In the wake of changing guilds, I wanted to take a bit of time to sit down and really think about what happened and see the ripple effects before I really talked about what I learned. Its now been over two weeks since I left my previous guild. Since I left, my previous guild has become a shell of its former self. A lot of very good players have been scattered to the wind. Some of them went places I’d rather they hadn’t. Some of them have been left to drift in a quagmire not sure where to go. Others have picked new directions.
Lets start with something I’ve learned about burn out. Just a fair warning… if you’ve ever seen a bear wall… this is going to look an aweful lot like one.
Understanding Burnout
There have been times in my past where I’ve burned out and just didn’t want to play the game. This isn’t one of those times. Yes. I know just by reading my words over the last few weeks, you can tell a discernable stress level built up. You can tell a level of frustration that built too high.
Burn out can be a lot of things. In this case, it was a situation that I’d seen before, and it was playing itself out again. I wasn’t going to sit in the same situation twice and watch it happen again. I was burned out on seeing the situation. I enjoy being a raider. I enjoy raiding. Hell I’ve enjoyed the hell out of spending the last two weeks raiding just a couple of nights a week.
Will I get back into raid leading? That’s probably a stupid question. Yes… I almost guarantee I’ll do it. The draw of Ice Crown will be too hard for me to resist. Seeing new bosses and designing raid strategies around those bosses? Um yeah… Its just how I’m wired. I recognize that.
Learning Point 1: Casual Raid Team Design
I’ve actually seen this repeated in previous guilds. I should have learned from my second guild given their past history, but as several famous people have said…. “Those who ignore the past… are doomed to repeat it.”
Can Casual Raiding Work? Yes… yes it can. Honestly I’ve read enough of other people’s sites to know that they are extremely casual people making raiding work. However… casuals and serious raiders DO NOT MIX well. Just by watching other more casual guilds, they go in to have a good time. I do too, but its for different aims and ends. For some raiders, they just want to go, mess around in Naxx for a couple of hours, or they want to play in Obsidian Sanctum, or try to kill Onyxia. Regardless of their desire, they aren’t there to worry about if the final boss goes down. They are doing it to have fun.
Its a fine way to play the game. I think its a great thing that Blizzard has done for them. They can go mess around with Molten Core. They can play with any of the old raids. They can PUG. They can generally just go and have a good time and they never sweat how far they’ve gotten. Will they see Arthas? Yeah… yeah they will, but they know it may not be till they are 85…. or even 90 or even higher. For them, they know its going to take a bit of time to get there, but they aren’t in a hurry. Sunwell? sure… someday.
As soon as you get a few “serious” players in the mix, you’re kind of doomed to some kind of split. I admit that in this expansion, I became a somewhat more serious player. I had a very good team of players, and from the start, I wanted to make a run at Arthas. I still believe my original team could have made it to Arthas. They have the skill. They were finesse players who honestly learned fights at an extremely rapid pace.
The problem really came that as we progressed, the team really started to fracture long before I had left. Its not the fault of anyone person in particular. Yes… some people will point and say it was so and so’s fault. That’s not the point. What happened…. happened. Now its time to learn and move on. What really came to our failing point I think was that we had a lot of people moving in different directions. Some people really wanted to be pushing the limits. They were very good players who had logged a lot of time on their characters. They were putting strain on the tanks to keep up who had very little access better gear.
Some players wanted to do 5-7 days a week of raiding. Some people wanted to be doing 1-2. Others wanted to do 3. Others wanted to be not raiding at all. Mostly, everyone had different wants and needs and unlike my hope that we had built a program based on concensus of direction, we had a lot people who all started in the same spot with the same goal, but as they progressed, their original direction kind of scattered. The speed at which they wanted to approach the goal was different as well.
Learning Point 2: Understanding Support Systems
I have this great failing in life. I just kind of jump in and do things. Not to take things over from other people, but I’ll jump in on things that aren’t getting done and help out. As one person told me, I put too much on myself. My wife recognizes it in me. My friends recognize it in me. Its part of who I am and how I’m wired. I guess you could say I’ve been that way for a very long time.
Back when I left my second guild, I said I had to make a decision. I had to decide if I wanted to form my own guild or if I wanted to join someone else’s. At the time, my wife and I spent a lot of time talking it over, and we reached the decision that with a lot of the thing going on with my son at the time and my family, I didn’t have the time to dedicate to getting a guild off the ground myself. So I made a decision. I’ve had plenty of people tell me it was probably the worst one I’ve made in a while, but… of course there’s the whole hind sight thing.
At the end of the day, what I really learned is that for me to be a raid organizer, I really need a check/balance type person. I need that person who is there every day, who hears me bitch and moan and complain and hear what’s stressing me. I need that person who will listen to me and then translate that and bring it forward to the guild for digest. Someone who can then help formulate those small stresses into a game plan of attack that the entire guild can work on to fix.
Basically… I need a support system of someone who I can vent to regularly. I’m not talking about just officer chat style venting. Basically… what I almost need is my wife to be a guild master for me. She’s certainly not affraid to take those vents and recognize when I’m just not dishing things off. Or recognize when its time for me to attack a problem more head on. Basically someone to advocate for me.
You remember that whole should I have formed my own guild? Hind sight baby… hind sight…
Learning Point 3: Raid Leader As Life
“One thing you taught me is that who the guild master is doesn’t really matter if you like the raid leader.”… Random DPS
“You realize you’ve been the defacto GM since day one right?”… Random DPS
The above two quotes/paraphrases really hit home for me. We were a casual guild, but what happens is that in many cases, if you have a group of raiders who become more serious inside of a casual guild, their fun, their lives in many ways revolve around the raid leader. I didn’t want to admit it. Hell I didn’t even realize. I figured I was a regular guy. I was just like everyone else. I just happened to be the guy with the plan.
What I’ve learned in the wake of my old guild going boom is that for a lot of people, you become central to their fun. If you aren’t prepared for that, it can be a daunting prospect. In my mind, when I made the decision to remove myself from that raiding situation, I was affecting me. What I discovered is that suddenly, there were 8-11 orphaned people sitting there staring at the void I’d left in a mixture of shock and awe.
People don’t want to have the stress of leading. When you get that rare person who wants to do it, they kind of latch on and follow. We had three people we’d picked up who came to us. One was an ex raid leader. He specifically didn’t want to raid lead. He didn’t even want to be a main tank. He’d rather be the off tank. He knew what went into it, and he wanted to be a follower. Why? Because its a lot of work and lot of stress some days.
Its easier at times when people find someone to follow to just latch on. Its hard to describe how that weighs on you over time. I was a bit more oblivious than some I think, but what I’ve learned in the wake of my leaving is that in many respects, if you’re the raid leader in a casual guild, the raiders make you a bit more central in their lives than the GM.
That’s not to say the GM can’t be a very important figure, but in many ways, I was the guy who always said hi. I like to chat it up a lot in guild chat. So I’d carry on conversations with a TON of people. In many respects, I became a central figure for a lot people. I hadn’t realized it. I just figured I was being friendly.
Learning Point 4: Guild Focus
Everyone has a goal and a desire. For a guild to function, I truly believe that there has to be a balance. If you want to be a casual raiding guild, you need to balance the casual side with the raiding side. There has to be kind of a yin and yang. There has to be an ebb and flow. If you don’t get that, it overbalances and things begin to topple.
If you’re a guild focused on raiding, then its easier to balance as your off times are dedicated to prepping for raiding or just doing whatever you want, but generally everyone in the guild is probably focused at some level.. on raiding.
I’ve heard the argument that my last guild failed because we got too focused on raiding. While its possible that’s true, the reality is that what we lost… was the balance.
A guild’s focus will be dictated by a combination of forces. The GM will set the tone for what the guild is supposed to be. When they put out clarion calls for people to help and everyone steps up? Yeah.. that’s what we’re talking about.
In the early days of The Rosuto Samurai, people were really engaged. We needed a high level enchanter for raids. One member stepped up and volunteered to do it. They spent a lot of time and money. I dumped my entire stock of old enchanting mats on the person and we then began running instances over and over to get the right type of enchanting mats. Everyone came together and gelled to a single purpose. Between myself and the other guy, we probably dropped 2-3k gold on the prospect, and other people pitched in too. Guess what? Nobody bitched. Nobody complained. Everything was just that one common goal.
If someone said they were leveling a profession, people tossed in mats to help them out. If we needed something for the guild bank, 3 stacks more than we needed showed up in the bank the next day.
As time progressed, the focus shifted. We had a mix of people and honestly it became hard to balance. The GM drifted away more and more to focus on important family matters. I’ve heard a lot of blame tossed his way. While I won’t consider him blameless, I can’t fault someone for putting the health of their family above a game.
From the same perspective, if you don’t have a balanced view and approach, things shift quite a bit. The problem really becomes that everyone wants to feel like someone’s steering the boat. When I ask for feedback, I want an opinion on your thoughts. I don’t want you to decide for me, but I want feedback. I don’t throw it out there and expect nothing but stony silence. The GM and I had trouble reaching a balance where we could toss opinions back and forth.
Where people began to point blame really came down to the fact that at some point, the GM just needed to be left alone. For right or wrong, they stopped making decisions. They stopped providing feedback. The decisions they did make came across as mandates with no explanation behind them. They hadn’t said hello to anyone who came online in weeks. So people started to not see the vision and suddenly there was only one vision…. There was that guy leading the raids.
When people lose sight of the overall vision, they are going to find vision to follow. Did we get too focused on raiding? Maybe… when we were on raid days, that is my focus. when we weren’t on raid days, people were diving into PUG raids. Suddenly, I couldn’t even run 5 mans in house. You can’t get away from raiding. The people who wanted to raid 5-7 days a week began to make it impossible to actually enjoy 5 mans in house or just mess around having a good time having a convesation.
When you log in and there is you… your wife and one other person who isn’t in a raid? Yeah. Originally when the guild formed, we’d all jump into Ventrillo and spend half the night just chatting away in Vent having a good time.
When you can’t strike up a conversion with some people you used to talk to all the time because their off in their own world? yeah…
Its funny. I have a strong focus on raiding when I raid. I want to make progress. I want to be the best tank I can be, but there’s a big part of me that wants to also just be social. I want to BS with a good friend and talk about how they got engaged. I want to BS and find out how their day went. I want to know we’re talking about the finer points of making a good pizza or what someone plans to do with their kids this weekend. I want to know these people.
Somewhere, we lost that focus and you know what… it wasn’t a social place to be. There wasn’t an advocate there and if you logged in on a non raid day, you just felt a bit lost. There was rarely enough people to do anything unrelated to raiding. And you can’t really BS and shoot the breeze with someone? I guess the game loses a lot for me. There’s something to be said for having a good time with friends where you can go mess around and have a conversation…even if you aren’t in the same zone.
Somewhere, people lost sight of that aspect of the fun. And there’s a focus that when you lose… its just not gonna come back without some serious effort on everyone’s part.
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Those last 2 paragraphs said it all. That is why I like WoW, that was the real reason why I came back.
Just folks concentrating on some form of raiding 24-7.
Too many times i’d log, go into a soccer / work rant and get only…. *crickets* No more movie reveiws. No drunken logs.
Yeah… To often it was exactly like that, I got more caught up in it than I ever intended myself. And now things dropped to too low of a mass to sustain any real conversation. Admittedly, particularly if I’m trying to tank, I often tune out most anything not related to what I’m doing atm, but I think to a certain point, we all do that a little. We did though, most of us got entirely too absorbed in either preping to raid, or pugging other raids (or mini-raids) and sort of forgot to have fun.
Now I find myself with a new group of folk, and am somewhat realizing just how focused we had become back in Rosuto.
It’s really a shame, it was a really fun place, but now, well, now it’s just sorta a ghost town…
Wiredude´s last blog ..New Tank PuG Hell
I agree with a lot of your points, but one thing I don’t totally get that I’ve seen a lot of guilds do when raiding is slowing down and no longer working within a guild.. people start saying “well we’ve got to get back to just having fun, we’ve been too focused on raiding..” so then they slow down or stop raiding altogether for a bit. Then the next thing that typically happens is those people that have fun raiding, they leave the guild and find a guild that does raid. Then the guild is left without enough people to ever get back to raiding and then others leave because they’ve decided they aren’t having so much fun trying to get back to having fun without being able to do some raiding on occasion.
Here’s the thing, fun is not something you have to focus on. Fun just happens.. if people aren’t having fun there’s a reason for it, but its usually because they are not doing what they enjoy, not because of what the guild is focused on. There’s always a deeper problem. If you’re focused on raiding and the people involved like to raid, and things are going along smoothly… people are going to have fun. It’s just going to happen like it or not
It’s when things stop going well that usually the fun stops, people start whispering each other more and there is less guild chatter. To get back the fun you’ve got to find a way to get things going smoothly again.. start having success again.
If your core group wants to do raids right and kick some butt when they raid, then that should be the focus. The casual raiders that don’t care as much can come fill in spots when a raider can’t be there. That’s about the closest you can come to making everyone happy. If you want to raid with a certain degree of seriousness, you have to maintain that level for the most part, once you go too casual where people don’t have to have food, flasks, or can raid in their pvp specs or whatever, its hard to go back to being serious again
Great post,
Really enjoyed reading this one, identified with it as this was exactly how i felt last time i was RL in our old guild, its the same reason why i left and the same reasons why we started up the new one as a smaller entity, no more fussing around 25 man raids anymore, 10 people i know and have played with for ages and who will ask me how my family are when i log in, or wont get too upset when i kick them around in raid and tell them they gotta focus. It goes both ways i think, its just managing the people so they know when to mess around and when it’s down to business.
I’m not adverse to starting up a little tune on vent to wake the sleepers up and lighten the mood. My favourite at the moment is singing “thou shall have a fishy on a little dishy when the boat comes in” each time someone places a fish feast. My rules on raiding are tough, but your right in one fact, it’s a game and people want to have fun, thats what keeps them coming back, define a persons idea of fun and you have them in the palm of your hand.
Try singing to them… or maybe the odd squeeee!
Cybac´s last blog ..Patch 3.3 Raid Quests
I found myself waiting for the social, getting bored, and going to find a raid. Which I think most assumed was the opposite by outside appearances. The GM going *poof* didn’t help at all though either you are right. They both were allot of the driving force behind the social side of the guild. This may sound evil but it was kind of a cool social experiment watching where people drifted to after it was gone. I myself app’d back to the place I bounced to after the last one fell apart, but I have doubts since I have been having a great time just signing up for “sure things” via the alliance we had, and pugging into good groups without fear or worry that canceling from a group run will send it to failure. With a channel like what used to exist and a common vent server to hide out in, who would even need a guild? I will keep drifting for now.
I honestly have just been trying to find a strong enough new hobby to pull me out of wow once and for all, but the only thing close I can find is way to expensive.
Have you guys seen the Cataclysm info about Guild leveling and Guild talents, it’ll be interesting to see the new dynamic that brings to the game and raiding. I wonder how that will work out with guild alliances too.. But what I’m waiting for most of all is seeing the new Guild recruiting spam in trade channel… Knights of (insert realm name here) is looking for new members, we’re a level 5 guild that is looking for new people to help level the guild, we have a tabard, bank tabs, and are working towards getting the guild mass rez talent!