Leading a Guild

Over the last decade I have grown along with the MMO industry, social interaction has evolved a great deal.

Back in the Pre WoW days guilds were groups of people who spent days huddled in spawn locations for great monsters who's spawn times were legend. And then a phone tree would go out and players who were offline, would start to appear ready to fight this monster that their guild mate was running in circles with while dozens of other players looked on all hoping he'd screw up and get killed so they could start running it in circles until their guild got there. Eventually the once every 10+ days monster would be killed and he would drop his super awesome item and some sort of predetermined outcome would happen. Maybe it was sold and the profits shared among the members who were present. Maybe it was given to a particular member for their service, and maybe some day in the future, if you helped enough, months from now you could have your very own once every 10 days monster loot.

Placating dozens of players who all want cool things takes an extreme degree of skill. I've been there, and I hate it.

As I grew into WoW I started to become involved in the guilds I was associated with. I always put in extra effort to make sure I was bringing everything I could to raids as a personal contribution. Buffs and gear, rep grinds and such. I played a lot, hours every day plus raid times. I was calm and well spoken in voice chat and outwardly reasonable when it came to loot distribution conflicts. This lead to promotions to Officer rank all the time, and ultimatly to my frustration and abandonment of the guild in the long run.


What most people don't tell you about running a guild is that it becomes the game. More than that, it becomes the only game, because the primary asset it takes to lead a guild is time. You can be a great leader, but if you aren't giving the game 40 hours a week your guild will fall apart. Of those 40 hours maybe you'll spend half of them raiding. That's the content you are interested in, that's why you are leading this guild. The other 20 hours, you'll be recruiting, dealing with member disputes, learning boss strategies, keeping up to date on server activities, game news and helping guild members get various tasks completed. Very rarely will you have the freedom to just find something fun to do in the game.


This is why I don't want to be involved in guild leadership anymore. I just want to play the game. I would like to Raid and tackle challenging content. But I also want to have the freedom to just log in for raids for a couple of weeks, or to just not log in at all for a month. And you can't do that if you run a guild, because it's nearly impossible to recover from it.


This is the situation I am in with my guild. It is run by friends, and we like to play together, but we are no longer interested in "leading." As life has, over the years, shuffled our schedules only 7 of us are remain consistently active, and it's a rare time when we can tackle challenging 5 man content. The nature of our overlap means that usually there are only 3 of us at a time, or there are 6 or 7. Almost always too few or too many


I gave it quite a bit of thought and I have determined the only real fix is for someone to get sick of doing nothing and find a new guild. The rest of us would follow. We need to find new leaders and step into the crowd of their team. I am not interested in doing that, as much as I don't want to lead, I am just as uninterested in being lead. But I do enjoy playing with my friends, so I will follow them if they move forward. I feel, though, that they are feel much the same as I do.

Maybe we all just got old.

I like Dailies

I am a player that actually enjoys daily quests. Most gaming pundits seem to wonder where the players are who these quests are designed for. Well here I am.

The most important part of dailies is that they are something that can be done every day by every player. It gives everyone a reason to log in every day. This is important for the broad community. It keeps populations stable and clumped so that they can intersect and feel like they are part of a community. This is also important for the small communities within the whole; guilds. Having a collection of daily quests to address each day gets me signed into the game, and into vent, and talking with my friends. We are bound by this common task and it opens the doors of communication. We start talking about dailies, and achievements, and then TV and other games, and news and local events. Also, they are entry level content, they aren't challenging, they offer players an opportunity to be powerful heroes, which I think is good emotionally.

So I like them. I also like running dungeons, working on challenge modes, or playing some of the games I bought in the Steam Summer Sale.

I haven't had an opportunity to do that for the last month since most of my gaming time (and a significant portion of the writing time) is soaked by the massive collection of dailies presented in World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria. It's really too much, when you add up all the crucial reputations it's about 40 quests every day. That doesn't count Cloud Serpents, Anglers or Nat Pagle. I feel like there are probably even more that I either don't know about or am forgetting. The system is not a good one.

There are a couple of ways this could have worked out better. The first would have been to use the Lesser Charms as a way to grant reputation. Have a weekly quest that costs X Lesser Charms and then rewards Y reputation in the amount that Blizzard wanted to limit the community to. The advantage here would be that after you finished the X dailies you could take a break, or store up some extras for the next week like you can for the Greater Charm quest. The disadvantage would be that there is a real risk that the servers kind of dwindle in population as the week goes on. On the other hand it could revitalize the community and allow more players to participate in all the great fringe activities we have in Mists. Pet Battles, and Challenge Modes and knocking people off their mounts with the turtle shell as they fly over the top of a mountain.

The other solution would have been to tie the gear to factions in a different way than they have. Instead of each reputation offering a certain item. Instead have every reputation offer every item, but with a unique look. Klaxxi armor, Golden Lotus Armor, August Celestial Armor and Shadow Pan Armor. Nothing crazy or over the top, but distinct. As pre-raid gear it shouldn't be the greatest in the game, but with Transmog as a feature there is no reason not to have a neat set of transition gear, people can choose to display it as a way of showing which faction they chose to focus their efforts to helping. Make it a real choice, you can only work on one rep at a time. You can do the other quests, but they don't generate rep, that way guild members can help each other out if they want, they still get gold and lesser charms, but no rep. Maybe block off those armor sets to only your first choice. Sure some people will want it all, but the more you offer limiting choices to players the more they will become distinct. And the less they will have to spend 3 hours running dailies every night for a month. God damn it I just want to play Assassin's Creed! The most epic thing I have had time to do is Perform a stunning aerial assassination on a Bunny Rabbit. Even in my single player action games....afkljfslad