wonderful people and really I like playing with them. I would not have applied to another guild had I been able to raid with them more.

Because I like to raid. It is fun, it is challenging and it is social. I like to quest and play solo a lot too, but if I hadn’t been able to raid at all I think I would have quit the game.

So to satisfy my raid itch, I found this Stormrage guild, and you know what? They are also sweet and nice and wonderful people, they dragged me into their chat channels and bid me welcome and didn’t blow up on me when I made mistakes.

I was worried at first, they are focused about their raiding, they do 25mans and hard modes and although I really wanted to try it out I was not sure I was cut out for those challenges. But you know what, I was and it’s fun! Great fun!

So I was happy, getting to know my new guildies on Stormrage and still spending a lot of time with my guildies on Aerie Peak. I was eating my cake and having it too.

I made a point of not mixing the two guilds, if anyone asked me I answered, but I didn’t volunteer any information or told stories from one guild in the other. I do not think one guild to be better than the other, they are simply two guilds with different styles, both good.

Also, I was terrified of my Aerie Peak guildies thinking I now saw myself as teh uber raider, doing all these 25 mans hard modes, or that someone would feel I was trying to poach people from one guild to the other. So I kept quiet and kept having fun in both places.

And then drama flared in my Aerie Peak guild.

The GM left, being badly burned out, and one of the officers and raid leaders left as well, saying he is going to make a new guild dedicated to more focused 10man raiding. Nobody else have yet left but some people have signed off the raid core and it is not unlikely that more people will leave.

The new GM, a lovely and passionate and adorable person whom I really care about and who was appointed officer just before I retired, came to me in her need and asked me to help out, and perhaps even coming back to being an officer.

I would do anything to help my guild and this girl out, she is absolutely outstanding in her dedication and passion and will to make things work and a fun giggly person to boot, I might even consider being an officer advisor or similar for some time til everythings sorted out, if they want me.

But I am not going to leave my Stormrage guild. I told her this, and it was perfectly ok.

And as my Stormrage guild is recruiting and could use a few more people for our coming hard mode attempts, I also told her that I might ask a few of the people who left, if any, to join me on Stormrage. Not asking them before they left, or even hinting that I would ask them, or in any way leaning or persuading or poking someone to leave. Not poaching on my Aerie Peak guild, because the people I’d ask would not be in the guild anymore, but rather poaching on the guild my ex-guildie is forming.

Logical, and clever, don’t you think? Any people leaving my Aerie Peak guild now is not leaving because I asked them, they are leaving of their own accord, right?

I wish it wouldn’t make me feel like such a rat.

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You know one surefire way to make me start to tremble and feel icy clammy slithers of dread down my spine?

It is when someone I know comes up to me and says “we need to talk”. Guess I am one of those that see the glass as half empty because that “we need to talk” opener, however worded, always fills me with apprehension of the bad kind.

So when one of the officers in my new guild whispers me just before raid start and ask if I have a minute to spare because she wants to talk to me you can imagine what happened. Did someone suddenly turn down the temperature in the room?

I know I haven’t been slacking too much in this last month I have raided with my shammy. I have made some a few a lot of mistakes, but I like to think I have learned from them and did not do them twice, and also think that I managed to do a few many some things right from the start.

So this talk a month after I got invited to the guild when I happen to know after having read somewhere that a new members’ trial period is a month should not be something to be afraid of, right? If I sucked badly they would have told me something before, right? Right? Right?

Still, I shiver a little as she asks me how I like it in the guild.

I reply truthfully – I like it a lot! The people are fun and friendly and nice and helpful, the raid leaders are calm and cool and I have a lot of fun raiding there.

And then she replies to me, saying not the words I dreaded but those I hoped to hear – they are happy with me and would like to offer me a full membership!

Yes! Yes, please! Thank you!

I still tremble but as I get promoted from Trialist to Raider in Adrenaline those clammy shivers are now replaced by a broad smile and tears welling up in my eyes and I jump up and down in excitement.

I R Raider!

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Look at these words below and tell me what colour the letters of the words have:

Blue

Green

Red

Black

You got it right at the first try? Congratulations!

Me, I always stumble on this, I start to say that the letters of the word Blue are blue although I clearly see they are red, and it takes an actual effort of will to look past the word itself and say the colour.

Red! The letters are red, dammit!

For me, the words clearly have much more weight than the color they are written in, I have trouble un-seeing the semantic value of the words and see them as colours only, devoid of any other inherent meaning.

I got reminded of this after looking at a few different guild applications lately (both of the guilds I am in are recruiting and new applications pop up every week) – some people write long, well disposed applications which seems to indicate that they have put a lot of thought and effort into it and really want to join, and some people copy-paste the application template and answer in leet-speak and monosyllabics, yes, no, u and i, things like that, and of course capital letters or periods are nowhere to be seen, which seems to indicate that this person wrote the application on his/her 5 minute coffee break and isn’t really that interested in joining this particular guild.

But am I (and many others with me) biased here too, getting fooled by the semantics and failing to see the colours?

Now, I don’t like leet speak. I don’t like people skipping out on capital letters and punctuation marks. I accept that people use it as a shorthand in chats and in forum posts – I even do that myself – but a guild application is not something you need to rush through. I doubt many guilds are that choked for applicants that a few extra seconds spent typing ‘you’ instead of ‘u’ are going to seriously impede your chances of getting invited.

Leet speak is adequate for short fast typing but for anything lenghtier than a few sentences it sucks and I hope your application will contain more than that. You don’t necessarily have to do like me and orate on forever and ever about just anything, but I guess most guilds have a “tell us about yourself”-section or similar in their application templates, and I hope you manage to flesh ut out a bit.

And unlike what many people seem to think, grammar and spelling and punctuation is not something invented by sadistic language teachers, it is actually a very useful tool when you want to communicate with people. The punctuation breaks the information flow up into easily digestable chunks, the capital letters helps by making it easier for the eye to see where new sentences start and also by flagging some words as more important, namely names with their initial capital letters, the spelling makes people understand what you are talking about, is it faces or faeces or fascists?

So, having said that I think it weighs in your favor if you make an intelligible application, if you use the language tools available (including spellchecker) and wrap it up nicely in small easily readable and digestable chunks.

That is only half the work though, the other half is having something to say, and you know what, brevity is not necessarily a bad thing.

But since the application you put in will in many cases be the first contact the majority of the guild have with you and their only way of determining what you are like and if you will fit in the guild it is not in your own interest to try to make your personality show through the lines, to give your possible new guild mates a prewiev of what you are like? Isn’t that rather hard to do that if you limit yourself to the barest minimum?

I think I can get over my aversion to distaste for leet speaks and spelling errors and such if the applicant manages to convey a real interest in the guild, a true wish to be part of the fun and has shown willing to put some effort into it.

In that case I think – I hope – I can see beyond the semantics and actually see the true colour of the application, and in it a hint of the true colours of the person behind it.

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There are many guides and articles out there on how to successfully run a WoW guild or how to be a good guild leader, most of them oriented towards what is good for the guild and how to keep the guildies happy.

But what about you? What is good for the actual person(s) running the guild? What kind of traits do you need to have in order to survive the ordeal of running a guild?

Because running a guild is an ordeal, make no mistake about that. It is time-consuming, most often thank-less and sometimes you wonder why you even bother. And of course sometimes it is a source of fun and pride and joy and happiness, which is why you keep doing it.

So, from my own limited experience of being an officer in two different casual guilds, I have accumulated some wisdom that I want to share with any prospective guild leaders out there.

Apart from the usual management and people skills you will need a generous helping of some more defensive traits as well, like

 

Thick Hide

No matter how friendly the guildies are in general, you will on occasion get attacked by people who think you are doing things the wrong way, or doing the wrong things, with a chip on their shoulder or who think that you just generally suck. 

They may be right or they may be wrong but rest assured they are nasty and viscious. They are not trying to help you solve something, they are just out for the kill and for boosting their own egos by blaming their own failures and shortcomings and mistakes on someone else.

These people will try to belittle you and to make you feel bad, and they will inevitably attack you as a person and not as an officer or representative for the guild leadership.

You will need a rather thick hide to be able to see it for what it is and not take it personal.

 

Infinite patience

When something happens, the shit hits the fan and people start screaming at each other, you will need to keep cool and calm and not get dragged into the fighting yourself.

It is difficult to not go into defensive mode or to start pointing out what people did wrong while glossing over your own actions, but you will have to stay away from that. If necessary, if it is something that involves the entire guild or is very visible to everyone, you can state a small summary of what has happened, making sure to keep everything matter-of-fact and to keep all value-laden or emotional words out.

And then sleep on it. A couple of days or a week. Very few important things need to be decided on the spot so do not, I repeat do not,  make any hasty decisions while you are still upset, do not make any public posts or quit as an officer or quit the guild in a rage over something. This will only add to the drama and make the mending of fences much more difficult.

Give it a few days to calm down, and most likely you will see things differently when you are cool and collected. Everything does not need to be fixed right now, many things will fix themselves with time.

And when guildies whisper you about it, or whisper you about anything, complaining or arguing, be polite and patient but answer neutrally, do not let yourself get drawn into polarised explaining and defending.

Remember, patience is a virtue, not only when it comes to having patience with others but also when it comes to being patient with yourself.

 

Selective Memory

It is all too easy to let the bad parts take over and dominate your impression of the guild leading. After all, the bad parts are the ones most infected and associated with strong emotions and hurt and even tears.

The thrill and joy of downing a boss for the first time can easily be overshadowed by having to resolve an argument over the loot distribution following it.

The satisfaction of slotting the raid groups in a good and fair way can easily be forgotten when someone whines about being benched.

The praise and cheers from your guildies about you and your guild leading can all too easily dwindle to nothing when some malcontent calls you names.

You need to have a very selective memory to not let the good and fun parts drown in the bad small-mindedness, because if that happens you will burn out real fast.

 

These three traits are necessary if you want to be able to run a guild and stay sane in the process.

I am not sure I have them all. Or, more truthful, I am not sure I have enough of them all.

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I love riddles.

I can spend serious amounts of time solving logic problems, puzzles, crosswords, any such things.  And I am especially fond of riddles like this famous Zebra puzzle:

Facts:

There are five houses in five different colours in a row.

In each house lives a person of a different nationality.

These five owners drink a certain beverage, smoke a certain brand of
cigarette and keep a certain pet.

No owners have the same pet, smoke the same brand of smoke or drink
the same drink.

Clues:

The Englishman lives in the red house.

The Spaniard owns the dog.

Coffee is drunk in the green house.

The Ukrainian drinks tea.

The green house is immediately to the right of the ivory house.

The Old Gold smoker owns snails.

Kools are smoked in the yellow house.

Milk is drunk in the middle house.

The Norwegian lives in the first house.

The man who smokes Chesterfields lives in the house next to the man with the fox.

Kools are smoked in the house next to the house where the horse is kept.

The Lucky Strike smoker drinks orange juice.

The Japanese smokes Parliaments.

The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.

Question: Who owns the zebra and who drinks water?

(If you are too lazy to figure this out yourself the solution can be found here.)

Now, some months ago when I was a brand new officer in AT I offered to help out with raid preparations and sorting the groups out, also known as raid slotting. At first, I was really clueless and unsure about how to do this and the raid leaders had to give me a lot of pointers and switch people around to get viable raid groups.

But I got the hang of it eventually, and these days I most often manage to sort our two 10-man raid groups on my own and our raid leaders seem to think they are ok (at least they don’t object too much ;P).

And I’ve come to realise why I really like doing this raid slotting. It is a puzzle, a logic problem!

And it is even more complex than the one above because I have another dimension to keep in mind: time. I need to keep track of past and future attendance, to get a fair and even slotting for the raid groups I am currently sorting. Complex, many-sided puzzle… me likes!

So, check this example out:

Facts:

AT guild raids are held on Wednesdays and Mondays.

These raids’ primary venue is Ulduar.

There are two raids with 10 players in each raid.

In each raid there will be two tanks, three healers and five dps’ers.

Raid Core (RC) players will have priority on going to Ulduar and on raid spots overall these nights, with the option of offering their spot to a guildie or alt if the raid goes to Naxx instead.

Players not in the RC will be rotated in as fairly as possible, considering gear levels and number of past raids attended.

Rotating RC players out of Uludar runs will also be done as fairly as possible, considering past raid venues attended.

Raiders saved from the Wednesday will have priority on the Monday run.

If all raiders do not meet requirements for Ulduar, the group will go to Naxx or other 10-man raid venue. 

All classes should be represented in each group to ensure maximum buffage.

Clues:

Sign-up/sign-off post for Wednesday. (RC signing off due to RL issues, not-RC guildies signing up if they want to come)

Sign-up/sign-off post for Monday next. (See above)

Excel spreadsheet on past raid attendance and raid venues, including RC, not-RC, benched people and replacements.

Question: Which players shall go where tonight?

Solution:

*cogwheels start to spin*

Our raid force consists of 17 people in the Raid Core (people who have committed to raid two days a week) and about 5-10 more who sign up for individual runs with very varying frequences.

So, contrary to the Zebra puzzle, the raid slotting may have several solutions, and there are a lot of “If A Now Then B Next Time” situations as I work it out.

“If I bring my warlock to group A tonight, resto druid X can come heal and next Monday when X can’t make it I’ll bring my resto shaman instead and mage Y whom will be able to come then will pick up the empty spot left by my warlock.”

“Paladin tank Z will be coming on Monday, so if feral druid NN tanks tonight he can go kitty on Monday and I will slot in that new DK tonight.”

“XX, YY and ZZ has been in Ulduar every time they’ve signed up, so since we had to settle for one U group tonight, they will go Naxx instead.”

The cogwheels keep spinning as the raid groups form, as I work throught the clues and check them against the facts.

And then I present the solution, two groups with the right amount of tanks, of healers, of dps, replenished, heroic, buffed to the teeth with every possible buff you can think of, the group outlines for the continued raids already formed in my head.

It is satisfying, and it is beautiful.

And like every other thing of beauty, it is ephemeral and next week I will do it all over again.

You know how it is.

You get home after a long days work and you are tired and hungry and can feel a headache coming on.

So you ditch your fancy office clothes and don your comfy sweat pants and that t-shirt you spilled coffee on last night.

You settle down to tirade your partner about how some wo-worker of yours have been extra annoying today. You are venting your irritation and frustration and maybe you are not exactly fair and just and forgiving, you are feeling miffed and restless and you want it out of your system.

Who is it going to hurt anyway? The only one listening is your partner and he nods and comes with an occassional concurring mhmm at seemingly appropriate times. Mostly.

You would never say anything of this to your co-worker’s face because it really isn’t that big a deal, it is just one little straw in a whole haystack but spouting it out at home will make you able to come back to work tomorrow, cleansed, energized, able to be friendly and polite once again.

Your partner just has to suck it up and listen to you ranting. And he will, because he loves you. Most of the time, at least.

This is in no way the same as thinking less of people. I get mad at my dearly beloved husband sometimes (you know, the one who faithfully listens to me when I am tired/upset/miffed at something) and need to talk things over with a friend to get things in perspective. I would not want him to listen in on those conversations. Same for the kids, I can really blow my top at them and rant about how I am going to swap them for a dog and sell the dog. But I would never do that.

And of course I do not do this all the time. I don’t do it very often, even. But when I do, I expect my rantings to be forgotten as soon as I utter them. They have served their purpose and reiterating them to anyone would serve no purpose at all.

It is the same in a guild or any place where people come together. There will be clashing of personalities, misunderstandings, people feeling miffed, people making jokes that other people don’t find funny. In a game like this, where much communication is written, hastily written, by people from many different countries and cultures,  many not writing in their native tongue even, there will be upset feelings galore. Even in a so called mature guild, there will be drama because people will have different opinions on what is fair, what is polite, what needs pursuing and what can be let go.

You need a place where you can blow off steam or cry a little and people will nod and murmur agreement, knowing full well that once this has passed you will be your normal sunny self again.

If you are a guild member, you have your party chats and whispers and other ways to communicate where noone else will see what you are talking about.

If you are an officer, you have /o and probably a private officers’ part on your guild forum where you unload and where you collect yourself and get down to the serious business of trying to get your guild run smoothly.

And your discussions about things are done partly in the forum, partly in-game, partly on vent, partly on the phone and partly on msn.

Sometimes you agree, sometimes you don’t agree, but what you all expect, consciously or unconsciously, is that these discussions will not be taken out of your forums, whatever they may be, for other people to see and act upon.

Sometimes you discuss matters with a friend or spouse to get some perspective on it, especially if it is a matter that is important to you, but you do not ever expect said friend or spouse to chip in on these discussions to anyone else but you. You expect them to listen to you and advice you so you can handle the situation, you don’t expect them to jump in and pounce and have their say at everyone involved.

Now, consider a woman who has a husband and lately she has been finding herself unhappy in her marriage. The husband looks through his wife’s personal correspondence when he finds her e-mail open one day and finds a letter from her lawyer about a divorce paper she has asked for.

Drama ensues.

The husband is hurt and mad about his wife’s thinking of leaving him, the wife is hurt and mad about her husband’s snooping through her private correspondance.

And the husband chucks his wife and her belongings out on the street.

Two wrongs do not make a right, and while not being straight with your husband if you think of  leaving him may seem like the bigger wrong for many people, to encroach upon someone’s personal integrity like this is a major no-no to me.

Somehow it doesn’t even matter if the wife left the mailbox open and the husband technically had every right to go through it since the program was licensed to him, it would still be a huge infringement on her personal right to read it.

Reading anything that is not meant for your eyes is wrong. Acting upon information you have gotten this way is also wrong.

But acting hastily upon information like this is most wrong of them all.

It leaves no room for reconciliation, no room for thinking things through once more and come to an agreement.

It just slams the door shut with no sight of a window opening.

Now consider the guild again. The social guild where friendliness and having fun together was ranked as more important than “performance” or “progress”.

Consider all these discussions, finished and on-going, all the rants, justified or not, all the general orating that takes place in the officer’s forum, this not-public forum for a few people’s eyes only.

Consider the posts you have made where you have opened you heart to your fellow officers in a matter that was important to you, doing this because you trusted them enough to understand, or if not understand at least not laugh at you or scorn you for being silly. They may have thought you were dead wrong and you might have gotten into one of those no-win internet arguments to be solved only when the initial fluffed feathers were smoothed by some of the other officers, and you would have come to an agreement and moved on.

It is kind of like an on-going multiple person diary.

Dear Diary, today I had to spend 15 minutes explaining to our new recruit why he didn’t get that shiny sword that dropped yesterday, and then another 15 minutes listening to him ranting about the unfairness of this – gief pixelated earplugs.

Dear Diary, I feel sorry for the guildie who drama-quitted last night when I heard his brother had recently been in a car crash which can explain his suddenly volatile temper, shall we throw out an opening to come back to him?

Dear Diary, why did my fellow officer act like that yesterday, it really pissed me off!

Dear Diary, I think we are on the wrong track with this new award system, I think it will lead to jealousy and unnecessary strife in the guild, I want us to go over it again.

What is the defining characteristic of a diary? That’s right, it is private. And because it is private, you can freely pour any emotion or silliness into it, because nobody is going to laugh at you or think you are silly. Or you can keep it rather neutral, avoiding any emotional outbursts, but it would still be your private thoughts, not meant for anyone else than the people you show it to.

Now, how would you feel if someone took your diary, your thoughts, your conversations and your opinions and published them for the world to see? Throwing open all those short and long entries, the things you’ve said and felt and argued for, letting everyone, all those people you meet every day, in to have a peek and giggle and get mad or pity you when you stand there without make-up in your sweat pants and the coffe-stained t-shirt.

Would you feel upset?

Would you feel betrayed?

Would you feel violated?

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?