Posts with tag voting

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.

As some of the insane political tactics in recent weeks remind us, we're less than a month away from election day in America. On. Nov. 6, nearly all Americans will have the opportunity to vote. Guilds don't often work that way, but should they? This week, one officer wonders whether his new guild leader is giving too much voting power to the masses.

Dear Scott,

I recently stepped down from being the leader of my guild due to obligations outside of World of Warcraft.

Before I stepped down, I placed a new system in effect that is very similar to a city council at the request of the existing members. I selected our five current officers and myself as councilmen.

I appointed a trusted friend of mine as the new guild leader/council chairman, and he has some pretty colorful ideas as to how our guild's structure should work.

My friend feels that our guild should allow members who have been active to become councilmen, like us, giving them an equal vote on all issues.

Quite frankly this scares the heck out of me.

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 few weeks ago, I wrote a column about the high rate of burnout among officers and guild leaders in particular. Lately I've been hearing about a lot of situations where guild leaders have stepped down or outright vanished. Not all such decisions are the result of burnout, of course. Sometimes, real-life obligations get in the way.

Regardless of the reason, losing a guild leader can be absolutely devastating to a guild. If the community was already on the rocks, the disappearance of a guild leader can be the last straw. How can the remaining officers make the transition to new leadership with their guild intact?

We asked you to show us your plushies and many of you sent in entries to both the Plushie in Captivity and Plushie in the Wild contests. We have narrowed down the finalists for you to vote on in each category. Once the votes have been tallied and the winners announced, we'll put all of the entries in the galleries for you to enjoy.

You have until Friday, March 19th to vote for your favorite in each category. Galleries and polls are after the break.

We've got not one but two different screeshot contests that have shown up on the tip line lately. First off, our friend Mep, who runs WoW Screenshots, has gotten his contest all up and running, and you can go over and upload a screenshot or vote for the winners over there right now. His contest runs through September 20th, and the prize is a mousepad with your winning screenshot printed right on it. Pretty groovy custom prize -- we can't wait to see what kinds of screenshots rise to the top.

And Chris also emailed us about a new site he's started up called Epic Screens. It's another screenshot database (a little competition is a good thing, right?), and he's hosting his own best screenshot contest, with two copies of vanilla WoW on the line (perfect, he says, for Recruit-a-friend). He doesn't have a final date (or any other official rules posted), so we're guessing you just head on over there and submit some shots, and if you win, he'll let you know. Sounds like fun -- let the screenshot competitions begin!

WoW.com readers, it's up to you to decide the fate of Turpen the Gnome Warlock with Choose My Adventure. Help test the site's new features by participating in this event, casting your vote toward the many aspects of Turpen and following his exploits on Alex Ziebart's WoW.com profile!

It hasn't quite been a week since I started this adventure, but Tuesdays (or around there) will be the days you'll be seeing on-the-front-page updates for Turpen the Gnome Warlock from here on out. For everything in between that, keep an eye on my WoW.com profile. Whether you do that by bookmarking my profile or adding it to your feed, that's completely up to you! So with that said, what's gone down since this project began?

What's Old is New Again
Since the character I was told to roll was a Gnome, I naturally started leveling in Dun Morogh. Despite how many Alliance characters I have, this is probably the starting zone I've done the least. I never really liked it, and to be completely honest... I don't normally do the Gnome/Dwarf thing. I don't really like them much. I love the aesthetics of Draenei and Humans, and I think the Human lore in WoW is awesome. I generally stick to those. Dun Morogh was a relatively fresh experience.

An industry survey put together by GI.biz has voted WoW's own Activision Blizzard as the most likely videogame publisher to succeed in 2009. Not that surprising -- not only do they have the Warcraft behemoth under their belt, but Starcraft 2 is rumored for a release this year, as is a sequel to 2007's best selling game, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and a Guitar Hero spinoff called DJ Hero.

And who knows what BlizzCon will hold -- even though we're only now reaching the steps of Icecrown, the time is ripe for Blizzard to start hinting at content patches that come after 3.1, or maybe even expansion number three. Blizzard and their parent company at Activision are on top of the world right now, so there's no question why 30% of the industry folks surveyed said they'd have the biggest 2009 around. We can't wait.

[via Joystiq]

On New Year's day supporters of Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul gathered on the Whisperwind (US) realm in World of Warcraft to march across Azeroth and show their support for their candidate of choice. The rally started outside Ironforge with approximately 240 players (with 400 members in their RP Revolution guild) and traveled to Stormwind, Westfall, Booty Bay, Ratchet, and finally Orgrimmar. And if you didn't make it, you can still experience the rally vicariously via our image gallery below (and if you did make it, feel free to send screenshots to us at aroundazeroth@wow.com!) or video above!

To the best of our knowledge, this was the first political rally to be held in World of Warcraft -- and looking at their numbers it seems to have been a successful and upbeat gathering (or at least it was upbeat for the participants). Will this event help Ron Paul's chances in the election? It's hard to say until the votes are cast, but the uniqueness of the event is causing it to get a lot of media coverage. (And no press is bad press, so long as they spell your name properly, right?) Read on for impressions of the event.

One of the choruses we heard at BlizzCon was that Blizzard knows about the AFKers in Alterac, and justice will be handed out. The plan, we've been told, is that it will be handed out in the form of a no-honor debuff, that breaks on combat. In other words, if enough people report you for sitting in the Peace Cave, you don't gain any honor until you get moving and start fighting.

The problem, however, is that we don't know exactly how many people it takes to hand out that debuff. Thunderbein tells the story of an AV where only 20 out of 40 players were actually playing, and so if the number of players that have to "vote" for the debuff is anywhere over 20, no one's getting the debuff in that BG. Hortus replies and says that it's not as high as 30, but how high is it? Can you give someone the with two people? With ten?

And then there's the question of whether we should know at all. What if we learned it was 10 people (in the interest of clarity, I should stress that we don't actually know what it is yet), and a group of 31 AFKers joined up to the BG? Then, nothing is solved at all-- those guys could sit in the Peace Cave all they wanted and gain honor the whole time.

The AFK debuff sounded like the best solution at BlizzCon, but every system can be gamed. Blizzard is going to have to be really careful about setting up the numbers on how the reporting works. And because we'll likely find out whether they tell us or not what the number is, they'll have to watch out for other ways AFK players can get around the punishment.

I hope everyone had a blast participating in this week's Caption This contest! However, as of Wednesday night at 11:59 PM EST the entry period officially closed, and I'd like to thank everyone who participated for making it a success! (And if you missed this week's contest, never fear, there will be another one starting on the Monday after next!) But now it's time to pick a winner -- the staff of WoW Insider has narrowed hundreds of entries down to ten finalists, and we want your opinion on which captions for the above screenshot are the best of the bunch. The winner will be walking away with a 60-day gamecard and second place will snag a More DoTs t-shirt from J!NX. So come on -- let us know which entry you liked best (polls will be open until 9am EST tomorrow), and on Monday we'll announce the winners!

Update: The voting period is now closed -- we'll announce the winners soon!