Tag: Wow

The other day I was asked by a new raid leader in the guild if there were any tips I could give him. I was in the middle of running a raid myself at this point and I’m fairly certain that whatever I replied with wasn’t all that useful. It was probably barely more then a string of non-sensical letters and yet he said his thanks and carried on.

It occurs to me now that there are number of things I should have known when I started raid leading and that if I’d spent less time trying to figure these out and more time actually leading the team I was with would likely have made quite a lot more progress then it ended up doing. I have written about the most salient points but there are so many different ways to approach raid leading that there are many I won’t have covered. All of them are a vital part of any leaders armoury and learning them is as much a part of your journey as your teams progression is.

I’m sure we have all had experience of ’that’ raider. They seem to come in an almost infinite number of flavours but the end result is always the same — a disruption to the team. Perhaps your version of ’that’ raider does not ever stop talking, perhaps they do not ever start talking, perhaps (and this is probably a little more common) they talk just enough to offend, antagonise or generally upset the teams delicate emotional balance¹.

I’ve not been playing this game all that long when compared to others—just a scant 2 years all told—so I still find that there is a lot of fun to be had in it’s various aspects. I appreciate that having played it for longer some may feel a little more jaded by expansions that don’t quite meet their expectations but I well and truly don’t understand comments like these¹:

It occurred to me at some point last week that I hadn’t taken a good look at my teams character maintenance efforts in a long long time. I remember, back when I first started the whole raid leading malarky, that it used to be a fairly prominent part of what I did.

Back then the task entailed looking at be.imba.hu or wow-heroes.com for each of the people in my team and then cajoling them into actually following the advice. They’d get bonus points if they went off someplace else and did some of their own research but that was a very rare thing indeed—pretty much all were content to just follow the instructions and be on their merry way. Beating on internet dragons is the aim of the game here, not the meta-game that is theory-crafting.

How big is your guild? Do you know everyone in it? Do you make an effort to really know everyone in it? Or are you content to surround yourself in the people you know and ignore the other 200?

Just this discussion came up the other day amongst my guild-mates and I and I genuinely think that it needs some serious thought if a large guild is to be successful. It is a natural human trait to form a small group of people around you whom you really know well—you might consider these your best friends. Sure, you will have other friends, beyond that acquaintances and everyone is different; one person may maintain a very small circle of close friends where others will have much larger groups. At some point though the guild grows beyond the size of even the socialites largest circle and that, in my opinion, is when issues arise.