+Last night, my guild wiped all night to Archimonde. 4 hours of wiping. It was dismal. We wiped because we had smart players die to falling damage. We wiped because we had smart players die in a fire. We wiped because we had smart players fail to execute a plan they know. Every guild has nights like this. Every guild has nights when things simply don’t click.

Last night after our raid I stayed up and talked to my partner in crime, pimp daddy Mikedabutcha*. He was demoralized. He should be as main tank and co-GM he felt a lot of responsibility for our wipe night. He felt like maybe he should have been able to do something to fix it, stop the wipes. Either as MT he should have tanked better, or GM he should have led better. I stayed up and talked to him. Do you know what, last night he tanked like a champ. And as a leader, I couldn’t ask for a better partner. He pushes us to be better, he’s stern and he motivates them. As a counterpart to my carebear, he’s perfect. And even more than that, he respects my leadership style too. I calmed him down and cheered him up, that’s what I do. I’m the carebear after all.

I also stayed up and talked to 8 of my 25 raiders. After that raid, they took a look at what they’d done, and they identified what’d they done wrong and what they were going to do better next time. I didn’t go to them. I didn’t ask them to. They did it because they are good raiders. They are good players. They didn’t like to wipe. They knew they could do better. On Sunday when we raid again, I know they will.

Last night sucked. God 4 hours of wiping. Even I, the eternal optimist, was discouraged. But there’s something more there. Last night in my group, the party chat was positive. Great job on timing that tremor totem. Great decursing, no one even had a tick of damage. What amazing healing, we never feared doomfire deaths. Our role channels, what a great job decursing tonight, you’ve really picked that up. 4 hours of wiping and no one pointed fingers. No one logged off in disgust, no one gquit in frustration.

Last night I replaced one raider. He stood in 5 ticks of doomfire, not the dot that is applied, 5 ticks of standing of the fire. Lots of people made little mistakes, but standing in fire, for that long… I don’t know, maybe he was having a bad night. God knows he wasn’t the only one. I pulled him out. He didn’t argue with me, he just logged off his main and onto his alt. I assume he was frustrated, he handled it well. It doesn’t change the fact that he stood in 5 ticks of doomfire, but he handled it very well.

Last night, everyone was demoralized, frustrated, at their worst. Even at our worst, I think our guild shows it’s strength. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not happy with last night. I think it highlighted some of the weaknesses our guild has. As a carebear sometimes I’m misunderstood as being content with our weaknesses. It’s not that, trust me, I don’t want nights like last night again. It’s just that even in last night, I can find the positive. Either way, last night happened. We can concentrate on the negative on what sucked. Or we can learn from it. We can take joy in our strengths and use those to learn from last night.

Last night didn’t demoralized me as much as it demoralized the others. But last night, tired me. Last night, many of my raiders, needed me to be a carebear. To help re energize them. Sometimes energizing others though, even though it’s second nature to me, leaves me drained. Today, I’m tired. Tonight, I rest. Tomorrow, I roll up my sleeves and I start fixing what last night showed me was broken.

*Name changed to protect the not so innocent

Okay, I get that I care a bit more about the player behind that computer than the average player, but I believe that spending 20 hours a week raiding with the same 30ish players, even the most hardened of curmudgeons is bound to make at least one friend. Let’s face it we’re all people who’ve made the decision that we prefer 20 hours of sitting in front of our computers and moving our pixels around over going outside and and doing whatever it is people do when there isn’t electricity nearby. That gives us at least one point of commonality that we don’t share with the majority of people.

So, I’m a social person. I like people. In my guild, I function as the care bear. The hard fact of the matter is though, I like some people better than others. For lots of reasons. Some people are funny, others share a common passion other than gaming, one member of my guild is my fraternity brother (oddly enough she’s a chick too). Now I’m not saying that if my dog got run over by a car I’d call these people in tears, but I can relate to them as people, not just raiders.

As a GM of a raiding guild, it’s my job to lead a stable guild that progresses through content as quickly as a team of people at this skill level can. I’m supposed to put forward the efforts to better my existing players and recruit stronger players so that I can to consistently raise the skill level of my guild. I have to ensure that we have enough raiders to always have the composition we need, while also ensuring that people aren’t forced to sit on the sidelines too often. I have to manage shared resources, so that we always have what we need to face the next encounter but also ensure that our resources aren’t wasting away in our coffers when they could be benefiting our guild. I have to ensure that every guild member feels like their opinions and needs are being heard while also ensuring that the decisions that we make benefit the guild as a whole and not just individuals. I have to manage our raid time in a way that allows us to gear up and also make progression. (I’m brushing over these with a single sentence now, but I’ll probably blog about all of these topics in greater detail later on) As a GM I’m required to evaluate people based on their contributions to our progress and reward them in kind.

For me, as a person, this presents the problem of forcing myself to value people based on things that are contrary to my instincts. As a hypothetical example (I respect my raiders too much to evaluate them, even anonymously, in a public forum. Also an extreme example makes my point more clear), I have a raider that shows up about 95% of the time. He generally performs above the average skill level. He’s also an asshole, he’s curt and rubs people the wrong way. He holds bigioted opinions about women and minorities, that while he doesn’t express in raids, affect my perception of him. So this raider fucks up and lets a construct in the raid. As a GM I need to be objective about his performance and place it context, at 95% attendance, even a skilled player is going to fuck up sometimes. As a person, I’d really like to rub his nose in it. Ha ha asshole, I bet a woman could do it better! 95% of the time, I let the objective GM win, bite my tongue and mock him mercilessly in my mind. 5% of the time I mess up. Hey, if he can fuck up I can too, right?

Conversely, I have a hypothetical raider who has a career as a doctor caring for children who are dying of cancer. He’s compassionate and gentle with his guildmates and everyone loves being around him. Unfortunately his raid attendance is 50% because those kids don’t have the courtesy to die outside of raid times, and even when he can make raids, his weary mind is unable to process Blizzard Raiding Rule 2b - “Don’t stand in shit that hurts you.” Now this raider and I spend many happy hours outside of raid times discussing the world. I really enjoy his company but his poor performance in raids, and poor attendance makes him a detraction to our progress. So now this raider fucks up and I’m forced to address it. Now as a person I don’t have the same urge to rub his face in his mistake but as a GM I am required to address his poor raid performance. I let the objective GM win, while we may allow him to keep his raid member status, he’s our last pick for raids, every time. Should I strip his raid member title, yeah maybe, but Sara the person just told Auzara the GM to lighten up, it’s a game.

So as a person I struggle with those two combinations where my responsibility as a GM and my normal human instincts challenge one another. But as a GM the other two combinations become far more challenging. What do you do with a player who you do not enjoy and sucks as a raider. It’s an easy answer right? Wrong!

A universal rule of raiding is everyone thinks they are a better raider than they are. When you fuck up, you know why, and it’s easy to excuse it. One time I let a tank die because someone walked in the room and handed me a sandwich. I did not tell the whole raid that the tank died because I was handed a sandwich. I don’t think they would have been as amused as I was. However, I also didn’t allow the sandwich incident to affect my opinion of myself as a healer. I believe my sandwich experience is not unique. But you have no way of knowing about other people’s sandwich issues. Therefore from your limited perspective, you tend to see yourself as a better player than you are. For me the GM it doesn’t matter, why you caused the raid to wipe, it just matters how often you cause raid wipes. Chronic sandwich incidents or extra chromosome, you still added 20 minute to our boss learning time.

So, if you know I don’t like you as a person and you don’t know you’re a bad raider and the GM tells you hey, your raid performance is terrible, pick it up or your raiding position is in jeopardy. You’re going to assume, you’re being treated unfairly. I’m mean sure you wiped the raid last night, but the Oskars were on. That’s excusable.

When a person you don’t enjoy is performing badly as a GM you encounter two problems. 1) You have to do an internal check. Am I reacting to this person’s poor performance or poor personality? 2) You have to be able to support your decision to the objective, or even biased member. Poor raid performer poor personality guy isn’t going to say “Hey, my GM has a valid point, I do suck” and suddenly stop sucking. He’s going to say “What a bitch” and grumble in the ear of whichever of the guild members are still willing to listen to him. You need to be sure that you have objective reasons to support your decision so he can’t convince the membership that you’re behaving irrationally.

Finally, the good player whose personality you enjoy. This player is a godsend. He shows up every night fully potted, full consumables. He’s your number 1 dpser, main tank or something. He’s read every strat, and yet never pipes up in vent unless you ask for feedback. He farmed all his mats for Shadow resist gear the first day you set foot in BT. Outside of raid times, you spend enjoy spending time together pvping and discussing your favorite TV show that you both watch. This is the perfect raider and every thing is great, right? Wrong. Every time you make a decision that benefits this player, you are again faced with the same two problems. 1) You have another internal check, is this decision truly in the best interest of the guild or am I being influenced by my friendship? 2) You have to be able to support your decision to the objective or even biased member. Not every member of your guild can be an all star. Every time you make a decision to reward your strong raiders you are setting them apart from your average raiders. When you do this with someone you like, you are going to be accused of favoritism.

I’ve used extreme examples to illustrate my point, but the less extreme realities of the people you raid with make the problems of interacting with these four combinations of personal reactions and professional obligations harder to pinpoint. It’s easy to find yourself slipping into reacting as a person and not as a GM. It’s impossible to completely remove the human element of your reactions to people. I believe to be a good leader you have to a least make yourself aware of how your human reaction impacts your GM decisions. The right balance of person and GM is different for everyone and every guild.

This is my first post. This is where I’m supposed to tell you who I am, what I’m going to talk about and why you should read what I have to say. For the most part I’m going to skip that. You’ll find out enough about who I am if you decide to read what I have to say. I’m going to talk about what’s on my mind. I’m a varied person who wears many different hats in my life. I’m going to talk about balancing the many roles I play, but mostly I’m going to talk about leading my wow guild. I’m not going to tell you that you should care what I have to say, because frankly I don’t care if you do.

I’m writing because when I started leading guilds I did a lot of reading. A few talented people shared their insight via blogs, forums and one on one conversations. Those people gave their time and energy and that allowed me to be a better leader. I hope that my energy may provide the same benefit to a new leader in training, or maybe just provide insight to an established leader. In addition, I’m currently in the process of writing a book on guild leadership. While the book is factual and not based too much in my personal experiences, I believe documenting my day to day joys and frustrations will help keep me in touch with my personal experiences as a GM. Finally, I’m writing because I believe as a reasonably articulate, female leaders of one of the top 1000 US guilds, my perspective and experiences are fairly unique in the gaming world, and may prove to be interesting to at least one other person.

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Now that we’ve all held hands and had our touchy feely moment. I’m just going to delve into what’s on my mind, and many other blogger’s minds, right now; the looming 2.4 patch and it’s impact on raiders (more specifically my guild). As a guild that has 3 bosses left in the current content the patch does not come as quite the relief to me as it does my Illidan farming brethren. As a little history, my guild was founded on 6.26.07 (the core policies and name recycled from an EQ2 guild I led.) Being established so far after the expansion’s release, we’ve spent a lot of time playing catch up with guilds that had a head start. The idea of Sunwell coming out and having a chance to start fresh on new content on par with everyone else is really appealing to me. However, it now feels like we’re racing the clock if we want to have that chance before the expansion. My peers who have farmed the crap out of BT and Hyjal, are loading their guilds up and take them to the PTR to learn the encounters in Sunwell. While I’m watching that opportunity for an even start diminish, I am trying to evaluate how valuable that opportunity is to me. Borrowing wise time management practices from the trail blazing guilds, I could drop Hyjal from our raiding roster and devote our focus to these last 3 bosses (2 really if you don’t count Mother of Shadow Resistance). However, it feels like dropping free epic night from our raiding week may be a hard sell and may be demoralizing. If we were leading the pack and eager to be the first guild that killed Illidan, it’d be a no-brainer, but how valuable is this even start to me and to the rest of my guild?

Outside of my Sunwell thoughts, many of my raiders found the 2.4 release notes demoralizing. Removed attunements means soon every guild, that has 25 people and has mastered Blizzard Raiding Rule 2b - “Don’t stand in shit that hurts you,” will be killing Rage, Supremus and a few other BT/Hyjal bosses. T6 badge rewards and increased availability of epic gems and badges to purchase those rewards also mean that the gear advantage that a raiding commitment brings has diminished (or nulified to the extremist). As a leader I try to promote the perspective that the raiding is it’s own reward. In the long run, the only thing you really get out of nightly epic battles is the experience of raiding. Eventually Sunwell will come out, eventually the expansion will come out, and the gear you have now will become obsolete. So if you’re raiding for gear alone, you’re really not going to get any further than a hamster in a wheel. That being said, even I get a kick out of knowing that there are very few priests that have the spirit that I have (yeah that’s right I stack spirit, wanna fight over it =P). There’s no denying that outgearing the majority of your peers makes your little pixelated head swell with pride.

Finally, tis the season. Valentine’s Day, or as one of my raiders puts it “Singles Awareness Day,” is a somewhat painful reminder to many gamers of the real life sacrifices they’ve made in order to devote time to our raiding habit. It’s that nasty time of the year where everything is damp and dreary and spring has not yet sprung. People are grumpy, tired and disillusioned by the news of upcoming changes to our raiding world. Even with fairly rapid recent raid progression, I still find myself searching for new ways to energize and encourage my raiders.

So that’s what’s on my mind. If you have thoughts or ideas, feel free to share them. If you’re bored, feel free to cease peeking into my mind.