Posts with tag personality

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, available now from No Starch Press.

A question for the readership: How important is it to you that the players you raid with are interesting and engaging people? Is it essential, or merely a bonus?

This week, a raid leader complains that his guildmates are boring -- to the point that he's considering leaving the guild altogether. He wants to know what he can do to inject some much-needed personality into the guild.

Hi Scott

I read your column regularly and find it very insightful. I have implemented various pieces of advice within my guild to varying degrees of success so thank you for this. Now however its my turn to pose a question.

How do you create a guild with character? Let me explain this a bit with some history. I have been raid leader for my guild for the last 7-8 months and in the last 2 I inherited the GM tag as he didn't have much time to play. I was practically doing all the work anyway so this wasn't an issue. My issue is two fold, firstly I don't think I really like anyone in the guild apart from one person. And secondly it seems like I play with a bunch of automatons. This isn't to say I dislike anyone but its just they all seem to lack any sort of character and wouldn't say boo to a goose!

All the World's a Stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players. They have their stories and their characters; and one player in his time plays many roles.

Throughout my career as a roleplaying columnist on WoW.com, I've been talking about roleplaying as a way to tell stories, but last week a comment by Zombie, as well as those made by a few others on the same topic, caused me to think about roleplay stories in a new way. Perhaps what we roleplayers do isn't actually storytelling so much as it is character development through interesting and somewhat disjointed anecdotes.

There's really no beginning, middle, or end to a roleplayed character in WoW. Instead, what you get is a mishmash of events and experiences, which you may then string together into a story in your mind if you like. But even if you don't, you can see that most of us don't really expect for a narrative to develop from a clear beginning, through various plot developments, and finally lead into an exciting climax. There is something else roleplayers want to get out of their experience, even if many of us have trouble articulating exactly what it is.

Ready Check is a weekly column focusing on successful raiding for the serious raider. Hardcore or casual, ZA or Sunwell Plateau, everyone can get in on the action and down some bosses. This week, we get psychological on your posterior.

We're all familiar with caricatures of raiders, from the aggressive aggro-hungry warlock to the placid, gentle priest. Generalising to quite this extent is perhaps a little unfair, but it's certainly true that many raiders share common personality traits; by looking at research into personality and learning types, we can understand our raid force better and perhaps even find out a thing or two about how to manage them.

Have you ever wondered what makes your raid group tick? Why people with seemingly conflicting behaviour and goals get on just fine when there are dragons to be slain? Psychology research explains it all.

All the World's a Stage is your source of roleplaying ideas n' stuff. The usual columnist is grateful to Alex and Matt for covering for him the last couple weeks while he got ready to defend his MA thesis.

Getting into character isn't all that easy. First of all, as Matt demonstrated last week, one must have the desire and the gumption to just do it. You can't sit back and say, "But I don't know how to do it right!"or "But what if people don't like my roleplaying?" or any other excuse like that. You have to put your fingers to the keyboard and just start playing your role. Whether people like it more or less depends upon a bunch of things, including your skills and knowledge about how to do it well, but first and foremost it depends on your willingness to go out and try things out -- then look back and learn from your experience. You won't stop having problems and making mistakes, but you will get better over time.

Today I'll share with you one idea I found that helped me a lot with a problem I was having: when I found myself having a bit of trouble "logging in" to a particular character's personality, I found the concept of the "Character Diamond" to be extremely valuable in pinning down exactly who this character is, how she would respond, and what it feels like to be inside her head. This concept was originally thought up by a screenwriting teacher named David S. Freeman, but it has gone through a bit of modification to suit the MMORPG world. So, with permission from the folks at Dramatis Personae who first taught me about it, I would like to sum it up for you here as a starter's guide and reference for making character diamonds of your own.

I have a friend who doesn't play WoW, but his roommate does. As a psychologist, my friend is a more astute observer of individual behavior than I am. At lunch one day, he theorized that we tend to play World of Warcraft with the same attitude that have in the real world. On this surface this statement seemed to be correct. People in game and in life vary from kind, helpful souls to nasty boorish trolls.

I like to think of myself as WYSIWYG (what you see what you get). I try to portray myself online with the same values that I feel define me as a person. I set goals and work hard to achieve them. I consider myself a good friend. Every once in a while I go too far and take on the role of martyr in both game and in life. This is something I'm proud of; on the contrary, I wish I could stop myself from doing it.

Right now WoW stands as the big boy on the online gaming scene. It will take quite a bit to close the gap between it and the other -- some could argue the inferior -- titles. Mark Ward at BBC News wrote an article on the subject of competition to World of Warcraft last week, and it raises some interesting issues.

Mark interviewed Funcom game director Gaute Godoger, the man responsible for the upcoming Age of Conan MMO. Gaute believes that competition is needed for WoW because it has such a stranglehold on the market right now. Normally, I would have to agree with him, since competition breeds innovation. But in the case of Blizzard, they are competing with themselves for innovation, which is why WoW constantly comes up with new and fresh concepts and content that other games strive to copy. From where I sit, the company appears to be driven by the internal desire to put forth the best game possible, and so I see little in the market today that would have the potential to actually compete with their ethic.

When I started playing WoW two years ago, my first character was a warlock. Not understanding what the warlock class was all about, I built myself a bright sunny blond little lock, and quickly tired of the class. My next character was my mage, and I took to that class quickly and easily, having played similar characters in Neverwinter Nights. But even the mage didn't truly fit my personality. Sure, she is my main character, she's my level 70 and I am proud of what I have accomplished with her. I just don't think I am a mage at heart.

I actually think I am a priest. Yesterday I even took the personality quiz on the World of Warcraft MySpace, and I came up as a priest, albeit an undead one. Since then, I have been thinking why is it I love playing my priest so much. She's only 32, doesn't have all the spiffy gear my older characters have. The conclusion I came to is that the priest class fits my personality best. I wouldn't call myself a pacifist, but I really don't like fighting all that much. Given a choice to confront a mob or go around, I choose the second option. Now that I have rolled my priest, I notice that I am much more content sitting at the back of the raid filling up those green bars. I get a feeling of accomplishment knowing that I am helping keep the group going.

Thinking of all of this made me curious. I'd love to know, what classes fit your personality best? If you were scanned into the game tomorrow, where would you fit in the world? Or, is there no class that truly fits you?