Reflections From The Pond

Posts Tagged ‘friends’

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!

This is for Gnomeaggedon.

Late was the hour in which Jools the priest choose to alleviate the Lovely Charm grind and once again get out in the world and meet new people while at the same time help defeat evil in the world, thus being ultra-efficient. She queued up in the LFG tool as dps and lo and behold, mere minutes later she was invited to join a party of bold adventurers.

They ended up in the Pit of Saron. Jools normally don’t particularly fancy that place, but since she had of late turned to the shadowy way of doing things she was not overly concerned…

The tank was a DK and his first words were:

hi all

first time tank

The group leader, a shaman, asked the DK if he knew the tactics for the boss and the DK said:

no

sorry I’ll leave

The shaman stopped him from leaving and then asked him not to pull so he could briefly explain a few things.

Our healer, a paladin, piped up saying he didn’t really want to waste time in this pit, but the shaman said let’s just try and the paladin stayed, saying he was gonna see how things turned out.

With the shaman’s encouraging words of

as long as you keep aggro you should be fine

we set out through the quarry.

First group speed bump passed! Nobody left although we had an unexperienced tank in our midst!

After the first mob was killed the paladin had inspected the DK and wondered why he was signing up to tank when he was in full dps gear, without even a slightest hint of defense. The shaman suggested that the DK go put Stoneskin Gargoyle on his weapon instead of whatever rune he had on, and the DK obeyed, promptly put up a Death Gate and returned within a minute or two, and we all waited patiently. Nobody dropped group!

The paladin was working himself up, wondering why the DK didn’t queue as dps when he apparently had no tank gear at all and initiated a vote to kick the DK.

The vote was not passed, the DK stayed and so did everyone else!

The shaman politely asked the paladin to not drama, that a DK in Frost presence and with the Gargoyle on was not that bad, if he knew how to play.

In the paladins defense, I must say he did a very good job healing the DK, snatching him back from the clutches of certain death a few times, and it can’t have been an easy job, especially since the DK did not have the best of tank skills.

At the first boss, I got aggro from the adds and since I for some reason had thought it a good idea to have Dispel Magic on my usal Fade hotkey I took a bad beating and died. The others managed to get the boss down though, probably mostly thanks to the healing skills of the paladin who kept the DK and everyone else alive.

Tank plate loot dropped and the DK won it, thus getting his first piece in his tank set.

The paladin said something about the difficulty of healing the DK and the DK started mouthing back to him, but the shaman told them both to calm down and they did! None of them left!

Another vote to kick the DK was initiated and not passed this time either, and still noone left! We were all still grouped together!

The ambush and the rock-dragging mobs were cleared without problems, and then we faced the second boss, the one with the bombs and the pursuit and the poisons. The tank in his one-piece tank set tanked it, the paladin healed him through it, and the rest of us dps’d the boss down!

We had one casualty, the 4+ k dps mage kicked the bucket at the end of the fight, but by then the boss was so far gone the rest of us could easy kick him over the edge and down him.

And then we faced what many people think is the hardest part of the instance – the multi mob packs on the slope up to the tunnel.

There on that slope we wiped, and there on that slope our group fractioned.

The mage who so far had said nothing dropped group without a word, and a few seconds later the paladin was gone too. We had faced two bosses down in a fairly ok pace and with no wipes, but on this first wipe they chose to drop out.

No hard feelings though, the paladin had done a great job healing in what must have been hard circumstances and smiled when complimented on it.

The shaman re-queued us and we waited for a few minutes for replacements. I was starting to wonder what took so long, we had a tank of sorts in our group after all, when I saw that the DK had checked dps and not tank. I commented on it, and the shaman was just about to requeue when two more players joined us, a druid healer and another DK tank.

The new DK tank had only a few k more hp than the old one, but he had a tank set and the slope was swiftly cleared. We even had time to squeeze in a few jokes!

We wiped two times in the tunnel but there were no expletives, no ffs!, and noone dropped group! We all corpse ran back and rode the way to the tunnel together, stopping outside it to buff up and get ready.

The druid said he hoped the pretty cloth boots would drop from the end boss but was a bit sad the he could not need on them due to Blizzard’s loot rules. I said I didn’t need them so I would pass and not greed or DE if the dropped, and the shaman said he would do the same.

We cleared the tunnel and engaged the Scourgelord. He took a while to get down, we did not have the most uber dps in the world, but he went down eventually. The boots did not drop for the druid, but he got the staff as an offspec.

And then we all said thanks for the run and went our separate ways.

So this is the tale of two pugs – the one that did happen and the one that did not, the one where the group fell apart on any of the numerous occasions it could have, on any of the vote kicks, or the wipes, or the inspecting of players, or the waiting around, where it could have broken up but it didn’t.

So, shaman of awesome from Eonar, I really hope I will meet more people like you, patient, kind and helpful. You kept this group together through the rough start, you calmed the ruffled feathers and you saw it through to the end.

Thank you.

A long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, when I had just started playing WoW and was taking my first stumbling steps out of Northrend Abbey into Elwynn Forest I remember meeting a weird-looking player in Goldshire whose name tag above his head was not green or blue but yellow. He spoke unintelligible things and challenged a lot of us lowbie players there to duels.

My son, the resident WoW expert due to his having played way much longer than me, told me that it was a Horde player and his nametag being yellow meant that I could attack him if I wanted to. He recommended me not to because if I were to attack, the Horde would retaliate and I’d be dead.

Later on, I learned that not attacking Horde only protected me from being killed if I were in the Alliance starter zones, and that encountering any Horde outside those areas was likely to be associated with one or many corpse runs. Playing on a pvp server but sucking at pvp ftl.

Sometimes you saw Hordes amassing at Thorium Point, a 40-man raid assembling to go for Molten Core or Blackwing Lair, and as a little Alliance rogue you quickly rode away.

The Horde was truly alien. You could emote at them but you could not speak with them, and it was not until Outland opened up and Shattrah became the new central town that you actually saw Horde on a regular basis and for longer than the usual few seconds that was my estimated lifespan when meeting them out in the great wilderness.

On a normal server the Horde are even more remote. You know they are out there, but as you not normally are flagged for pvp you don’t really see them. When I transferred from my original pvp server to Aerie Peak it took me a long time to realise that half of the players outside Karazhan using the summoning stone were actually Horde, so conditioned was I to interpret blue or green name tags as friendly and only react when I saw a red tag.

It’s the same in Dalaran. The Horde are there but you don’t really see them and you don’t interact with them at all.

You do Wintergrasp battles against them, you do the other bg’s and fight the Horde, perhaps you gather up to kill the Horde leaders for that black bear and the achievement, but apart from that, they might as well be thin air or insubstantial ghosts or not even there, so little do they affect your actual everyday game play.

My son played a gnome mage on the same pvp server I started on, and one of his friends played a Horde char of some class or other. Sometimes they’d meet up in the wilderness with headsets on so they could communicate and go slaughter boars or help each other with quests in that area and just play a little together. Being on a pvp server, it was generally a pain when they ran into some other player who often would attack whomeever was of the opposing faction, sometimes despite the hurried attempts to explain that this was a friend and not to be killed, please!

Seems friendships across the faction barrier were destined to be hard to maintain.

And then I read something in a post by Sudiin over at (Gnome) Tank for Life which intrigued me. He was talking about alts and how Blizzard seems to go out of their way to encourage people to create and play alts, and he speculated a bit about the future in asking:

With people running out of new avatars to play will they finally break down the Horde-Alliance social barrier?

Now, as readers of this blog probably can guess, I think that would be wonderful.

I know there are a lot of old bad blood between the two factions, but if Horde and Alliance already can co-exist in the cities and even fight battles together (Veteran of the Wrathgate anyone?) I see no reason why we should not work on bringing this peaceful co-existence out in the world.

Even before Shattrah and Dalaran, the druids of both factions managed to co-exist peacefully and share Moonglade, why should the other classes and other races not be capable of this?

I know it would take a lot to turn the other cheek, to decide to if not forget then at least forgive old wrongs and grievances, to make that conscious effort to start anew with a peaceful and patient mind. But would it not be worth the effort?

And while the faction leaders negotiated and signed this peace treaty, and would be expected to make their best effort to keep it, there would still be contested areas where battles and skirmishes would be fought, like in Alterac Valley and Arathi Basin, – maybe this way you would find out if it’s really true that the Horde always pwn Alliance in bg’s.

And there would still be disgruntled faction members out in the wild who would fight this peace and attack what used to be enemies on sight, world pvp would not go away just because a new and fragile peace treaty exists.

Think of the possibilities it would open up!

You could learn the languages of the Horde and go visit their cities as a tourist and you’d (probably) be safe as long as you didn’t wander into the really dark alleys.

You could run dungeons and raids with Horde that were friendly to Alliance, or possibly friends that play Horde.

You could try out all the quests Horde-side, all of Alliance could help out and perhaps finally Mankrik could stop looking for his wife.

Making the Horde and Alliance green to each other would not be necessary; they could still be yellow to each other (on pvp servers) and thus attackable. But if you worked hard you would gain rep with the Horde factions, going from neutral to friendly to finally Exalted and then you would be green to everyone, friends with everyone.

Friends with everyone – wouldn’t that be awesome?

I got a Purple Ribboned Holiday Gift in the mail some days ago, seems a guildie of mine had been overcome by the Winter Veil spirits, or had possibly drunk too much of it, and had sent all his guildies a gift!

Upon opening it, I found it contained a Club!

To me, this is the essence of Club-ness.

It is a piece of sturdy plank, considerately wrapped with cloth at the handle end so the wielder won’t get any splinters in her tender hand when whacking it around, and – like an afterthought – a huge nail is hammered through the bad end of it for extra efficiency.

This is a club made for one purpose – to hit people and to make sure they stay hit.

It is what I have always wanted! :-D

Candy, the shadow priest (mostly) of Bible of Dreams came up with this meme and tagged me a while ago. She managed to hit the busiest time of the year for me, and what time I’ve had to spare has been mostly spent playing the game or sleeping, so I am very late in answering this. But hey, better late than never, right? :-)

So thanks Candy for being interested in how I think about my year in WoW and here we go:

My Warcraft Year in Review

1) What did you do in the World of Warcraft in 2009 that you’d never done before?

I joined a guild which focuses on raiding and actually calls itself a raid guild – not a casual raid guild or a casual guild that raids or any of those fuzzy labels that can mean just about anything, but a raid guild.  And I like it!

2) What was your favorite new place that you visited?

Since I have been so slow in replying to this patch 3.3 have been released and I get to answer: Icecrown Citadel! 

Probably due to the fact that it is new and fresh and I have so far only seen the first wing of it, but how can you not love a place where you get to fight like a pirate and board ships? 

Had I been quicker to respond I would probably have said Ulduar due to the epic beauty and grandeur of that place.

And I really like the woods of Grizzly Hills.

3) What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?

This is a hard one, since I really don’t feel I’ve lacked that much in 2009.

I’ve had fun, progress, achievements, I’ve made lots of new friends and met old ones again, I’ve had a little drama but things have worked out fine in the end.

So, 2010, surprise me!

4) What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Sadly, I don’t have any major milestones either.

I got three chars to 80 (my warlock, druid and priest, the shammy dinged 80 in 2008), I made a DK, I’ve seen all dungeons and raid instances on one difficulty level or another, I have explored the world, I’ve done a lot of fun things that all are achievements of one kind or another, but nothing outstanding!

5) What was your biggest failure?

Probably getting extremely bored with holiday dailies and stopping working towards the proto-drake. But hey, it’s a game right? I was a bit disappointed with myself for letting it go but also a bit proud that I didn’t kept doing something I found frustrating and extremely boring for days on end just to get me a new shiny set of pixels to ride on.

On a related note, not getting the Raven Mount to drop for my druid after 30+ of Sethekk Halls solo runs also feels a bit like a failure although I know the droprate for that mount is abysmal.

6) What did you get really, really, really excited about?

I see a pattern emerging… I got excited about a great many things, I got really excited about many many things and I actually got really really really excited about quite a few things as well…

Things like tanking Naxx10 the minute I hit 80 with my druid and pulling it off with her still wearing half her lvl 70 raid gear, doing Flame Leviathan on the day Ulduar was released, doing Flame Leviathan with all four towers up months later, all of the Ulduar hard modes, running the Northrend instances with my shammy without a clue what to do but still working our way through them and having so much fun!

In general, my biggest thrills over the year was from doing things, not by getting things.

7) What do you wish you’d done less of?

Ambling around really bored in-game not knowing what to do but still not logging out to take a walk in the woods or go to the gym or read a book or anything really except that mindless staring at the screen. Didn’t happen often but too often for me to feel comfortable with it.

8) What was your favorite WoW blog or podcast?

I didn’t listen to any WoW podcast and my favourite blogs are all linked on my blogroll. I really do wish I had time to read more blogs more often.

9) Tell us a valuable WoW lesson you learned in 2009.

I didn’t learn it per se but was often reminded that in WoW as in life it is not worth it to get annoyed or irritated at people, that you will feel better yourself if you try to see people in a benign light and always interpret things for the better. The many pugs of different varieties I’ve been in (5mans, 10mans and 25mans) have had ample opportunities to get irritated and annoyed at people, but life (and WoW) gets better if you just don’t let it get to you.

Smile, and they will smile at you, and if they don’t, well, at least you are smiling yourself :-)

10) Folks I’m tagging to Complete this Meme

I am not one to tag folks but if my blogging guildies Jacx, Zetter, Larísa and Bouncy Gnome would like to complete it I’d be most interested to hear what they think about their WoW years of 2009. And of course if anyone who reads this is interested too please fill it out, and please make a comment on Candy’s blog where she started the meme when you do!

I was debating whether I should title this post the more catchy “How To Get Four Achievements On A Single Raid Boss”, but I settled for a slightly down-toned variety.

The well known quote of “Standing on the shoulders of giants” refers to how you can make intellectual progress by using the understanding gained by notable thinkers who have gone before you, to how much farther you can actually see from a slightly elevated position.

In WoW, most of us are standing on the shoulders of someone, perhaps not giants but gnomes, dwarves or maybe orcs. Very very few of us set out into the world intent on discovering it all ourselves (at least not after the first toon levelled to 80 :P).

We seek out information about where Mankrik’s wife can be found (yes, even I have done that quest on a lowbie Horde alt) instead of scouring the Barrens on our own and we happily use knowledge gathered by others to further our own understanding of the world and our abilities.

There is not that many of us that run into a new dungeon totally oblivious to what may come. Instead, we prefer to study videos made by those who really did go in not knowing what to expect and we read up on encounters and what information has leaked from various sources before we even enter the big ugly mofo’s lair.

When we see the big dragon lying asleep, curled up on the floor of her cave, we know that she has a nasty breath and a tail that will swipe if we come too close, we know she will fly up after a while and breathe lethal fire down upon us and we know her eggs had better be left untouched or we may regret it.

We have an inkling of what to expect and we work out a way to get what we want, sometimes by slavishly following someone else’s tactics, sometimes by tweaking those tacticts to suit our own group and abilities.

We are standing on the shoulders of gnomes, elves and orcs. We use the knowledge and information and tactics and understandings gained by the people who have gone before us.

Nothing wrong with this of course.

I don’t need to prove the Pythagorean Theorem myself before I use it – I can see the proof and understand it and gladly use it.

If I am going kayaking a weekend I want to know beforehand how to get up again in case the kayak does a flip and I get submerged, I don’t want to work it out on my own hanging upside down in the water.

If I am going to be part of an attempt to do the Assembly of Iron the hard mode way, ie killing Steelbreaker last, I want to know what I should look out for and how I should try to react to the various bad things coming my way.

(Now, those of you who know me know that I’ve usually been very keen on wanting to experience new dungeon and raid content fresh, of not knowing what to expect when I entered, of finding out myself why doing certain things are good and some are bad.

I have been very stubborn about this, but lately I have somwhat reluctantly acknowledged the fact that information does not always diminish the joy of the play.

Because while there are thrills and joys to be found in exploring and discovering things, there are also thrills and joys to be found in the execution of things, of having a theoretical if not yet practical knowledge of the steps of the dance and how to follow in your partner’s lead.

And, of course, the fact that most people I run with would already have a good knowledge of the fights and me refusing to listen did only leave me the noob might have had something to do with my changing my views on this as well :P)

This possibility to stand on other people’s shoulders is also why a generally bewildered and somewhat bedraggled raider like me can snag four achievements in a single boss kill. I was standing on the shoulders of both the people I’ve raided with before and the people I was raiding with that night as I went from doing 10mans the normal way to 25mans hard modes without going through any intermittent stages.

It makes me feel grateful and indebted and humble – regardless if you’re doing the social variety or the more hardcore one raiding really is a team effort and I hope that I can pay it back and that someday someone else will be standing on my shoulders.

So, still suffering from the dazed shock known as “getting back to work after the summer vacation” I was browsing through my feed browser today and happened to come across a post at the Pink Pigtail Inn about the coming cross server LFG.

My heart and mind did a double beat – this is by far the most awesome news I have heard about what is coming in WoW!

Deathwing ripping the world apart, the Greymane wall breaking, Worgen druids, bah, what is all that compared to being able to play with friends on other servers?

I was originally playing at a pvp server. It took me what? 5? chars levelled to 70 before I finally acknowledged that world pvp was not for me.

I folded my teepee and transferred to a pve server, where I have played happily ever after since.

But of course I miss playing with a few of my friends back on my old server, and miss a few of those who have moved to other servers than mine.

But this looks like I’ll I be able to play with them again and not just by doing lowbie alts together on some god-forsaken servers!

I really hope Blizzard will make this EU-server-wide and not restrict it to battlegroup-wide only.

So, dear Blizzard, if you open up this cross server LFG and make it possible to play with old friends again, I promise I will never ever utter a word of complaint against anything you do! I promise I will see the possibilities only, not the obstructions, and if I ever rant about anything it will be in a happy and tongue-in-cheek way.

Maybe Paynne the warlock will finally be able to play with her knight in shining armour again!

I can’t wait!

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.

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?