Here’s the synopsis: female gamer joins a guild with a friend.  She doesn’t like to talk on voice chat, preferring that other players assume she is male.  The friend transfers servers, leaving her as the only female in a 10-person raiding guild.  The GM starts showing an interest in her, asking personal questions, promoting her to officer rank to have “private chats”, and inviting her to visit him for vacation.  She is now faced with the decision to leave a guild that she likes or deal with inappropriate attention from her GM.

I don’t tend to write much about personal relationships because each situation is unique.  I don’t want to disparage the idea of real-life relationships that start in-game, as I have seen it work on one or two occasions.  I’ve also seen it crash and burn, doing damage to the guild and others in the process.

This story has multiple warning flags, and there’s a lesson for both parties to take away.  I’m going to be painting with a wide brush here, so take this as my opinion only.

First, I hate to see situations (in game or out) where someone is forced to hide or suppress some aspect of who they are for fear of confrontation or reprisal.  Outside of the game, those fears may be rational – there may be serious repercussions to expressing yourself.  In-game, we shouldn’t have to deal with the same.

Second, male players (and especially those in guild leadership) need to realize that every unattached female isn’t playing WoW in order to start a relationship.  Really, some people play just to play.  It’s a rare lasting relationship that begins in a fantasy world.

Sadly, the best way to address the situation is (as many respondents to the OP stated) for the female gamer to speak up and be clear with her GM that she’s not interested in him, and that his actions are making her uncomfortable.  Essentially, she has to do exactly what she was trying to avoid – all because someone things that WoW is where he’s going to meet the love of his life.  The only other options are to quit the guild and possibly server transfer.

Wanting to avoid conflict is natural.  I don’t think anyone genuinely enjoys conflict, save for the bullies who use it knowing that most people will back down from them.  Wanting to hide behind the anonymity of your avatar should be every player’s right.  It’s not an excuse to act like a complete ass just because nobody can tie your actions down to a person, but if you choose not to expose any details about your personal life, you should be able to.

Unfortunately, there seems to be this hard-coded behaviour in males when they encounter a female gamer who is meek or timid, or just gives the impression of being so by not interacting like one of the guys.  Some will act as protector, while others will see you as weak and something to be exploited.  This is completely unfair, and for someone in a position of authority to take advantage of it speaks volumes against their character.

Male gamers don’t have this problem – they can choose to be loud and boisterous or completely silent, and they don’t seem (in my experience) to suffer any ill effects.  People don’t think less of them.  It seems that when a guy says “my microphone doesn’t work”, people believe them.

I may be assuming too much, and I may have the female perspective completely wrong here.  Most of the female gamers I know well are of the loud and boisterous variety, or if they’re not they know how to smack the children back into their place if they get out of line.

How do you deal with situations like this?  Does it make you as angry as it does me?  How do we as guild leaders promote an environment where this doesn’t happen, or where there are direct and immediate consequences for those who step over the line?  How else could the female gamer deal with this situation?

Until Next Time

Related posts:

• Become Genuinely Interested in Other People
• When Do You Throw in the Towel with Guildies?
• Stuck Up Officers

I am probably one of a few people who can remember having to save up to purchase a tabard pattern for their guild.  Unless you ran a leveling guild in the days of Vanilla, the idea of not having a spare 10 gold among your members may seem preposterous, but it did happen.  We were noobs in our 20s and 30s.  The idea of spending 90 gold on our level 40 mount had us hoarding every copper we earned.  Getting donations to spend 10 gold on some fancy piece of cloth?  Forget it.

The thing is, that was five years ago.  It was right around that time that having a tabard ceased to be a differentiator.

I have never been presented with the choice of two equal guilds and broken a tie based upon what their tabard looked like.

SO WHY DO PEOPLE STILL ADVERTISE THEIR GUILDS AS HAVING A “COOL” TABARD?

Yet I digress.

I’ve started to think about effective ways to recruit, as recruiting season will soon be upon us.  If you’re an established guild, you may not have to actively recruit.  Just putting the message out to your members that you are in need of a few people may encourage applicants who know you have a history.

But what if you’re just starting out?  Do you advertise in trade chat?  On forums?  Do you use the worldofraids recruitment tool?  Will you use the simplified “looking for guild” interface that will be part of Cataclysm?

How do you make yourself stand out?  If you’re part of the middle 80% of guilds who are basically identical with different raid nights, how do you entice someone to look deeper than your guild name?  Once you start looking at guilds in more depth, the differences start to distinguish them.  This one has policies more in line with what you like, that one does profit sharing from the guild bank, and the other has a goal of clearing all the hard modes before Cataclysm.  But until you can get someone over to your website, or at least to read your forum recruitment post, you’re just another name and maybe a subject line.

Not so long ago I was trying to get Cold Comfort the guild up and running.  I tried the witty approach to recruitment.  I did advertise in the LookingForGuild channel, and not as often but sometimes in Trade.  I thought my tagline would pique interest and let me spark up more in depth conversations with prospective players.

Cold Comfort: All Guilds Suck, We Suck Less.

It was brilliant.  And it failed utterly.  In retrospect, it was obvious that it would.  The people who hang around in Trade regularly aren’t known for their analysis and subtlety.  Anyone who could read between the lines and see the joke might have been interested, but most people just thought I was insulting their guild and saying that mine was better.

So I toned it down a bit.  “Cold Comfort: Raiding Doesn’t Have To Suck”.

[W From Someguy]: raiding doesn't suck you noob.  I bet you've never raided in your life.

Or something like that.  He probably used less vowels.  And a few phonemes that I wasn’t aware were in the english language.

Ok, so maybe using “suck” wasn’t the best idea.  So I dropped that and went for a basic message – we’re a new raiding guild, we use EP/GP and we’re recruiting for a 3 night raid schedule.

And I got nothing.  Without something to distinguish me, I just faded into the noise that is city-wide chat.  The same thing happened on my realm forums, though someone was nice enough to explain that I was probably shooting over people’s heads with my joke.

I’ve haven’t tried to recruit since, but more due to real life commitments that wouldn’t let me be the leader I want to be than for fear that I’d get no responses.

So tell me: if you’ve done the trade channel / forum grind to start up a new guild, what advice would you give?  Did you abandon all pretense of interviewing people, firing invites to anyone who whispered you?  And for those of you with established guilds, did you ever find that your reputation was not enough to fill empty spots when you found your roster lacking?

Until Next Time

Image from zazzle.com (you can buy one if you want)

Related posts:

• Major Guild Improvements Dropped from Cataclysm
• Cataclysm: Reforging Your Link to your Guild

I can’t seem to peg reader response to my articles.  The ones I’m most proud of get no comments, and the rushed ones get a conversation rolling within hours of going up.

A friend tells me that those rushed articles expose my human side.  When I explain (in my best Lich King / Dr. Claw voice^[1]) that I have no human side, she just glares at me (like Smiling, this also works virtually) and calls me a dork.

So, let’s try another open question about fixing things and see if her theory holds.

Let’s say that you have the power to change one annoying thing about being a guild leader. You wish it, and it’s changed forever. Again, it could be mechanical or social (and possibly, though not likely contractual).

What’s that one thing that you have to deal with as a leader that gets under your skin? It could be something that happens occasionally that sets you off, or a daily chore that you smile your way through because you know it’s what the guild needs from you.

Me? Convincing people to stick it out when recruitment leaves us unable to raid for a week. I’d love to be in a strict 10 person guild, but experience has taught me that the threshold between having not enough, just enough and too many people is too thin. As little as three people can be the difference between raiding and canceling.

If any two members are linked (such that one would leave if the other did), this becomes even harder. One person leaves for whatever reason. Their friend bails too. Now you find yourself unable to raid, and people get antsy. As a guild leader, I take the long view. Members often don’t. After one or two weeks of called raids, it’s not uncommon for people to start heading to greener pastures, and then your recruiting job becomes even harder.

So I’d wish for my members to take the long view as well. To understand that building a solid raid team with such tight thresholds is always going to go through periods of instability. The only way to even out these periods is to have so many people on the roster that you’re constantly sitting people, which can snowball into it’s own set of problems.

So that’s my wish. How about you?

[1] Seriously, try saying “I charge you now with the cleansing of Zul’Drak, Drakuru” then “I’ll get you next time, Gadget, next time!”. I can’t tell mine apart.

Related posts:

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• Reboot

The recent developer chat on Twitter didn’t give us much information specifically related to guilds, but it did raise further questions about the changes originally announced at Blizzcon related to reforging.

My concern when the changes were first announced was related to the cost and/or priority of reforged items.

For all but completely random or open-bid loot systems, reforging may require you to re-think how you distribute loot.  Before we look at how, let’s go into some background on items levels.

The Math Behind Item Levels

The item level is something that Blizzard assigns to an item based upon the stats present.  Various attempts have been made to reverse engineer the formula.  If you’re so inclined, you can read about the gory details at Elitist Jerks.

Though the formula is stats to item level, it tends to be used in reverse by item designers.  A given dungeon at a given difficulty drops items of a given item level.  Blizzard throws stats on an item, runs it through the formula, then tweaks the stats until the item level matches the target.

Item level is a fixed attribute on that item, not calculated on the fly.  For items with only the standard stats, the formula is pretty simple.  Adding sockets or proc effects is where things get a bit more difficult to calculate.  Just how much of an item budget is used up by an on-proc effect is based upon some estimation of the value of the proc.  Obviously the opinion of Blizzard vs the opinion of the community may differ in this respect.

When people claim on the forums that “item x is under budget”, it’s because the reverse engineered formula says the item level should be lower than the item level in game, suggesting that some of the stats are lower than they should be.  When the math behind this is sound, Blizzard often adjusts an item.

Stat Changes and Reforging

In the post about stat changes in Cataclysm, there was a little blurb about reforging, which I’ll quote:

While these changes will go a long way to making a wider variety of stats more attractive, we understand that sometimes you simply don’t want more Hit Rating on your gear or you’d rather have more Haste than more Crit. In Cataclysm, we are going to give players a way to replace stats on gear as part of the existing profession system. As a general rule of thumb, you’ll be able to convert one stat to 50% of another stat. While some conversions (like converting Stamina to Strength) won’t be permitted, the goal is to let you customize your gear more.

So, what we do know is that:

• reforging replaces 100% of one stat with half as much of a stat that doesn’t already exist on the item
• there will be restrictions in terms of what stats you can convert

But there’s a lot we don’t know.  First, the restrictions: is it possible to guess as to what we won’t be able to reforge?

in Cataclysm, every class cares about stamina, and every class cares about one other “core” stat: strength, agility or intellect.  I am going to assume that for the purposes of balance, we won’t be able to fiddle with these stats.

I don’t think the raw spellpower on caster weapons will be reforgeable, because that’s there purely to avoid the current formula where spellpower is a function of the other stats on the weapon.  You’re still going to see all weapons of a given item level providing the same total amount of spellpower, but rather than fiddle with stamina and intellect to get there, they want to just backfill the portion that doesn’t come from intellect directly.  Allowing us to reforge the spellpower off would quickly lead to an imbalance.

I think it’s easy to see that we won’t be able to reforge into or out of mastery, as there should never be a downside to that stat – it just boosts aspects of your spec that you always want boosted.

Spirit we probably will be able to reforge, as rather than making it interesting via talents and abilities to all classes, it is only of interest to healers and Balance druids.  Elemental Shaman, Warlocks, Mages and Shadow Priests will all have a valid reason to reforge Spirit into something else.

Resilience I’m not sure about.  There were issues at the start of WotLK where PvE gear dominated in arena because it was easier to get (much in the same way that PvP gear was used quite often in PvE during The Burning Crusade.  Allowing people to dump PvE stats for a PvP stat (and with the changes to how tanks will become uncrittable, resilience is definitely PvP-only now) might set us up for a repeat of that situation.  My money says we won’t be able to reforge for resilience.

That gives us:

• Hit rating
• Critical Strike rating
• Expertise Rating
• Parry Rating
• Block Rating
• Haste
• Spirit (probably)

In the current item level calculation, these are all equal (their stat modifier is one).

Item Levels Reduced

Because reforging halves the stat in the process, it effectively reduces the iLevel of an item.  Let’s take a simple non-socketed item like the Lungbreaker.  I’m using the WotLK calculations, because after 4.0 hits two of the ratings on this item will be folded into other stats.

The current item level calculation is:

106.29 * log( ( ( 69^1.7095 + (69*2/3)^1.7095 + 46^1.7095 + (93*1/2)^1.7095 + 46^1.7095 )^1/1.7095) * (27/64) ) – 344.36

Which gives us 265.91.  That’s close enough to 264 (the actual item level) for the purposes of this article.

If we reforge the item to swap 46 critical strike rating for 23 haste rating, the calculation becomes:

106.29 * log( ( ( 69^1.7095 + (69*2/3)^1.7095 + 23^1.7095 + (93*1/2)^1.7095 + 46^1.7095 )^1/1.7095) * (27/64) ) – 344.36

Which works out to 258.29.  The item level as queried in-game won’t change, but if you apply the formula to the item there will be a discrepancy between what the item level should be and what the game says it is.

This may turn out to be the only way to detect a reforged item – it’s not clear if the results of reforging will be invisible, or if they’ll be presented as a pair of enchants (i.e. “-46 Spirit and 23 Critical Strike Rating”).  The game does support the idea of negative stats, even though you hardly see them in current content.

Cost and Priority of Items

If your loot system uses the item level to calculate the cost of an item, will you change the cost based upon whether the item is going to be reforged?

Enchants and Gems only enhance an item.  You can make the wrong choices and not enhance it as much as is possible, but you can’t make an item worse through the use of these augments.

Reforging is different.  Let’s say you’re a warlock.  You don’t care about spirit.  An item drops that is an upgrade for you, but only if you reforge the spirit into haste.  Let’s assume that your guild uses EP/GP.  Do you pay the GP value of the item before or after it has been reforged?

What if a priest also wants the item, but can use it without any modifications?

A loot system that has a fixed price for items tends to derive that cost from the tier of content.  Most guilds that I’ve been in set a price for each set of gear, with a similar fixed price for non-tier items from the same instance.  Systems like EP/GP derive the GP value in part from the item level.  The idea is that the price you pay is related to the benefit you get from the item.

Since a reforged item is by definition less powerful than an untouched item, it follows that someone who can make use of the item in it’s natural state gets a higher benefit out of it than someone who reforges it.

Reforging is meant to make less attractive items more attractive, saving them from being disenchanted.  I don’t think (and you may disagree with me) that you are meant to be re-forging every single item that drops the way you chant and/or gem items today.

So should someone who plans to reforge an item be given lower priority on that item?

Some loot systems already break ties based upon the perceived value of an item to the various members.  For example, in EP/GP, some slots have different GP values for different classes.  A ranged weapon is worth three times the GP for a hunter than for a rogue.  In my loot policy, PR is a tie breaker only if two or more people declaring would be charged the same amount.  A hunter with a lower PR will get a gun over a rogue with a higher PR, because the higher cost means that the hunter will get more benefit from the item.

Granted, the item level difference that reforging will have is much smaller than the 3:1 ratio in the above example, but the principle is the same – more benefit has higher priority.  Loot council guilds tend to operate on similar principles, so they’ll have to deal with this as well.

Will you ask your members to indicate that they will re-forge an item when declaring to help you distribute loot?  Does your loot priority now change from “mainspec beats offspec” to “mainspec -> mainspec with reforge -> offspec”?

I’m not really sure how to answer those questions, but I do think they bear some thought before Cataclysm launches.  Nobody can make an informed decision until we see the full range of reforging patterns that will be available.  I am interested to hear what opinions you have on whether reforging will impact your loot policy.

Until Next Time

Related posts:

• Guild Changes in Cataclysm: Overview
• Breaking Up a Guild Bank
• To Officer or Not To Officer?

What do you do when you become aware (or find yourself a part) of “The B Team”?

The B Team in a guild is a separate raid team (usually for 10 man raids) that just doesn’t seem to progress as quickly or as cleanly as the first or primary raid team.

Having two raid teams in a guild isn’t a problem unto itself.  I suggested as much in a recent article on bridging the 10 to 25 gap.  My advice in that context was to organize two 10 person teams if you found yourself short of the 20 regular raiders to comfortably back fill a 25 person raid with pickups.  It was a means to an end, not a long-term solution.

I didn’t recommend running two 10 person teams long-term because of the balance and swapping issues it brings.  You may find your second team short by two people, but the only extra raiders online are locked to first team’s instance id.  If you can get around this, or if your guild runs two distinct schedules (e.g. a day and night raid), then you may find that one of the teams progresses faster than the other.  When that happens, players can find themselves discouraged if they’re not progressing as quickly, or in some cases turn into jerks if they’re on the “winning” team.

How then do you try to avoid these problems, or address them once they’ve cropped up?

Foreward

Just to be clear, I’m not referring here to the multiple 10 person raids that a functioning 25 person guild may run on the side.  Those are typically populated by alts or pickups, and often use a different loot system.  I don’t think that anyone judges a player by the progression made in an unofficial raid.  I’m referring to a guild whose multiple 10 person raids are the main path to progression.

Downplay Comparisons

While a bit of good-natured competition within a guild can spur people on, I’ve not found it to be a useful tool long-term.  Perhaps one night you race each other for a speed clear of a farm instance, but to compare progression speed when the teams may not be equally matched isn’t fair.  When learning fights, certain combinations of buffs and debuffs can make a major difference – just having heroism or bloodlust available can make or break an encounter.

Though I’ve used the term for this article’s title, never use the terms “Team A” and “Team B”.  No matter how you try, these names (or any names from a set which has a defined sorting order like numbers) is a bad idea.  The connotations of superiority are just too hard to overcome.  Instead, use completely unrelated terms, or even made up words.  I wouldn’t recommend going with pop culture references, in case they are polarizing (e.g. Team Spock vs Team Kirk).  Quick: which is better: “Team Mittens” or “Team Flügelhorn”?

Answer: Neither.  Team Pfaffendorf beats them both.  Bonus points if you know why.

You should also be on the watch for teams judging each other, especially if one team ends up being joked about in guild chat.  Once people start to think of themselves as part of an elite group within the guild (or outside of a perceived group of elites), you’re only a few steps from a clique.  The best way to avoid that (if you can) is to mix up the teams periodically.

Mix it up

If you have 20+ raiders who all raid at the same time, try to mix the teams up a bit.  For progression you probably don’t want to do this on a week-by-week basis, but at least once a month you should re-shuffle the teams.  Have both raid leaders pick people much as you would in school sports – back and forth until only one person remains.  Just don’t do this publicly – nobody liked being the last person chosen in school and it’s not going to boost morale in WoW either.

When mixing teams, try to keep the quality of the leadership experience the same for all members.  Don’t put two amazing raid leaders on one team and leave the other team to learn everything from wowwiki.  Also try to keep the strategies for each boss fight as close as possible.  If both raid leaders have different approaches, sit down and discuss which is best.  This will help members stay focused and effective when they move from one team to the other, and will continue to serve you if you merge into a 25 person team.

If you choose not to keep the strategies the same, then make sure that whoever “owns” the strategy (typically the raid leader) remains with one team long-term.  The people they bring to the raid may chance, but members should know that if they’re on Foo’s team, they are executing a particular boss fight in a given way.  It also helps to have the strategies documented on your guild forums, preferably with a descriptive mnemonic.  On Lady Deathwhisper you might refer to the “normal” tactic and the “AoE kill zone” tactic for example.

You will need to set an expectation among members that when teams are shuffled, performance and progression might not be perfect from the get-go.  It takes a few raids for everyone to get used to everyone else’s play style.  Over time, this period of readjustment will get shorter.  Be quick to shut down cries of “the other team is so much better at this” or “I don’t want to be on the sucky team”.

If you’ve let the raid leaders pick back and forth and they’ve paid some attention to balance, individual performance shouldn’t be a concern.  You are more likely to wipe because someone decides not to give it their all or refuses to alter their playstyle to match the members they’re paired with.

Examining and Fixing

If both teams are progressing at exactly the same pace, you won’t have most of the problems I describe above.  But that’s not likely to happen.  Class balance, buff and debuff synergy, and the unavoidable differences in player skill mean that one team is probably going to move ahead quicker than the other.

If you’re switching things up once a month, you may not need to jump on this right away.  If it continues even when people are changed around, then you might need to look more closely at how the raid is being lead.  Are the raid leader’s instructions clear?  When people fail to follow them, is action taken to make sure that it doesn’t happen again?  Are subtle but important details about the fights overlooked, or does the leader assume that everyone knows them?  Any of these things can be a thorn in the side of progression.

You may wish to have the leader (or just an experienced leader) from the other team “audit” the team that is behind on progression.  Have them join on an alt.  Don’t have them take over the raid – just observe how things are run, make note of things that are different, and see if anything jumps out as a causal factor.  After the raid is over, take the time to sit with the raid leader and discuss what you observed.

Leading a raid effectively is an art unto itself, and just like playing a given class a little mentoring may be very helpful.  You may find that the issue is one of occlusion – the raid leader doesn’t realize that something is going wrong because they don’t have a given addon or perhaps just don’t know where to look among the information they do have to determine the root cause of problems.

Recruiting

Make sure your recruiting efforts are tailored to the needs of each team.  If you know that the reason one team isn’t progressing as fast is that they only have two strong healers, make it a priority to find a strong dps/healing hybrid so that you can move between 2 and 3 healers based on the fight without rearranging the group.  If the end goal is to be a single 25 person team and you only have two teams as an interim measure, then make sure you’re out there looking for the bodies to bring you up to full strength.

When trying to merge two 10 person groups into a 25 person team, you have a little more flexibility in terms of who you bring in.  20 decently geared raiders can help carry 5 lesser geared people far easier than a 10 person team can balance even two undergeared members.

Different Schedules and Alts

If your guild runs two separate raid schedules, you may have some members who can make both times, and want to raid on two characters.  Unless all of your main raiders are getting spots in a raid regularly, I would recommend against this.  It can be quite a morale hit to be seated for a raid while your spot goes to someone whose main has already seen gear upgrades this week.

Unless you have a strong need for a particular members’ alt, I prefer a policy where the guild “owns” a given raid size lockout on your main, and all other lockouts are yours to do with as you please.  Some members may choose to join PUG raids, some may not raid on alts and be available to swap into guild runs as required.  But make sure that every individual gets a chance to raid before any one person gets to raid twice.  Not doing so only slows down progression in the long term.

How do you deal with multiple raid teams?  Have any of you maintained two or more long-running teams for more than a few months?  If so, how did you work to achieve balance and keep everyone focused despite different progression rates?
Image from Robot Chicken Season 4, Episode 5

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A reader posed this question to me recently:

How long do you keep trying an encounter with guild members (in a non-raid environment) before you throw in the towel?  I recently spent two hours and eight wipes with an all-guild group trying to complete Heroic Halls of Reflection.  The group should have been able to complete the instance easily, but they refused to listen to any of my suggestions.  They fought the spirit waves in the middle of Frostmourne’s room, ignoring my requests to use the alcoves.  When we finally completed that, someone attempted to use the ledge to escape the Lich King (this was the day of patch 3.3.2), wiping the group.  We then tried the escape four more times, always dying on the third or fourth wall.

After that wipe I couldn’t take it any more, and I left the group, as did another member.  I hate abandoning guild members, but when they’re performing far below the standards of even the worst dungeon finder group, what do you do?

I like this question because it touches on a few different aspects of being a guild member and a guild leader.

I think it’s safe to assume that nobody’s going to ditch on a guild raid due to wipes.  That’s part and parcel of being in a raiding guild, and if you can’t take the pain of wiping, you should find another route to progress along.  The raid leader decides what encounters to tackle, when to move on to a different fight if things don’t gel.

I Shouldn’t Be Stressing Over This!

Running non-raid content with guild members is supposed to be a fun, rewarding and relatively stress-free experience.  The gear disparity be smaller than you might see in a dungeon finder group.  You probably know the people you’re playing with, and know how to work together as a group better.  You may have some kind of voice comms set up, so you can react to changing conditions faster.  And when things do go pear-shaped you should be able to laugh it off as dumb luck and move on to a clean kill next time.

So what do you do when your guild mates perform worse than a group of random people?  With a PUG, you’re probably not going to survive three wipes, and many groups will fall apart after two (or even one, but I think those people are overreacting).  You don’t want to leave your guildmates in the lurch, but at some point you just have to accept that things aren’t clicking.

There’s a few reasons why things might not gel for a heroic group:

• someone’s having an off night.  It happens to everyone from time to time
• unintentional complacency.  It’s easy to get into the “this will be easy with all guildies, I don’t have to pay as close attention” mindset.
• underperformers.  Every guild has them, and in a 25 person setting, it’s easy for your shortcomings to blend into the background.  Get too many such players together, and failure can be the result.
• too many undergeared alts in the group.  A raid-geared tank and healer can’t carry three DPS in iLevel 200 blues through Heroic HoR – mobs just won’t die fast enough.

Regardless of how you find yourself in the situation, you’re now in a state where your guildmates aren’t living up to your expectations.  You have two choices: convince the group to give up, or figure out what’s going wrong and suggest ways to correct it.

Figuring Out What’s Wrong

Let’s talk about analysis first.  Think of it as a form of mini-mentoring.  If you don’t have experience doing this in a raid settings, this may be unfamiliar territory.  Perhaps it’s an officer or class lead who does this for the guild normally.  Don’t worry – it’s not that hard to do, and knowing how will pay dividends when you are raiding.  You’ll be able to look in detail at the specific problems that you can address, answering questions like “Why did the tank you were healing die?” and “Why did my partner DPS on that add take so much damage?”.

Meters and Death Tracker

Two addons that make analysis much easier are a damage meter that tracks more than damage done.  You want to be able to look at things like damage taken (including a breakdown of which attack), enemy damage done, dispels, interrupts and debuff uptime.  I use Skada for this, but any decent meter including Recount will do the same.

You also want a death tracker addon.  I believe Recount has one built in.  If your meter doesn’t, I recommend Acheron.

Reasons for Failure

Wipes tend to start one of several ways: a DPS dies, the tank loses agro, the healer runs out of mana, or the group falls behind the instance spawn rate (portals or waves forming before the previous one has been dealt with).

If people are dying, you need to know why.  Find out how quickly someone went down, and to what boss abilities (the damage taken breakdown of your meter will help with this).  If someone is taking a large proportion of magic damage, find out if anyone in the group can dispel that type of debuff.  I’ve seen groups fail in Trial of the Champion because we only had a Shaman healer and the Ret paladin didn’t realize how much damage he could prevent by cleansing Holy Fire and Shadows of the Past.

If the tank is losing agro, then DPS just have to learn to reign things in.  I’ve talked about this before: your uber dps doesn’t matter one bit if you are exceeding the tank’s threat.  No matter what the tank’s threat level is, the DPS have to get as close as possible without going over.  If that means you need to hold off on all DPS for 10 or 15 seconds, so be it.

If the healer is running out of mana, you need to look at whether some of the damage they are healing could be avoided through dispels, or simple things like not standing in fire.  As with death analysis, look for things that can be dispelled by the DPS or tank but aren’t being removed.

If there’s no obvious avoidable damage, then look at healer rotation and synergy.  The spec, glyphs and spell choices that you make in a raid may not be as effective in a smaller group, especially with lesser geared players.

Finally, if things just aren’t dying fast enough you need to delve into damage meters.  Are there mobs that heal?  Are they being interrupted?  What about kill order?  Despite what you may have heard, marking mobs for a kill order isn’t dead.  Taking out the melee mobs when casters are pelting the group make the fights go longer, the healer use more mana, and the tank have to pop more cooldowns.

Suggesting Alternatives

Once you’ve figured out what’s going wrong, choose the way you suggest changes carefully.  Announcing to people what they’re doing wrong is likely to get them on the defensive, guild relationships notwithstanding.

Try to begin suggestions with “perhaps we can try this” or “do you think that _blank_ might have an effect”.  These may just be other ways of saying “hey you, do your job!”, but the difference in how each is received is massive.

If you get the feeling that people are hesistant to admit where they screwed up, try going first.  Saying something like “sorry, I should have interrupted that heal” or “sorry, I need to be faster on my dispels” may encourage people to look at their own shortcomings.

Setting Goals and Limits

Even in small group content, you need goals.  When everything is going swimmingly, these are completely unspoken.  Your goal is to complete the instance quickly and without anyone dying.  Once that fails to come true, it doesn’t hurt to give people specific things to focus on.  ”This time we’re going to get wave seven down before wave eight spawns” is more effective than the plain “ok, let’s do this again”.

Ideally, the group leader does this, but as I’m sure we all know the person assigned the party leader role is often not qualified to lead.  In non-dungeon finder groups, the leader may just be the person who started the group, or leadership may get passed to the tank.  Still, someone needs to step up and guide the group through something they’re having trouble with.

If nobody steps up, then it falls to you to do so.

Setting limits is also the role of a leader.  Everyone may want to quit, but nobody wants to be called a quitter.  The leader can let everyone save face by stating what the group is willing to do.  ”Ok, we’re going to give this one more shot, but if we lose someone before wave seven, then we’re going to call it”.

If the group seems hell-bent on finishing the instance but things just aren’t clicking, don’t be afraid to suggest going to another instance that you know you can complete easily.  The change of setting and quick success may turn things around.

Walking Away

Even with all of the above in your toolbox, you may not be able to get the group to come together.  If you’ve truly given it your all, don’t be afraid to say so and excuse yourself.  While this may be your go-to technique for dealing with dungeon finder groups, so long as it is the last ditch technique for guild groups, I don’t think you’re selling anyone short.

I would suggest not faking a reason to leave.  You shouldn’t need to make things up to justify legitimate actions to your guild mates.  If you really have reached your personal limit on small group content, then say so and hope to do better next time.

Applying this Elsewhere

The techniques I’ve described here scale to raid groups and to non-guild runs as well.  The next time your raid group wipes, rather than wondering “what the hell did we do wrong?”, you can start going over meters and get some insight into what went wrong.  If you notice something that nobody else has, you can share it with the group.

In Dungeon Finder groups, your response to people failing may be to get angry or frustrated.  But if you can do some quick analysis, you may be able to help the group succeed and the person become a better player.  Even if you do eventually choose to walk away, you can do so knowing that you did your best to make things better.

Thanks for the question.

Until Next Time

Related posts:

• Smile
• Remember People’s Names
• Always have a Hidden Alt

… is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt

- Bertrand Russel

I normally don’t do “go look at this other blog post” articles, but I couldn’t resist with this:

The Dunning Kruger Effect (Critical QQ via Pwnwear)

This does explain a great deal of what we see in dungeon finder groups, and covers succinctly my feelings from the post on Selfishness.

Related posts:

• How to Win /friends and Influence /guildies
• Casual Schmasual
• Remember People’s Names

The image theme lost steam somewhere around article 2...

This is part 3 of an article series: Jump to Part 1 or Part 2

Ok, so now we have some idea of how to transfer leadership and have gone into depth on the things that guild leaders do.  Now let’s talk about ways to make leadership transitions easier.

Even if you’re not going through a leadership move right now, adopting some of these ideas will make it much easier when and if that day comes.  And if it never does, you still end up with some neat benefits.

In the course of this article, I’m going to make reference to a few specific companies and/or products.  These are simply ones that I use or are familiar with.  If there’s a link to them, it’s not an affiliate or referer link.  If you know of alternative providers or products, feel free to mention them in a comment, but keep the links generic.  Thanks.

Making Contacts Generic

Much of the things that you need to transfer can be made easier by using generic contacts rather than specific people.  Create an email account for the guildmaster, one for the webmaster, one for recruiting, and so on.  Even if one person does all of these jobs, create separate email addresses so that you can split responsibilities up.  Then forward the mail from those accounts to the actual person doing the job right now.

In all of your web apps and online contacts, use the pseudo-aliases rather than personal email addresses.  This way, when the person doing the job changes (even just temporarily) you can just go and change where the forwarding points to rather than re-configuring the thing that sends the mail.

If you intend for people to be able to reply from the pseudo-address, you may need to be more selective in the manner you get your email.  Most desktop email clients let you change the “From” address in your emails.  Some let you swap between several on the fly.  Not as many web email systems support sending with alternate From addresses, but Google mail does.  If you’ve never set it up, it’s easy.  Go into your gmail settings and select the Accounts tab.  Then click on “add a mail account you own”.  This will send an email with a link to that address.  Log into the other account, click on the link, and you’ll be able to use that as your From address when replying to emails.

You can also set gmail to make the From address sticky: if someone sends mail to guildmaster@guild.com which forwards to your personal account, you will by default reply as that account.  This will save you from accidentally exposing your personal email address.

There is one caveat: once this “send as” functionality is configured, you can’t revoke it.  If someone leaves the guild, they can continue to send as lootmaster@guild.com.  But if they were using a desktop mail client like Thunderbird, they could do the same thing.  Remember, you can never trust the “From” address on email.  You can’t really trust any part of email, to be honest.  The underlying tech was developed in a simpler time before spam and malware.  Backwards compatibility preclues massive changes to email to make it more secure, so you just have to live with the way it is.

Billing Accounts

When it comes to services that require exchange of real money, you can probably get away with using a generic email address, but you can’t make up a generic name for payment details (nor would you want to).  You will have to go in and change these details, and ideally the person leaving the role will remove their billing details from the account before the next person takes on the position.  At least by using a generic email notices about the account (like “your Ventrilo service is due to expire in two weeks”) won’t be sent to someone who is no longer associated with the guild.

Your Own Domain

The cost of setting up a domain for the guild (as opposed to using a subdomain of a hosting service) is pretty small – on the order of $10 a year.  The problem is that you do need someone who has some background with web sites and the underlying tech to make it all happen.  Some web providers will let you register and host the DNS (domain name service – the thing that turns www.yourguild.com into the address of a computer on the internet) all from one place.  Others will require you to set up each component (domain registration, DNS and web hosting) separately.

Even for providers who will do everything from one place, the cost may be cheaper if you do it yourself.  For example, GoDaddy lets me register my .com cheaper than my web hosting provider did, but not my .co.uk address.  There are of course advantages to having all your domains hosted at the same place, but if you’re looking to minimize costs, consider using the cheaper option based on what type of address you’re registering.

There are a few things to bear in mind when choosing and setting up your domain.  If you plan on using something like Google Apps (more on that below), then you will need to be able to edit your DNS records directly.  Some providers don’t give you this level of control.  Also take care when choosing the admin, technical and billing contacts for your domain.  It’s quite common to set these to the same person and for that email address to be in the domain itself.

The problem is that if anything goes wrong with your DNS, you may not be able to get the domain back because the provider can’t send you email.  It is safer to go set up a separate Yahoo/Google/Hotmail account called domainowner-guildname@whatever.com and use that for your domain contacts so that you can still converse even if the domain records break.

Speaking of registration deadlines, don’t miss those.  Your guild domain name may seem to only be of value to you, but domain harvesters look for expiring domains, snatching them up if the legitimate owner misses a deadline and then trying to sell the domain for much more than the registration fee.  You don’t want to be in the position of buying back your own domain.

Hosting Everything Yourself

If you have the technical skill, you can host everything yourself.  Providers sell virtual servers, which are full Linux or Windows machines onto which you can load anything.  You set up your own web server, FTP site, third-party packages, whatever you like.  I use a service called Slicehost to do this – this blog runs on a 256mB slice that I pay $20 USD a month for.  In addition to wordpress, I have Gallery, a Wiki, MySQL and a few other little packages.  If I was really adventurous, I might even try this newly discovered open-source voice service called Mumble, which would eliminate the cost normally associated with a Ventrilo service.

The advantage to this service is that there is nothing I can’t set up quickly and play with.  I don’t have to wait for my hosting provider to approve a piece of software, then live with whatever upgrade cycle they choose.

The downside is that this requires a very skilled technical person, and it will be hard to transfer the knowledge required to set up the server to someone less technically knowledgeable.  Don’t use a system like this as an opportunity to learn how to build your own server – at least not for the guild.  You are responsible for everything – the web server, the firewall, the database, and security.  Simple mistakes that you make when learning can leave your guild site open to abuse or hacks.

If you want more control than a guild hosting site provides but you aren’t ready to jump into a virtual server, try to find a shared hosting provider that allows shell access.  Before I was on a virtual server, I used a company called Dreamhost for this.  While the web site rendering was quite a bit slower, I did have the flexibility to install whatever web packages I wanted.

Sharing the Cost

As I mentioned in Part 2, some providers offer easy ways for your members to chip in towards the cost of hosting services.  You tend to find this on things like Ventrilo (which is more gamer and thus more guild oriented) than on web hosting plans.

If your provider doesn’t offer such a plan, try to find one that accepts Paypal.  Then your members can send you money via Paypal and you can use that balance to pay the hosting charges directly without having to futz about getting the donations into whatever account you pay your credit card from.

The downside here is that Paypal does not allow you to open multiple accounts for the same person, and the accounts need to be verified, so you can’t help but expose personal email addresses that way.  You can use whatever email address you want though, so you could set up a paypal-specific email account.  Just remember to check it regularly or forward it to your primary email account.

Do take care to read the specifics of the Paypal payment options though.  They differ by country, and in some countries payments made by credit card can’t be accepted by a personal account, or they have a fee attached to them.  If your members haven’t linked their own bank accounts to Paypal, you may end up with pending payments that you can’t accept.

Delegating Permissions

No matter how you set up your guild website and voice communications, you’re going to end up with a few systems that have various permission sets.  Your forum, your FTP site, your screenshot gallery, your DKP system – all of these may have accounts that allow officers to do some of the work.  Make sure you set up this level of access.  There’s no point in the officers being able to act in your stead in-game only to be unable to add new members to the web-based loot standings or approve new forum members.

When setting up these permissions, it’s tempting to be more restrictive than is really required.  Remember that you want to set up permissions that let the officers act in your stead.  Either you make the officer permissions open enough that they can just do your job when you’re not around, or you bump an officer’s access up to your level any time you’re going to be away for a while.  The former will cover unexpected absences while the latter will not.

Wiki

A Wiki is a shared webpage that multiple people can edit.  It supports simple markup to create lists, tables and links.  Most people are probably familiar with Wikipedia.  Imagine a Guildopedia just for your guild.

Keeping track of all the information about your guild in forum threads can become confusing.  Changes aren’t tracked, and sometimes people can’t tell when things have changed.  A wiki is a good alternative for this for things like policy and tutorials.

In one guild, I used a Wiki for two things: to document policy for users and to provide “here’s how to run the guild” pages for my officers.

There are many wiki packages out there: some you run on your own server (which require shared hosting or a private machine) and some are hosted.  Among the hosted options, you usually have to pay to be able to restrict reads to certain groups.  If you’re going to put information that only officers should read, you need tobe confident that your wiki is going to prevent other people from finding those pages.  Mediawiki, the software that runs Wikipedia is very nice, but has some issues with this: pages that are supposed to be protected can be found via searches, and the search result excerpt may expose information even to those who aren’t allowed to read the whole page.

I’ve had a lot of success with a wiki package called WikkaWiki.  It offers nice clean access control including groups, and search results are properly hidden if you can’t read the page.

Twitter

Twitter is a great way to send quick updates to the guild out-of-game.  Set up an account in the guild’s name, sharing the password among the officers.  Ask your members to follow the account, then use it to post about raid schedule changes, important forum posts to read, first kills and the like.  Be careful that it doesn’t become a “stream of consciousness of the guild leader” though.  Take care as to whether you protect your tweets or not.  If you do, you have more work to do to approve followers.  If you don’t, you will get spam-bots following you and you won’t be able to post anything that is considered private to the guild.

Google Apps

I’d like to take moment to discuss Google Apps, which is a free service offered by google to host your domain.  It can provide a start page, webmail, documents, and calendar sites, all using your domain name.  I have this set up for cold-comfort.org, and I use it to store things like spreadsheets for blog posts.  I can offer my guild members email addresses @cold-comfort.org, and create any number of pseudo-accounts for billing contacts or test users for my forum.

I then forward these accounts to the proper personal email address (which is my personal domain, also using google for mail) and use the aforementioned “send as” feature so that both my personal and guild mail end up in the same inbox.

You can use Google Calendar for raid signups, though it’s obviously not optimized for things like limiting signups by raid roles.  You can organize people into groups (so members / raiders / officers /etc.) and then use those groups to protect documents.  Rather than setting up a Wiki, you could put all the passwords and tutorials in Google docs documents, then restrict them to only be readable by the proper groups.

Depending on the complexity of the spreadsheet, it might even be possible to take some of the theorycrafting sheets and upload them.  Google docs can’t do everything Excel can do, but the functionality is surprisingly good for a web app.

It’s even possible now to upload any file to Google docs (with a 1gB limit, but you can pay to increase that), so you can use it like an FTP site to store addon packages or short guild movies.

Setting up Google apps for your domain isn’t terribly difficult, but does require a bit of knowledge of DNS.  For the technically minded, you create a CNAME record with a special key, which Google then looks for as proof that you are the domain administrator.  This is why I mentioned earlier about choosing a DNS provider that gives you full control of your domain – if you can’t create CNAME records, you may have trouble bringing your domain over.

Documenting Everything

Regardless of how you host your site and voice communications, make sure that somewhere there is a list of everything the guild uses to provide service to the members.  Any third party package, any hosted site.  This can be in a forum thread that only officers can read, a wiki page restricted to officers, or a Google docs file that is shared to the appropriate group.

Make sure that this is kept up to date with information like who is paying for the service (if applicable), the date that the service runs out, the email address that members can send donations to for each service, etc.

If you choose to use a single account for officers to access various parts of the guild website rather than accounts for each person, those details should also be stored here.

You should also consider writing quick little guides to help your officers learn how various guild functions are performed.  How do they collect loot details for upload into WebDKP?  How do they do decay in EP/GP?  How do they give a new member the proper access on the forums, or in the scheduling system?  How do you add a new room to the Ventrilo server?  Having these tasks documented before a leadership break or transfer happens will do wonders to ease the job.

Changing Passwords When Leadership Changes

If you do use shared passwords, make sure you change them when someone who knows those passwords leaves the guild.  Don’t only do it if you think that person might misuse the passwords.  Security is best applied consistently – don’t try to make a judgement call on someone only to learn to your regret that you guessed wrong.  If you change them every time then it’s about the practice, not the people.

Yes, this is more work, and a bit of pain for the people who use the passwords.  But it’s the safe way to do things.  At least if you’ve documented all the places the passwords are used you can build a checklist.

Testing as a Regular user

Most of your guild websites will have several grades of users: unregistered guests, registered guests, guild members, guild officers and the site administrator or guild leader.  If you’re always logging in as a privileged user, you’ll never be aware of problems with your permission system.  You don’t want to make a post that is intended for officers only to find out that the forum you posted in is readable by all and only writeable by officers.

To address this, I create a dummy account for each grade of user (except unregistered guest, which is defined as anyone who visits the page without logging in).  Any time I add a forum or change permissions, I log into each of these accounts in turn and make sure that the changes look correct for each class of user.

Hopefully this last installment has given you some ideas that are useful whether you expect to be changing leadership in the future or not.  Or perhaps you’re starting a guild, and these tools will help you make things better from the start.

I’d like to thank Veliaf for the question that led to this series.  If you have any questions or ideas for articles that I haven’t covered in the past, please feel free to get in touch: karatheya@cold-comfort.org

Until Next Time

This is part 3 of an article series: Jump to Part 1 or Part 2

Related posts:

• Turning Over the Reins, Pt 2
• Turning Over the Reins
• Best of 2009

This is part 2 of an article series: Jump to Part 1 or Part 3

This article might be a bit dry compared to part 1.  It’s meant to be an expansion of the things that a GM does, and will (I hope) be useful for a GM planning their retirement or a new GM starting up a guild.

In some ways, this is also a list of tasks that a GM might choose to delegate to officers, regardless of whether a leadership change is in the works.  If you use it for this purpose, you may also want to read the article “To Officer or Not To Officer?”.

So, please ignore the blindingly obvious stuff and perhaps you’ll learn a bit about some of the subtle things that guild leaders take care of.

The Figurehead

The most obvious role of the guild leader is as a figurehead.  Even if you none of the other items below, it’s your name at the top of the roster, and it’s you that people will look to to set the direction of the guild.

The only important point to make here is that the guild leader should make a regular appearance within the guild.  This seems obvious, but have you ever had a guild leader switch mains and stop logging on on the high-rank character except for brief maintenance tasks?  If you ever make such a switch, be sure to make your primary character the titular guild leader so that members (especially those who are new) can more easily find you.

Loot System Guru and Maintainer

Loot systems can be very complex beasts.  The good ones keep things complexity from the members, but all stateful systems have a certain amount of upkeep that tends to fall to the guild leadership.

This upkeep comes in two forms: the operation of the loot system during raids, and the maintenance of the loot system on a regular basis.  It’s quite common for the officers to know the former, but the latter is often locked away in the guild leader’s head for no other reason than that nobody else is interested in learning it.

For the day-to-day operation of the loot system, make sure that all the officers can be the loot master on a raid.  If an addon is required, all the officers need to run it on all raids.  If you keep track of loot for upload into a web DKP system, or for posting on a website, more than one person should be logging in case someone gets disconnected or experiences a crash.

The guts of the loot system is knowledge that should be distributed among the officers at all times.  I recall a guild I was in where we had to switch to EP/GP because the guild leader went AWOL and none of the officers had the ability to add new members to the web-based DKP system.

To ensure that this knowledge is properly distributed, assign loot management to a different officer each week (or each raid at your preference).  The guild leader should do nothing with the loot system other than answer questions.  Every time you find something that an officer can’t do, permissions should be modified rather than having the guild leader step in and do it themselves.

At some level, most web-based loot management systems will have a administrative password which can only be held by one person.  We’ll talk a bit more about how to manage such passwords in part 3.

Also make sure that the periodic tasks related to the loot system are known.  This may be as simple as clicking the “Decay” button if you’re using EP/GP or as complex as looking through the entire member list on a web-based system looking for people who haven’t raided in a certain amount of time.  Whatever has to be done regularly should be accessible by officers, as well as the corrective actions that may come out of it.

One word of advice that applies equally to any job where you rely on “the officers” to do it: if you assign a task to a group of people, you only guarantee that everyone will think that someone else will do it.  Rotate the job around the officer corps if you like, but make sure that an individual is tasked with it for each week / month as you see fit.

One element of the loot system that tends to remain with the guild leader (because it’s policy) is revising the loot policy when new content comes out.  If Blizzard maintains their form, every major content patch will have an “orb” of some sort and possibly a new way of upgrading your gear with a token.  It’s the guild leader’s job to go through the loot policy once these details are known and make sure that the policy is clear on how these will be distributed before you first see them drop.  Don’t wait until the first piece of a legendary item drops to figure out how you’re going to assign it to someone.

Recruiter

While you may have an officer or senior member do the palm rubbing and face-to-face recruiting, the guild leader may have a lot to do behind the scenes once someone joins the guild as a trial member.  They may need to create (or approve the creation) of a new user account on the forum, loot, and scheduling websites.

If your guild uses a rigid trial period, or member voting for acceptable of a trial, there may be a special forum post to be made, or polls to set up.  Once someone becomes a full member, many of these sites will need to be visited again to change the member’s status.

All of these are candidates for delegation to an officer, so long as the full process is documented.

A guild leader may also hold certain personal accounts that factor into the guild’s recruiting strategy.  For example, the guild recruitment forums on Elitist Jerks and TankSpot are only accessible to donors, or in some cases a one-off fee.  If you rely on such threads to bring you applicants, make sure that the access to this account (if allowed by the site) is transferred, or a new paid account is set up.  You don’t want to be locked out of your quality recruiting thread because of a leadership change.

Banker

The guild leader often takes charge of keeping the guild bank free of junk which may accumulate.  They may also ensure that the consumables tab is properly stocked by passing mats to a crafter.

Depending on the trust level in your officers, you may be able to delegate this.  Even if you allow unfettered officer access to the guild bank, you need to have some guidance as to what should be sold and when.  Perhaps you keep BoE items and patterns that drop in your raids to give members a chance to purchase them before they go onto the AH.  Are these announced to members, and if they don’t sell internally how long do you keep them before selling them to outsiders?

Raid Manager

Who decides when you raid?  Who sets up the invites, and decides who raids and who sits if there are more raiders than spots?

If you do have to sit people on a regular basis, do you keep track of who was asked to sit and try to get them a starting position on a future raid (balance concerns allowing)?  If so, where is this tracked?

As I mentioned in part 1, if you have a functioning raid schedule when you change guild leaders, keep it – at least for a month.  Once guild I was in decided to drop the “Sunday raids start half an hour early” after a guild leader swap.  Not only that, the change wasn’t made consistently.  As a result, we never started our Sunday raids on time and had less time in the instance.

Rank Maintenance

How do people move from trial to member to raider rank?  Do your members have to maintain a certain percentage of attendance to remain at a raider rank?  What about people who don’t log in for several months – do you purge them to keep the roster under control?

Most of these should be delegated to officers, but the periodic cleanup may be something that the guild leader took care of from time to time.  Document it and assign it to a specific person to manage once a month.

Policy Manager and Goal Setter

Beyond your loot policy, you should review all your policies from time to time, checking whether they still reflect the way the guild is mananged.  Ideally, as the operation of the guild changes the policies are updated alongside, but this is quite time intensive and anyone can fall behind.

If a policy needs to change to reflect the way the guild operates, you probably don’t need to make any announcement – just post the changes and indicate that it’s to reflect reality.  If on the other hand you feel that the policy needs revision to serve the guild better, go with a transparent approach and provide both justification and advance warning.  But as I advised in part 1 of this series, don’t start doing that right away.

Don’t forget to keep your goals up to date either.  These will require updating more frequently than policies, but at the very least, they should be updated every time a major content patch comes out.  Updating them during seasonal slowdowns during the summer and end of the year is also a good idea.

Webmaster

I’ve saved the obvious intersections with real life until the end.

When it comes to guild websites, there’s many different choices.  The simplest is a free sub-domain of one of the popular guild hosting sites like Guildportal, Guildomatic, Guildlaunch and the like.  You get a bunch of pre-made widgets to throw together, and various levels of customization.  The domain name won’t be very memorable, but you can get up and running quickly.  You won’t have the flexibility to put different third party packages like eqDKP or WebDKP.

Transferring sites like this is fairly simple because everything is hosted by one site.  There’s just one password list.

A guild that puts a lot of effort into their website might have multiple packages – a front page portal, a forum, a DKP or loot site, a scheduling system, etc.  Depending on where each comes from, they may be able to share passwords or they may be separate.  If the person managing your website is particularly crafty, they might set up some kind of password synchronization of their own design.

The guild leader may not be the person who sets up and runs all of these pieces, but they should have administrative access to all of them.  If you leave the website management to an officer or trusted member, you are just as much at risk if they leave, and and officer leaving may not be something that you think to plan for in as much depth.

However your guild website is set up, make sure that the person responsible makes a short list of everything that goes into it.  A list of software packages and where to download them.  A brief description of how the bits plug together, and whether any patches or other changes were made to the software.  You want to know where to start re-building if that ever becomes necessary.  A regular backup should also be part of the websmaster’s job – but don’t forget to test them.  Nothing’s worse than finding out that your “Backup and Restore” system was just a “Backup” system when you need it most.

If you go with paid website hosting, make sure the guild leader has access to the billing account.  If the account is in the name of the former guild leader, you may need to contact the hosting provider to get both the account and the billing moved over.  Though it may be tempting to just keep paying the bills and leave the account details untouched, don’t do it – when you need to talk to support or customer service, you’ll run into roadblocks if you can’t prove that you’re the account holder.

If you have a custom domain name, bear in mind that both the registration and DNS may be completely separate from your web hosting.  Many providers offer all three, but sometimes you’ll find setups where each is handled by a different company.  Make sure that you transfer ownership of the domain if it’s still in the old guild leader’s name.  If the domain provider isn’t changing, you may be able to do this via a portal.  If you’re moving hosting companies, you’ll need to get a transfer authorization code to give to your new provider, as well as unlocking the old domain for transfer at the old provider.

Voicemaster

I highly recommend that guilds have their own hosted Ventrilo server rather than piggybacking on a free service.  Professional services aren’t that expensive – $85 a year for a 30 user server, which is less than $0.50 per month if even half of those users contribute.  A 10 person guild could get away with half that.  Many providers make it easy for you guild members to contribute individually.

Like a website, the Ventrilo service will have both a billing account and an admin account.  On top of that, each server has a configuration file and set of custom channels, each of which may have channels.  The guild leader should have all of these passwords.  Most voice providers give you some way to back up these settings, which makes it a bit easier to re-create the server on another provider, or even on another account with the same provider if you can’t change the name of the registered account holder.

Have I missed anything?

In the final article of this series, we’ll examine some ways in which you can set up your guild to make the migration from one guild leader to another easier.

This is part 2 of an article series: Jump to Part 1 or Part 3

Related posts:

• Turning Over the Reins, Pt 3
• Turning Over the Reins
• Best of 2009

This article was suggested by Veliaf of Imperial Guardsmen.

I currently run a small guild in WoW, and have done for several years, but in the near future I’m going to be leaving WoW for a few months (probably until Cataclysm is released). Obviously this means I’ll be stepping down as GM, and this leads to questions such as who is going to take over, in what capacity, and so on.

We (that is, myself and my three officers) of course want to make the transition as smooth as possible to avoid disruption to the guild.

Managing the transition from one guild leader to another can be quite stressful.  As much as you may try to make the guild about the members, the purpose and the policies, some of your members will always put you on a pedestal and think that you stepping down means the end of the guild as they know it.

The good news: you’re thinking about it ahead of time.  The more preparation you put into this, the smoother things will go.  Many times a GM disappears without notice, catching the officers by surprise and leaving them without some of the critical privileges they need to keep the guild moving forward.

Veliaf posed some specific questions, which in and of themselves could fill an article.  But this is a huge topic to cover properly, because in order to manage the transition from one guild leader to another, you have to have an appreciation for everything that a guild leader does.  While anyone can can give a general description of what a guild leader does, it would probably be limited to the visible in-game and figurehead aspects of the position.  Guild leaders tend to do much more behinds the scenes.

To give this it’s proper due, I’m going to split this into three medium-sized articles rather than two very large ones.  First, we’ll talk about how to manage the transition itself – choosing a new guild leader, communicating the change to your members and keeping the guild on an even keel throughout the process.  Next, we’ll go a bit more in depth as to all the things that a guild leader does.  This will also serve as a laundry list of tasks that may be suitable for delegation rather than transferring them all onto one person.  Finally, I’ll talk about the practical steps you can take to prepare for your temporary or permanent departure from a guild so that you can quickly transfer leadership and deal with real life.

Crunch Time or No?

Your immediate goals for handling a leadership transfer are going to be very different depending on whether the change is planned or not.  If the current GM has decided that they need to move on and you have even a couple of weeks to make that happen, your job is going to be much much easier.

If your current GM just logged on to transfer leadership and gquit, you need to keep the guild operating smoothly while you plan out the transition.  The worst possible situation is that your GM has disappeared or announced their departure but hasn’t transferred leadership.

If you find yourself with an AWOL guild leader, you can petition a GM to transfer leadership to an officer after the account has been inactive for 30 days.  I believe that the account needs to have no login activity, so in the rare case that the GM has moved to a new realm but is actively playing, there may not be much you can do.  Until you can get control of the guild leader rank, what you can do will be limited.

I’ll go over the various things to deal with in the sections below.  If you’re dealing with an unexpected GM change, you will probably be most interested in:

• Steady As She Goes
• Selecting a New Leader
• Replacing What’s Been Lost
• Changing Things Up

If the move is planned, then you’ll find more relevant advice in:

• Selecting a New Leader
• Guidance Before Retirement
• Handing Over the Keys
• Steady As She Goes
• Preparing For a Return
• Changing Things Up
• The Golden Parachute

I can only give each of these a short treatment, so if there is a topic that you’d think would be a good standalone article, please leave a comment.

Steady As She Goes

In the days following a guild leader’s departure or disappearance, the remaining officers may be tempted to start making immediate changes in the way the guild is run.  I would strongly advise against this, unless the guild is so dysfunctional that you can’t even put together simple events.  Members need time to adjust to the change in leadership, and throwing policy changes into the mix increases the chances that members will flock elsewhere rather than stick it out.  After all, if everything about the guild is changing, it’s not all that different from applying to a new guild, is it?

If you have a raiding schedule, keep it.  If you have a loot system that is working (even poorly), keep it.  Don’t cancel raids, don’t change progression goals (unless your roster has been thrown in to turmoil and the goals are no longer realistic).  If that’s the case, set a couple of achievable short-term goals to encourage attendance.  What you’re trying to avoid is people going AFK while things are in limbo.

Make sure you keep communications flowing with members.  Make sure that your MOTD and guild info panel has current info in it, and directs people to a forum post to explain what’s going on so that people who log on in the middle of the night two weeks from now have some clue as to the state of things.

There may be a few things that will have to be changed immediately, but only if you’ve lost access to the old ones.  If your guild leader packed up and took the Ventrilo server or web site passwords with them, you may need to set up new ones, but I would recommend against building something massive at first.  All you really need is a place for out-of-game discussion to take place and possibly something to manage your loot.  You can set up a quick site on one of the many guild hosting providers, then build a proper guild site once things have calmed down a bit.

Selecting a New Leader

Although you can use a council style of leadership, where no one person has absolute control, the design of WoW forces you to give one person the keys to the kingdom, as it were.

I’m not a fan of council-style leadership.  Unless executed perfectly by very trustworthy people, it can easily lead to infighting.  Since the council cannot be enforced in-game, there is aways a possibility that whoever holds the top rank in the guild could go rogue.

If the guild move was planned, the leader may have chosen a “guild leader heir”, someone who has been learning the ins and outs of guild leadership.  Even without such preparation, the outgoing GM may hand-pick a successor.  This can be a delicate subject, depending on the nature of the departure and the possibility of the guild leader coming back.  A guild leader might be tempted to turn over the role to a real-life friend, without regard for that person’s suitability.  Be wary if the person selected is someone who would normally be relegated to a junior officer role.

The former leader’s pick may be perfectly sensible.  They may choose someone who they feel will continue to run the guild in the way that they have been.  This is fine, so long as the former guild leader’s style was generally well received by the members.  Not all guild leader transitions are flowery events.  There may be some bad blood that suggests the way the guild has been run isn’t the way it should continue to be run.

If you have to pick someone in a hurry, I suggest choosing the trustworthy officer who wants the job least.  Reconfigure permissions so that this person is a figurehead only, and that the officers have more or less the same level of control.  Even better, have this person roll a new alt, make that into a “GM bot”, and encourage them not to log onto it – continue to use their officer account for all day-to-day business.  This will give you some time to pick a replacement.

How then to go about that?  First, find out who is interested in the position.  If nobody is, consider opening up the position to long-term members.  I know some guilds frown upon promotion that jumps over the officer rank, but if your officers aren’t willing to step up to the plate, will they really make a good GM if forced into the position?  You may find you have a member with GM experience who will do a better job.

If more than one person is interested, figure out what the differences in vision are.  If you can’t reconcile and come to an agreement, it’s time to open it up to the members.  Have each candidate state what they feel they can do for the guild.  What do they think is wrong, what do they think is right, and what would they change?  Then let the members decide.

If the losing candidates aren’t able to accept the member’s choice, you may be in a tough position.  You don’t want to move forward with an officer corps that is holding resentments.  It may be necessary for the candidates to agree that whoever wins becomes GM, and the losing candidate returns to the most senior member rank.  Then the new GM can establish a new set of officers.  This is a considerable shakeup though, and should be avoided except in the case where keeping all of the old officers will lead to more instability.

Guidance Before Retirement

If the transition is planned, it’s a good idea for the changeover to take place a bit in advance.  Once the selection and announcement to the members has taken place, give the new leader the official role.  This allows the former GM to provide some level of support and guidance while making it clear that the new leader is formally in charge.

The old GM should do none of the daily tasks – all these should be handed over to the new leader.  If the former GM notices that something isn’t being taken care of, they should mention it; perhaps the task was missed in the handover.

If members continue to ask questions or make requests of the former GM during the handover period, they should be gently reminded to ask the new guild leader.  The new leader has an important part to play in making this happen though, as they need to be available and approachable to members, perhaps more so now than once everything has settled down.

Handing Over The Keys

Part of the guidance the former GM should provide is access to all of the bits and bobs that make the guild function.  I’ll go into these in more detail in part 2, and suggest ways that transferring them can be less work in part 3.  Even the old guild leader may not remember all the little things they’ve set up in the past, so be sure to spend some time thinking abou this.

At the very least, this includes things like

• Ventrilo administration passwords
• web site admin passwords (including sub-components of the web site, like eqDKP)
• access to forums that may not allow public recruitment posts (TankSpot for example)

At various points in this part of the handover, you’re going to find that virtual life overlaps and collides with real life.  It’s all well and good to give the new leader the ventrilo admin password, but if that gives them access to the billing portion of the provider’s website, personal details that have nothing to do with running the guild may be exposed.

In part 3 of this series I’ll talk about how to prevent this from being necessary, but in the meantime you may need to set up new billing accounts in the name of the new leader.  This will probably involve a voice call to the provider’s customer services.  I’ve only had to do it once, but the provider was more than happy to move the Ventrilo service from one billing acccount to another rather than lose the business entirely.

Replacing What’s Been Lost

If there hasn’t been any planning and your new guild leader was hastily promoted by the old one or by Blizzard, you won’t have the luxury of getting all the keys and passwords described above.  What’s worse, you may not even know the full list of things the old GM did or had access to.  Use part 2 as a checklist of things to get access to.  In many cases, you’re going to find that companies won’t turn over services without the approval of the current account holder, so replacement services will be required rather than getting access to the existing ones.

Don’t try to replace everything at once.  Even if your providers won’t transfer control of the accounts to you, they may be able to tell you when the current contract runs out.  Order things by how soon they’ll be cut off and focus on keeping the important ones going.

Preparing for a Return

If the guild leader is taking an extended break rather than leaving for good, you may not want to formally transfer the out-of-game elements to the new leader.  Everything in-game should be moved over as if the switch were permanent.

Veliaf raised an important point about the new members you recruit during the GM’s absence: won’t it be strange for them to have a new GM just appear out of nowhere one day?  Indeed it will.  You can stave this off by making sure that your members have access to the current state of the guild with regards to leadership.  You charter, “about the guild” pages on the website, and guild information panel should all reflect that the GM is on a temporary break and that they’ll be returning at a specific time.

The welcome letter you send new members should also include these details.  What’s that?  You don’t send a basic welcome letter to new members both in-game and on your forums?  Start doing that.  In game, send a link to the forums.  On the forums, provide quick links to important posts and policies, tell them what things they can expect from the trial period, and make sure they understand about the GM issue.

If your guild prefers the personal touch, where the above details are communicated directly by a recruiting officer, make sure that they explain the details to new members.

If the current GM wants to leave but doesn’t know when they’ll return, I recommend doing a full cut over.  Assume they’re leaving forever, and agree that the GM spot is no longer theirs.  When they come back, they can get an officer position, but it’s not fair to the members to know that leadership is going to change “sometime when the old GM gets around to it”.

Changing Things Up

Don’t make any radical changes in the first month – just let everyone get used to the change.  Even then, take it slow.  Just because you didn’t agree with some of the old guild leader’s policies doesn’t mean that your vision is 100% right.  The best approach is to observe members, talk to them, get some idea as to what they think needs to be changed.

An anonymous forum is a great tool if you website offers this feature – ask people to post their gripes, then look for patterns.  If you don’t get many suggestions, get together with the officers and list the things you think should be changed, then bounce that off the members.  You can’t change everything in the short term, and arguably you shouldn’t – if you are opposed to everything the your guild is about, you should be starting a new one, not trying to imprint your ideas on an existing one.

Let the members pick from your list, then put solid effort into fixing the top three or five things.  If that goes well, you can look at the next tier of things to fix, and so on.  Better to be focused than spread too thin.

The Golden Parachute

Another question Veliaf posed was this:

If the GM isn’t quitting the game, but merely leaving to move on, what happens with regards to things they’ve stored in the bank, etc? What if they feel they deserve ‘compensation’ before they go?

Personally, I’ve never thought of anything in the guild bank as belonging to the guild leader.  They belong to the guild.  This should be true of any member – if you kick someone, do you go through the bank logs and refund them everything they contributed since joining?  Probably not.

In the absence of a policy stating otherwise, anything deposited into the bank becomes the guild’s property, owned jointly by the members.  If someone is leaving (regardless of rank) and asks for donations back, the request should be rejected.  The problem is that if leadership hasn’t been transferred, or even if it has and the former GM has sufficiently high bank privileges, they may just choose to take what they think is theirs.

This isn’t really a guild leadership transfer issue, just plain theft.  Nobody should use a guild’s bank as if it were their personal bank alt, even the leadership.  If you really need more space than a mule character can provide, go create a vanity guild.  It’s not that expensive, takes a couple of hours at the most, and keeps ownership cleanly separated.

If the leader wanted to retain some claim to their contributions, they should have written that into policy, and had some way of tracking donations over time so that an accurate withdrawal could be made.  I doubt that you’ll find many guilds with such a policy though, as it runs contrary to the general understanding of what the guild bank is for.

It may be true that some guild leaders contribute more to the guild than other members, or that they prime the bank with a few thousand of their own gold.  If that was to be repaid in the future, it should have been part of the guild charter, not demanded as the person is leaving.

If you do end up in a situation where the former GM demands their contributions back, consider doing a guild bank liquidation, starting over with a clean bank when the new guild leader takes over.  This may still be problematic – if the guild leader is making these demands in the first place, they may not be happy doing a liquidation based upon effort.  If you choose some other metric to use for distribution (like contributions), then you’re just caving to an unreasonable demand and making more work for yourself.

In the next article, I’ll get into more detail about the various things that guild leaders do that members may not even be aware of.

Until Next Time

This is part 1 of an article series: Jump to Part 2 or Part 3

Related posts:

• Turning Over the Reins, Pt 2
• Turning Over the Reins, Pt 3
• Best of 2009