Posts with tag punishment

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.

Like any group that runs an organized activity, raiding guilds need rules. Rules define expectations, set boundaries for behavior that might cause problems, and establish consequences when a member hurts the team. The latter part is often tricky. The week's email asks, What do you do when someone breaks the rules?

Hello,

I have a question about guild management.

Coming into MoP raiding we have afew new people and we've written up our rules on the forums such as being on time, gemmed/enchanted/flasked, etc to make it clear to everyone what we expect from our raiders. One challenge that we currently have is coming up with consequences for breaking these rules. Our guild roster isn't large enough to always bench someone from coming to raid and while we're all gearing up denying someone gear seems to just make things harder for everyone else overall. If occurrences are excessive we will recruit to replace the person, but otherwise we need some good consequences for rule infractions.

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 this spring from No Starch Press.

Who deserves to be an officer? Guild leaders struggle with this question quite a bit. It comes down to this question: In your guild, does the officer rank exist to reward players or to give them responsibilities? In other words, what is the purpose of the officer rank? Later, I'll talk about the two most common purposes. But first, this week's e-mail comes from a player who feels he deserves a promotion to officer.

Hey Scott,

Dodge the drama and become that player everyone wants in their group with the Drama Mamas. Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are real-life mamas and experienced WoW players -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your server. We're taking your questions at DramaMamas (at) WoW (dot) com.

Pictured above is just some of the torture devices on the prison ship Success. The writer of our first letter is not looking to send a guild "criminal" on a tortuous journey across the globe to a penal colony, but he is looking to exact a harsher punishment than the one already meted out. Our second petitioner is tortured about being considered weird for playing the opposite gender. We won't torture you with any further delays before letting you at the drama.

Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.

All the great new content in Wrath has brought a number of my guild members back to the game. It's great to see their names lit up in the roster again. But I imagine that, in some guilds, players have come back that no one is particularly happy to see logging in again. This week, one reader wants to know how to handle a member that annoys just about everybody.

Hey Scott!

I'm an officer in a pretty big, casual guild (roughly 100 people). One issue that [. . .] has caused quite a lot of discussion in officer chat and forums alike is a few of our members. These members are disliked by many people in guild, due to their overall behavior, as in repeatedly asking for the same things in chat, and complaining during raids (among other small things, that over time drives people crazy).

Now, this have gone on for a fairly long time, and we have come to the place where most officers just want to get rid of them. Problem is, they have not actually broken any of the rules. They are close to at many times, but they never actually cross that line and do something that is clearly against the rules. We don't have a "no annoying people rule."

We have now experienced three full seasons of Arenas in World of Warcraft. The numbers are being crunched and we shall see the winners of end of season rewards shortly. Most of this season has been plagued, like others with dishonesty among some of the players. Blizzard took action a few weeks ago to combat win-trading and point selling with temporary account bans, personal rating requirements for match-ups, and penalties for queue dodging. It seems Blizzard is not quite done meeting out their punishment.

On an alt named Wtfkalgan, a player noted:
A team recently got reset to 1500 (questioning the judgment of the GM involved isn't the purpose of this thread). The email states, "Note: This also disqualifies the above player from any end of season rewards." Does this mean the player involved is completely ineligible for any end of season rewards, or just from the end of season rewards for the team that received the action?

Belfaire, a CM , clarified that this does exclude the character from receiving all end-of-season rewards. This may be an isolated incident, or it may be the beginning of another wide-spread crackdown on arena cheating. This may also include stripping honor from battleground afkers.

I can't wait to see how this plays out tomorrow and when rewards are handed out. I'm thinking it's going to be epic. Thanks for the tip, Feller.

Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.

"You can punish bad behavior in your guild by having a leader talk to the person causing trouble."

-- WorldofWarcraft.com's Game Guide

Blizzard's official site can help you do many things. It can help you communicate your grievances to a customer service representative. It can help you figure out when the Darkmoon Faire will be setting up camp in Mulgore. It can even help you spy on the competition. But it is remarkably ill-equipped to help you run a guild. So where do you go for a little advice when drama explodes in your face like a backfiring Goblin trinket? For myself, I've basically had to wing it. But I'm here to make sure you don't have to. I'll discuss some ideas about how to punish guild members in a moment. Since this is my inaugural column, however, allow me to introduce myself first.

Hi. My name is Scott and I'm a GL. In fact, I've been a GL of a single WoW guild for longer than just about anybody. My guild was founded in January 2005, about a month after the original game's launch. Because I was the first person of our group of friends who bought the game (and therefore had the highest level character at that time – a mighty level 40 or so), it fell to me to set up the guild. It was my first time running a guild in an MMO. My previous leadership positions included senior patrol leader of a Boy Scout troop and editor-in-chief of my college's literary journal – not exactly good preparation for the sheer insanity that can confront the leader of an online guild.