Posts with tag leadership

Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook.

The good news for raid leaders these days is that so much help is coming from patch 5.4, if what's on the PTR is any indication. Flexible raiding could be a lifesaver for guilds who stalled out in today's challenging normal modes. Virtual realms could inject new blood into every realm. The Throne of Thunder raid should see an across-the-board nerf from the patch, too. With all of these changes on the horizon, what raid leaders need to focus on right now is holding on and keeping their teams intact.

The bad news is that no one knows when the patch will drop. We are likely at least six weeks away from 5.4, and probably longer than that since Blizzard has new systems to test and a new raid to tune. This week's email comes from a raid leader who isn't sure he can make it:

Hello Scott,

I am the current Raid Leader of a 10 man raid guild that considers ourselves to be progression-focused, semi-hardcore, or whatever you want to call it. We raid 3 nights a week for 3 hours a night, keep logs of all our runs, and really push to be successful. In the past, this worked out fairly well for us, as our guild maintained a top-10 place on our server according to wowprogress.com all through tiers 12, 13, and 14. However, since the release of MoP the members that made up the original progression team have been slowly bleeding away for one reason or another. At first, these losses could be absorbed by the extra standbys on our roster as well as a few people that swapped from our more casual 2-night-per-week team. Eventually we had to start recruiting out of guild in order to fill our raids each week. Generally speaking, for each player we lost the replacement we found was of a lesser caliber, whether it be in skill, gear level, or dedication.

With the release of ToT and the difficulty of certain bosses (Horridon for example), our progression has begun to seriously stumble.

Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook.

Just when I think I have Blizzard figured out, they throw us a curveball. Only a month ago, I made the case on the Starting Zone podcast that raiding had evolved into three difficulty levels, and those levels could be compared to the easy, normal, and hard modes that most single-player games offer. I wrote in a column that normal mode raiding should now be labeled "guild raiding," because it took a certain level of coordination to succeed at that level. Normal raiding is no longer PUG friendly.

I said on the podcast that Blizzard is still figuring out just where the difficulty of normal modes should lie on the curve. It seemed that once their encounter designers figured out the appropriate tuning for the three modes, that is what raiding would look like for all foreseeable upcoming tiers and expansions.

As it turned out, Blizzard had a new raiding system hidden up their sleeve the entire time -- a system that few could have predicted. Let's look at the potential impact of this new way to raid and how your guild might need to adjust.

Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook.

Some people became guild leaders because they had a vision for a new type of guild or a new policy. Some just saw a need for better organization among a group of friends and took up the mantle. Some are elected. Some volunteer. Others have the position thrust upon them.

Such is the case for the author of this week's email:

Hi Scott,

I was recently given the GM position by my former GM who also happens to be our raid leader. He's cancelled his subscription as he's not enjoying the game anymore, and left everything to me. His leaving has caused other members to leave as well, for similar reasons. I can't fault them for not wanting to stay if they aren't enjoying the game.

I initially feared these people leaving would be the death of both the raid team and the guild (we are small, with few people playing other than to raid), but other members of the guild have stepped up and begun to help with recruiting to replace our missing raiders, and I am very appreciative of their efforts.

So my greatest problem at this point is that I never wanted to be GM or raid leader, and now I'm both.

Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook.

Breaks are good. Everyone needs a break from something that they do on a regular basis: work, school, sports, etc. Raiding is no different. Raiders need breaks. So do roleplayers, arena teams, and achievement junkies. Whether it's one person stepping away from WoW for a little while or a team taking a week or two off from group activities, this kind of short-term sabbatical is a healthy practice.

As an officer, breaks can be dangerous to your guild if you handle them poorly. Take a lesson from the Horde: Thrall needed a break and now Durotar is a war zone. Let's look at the right way to manage it.

Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook.

Mists of Pandaria has given us some fantastic raiding experiences -- it's easy to forget just how many activities this expansion currently offers. Much of this new content is either group-oriented or can become group-oriented if you want to make it so. With Mists' third content patch set to go live tomorrow, now is a great time to look at some of the many guild activities that are possible in this expansion. Here are nine ideas that go beyond raiding.

1. Earn your Stormbreaker titles.

Some of the achievements for this meta can only be accomplished solo, but many of them are much easier with some help -- and some all but require it. The summoned elites for It Was Worth Every Ritual Stone, for example, mostly require a group to take down. Some classes can't solo Tak'u with all of his powers active if they can't dispel his robust HoT for Our Powers Combined.

Ready for RAAAAIIIIDDD?!?ing is rough to solo. It can be accomplished most easily right after a server reset, but with a raid group you skip that hassle. Every roach squished counts for everyone in the raid.

Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook.

Mists has delivered new content faster than any WoW expansion to date. The days of waiting six months, eight months, or more between major patches seem like a bad memory now. With patch 5.3 likely to drop in the next few weeks, that will mean we've had an average of one patch about every three months in the wake of 5.0.

In years past, officers had to steel their guild for long lulls, which always seemed to land in summertime. They had to make backup plans to account for long absences from players who just couldn't stand to run the same raid one more time. Guilds who couldn't find replacements sometimes found themselves closing shop instead.

In 2013, that age seems far behind us. However, the accelerated content has brought with it a new kind of burnout instead, and it's one that officers and raid leaders should keep in mind as we move deeper into Mists.

Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook.

A few weeks ago I had a great chat with Mick from The Starting Zone podcast about casual raiding in Mists of Pandaria. We both agree that normal mode raids have become more difficult than in the last two expansions. The existence of LFR has emboldened Blizzard to tune normal more tightly than they have in recent years.

If you're in a casual raiding guild that is having trouble in normal mode, here are five tips on how to improve progression and morale without pushing your raiders to the breaking point.

1. Talk about your lack of progression. For an officer, silence is deadly to morale, both during raids and after. In that silence, you know that people are whispering to each other about what's going wrong, or griping about other players. Maybe they are just sitting there stunned and disappointed, unable to muster a coherent thought. In any case, it's bad.

It's up to the guild's leadership to break the silence. During the raid, talk about what's going wrong in a constructive way. Don't forget to talk about what's going right, too. Afterward, create a thread on your forums to debrief. Solicit suggestions and strategies. Encourage a dialogue. Let people vent a bit, if they have to. It helps relieve the pressure -- just be sure to moderate and make sure the discussion stays civil.

Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook.

Guild rosters inevitably become bloated over time. They fill up with inactive players or throwaway alts that current members haven't dusted off for years. This week, a guild leader asks when is the right time to remove characters from the roster -- and whether we should even do it at all.

I run a casual guild. One of my officers puts it thus, "We're a raiding guild that acts casual." We have a decent roster and a great group of people, but we also have a lot of people who join, show up for awhile and then disappear. Some come back in six months and some, I have no idea if they are coming back or if they are gone for good.

I like my roster to reflect an active guild, which we are. My membership officer sent me a roster list and I'm in the process of going through it for names that haven't been played in over 6 months. We've been doing a purge like this for the last 3 years and, every time, there's always some consternation about removing names from the roster.

Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook.

We've all been there. You invite new people to your guild. They seem like they'll be a great addition to the roster. They ask for help and you gladly offer it. They ask for more and you give more. Then they promptly ride off into the sunset. This week, an officer wants to know how to avoid being the victim of these players.

Hi Scott

We're a friendly, mainly social guild with helpful officers and roster. We occassionaly meet some seemingly cool, nice people that I or the officers warm up to immediately, chatting in vent, etc. They might jump right in to be active in guild chat, and otherwise give every indication that they are mature, responsible and ethical. Every now and then I guess I'm too trusting, and extend help to some of these people in the form of time, guild bank items, and even gold, and then I log in and see they've left the guild without so much as a thank you. Mind you, some of these people have accepted some rather expensive help from us. So I've decided that no matter how nice you seem, or how much any of us may like you or know you, you will have to have been in the guild a certain amount of time before getting any bank items or money, etc. say, over a certain value maybe. I'm just not sure what the specifics on this rule should be, or what else we should do to protect ourselves from these kinds of people. Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks,
pj

Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook.

Ideas for unique guild concepts are hard to come by. This week, a guild leader who thought she had a winning formula finds out that no one is interested. Let's look at what she came up with and how we can rework her ideas to entice more recruits.

I have recently transferred from Nazgrel to the RP server of Moon Guard. I did this with a certain goal in mind, to establish an all Goblin Trade Guild. I have hit a crucial snag however and can't seem to generate any interest in my Guild idea. One major selling point of my Trade Guild would be that we would hold a monthly [Bazaar] in which other Guilds would be encouraged to join in and sell their wares along with us. Using [Gryphonheart Items] we would create an item catalog and haggle over prices. I was hoping that this would help revitalize the role play community. Nothing I have tried has worked to recruit Any suggestions?

@jagoex The off-spec loot option in 5.3 might help a bit. Some future ideas may help a bit. How do we get more people to tank/heal?

- Bashiok (@Bashiok) April 8, 2013

The key is, of course, the final sentence. How does Blizzard get more people to tank, and indeed, to heal? It seems to us here at WoW Insider that a key part to answering that question is to establish what's stopping people tanking and healing in the first place. Hence the question in the header, why don't you tank or heal?

Why does it matter? Well, for those who don't tank or heal, there are currently rather long queues, in the Raid Finder as well as the Dungeon Finder. If whatever's stopping people can be dealt with, and more players take on these roles, then queue times will drop for everyone. WoW Insider has some theories about potential things that are stopping people, but do tell us what you think.

I never thought I'd be writing an OQ column about intellectual property, but here we are:

Hi Scott,

I'll make this short and to the point, because I'm honestly at the end of my rope with just how disrespectful, inconsiderate, and shady some folks who play this game are.

Without going into too much detail, we removed some folks from our guild a few weeks ago; they tried to poach our members and couldn't, so they ended up stealing our charter instead.

I found out because I noticed them advertising in trade chat, so I scoped their website out. Lo and behold, there were MY words I worked so dutifully on, for many hours, over the course of a few weeks, with my co-GM and other officers. This charter was the result of almost a year's worth of questions, concerns, comments, and experiences we all have shared since forming our guild, and to see another guild just blatantly rip it off was infuriating.

Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook.

This week's email comes from a player whose guild recently made the always-difficult, always-drama-fueling decision to form an A team out of their raiders. Is creating an A team the right move? When you wind up on the B team, what's next?

Hi Scott,

I'm a member of a medium-sized guild that has been running two raid teams simultaneously up until recently. These teams weren't fixed; group composition was mixed up every week. I rather enjoyed that, as it meant that I got to play and interact with lots of different guild members, and there was little room for cliquishness.

However, the other day guild leadership announced that this was all going to change. Going forward, most of the officers will be in a fixed "progression team" while the rest of us will be left to our own devices. There should still be enough of us left to form a second team, but we'd pretty much have to make it work ourselves.

Loyalty, and its limits, are pretty big underlying themes in WoW's current story arc. As of patch 5.1, the WoW poster child for complex loyalties and their consequences is Aethas Sunreaver. Aethas has a divided heart. He is a blood elf (and was, once upon a time, a high elf) and as such, he is loyal to Quel'Thalas. But he is also a citizen of Dalaran, it's his adopted homeland, and he also wishes to be loyal to Dalaran. These are loyalties he has tried to juggle for three expansions now, and they finally, inevitably, came to a head. Aethas' failure in patch 5.1 lies in either his own arrogance or naivete, that he couldn't see the truth: in this day and age, in Azeroth, those loyalties were irreconcilable. Once Quel'Thalas had decided to ally with the Horde, a longtime enemy of Dalaran, it was only a matter of time before that political division bore consequences for individuals. Aethas' own refusal to choose is ultimately what led to his choice being forced.

I feel for Aethas, in this sense. I sympathize with his impulse toward reconciliation. Why shouldn't he have tried? History was on his side. Quel'Thalas and Dalaran have, in fact, been traditional allies for quite a long time, much longer than they have been enemies. I don't think his hope was unreasonable, but it did turn out to be impossible. There is just too much bad blood - on many sides - for any sort of truce to exist at this point, and it will likely be a very long time before those wounds are healed enough for bridges to be rebuilt. Sometimes compromise just isn't an option.

Fair warning: there are minor spoilers for patch 5.3 below the cut.