Turns out I'm not a very good headhunter. Should have rolled a Troll.

Xeppe (author of the excellent blog An Ordinary Priest) and I have a strange history.

I actually found Xeppe’s blog through a link via another link from someone else’s blog. I was amazed to discover that she was not just a fellow Priest, or a fellow Oceanic Priest, or even a fellow Barthilas player – Barthilian?, or even another girl WoW player. No. Xeppe was all those things, but even more interestingly, she was a brand new recruit in my guild’s shady splinter guild: DeZire.

Talk about good gossip!

You see, back around the time my guild was first struggling with the new Icecrown Citadel hard modes two distinct, but major events occurred within our ranks. Firstly, we recruited a third Mage to join our two existing Mages (the existing pair of boys happened to be very good friends and had gamed together for years and I think, perhaps, even knew each other well outside the game). The third Mage, I’m sorry to say, was a piece of work. She was one of those people who help perpetuate the girls-are-trouble-and-don’t-belong-in-serious-raid-teams stereotypes.

In those days we made a fundamental mistake. One that your guild is probably making right now:

We put our pure caster DPS in Group 3.

Do not do this. For the love of god, do not do this. It was pure happenstance that one week I also found myself in Group 3 (perhaps I had logged on extremely early and sniped one of the first slots). And by the time we had killed Heroic Blood Princes party chat had dissolved into a pretty serious argument between New Mage and I over the Shadow Silk Spindle. New Mage made a snarky comment when one of our Restoration Druids (not Lathere, by the way) outbid everyone else and won the Heroic Shadow Silk Spindle. It was the first one our raid had seen, and yes, coveted by all the casters.

New Mage felt that the item should be for DPS casters only. Because any serious raider would know that there is a Spirit offhand waiting to be had from Heroic Sindragosa, and that is better for Restoration Druids, and the Resto Druid that won the Shadow Silk Spindle was outting themselves for being unprepared and ignorant of their class.

I think she was surprised that I was so angry with her. I think she was really just directing her complaint towards the other two Mages in the party, and both agreed with her, and never intended for me to see the conversation. I’d certainly never seen her say anything like that in Guild or Raid chat before.

I have no patience for players who claim to know what other classes should or shouldn’t be equipping (especially when it’s to argue that someone doesn’t deserve the item you want – talk about biased!). And furthermore our loot system is set up to be as open as possible and we make no concessions for best in slot or class by class comparisons. It’s not a Loot Council. Far from it. You bid on what you want. And if you want it that bad be prepared to spend a lot.

We got into another argument about a week later, also in Party Chat, but I can’t remember what it was about. By then I had mentally labeled her as a Troublemaker with a capital T. Over the next few weeks our other two Mages became more and more discontent with our raiding and were quite vocal about it. They were fast to post DPS meters when one of the Mages had hit the #1 spot, and very defensive of each-other if anyone dared point out a mistake that one of them had made.

At the same time one of the core founding members of the guild, a Rogue, was also becoming unhappy with our raiding. He was angry when we struggled to get numbers, angry when he felt the officers weren’t recruiting properly. He was angry at our raid leading, angry at our mistakes. He eventually left to join a more progressed guild and I, like most of the guild, was both sad and relieved.

Anyway, to make a long story short, our unhappy Rogue decided to come back and give our guild, and his old friends still in the guild, another go. He chafed under the rules even more than before. Throw that into the mix with our 3 discontent Mages and it was a pretty miserable time to be raiding with Vitare. I blogged about it here.

To make a very long story short, during a tough night wiping on Professor Putricide, our Raid Leader decided to penalise one of our Mages (who had been topping the DPS meters) for doing something silly: getting hit by Malleable Goo or something. Within a few minutes all three Mages had left the raid and left the guild. While it was completely expected, and in fact the officers had over-recruited caster DPS just for that reason, it was still a pretty uncomfortable moment for the guild. Probably the most drama we’d seen in two or three years.

Not long after, perhaps a week or two later, our unhappy Rogue also called it quits. This time he decided to head up a brand new 25 man raiding guild on Barthilas, clearing the same content, with the same hours, same start time, same everything as our guild. DeZire started with 1 Rogue and 3 Mages. They took raiding applicants that we declined. They welcomed raiders who decided they didn’t like us enough to stay after their trial period (we can’t be everyone’s cup of tea, I suppose). And they built themselves up to a formidable and successful raiding guild, eventually surpassing us on the server progression tables if not by content cleared, but by the speed that they were able to clear it.

So imagine my surprise when I started reading An Ordinary Priest and all the drama of their new 25 man raiding guild is there to see written in between the lines of a young Discipline Priest second guessing herself during her raiding trial. It starts here, and gets better, and even better here and ends here.

Xeppe and I got to talking both on her blog and also in game – after all, we were on the same server raiding the same content at the same time. We had many online friends in common, and I had met a few of her raid team in real life so I had my own impressions and stories to tell.

Unfortunately Xeppe didn’t have a very good time of it in her Barthilas guild. I started thinking of ways to get her into Vitare. I knew she would fit right in, and while her guild and mine were identical in raid times, gear and progression, the personalities and attitudes which drive both guilds are as different as night and day.

As much as I would have liked to sponsor an application to my guild from Xeppe the timing was all wrong. We had a full roster of Priests and our Raid Leader leader is a Discipline Priest. And she was of the opinion that Discipline Priests don’t stack well.  Tack on our two excellent and long term Holy Priests and there was just no reason, other than pure favoritism, to welcome another healing Priest to the team.

I was dismayed to hear that Xeppe had burned out and left Barthilas, forever associating hardcore raiding, 25 mans, and progression raiding with that bad experience in DeZire.

If you haven’t been reading An Ordinary Priest you might not know it but Xeppe has turned from a white bar into a dark blue one: these days she’s playing a Restoration Shaman. And it just so happens that my guild, Vitare, is being very open-minded about our roster for Cataclysm. And there’s definitely room for a Restoration Shaman.

There’s room for Xeppe. If only I could convince her!

Natassia, a Rogue in my guild, played with Xeppe when they were both in DeZire, Xeppe’s old Barthilas guild. She chimed in on Xeppe’s blog to add support to my Must Recruit Xeppe Plan of Attack. Our Raid Leader has been reading An Ordinary Priest on and off for almost a year. Our Recruitment Officer is keen for Xeppe to join too.

And if you need further proof of how much we want you to join, Xeppe, here it is!

Plan: How to Recruit Xeppe

My hopes for Vitare in Cataclysm are thus: to hash over our experiences in game online here at HoTs & DoTs (written by yours truly and if you’re lucky you might get some mad ramblings from Lathere), our guild’s anti-gnomes Warlock over at Emberstorm (written by Velidra) and our future guild’s Absolutely Unique Shaman (that would be Xeppe)!

ps. These days it is a firm rule in Vitare that Mages are never placed in the same party within a raid and are, instead, almost always separated among Groups 2-4.

I know, I know, my portrait on the footer is out of date.

Since Christmas Lathere has spent more time administering the guild than actually playing the game. And the topics she wants to blog about include all the bad stuff that comes with being part of the running of a guild.

When she was drafting her last post she said to me “I feel like about writing about all these things but I don’t feel right about publishing it”.

I’ve heard about people getting fired, or not being hired, because of incriminating Facebook profiles and comments. A friend of a friend of a friend blogged about their everyday life, including stuff happening in their workplace, and was fired over it. Do the same standards of privacy and confidentiality apply to publishing and guilds?

Legally (and bear in mind that I’m no expert) I don’t see how they could. First off, you sign a contract when you become an employee. To a certain extent they own your mind – and any ideas you may have – while you are an employee. If, as an employee, you publish on the internet “I work at XYZ Telecommunications and the reason that our servers went down the other day is because we all went out for a boozy lunch! Even the techies!” you could seriously damage the reputation of your company. Your damage might lead to a loss in customers and revenue.

But a guild isn’t a business. Our employees are our guild members. We have potential employees everywhere. Our competitors are other progression-driven raiding guilds. The closest thing we have to customers are the players on the server we might trade goods with, or players we might bring ask to join a PuG. We are not reliant on our customers to “succeed” as a business. We primarily do not exist to raise gold. We define succeeding as killing bosses and raid progression.

To reach our goal, we need a strong raid team – a strong team of employees.

Yes, our reputation is still very important to us. A guild with a poor reputation will have a much more difficult time recruiting players. Even very successful (progression-wise) guilds with poor reputations will have difficulties recruiting players.

If you’re having difficulty recruiting excellent players (er employees) you end up dropping your standards to recruit good players and end up with a weaker team overall. So our reputation definitely contributes to the success/failure of the raid team.

Somehow Lathere (and I) need to walk a fine line – blogging about our experiences within our guild, without damaging the reputation of our guild. Or, we could just not blog about it at all. Or, we could change our character names, remove the WoW Armory links and completely disassociate ourselves from our characters, server and guild.

The second option seems somewhat extreme. But if we had taken that stance from the day we set up Hots and Dots I think it would have been easily achieved. But we never set out to hide who we are. I like having players whisper me in game and leave a comment, in person so to speak, about an article that we’ve published.

I’m not ashamed to leave my character exposed for all my readers to poke at my gear, gems or achievements. In the same way that I lack respect for players who post on the official forums as their level 1 alt, I would lose respect for bloggers who offer advice with no way for me to establish who they are, where they come from and what they’ve experienced.

I read many bloggers who hide (unintentionally, I think) what server they play on and what their character name is. To be fair, most of them write about personal, very subjective, learning experiences – opinion pieces. And I don’t think it’s necessary to establish credibility for that kind of writing.

But if you expect me to follow your 3.3 Resto Druid Raiding Gear Guide, well, I’d want to know that you actually raid as a Resto Druid! I’d prefer to learn about Resto Shaman healing from someone who is actually, well, an experienced Resto Shaman.

I don’t think anonymity is a valid option for Lathere and I.

So should we only write about the good stuff? We blog about lots of guild achievements – when we master a fight strategy in particular. We share our guild strategies and ideas right here on the blog. I’d like to point out that this is all positive publicity for the guild which often goes unrecognized.

I think it’s lying to only blog about the good stuff. Bad stuff happens in every guild. Is it better to try and keep it private? Perhaps. Some problems and personal conflicts can blow over if you ignore them, or try and solve them in private without the rest of the guild, and the community, reading with a bowl of popcorn at hand.

When I blogged about a little bit of drama that somehow split the guild right down the middle, one 10 man group vs the other, I was extremely vague about the circumstances. I wanted to write about it and I felt that I couldn’t write any other post at the time. But I also felt that if I were to drag all the details and personal conflicts out into the open I might just be making the problem infinitely worse. So I didn’t. It was frustrating to write it like that, but I certainly don’t wish be the catalyst which makes existing drama worse just to satisfy my writer’s muse.

Lathere is in a more difficult situation than I. She is an officer and has to deal with all the complaints, dramas and conflicts that I remain blissfully unaware of 99% of the time. But on the few occasions that I’ve been caught up in guild politics or drama, I find myself shying away from publishing those articles too.

Perhaps I need to set us, Lathere and I, some guidelines. I think it would be wrong to:

1. publish a story which identifies individuals by name and defames them
2. inadvertently publish some new guild policy before telling the guild first
3. take an opinion (we’re bloggers, that’s all we can do) and write about the details of a conflict between two guild members

Other than that, I think nothing else should be off limits.

I believe that our readers are smart enough to recognise that there is good and bad things in Vitare. Good and bad things happen in all guilds.

And when we write about them, it’s because we wonder if you might have experienced the same thing.

I've played with people like this. And liked them.

It’s bound to happen eventually. Drama. Usually I hold myself back a little bit from most in game conflicts and disagreements. Put it in the light of day, say it out loud and suddenly it seems pretty ridiculous.

You see I’m part of this crazy, out of control will-powered machine called a raid. It has 25 people in it. Some of those people I hope never to meet in real life. Some of those people make me roll my eyes. Some of those people I have had to, well, learn how to love them.

We’re all grouped up at our computers to participate in something bigger than ourselves. And it’s actually a pretty selfish, mercenary desire that brings us back – loot, glory or character achievement. You can see it on your Armory. Sometimes the other people we need to get there just get in the way. Really when you look at your character everyone else just seems to fade away in the background. Or perhaps you think of them as some meaningless, faceless group of 24 strangers who were unwelcome, but necessary.

No matter how good a player you are, paired with 24 poor players you’re not going to achieve anything. Of course the vice versa is always true and I can think of several people who should have just renamed their character to “Carried” and come out of the closet.

The Myer Briggs type indicator models why people make decisions they do – it’s abbreviated to T or F and it stands for the two extremes: Thinking or Feeling. I’m not going to talk about the two extremes and how they differ, the most important thing to remember is that people make decisions for different reasons. And even more importantly, in a group of leaders you want people to approach decision making from different places – combined you get a much more thoughtful solution to the problem.

I’ve played with some trouble makers in my time. I think the guild I was part of during the last expansion could have been renamed Home for Wayward Souls Not Tolerated Elsewhere. You know when you read the Blizzard forums and think to yourself “where do all these arrogant, angry and mean people come from?” well the answer is: from guilds like ours. Yes, I’ve played with people like that. And liked them. People who made me cringe when they scolded a new member for making a mistake. People you’d never want to PuG with.

After a while, well I learned to love those difficult people. And here’s why: None of them, no matter how offensive their words, had any real hatred or malevolence towards the other guild members.

Let me tell you a story. Meet Skady. He’s well liked by pretty much everyone. Never says a word on vent, but he’s always keen to join in on the fun. He’s an excellent player. He could be in a more progressed guild.

Meet Naxex. He’s obnoxious. He’s rude. He’s harsh when players make mistakes. He joined to complete his Tier set and (unspoken) will then quit. Everyone does their best to ignore him. He’s an excellent player. He could be in a more progressed guild. He’s amazed that we keep inviting his friend to our raids when his friend’s DPS is just plain terrible.

One day Skady quits the guild. Everyone is surprised and upset, he’s a rock, a core member of the guild. I whisper him to find out why he left. He tells me that Naxex had said something racist in guild chat that offended him. Nobody else in the guild seems to know exactly what was said. Neither Naxex or Skady can remember exactly, or are unwilling to say. Some people say that Naxex was in the wrong, some say that Skady overreacted.

I hate to remember it but the other officers and I convinced Lathere (our GM at the time) to kick Naxex. If Skady was offended, then Naxex had cost us one good member too many. Naxex was the poison. He was the person who we all put up with but he’d probably offended lots of other people too.

Lath didn’t agree, but there didn’t seem to be any other option. She spoke to him over vent to break the news before removing him from the guild. And she told to me afterward that he was upset and had decided to quit the game if he wasn’t wanted in our guild any longer. That’s right, the tough guy who yelled at people when they made mistakes almost cried when he was removed from the guild. He sold his account about a week later.

Then I remembered how we, as a guild, had just adapted to Naxex. Even at his most offensive, we’d scold him and move on. We learned not to take him too seriously. And when he yelled at a Hunter for “failing to kite properly” what he really was trying to say was “ask me and I will tell you what you’re doing wrong and how to fix it”.

And I remembered that yes, even though he implied he would quit for a better guild once he got his gear, he never did. He raided with us, tanked what we told him to, for over a year. Even when he argued that we were too lenient towards our raiders he showed up on time. If we were short a healer, he brought his healer.

But it wasn’t until I convinced Lath to kick him that I realised that he actually liked us. He’d jumped from guild to guild, an excellent player with a terrible attitude, and stumbled into ours. And perhaps that was the very first time that he was accepted.

The moral to this story, if there is one, is that people are just people. Both of these guild members were fantastic players. One was very likable, and one was not. But both genuinely wanted the guild to succeed and liked the people in it. Sure you can run a successful raiding guild with 25 likable people. But I believe there’s room for a few troublesome members too.

I spoke to a Warlock in Dalaran the other day and asked him if he’d consider joining Vitare (I think I mentioned that we were pretty low on Mages and Warlocks, right?). He surprised me when he said that he had actually applied and been accepted in the past but didn’t like one of our Shaman. I hesitantly asked “which one?”

It turns out that the Warlock had gotten into an argument with one of our members, a Shaman, who rigorously interrogates new applicants even though he’s not an officer, or a raider, he’s just a casual member. Sometimes he goes too far and one of the officers has to pull him back in line. After all, he doesn’t have any real decision making power in the guild and he isn’t part of the raiding team. But I think if we gave him the position of “Guild Cheerleader” he would spend the night boasting of our guild achievements in Trade chat. For someone non-central to the guild, he sure is proud. I think he gets more excited over our raid achievements than we do!

So I explained to this Warlock that this particular guild member wasn’t part of the raid team but threw in “nice guy, though” which must have baffled the Warlock based on his previous experience. But I wasn’t lying – you can be a nice person and still be pushy, demanding and tough on new recruits. If it comes from the right place. I’m sure this particular Shaman thought that he was doing his very best to ensure that the quality of raiding candidates remained high. He wasn’t going to let any undesirables slip through.

Think of that person in your raid that you dislike. Are they really all that bad? Do they genuinely want the guild to fail? Are they intentionally offending guild members in an effort to force them to gquit? Do they intentionally waste other guild members’ time? I doubt it.

What would they do for the guild, for the success of the raid? Do they give up their time for the whole when there’s no individual achievement in it for them?

You don’t have to like every person you raid with. You just need 25 people who all are rocketing towards the same goal. Consider that they devote their time playing this game so that you can achieve something. It’s a joint effort.

Perhaps you make decisions for different reasons. No one is right. It just is. Take a deep breath.

If they break the rules, take it up with the boss: the GM. And if you have a personality clash, try not to let it affect the entire group and your own enjoyment of the game.

But whatever you do, don’t try and persuade me to dislike someone based on hearsay. I can form my own opinions, flawed as they may be, all on my own.

Note: I apologise for not coming right out and explaining exactly what has caused the drama in my guild, Vitare. To any guildies reading this, I know the story above isn’t really a direct parallel. Neither are the players involved. But somewhere there must be a parallel because this is the event that springs to my mind when I think about what’s happening right now. Perhaps the point I’m trying to make is please don’t make any rash decisions or statements and turn a misunderstanding and/or personality clash into something much more problematic.