Cold Comfort

Guild Management and Leadership in WoW

Posts Tagged policy

Turning Over the Reins

Feb 1

Posted by Karatheya in Best Practices, Guild Management | No Comments

matrixcoconut Turning Over the Reins

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.

(more) Steady as She Goes...

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Your WoW Identity

Jan 7

Posted by Karatheya in Guild Management, Off-Topic | No Comments

A bit of a thought experiment this week.

I was ready to write an article about Guild Mergers, but after running over my thoughts on the topic I realized that there’s some background I need to get people thinking about first.  Here’s a quick preview: the fear and trepidation that surrounds a guild merger is all about the fear of losing your identity.

But what is your identity?  What makes you “you” online?  How much of your personality and values make it into the persona you expose to your guild members?  Are you more or less the same person, or do you build up a completely different you when behind a keyboard?

Consistency or Facets?

Assuming that nobody knows of the common player behind your alts, do you choose to expose a different facet, or even an entirely different personality on one character vs another?  Or do you play all of your characters act in a way that is consistent with your personality and values?

Personally, I think of myself as a protector, and this comes through in all of my characters.  It’s what led me to always have a tanking or healing main character.  It’s why I only death grip on my DPS Death Knight to pull a mob off the healer.  I like the idea that I am responsible for the other people in my party – not for their behaviour, but for their safety from whatever the game throws at us.

MBTI

If you’ve never thought much about your personality traits, you might want to take a few minutes to take the Meyers-Briggs Typology test.  The full test has 72 questions.  There are shorter versions, like this one that uses the Simpsons characters, but you can’t expect to get much out of a personality test that asks four two-choice questions.

(when our vice president joined the company and wanted to do some team building, he gave us the Simpsons version of the test and I came out as Principal Skinner.  Read into that what you will.  Now that I think about it, it might be fun to work out the 16 WoW NPCs that match the various typologies.  Garrosh Hellscream for ESTP?  Wait, “able to handle criticism”.  Perhaps not)

If you’ve done one of these tests in the past, you may know the general category you fall into.  If so, pick one of your characters and do the test as them.  If you’re someone who does absolutely no role-play, there may be no difference in the results, but I suspect a great number of us switch things up even a little bit when playing.

(more) What Are Your Limits?...

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Primordial Trophies and Orbs, Oh My!

Dec 24

Posted by Karatheya in Best Practices, Cold Comfort, Guild Management, Raiding | 1 Comment

trophy Primordial Trophies and Orbs, Oh My!

When a new content patch is on the horizon, I like to go through my policies and see what needs to be updated – typically with regards to loot.  I continue to do this for Cold Comfort even though the guild is in stasis at the moment.  It’s a good exercise, and it helps build up a history with which to demonstrate my ideas on policy transparency.

For patch 3.3, I wanted to update the policies to remove old instances and set a policy for dealing with new items that would drop in Icecrown Citadel.  In doing so, I realized that I had never drawn up a policy for distribution of the non-gear items that drop in Trial of the Crusader.

I’ve heard many people complain about how their guild deals with things like Trophy of the Crusade.  Certainly the way that Blizzard set up the various grades of tier 9 armor didn’t help much, but most policies I heard about seemed to split one of two ways:

  • make them purchasable in the exact same way as gear, with anyone who is interested bidding on them
  • distribute them via some loot council system (even if the main loot system is DKP-like) when a member reaches some threshold (such as having the other materials required for turnin)

The way that you obtained tier 9.25 and 9.5 armor made either approach painful.  In the first case, people would try to grab the trophy early to ensure that they controlled when they were able to upgrade their gear.  In some cases, this let them skip the 9.10 tier entierly.  The second technique led to the opposite behaviour – if you didn’t know exactly when you were going to get your trophy, you might hold off buying your 9.10 set so that you weren’t emblem-starved when you did receive the token.

Crusader Orbs were also tricky, as they were used in 36 recipes to make gear on par with Normal 25 / Heroic 10 drops, but the items crafted were bind on equip.  Imagine that a Blacksmith tank has just purchased four orbs to craft Saronite Swordbreakers for themselves.  While waiting to do the last Titansteel transmute they need, Armguards of the Shieldmaiden drop.  The items are roughly equivalent (depending on the mix of stats you have on the rest of your gear).

Should the member be able to give the orbs back and get their DKP back?  If the items were given via loot council rather than purchased, does the member now owe the orbs to the bank because they would not have received the orbs if they’d already been wearing the dropped item?  What if they’d already crafted the item – are they now at the back of the line for orbs, even though they just wasted them?

Primordial Saronite, the new “orb” of Icecrown Citadel adds yet another variable.  While it’s used for half as many recipes, it is also used in large quantities to progress through the quest to form the legendary weapon Shadowmourne.  While you can purchase the Saronite for 23 Emblems of Frost, doing so would take weeks of pouring all your emblems into the task, and prevent you from purchasing any other EoF rewards in the process.

Even Blizzard doesn’t really have guidance for how Primordial Saronite “should” be distributed, acknowledging that it’s a problem of social dynamics (more) My Plan...

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Bigotry In The Ranks

Oct 15

Posted by Karatheya in Best Practices, Guild Management, Ranting | 5 Comments

Death and life are in the power of the tongue

King Solomon (Proverbs 18:21)

I have always been a believer in the power of words.  When I speak or write, I choose my words carefully.  I try to know my audience and consider the ways in which what I say could be misinterpreted.  I do this both because I want what I say to come across clearly and because I understand how words can hurt someone, even if not directed specifically at them.  I don’t want to say something that brings up a particularly traumatic experience, or reinforces prejudices, or just crosses the line of human decency.

Rarely is it necessary to go to such lengths to get your message across.  Yet daily, I see examples of people abusing the power of words in WoW.  Some days, I see people purposely using words to incite others, or to try to hide racist or sexist messages in their guild or character names.

Why do people do this, and more importantly, why do we let them get away with it?

Let me use an example that to this day both infuriates and boggles my mind: the guild name “Sapped Girls Can’t Say No”.  There are more than 120 such guilds on the US and EU realms and over 300 arena teams.  Most of the guilds have five or less members, and many have only one.  These aren’t real guilds.  They are attempts by people to make a joke.  A joke about rape.  There’s no wiggle room here – go do a google search and you’ll find that the top hits replace “sapped” with “drunk” or “drugged”.

If you stood in the middle of a busy city centre wearing a sandwich board that read “Drugged Girls Can’t Say No”, you would at the very least convince passers-by that you were an asshole, and at worst get lynched.  Depending on the country you live in you might be charged with a hate crime or inciting sexual violence.  Yet somehow it’s OK to do the virtual equivalent in WoW, and we (the people who see them displaying that guild tag) let them get away with it.  Under Blizzard’s terms of use, such guild names are clearly not allowed.  All it takes is one report and Blizzard should by all rights force the guild to change its name.

That these names still persist suggests that people either don’t care or think the joke is funny.  But what about those players who have been the victim of sexual violence?  Is it fair that they should be reminded of that dark past just so that some asshat can have a laugh?  Why do we not extend the same human kindness in the virtual world that we do in the real world?  You can’t play these types of things off as “part of the roleplaying experience” – it’s a plain and simple attempt to tell a sexist joke from behind the shield of anonymity that your character provides.

Dredging the Forums

So, what prompted me to write on this topic?  Against my better judgement, I decided to take the pulse of the WoW forum community by browsing the General forum, a decision that was both stupid and tragic.  Among the torrent of nerdrage about the forced Battle.Net merge (more on that next week), I came across this post:

Yes our named got banned because I camped a shadow priest. Tell me what is wrong with the guild name “halaa back naga”. Two of our members that are african american suggested that name, we liked it so we made it. We were getting complements like “man awesome guild name” “Dude can I join your guild its so awesome” etc.  I want a gm to respond to this because that guild lasted 4 months before some scrub that couldn’t get away from me reported it.

Admittedly, this guild name is less offensive than my example above.  But the responses (in which the OP is essentially told that he is an idiot and should have known better) encouraged me to write about the more extreme examples that I’ve seen in the past.  Obviously I’m not alone in my thinking.

It’s not every little thing that I take issue with – just the extremes: racism, sexism and religious zealotry.  I remember an incident from my first EU guild.  I was leveling both my Paladin and Death Knight at the time, and mentioned in guild chat that it would be great it Paladin tanks had a similar spell to Death Grip – call it “Holy Lasso” or something like that.  The response that came back (from the guild leader no less) was that if I wanted a holy spell that dragged people in, it should be called “Islam”.  That was a serious “WTF?” moment, after which I ripped the guy a new one publicly for preaching that level of intolerance.

Calling a Spade a Spade

Let me be blunt: I consider the extremes of this type type of behaviour to be bigotry, plain and simple.  Is that too harsh a word?  Should I try to find something less insulting those those who are only a little bit racist or sexist?  Nope.

A bigot is someone who is intolerant of those whose ideas differ from their own, most often with regards to religion, race or politics.  When you attack or victimize someone who differs from you, you’re being a bigot.  That the attack is passive (displaying something offensive towards another group in a public forum) rather than active is irrelevant.

It’s the degree that is the problem.  Intolerance is such a malleable term.  Some people will observe a disagreement or heated discussion and accuse one or both of the parties of being intolerant.  If any degree of intolerance could be equated to bigotry, nobody would be able to say anything negative to anyone else, and that would be a terrible world to live in.

For my purposes, the line is when you say or do something that would be generally offensive to a mixed group of people you didn’t know in the real world.

(more) Too sensitive?

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