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.