A GM’s Perspective

These past few weeks have seen my guild leadership work increase twofold. Nearly every waking hour between half-marathon training, sleep, work and school has been focused on leading the guild. The work has obviously come to the point where my blog and time for leisure has suffered.

Recruitment particularly has required more attention than previously. During our time working on Kil’jaeden, and shortly after the kill, my guild suffered a massive amount of attrition:

• 1 holy/disc priest: to focus on life. I do not wish to explicitly say why, to protect his privacy, but it’s a very good reason.
• 1 resto druid: to become a helicopter pilot.
• 1 resto shaman: as a commitment to his new wife. He is available on occasion, however.
• 1 holy paladin: to join the navy.
• 1 mage: to pursue a relationship and focus on life. He is available in emergencies, however.
• 1 mage: to focus on work and life. She is available in emergencies, however.
• 1 arms/prot warrior: to take college courses that occur during raids.
• 1 rogue: mostly because of time differences, I think.
• 1 shadow priest: for reasons I’ll leave unsaid.
• There’s also a couple who disappeared without really saying anything, though one of them explained why after-the-fact.

This means we lost eleven people total leading up to our defeat of Kil’jaeden. Of course, we did gain a couple people in this time, as well. But the predicament resulted in dropping our core raiding numbers down to a dangerously low level. And applications weren’t exactly rolling in, since most of the available people out there applied to guilds that were 6 of 6 in Sunwell, instead of 5 of 6. And those that did apply to us weren’t qualified or didn’t pass the trial. We also had problems where people would occasionally miss raids for summer-related activities like family barbecues, birthdays, short vacations, etc. Now that we have Kil’jaeden down, however, applications are rolling in at a decent pace.

At a certain point, when recruitment pools are limited, attrition makes it extremely difficult to set up a raid that can succeed in downing bosses. Even nerfed, M’uru still requires a good balance of DPS: enough melee such that each door can be taken care of efficiently, but enough ranged such that gravity balls during Entropius are less impactful if they spawn near and leash onto the melee. The fight is certainly a joke compared to the pre-nerfed version we killed back in June, but it is by no means easy to repeat every week. There were nights where we would be playing with only one experienced resto shaman and two formerly enhance shamans playing resto to cover for our losses. Or, worse yet, no experienced resto shamans, one formerly enhancement shaman playing resto, and someone playing an alt shaman. The situation certainly came to an extreme in this regard.

Luckily my guild in now in a position to recover from our losses, however. Already, I have a resto shaman and a resto druid queued for trial, we’ve been trialing a holy/disc priest, and we’ve picked up a mage. Furthermore, people have been expressing interest in the guild everyday. So I’ve found myself standing deep in leadership work with merely recruitment. It does beg the question, however: where do you find the time to lead? I’ve been so swamped with reading applications and interviewing potential applicants I’m simply overwhelmed!

Where Do You Find the Time to Lead?

It doesn’t take a lot of effort to simply lead a raid or a guild. Anyone can invite people and run raids on a superficial level. However, if you want to lead a successful raid, there’s a rather long list of daunting tasks to perform. Personally, after the departure of my guild’s previous “administrative assistant,” I was taking on all of these duties:

• Outside of raids:
  • Assessing what classes we need, and making sure recruitment posts were created and updated on World of Raids, MMO Champion, WoWProgress, and the realm forum.
  • Reading applications and determining whether or not a person is worth interviewing for a position in the raid.
  • Interviewing applicants over Ventrilo if they warrant a further look.
  • Deciding if an applicant passes the interview and should trial with us.
  • Distributing epic gems.
  • Distributing sunmotes.
  • Evaluating attitude problems that might have occurred during or outside of raids and making decisions about them outside of raids.
  • Updating the web site.
• During raids:
  • Determining who is in and out for each encounter.
  • Assessing some of our trials and recruits.
  • Determining whether trials or recruits make the cut.
  • Taking interest in loot, and putting in my vote as part of the loot council.
  • Keeping people focused and calm.
  • Organizing the healers.
  • Sometimes organizing the DPS if it’s needed.

This comes between personal pursuits of blogging, training to run half-marathons (and eventually marathons), attending classes, homework, work, spending time with family or friends, and simply enjoying WoW for what it is. The latter point I think is important. What is the point of playing a game if you simply can’t enjoy it? Luckily for me, part of the enjoyment I get is in leading itself. I can sit back and laugh about the workload. However, I also like to take some time to just relax and mindlessly grind honor or levels at times.

It’s crucial to note the list of my duties doesn’t consider those my co-GM covers, which include helping with raid pacing, providing input as the other part of our loot council, paying for the guild’s web site and Ventrilo servers, distributing flask tokens, selling HoD’s, leading the tanks during raids, making sure we have extra consumables for the tanks in case they run out or didn’t have the time to farm for that day’s raid, and recruiting people through EJ’s benefactor bar. He also helps discuss and make some decisions outside of raids. It also doesn’t cover guild-specific tasks other guilds might have, such as maintenance of a DKP system.

To be blunt, it is impossible for one person to find the time to do everything on their own, unless they are retired or have a sponsorship that allows them to perform these tasks all day, everyday. Otherwise, it requires real life sacrifices many people aren’t willing to make–myself included.

Delegating to Find the Time

It is important for any good leader that doesn’t find all the time they need to delegate various tasks to others in the guild.

With the recent departure of one of our prominent officer figures, I’ve had to delegate some of the tasks to help make the raid more efficient. I am still in the process of refining this delegation, however. One of our rogues has been helping find potential applicants, and this has been a large part of the increase in applications we’ve received. As a highly respected member of the WoW community (the top rogue theorycrafter on EJ), people are keen in his advertisement for the guild. One of our shadow priests has been helping us track raids for several months. Furthermore, one of our warriors has now taken on the task of taking interest in loot when it drops and gathering information about people’s loot history, so we can make decisions while I simultaneously facilitate swaps for the next encounter after a kill.

That said, I have to talk with my co-GM about when we give them access to the officer channel and such. And I am still trying to decide who would be a good candidate for gem distribution. That way my focus will be primarily on evaluating and interviewing applicants or recruits, facilitating group composition for each encounter, leading the healers, keeping people focused, distributing sunmotes, maintaining a good atmosphere, and updating the web site. This is a manageable amount of work for me, whereas the three weeks before this one has largely been unmanageable.

How Much Delegation Is Too Much?

One of the things I’ve discovered over several years of playing MMO’s is that having too many people in various leadership, officer or officer-like positions actually has the potential to create a system that is too mired in “bureaucratic” stagnation. This creates a contrasting problem against the need to delegate tasks so you actually have the time to lead a successful raiding guild and prevent yourself from burning out.

Even in a co-GM system, where we primarily make the decisions, I’ve found there are certain topics too sensitive to act on before consulting my co-GM. For example, I am hesitant to kick or demote members without his consent. And what I’ve found is that he is extremely reticent to kick anyone. This means I often let issues of these kind drop and compromise by simply abstaining from putting people in if their attitudes are problematic. But his reluctance has admittedly prevented bad decisions. So it has slowed down the decision-making process, but it’s made it so both of us are not too mired in guild-based work.

I will say I think it’s important to have at least one other person who can fill in when the traditional leaders are absent or indisposed. However, I also think it’s imperative for a leader to exhibit restraint in just how many people they tap to help them. If minor stagnation occurs with merely two people leading a guild, imagine how much worse the problem would be if five officers all got together to hold a vote on various issues. The process would simply aggravate situations that require swift decisions. And sometimes you need quick choices and drastic actions to prevent further problems.