Posts with tag promotions

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 from No Starch Press.

It's certainly no rare situation when a guild leader has to scale back his or her time due to offline obligations. The right thing to do is appoint someone who's willing and able to cover your own slack. But what if that person isn't even an officer? This week, a guild member wonders whether it's time to panic.

Hi Scott!

Recently I joined a re-roll guild that has been around since the first of January. The premise of the guild is simple: new members can only join with a level one character and must level up within the guild without the help of outside resources. For a while, this worked out well. Everyone became fast friends and the guild grew to be called "the fam." But now we are approaching another month of "re-rolls," and drama has reared its ugly head.

Our GL just announced an impending life change and since then he's been markedly absent from our roster. One member posted on our forums noting that activity had declined, and another responded with suggestions on how to improve the current state of affairs. A few of the officers replied agreeing and disagreeing with various points, but the general consensus was that the members were not happy with things as they were. Before I go any farther, it helps to understand the... unique, way in which our officers are appointed.

Last week, we heard about an incident where a player received a rather hostile in-game mail from an officer after missing a raid following the death of a relative. The issue stemmed from a lack of communication among the guild's officers.

Along that theme, this week's email describes a case where lack of communication -- and some other classic blunders -- escalated into a full-blown drama bomb.

Hey Scott,

So I'm an Officer in a medium sized guild. Our main focus is to simply have fun, help each other out, PVP, raid, and everything else in between. I've only recently become an Officer for our guild as decided by other Officers and the Guild Leader.

About a month ago we got a new recruit. Let's call him Jack. Jack is a personal friend of our guild leader which we thought was awesome. Having at least one person you know in the guild personally has always helped us stay grounded in and out of the game. My girlfriend is a recruit in the guild and one of my best friends is one of the Officers.

So about a week ago, I logged in to see that Jack had mysteriously been ranked up to Officer rank as well. This confused me. I had been in the guild for almost a year before I was even considered for a role of responsibility. I pulled out my phone and texted my Officer buddy, let's call him Bob, to come over. I explained to him that I didn't think it was very fair that Jack got to be an Officer when everyone else had to work their way up in the guild. To my surprise, Bob had no idea about Jack's promotion. There are only 3 people in our guild that can even rank someone up to Officer and that's our GL, Bob, and another high ranking Officer. Bob proceeded to contact our GL and found out that she had promoted Jack without consulting any of her officers first. Now Bob was pissed.

m0rtis has an interesting question over on WoW LJ: should guilds require authenticators on the accounts of everyone in the guild with bank access? Authenticators are relatively cheap, if not free (and still in stock most of the time nowadays), so if you're running a guild and in a position where your bank is important enough to protect, should you be able to require authenticators to keep guildies from getting hacked?

There are a few caveats here that m0rtis doesn't mention, but we will: first of all, there's no way to guarantee whether someone is using an authenticator or not, so while you can make guildies promise, there's no real way to check up on them. Second, not all guild banks get emptied out due to hackers -- many guild banks get ninja'd by someone within the guild, and there's no authenticator that can protect against that. So having authenticators on bank members (or at least having them promise they've got them) isn't 100% protection. But it is something.

After reading Outland Bound's amusing tale of an encounter with a level 59 "Recruit-A-Friend" player wearing level 26 pants because of the triple-leveling benefit, I got to thinking about the gameplay ramifications of this promotion. As a marketing professional as well as a student of game design, this promotion seems to me at best a bad idea and, at worst, a game-killer.

As tight as the Blizzard team claims it is, and as much as it professes to act only in the best interest of gameplay, this promotion may have been poorly conceived. It seems like the Marketing Department had a great idea to accomplish two goals: (1) acquire more accountholders and (2) encourage current accountholders to stay. However, I wonder how well this idea was vetted by the game design team. My guess is: not well at all.

For those of you who are interested in satellite television (and in the USA), DIRECTV is currently running a promotion for new customers: if you subscribe to DIRECTV and activate your account, you get a code good for 11 months of game time. In case you don't already have a copy of the game, they'll also give you a code good for upgrading a trial account into a proper account, which also comes with a free month of game time. So that's 11 months for existing WoW players, or a copy of WoW and twelve months for new players.

Note that this offer doesn't apply to existing DIRECTV subscribers, and also that they won't give you a BC upgrade code, so you'll have to buy that yourself ($40) if you don't have it already. But if you're looking to set up satellite TV service, you should jump on this -- even at the cheapest subscription rate (buying six months at a time), 11 months is worth $143. What's better than WoW? Free WoW.