Memoirs... (Part 27)

"Arcturus over the cabin" - North Central Saskatchewan
Used under Creative Commons License, by Space Ritual

Chapter 3

The Restructure

In the summer of 2008, I had a lot to think about.

I had built Descendants of Draenor, my WoW guild, from a group of people I used to play Quake and CounterStrike with, to a guild of hundreds. Over the course of both Vanilla and The Burning Crusade, the original ideals I set out for DoD evolved into two core goals. In Vanilla, my priority was to construct and grow a guild with other players of a similar, mutually respectful mindset. I accomplished this by building a solid core of friendly, helpful, skilled players, which in turn, catalyzed the assimilation of other guilds who shared that mindset. With the core in place, we began to dabble in raiding, and saw some impressive successes, but it was haphazard and lacked focus. So, by The Burning Crusade, a second goal for DoD emerged: To make a real competitive push in endgame raid progression without having to maintain a hardcore schedule. We were working men & women after all, we couldn’t be expected to raid until Midnight (or later) throughout the week. I implemented changes during TBC to drive new behaviors surrounding raiding. We clearly identified the expectation of the raider, and what their unified goal was: defeat raid bosses, keeping pace with other hardcore guilds. I also stressed personal responsibility, compelling the guild to re-examine each player’s individual level of contribution. Via these changes, we were able to maintain a 2-day per week raid schedule, and clear all of the content up through Black Temple, ending with an Illidan kill, prior to the 3.0 nerf.

But there were other struggles beyond the schedule I had to give serious thought to. Players came and went in our raid rotations, and it made the core players very frustrated and stressed out. We had to retain a large pool of people to choose from, in the case that we had emergencies or last-minute-cancellations, and those fillers often left a lot to be desired. The disparity between player skill levels was vast. People coming and going also led to a decrease in overall raid performance. Additionally, this opened up the possibility of a brand new player joining us, winning an item in the raid that people had been working towards for weeks, and then switching guilds the next day, effectively pissing off the entire raid team. Morale among progression was a roller coaster of highs and lows.

On top of all of this, my raid leader, Blain, had quit the game--burned out from the exhaustion of having to deal with so many failed players, excuses, and the lack of that “spark”; that willingness to simply cut out the excuses, pull yourself up by the bootstraps, and dig in to endgame content until it was farmed. When he joined DoD at the start of Blackwing Lair, my then-Warrior officer (Ater) had warned me, “he’s going to whip this group into shape, but he’s not going to make a lot of friends doing it.” Ater and Blain had played together previously in Lineage 2, and Blain had made a name for himself as being detail-oriented and focused on doing whatever it took to be the best. When he joined the rogues, they were the most underperforming group of players in my guild. He walked into our raid with a Zulian Slicer in one hand and an Ogre Pocket Knife in the other. Within minutes, Blain was not only destroying the other Rogues in DPS, he was quickly shooting to the top of the entire damage meters. He went on to become my raid leader for the duration of Vanilla, broke briefly at the start of TBC, but re-assumed his role when it was time to set the raid team straight. He then held the position all the way through the death of Illidan the Betrayer; by then, he was completely spent. For nearly two years straight of having listened to excuses and complaints: “This is too hard”, “You’re such an asshole!”, “Why are you pushing us into more difficult content when we don’t have the items we need from earlier bosses?”...he was done. I didn’t want him to go, but I didn’t blame him.

These were only the in-game issues weighing heavily on me. I had a family that I was putting on the back-burner, and a career that was stagnating. I had to give some serious thought to how I was going to run Descendants of Draenor from here on out. The person whom I looked to for general leadership and guidance, Ater, was gone; I was officially on my own. So, I took my summer vacation out at my Dad’s farm in a town called Hudson Bay, Saskatchewan--a speck in the northern reaches of the Canadian prairies. Here, hours and hours away from any metropolitan city, I could step out on the deck at night, look up, and see nothing but stars. I'd stare upwards and lose all sense of time. No noise. No distractions. I let my mind go blank. All the stresses of the world washed away. I didn't care about the problems at work. I wasn't stressed about my family situation. And--it goes without saying--the pressures of running the guild were gone. Finally, I was able to think straight.

Kerulak, my main during Vanilla

 Learning from the Past

While I contemplated the state of my guild and where I wanted to go with it, I explored new avenues to gain insight and perspective. I read “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” by Patrick Lencioni, a fascinating tale of a failing company and its various employees, locked in a constant state of finger-pointing, stubbornness, and old habits. Although intended for the entrepreneurial crowd, I found an amazing amount of parallels between it and the difficulties I was experiencing managing a raiding guild. The book spoke to my plight so accurately that I paraphrased many of its concepts in a forum post that would help align the raid team during their preparation for Archimonde. Now on vacation, I returned to those notes, and re-purposed them into a new post entitled “Why Raid Teams Fail”. In my post, I simply reiterated the same core fundamentals that Lencioni touched on. Instead of targeting a company and employees, my post was tailored for a WoW guild and its raiding members. I reviewed the forum post, and all at once, I had a path to follow.

This would be the outline for my restructure.

Descendants of Draenor had been following the same set of unwritten rules I set forth since its inception in late 2004, and although we were still together and things seemed fine on the surface, there were cracks in the foundation. I had a raid team that, while successful, drained a massive amount of energy to manage and coordinate. I also had players of such vastly different skill levels contributing to raids that progression would stagnate for weeks at a time. This led to increased administration on my part, which forced me in-game for longer periods of time. I was pouring too much of myself in, and needed to balance my WoW time with my family and other external responsibilities. In order to accomplish that, I was going to need to refine and delegate. The guild would need a completely transparent set of expectations, unambiguous and not open to interpretation. Every member would read them, confirm that they understood, and either meet those expectations...or be dismissed.

I reflected on the lessons I learned during Vanilla and The Burning Crusade, from the many individual experiences, players, and mentors that had come and gone. What were some of those highlights?:

• The mass assimilation of guilds was a task I fielded solely during Vanilla. This granted me the luxury of first-hand knowledge of a person, and to go with my “gut” instinct when something felt right or wrong. This hands-on knowledge of people, in turn, was vital to the success of building a foundation comprised of guilds with similar mindsets as my own; it allowed us to make the leap to 40-Man Raiding. But in the course of TBC, I delegated much of the recruitment to my officer core. Each officer’s opinion of a player varied too greatly. Thus, the pool of players that we expected to help us with raiding were vastly disparate. I would solve this by personally taking on the recruitment process. All applications would go through me, and I would no longer delegate the recruitment process to any officers. All invite privileges in-game were revoked. The public application forum (which often derailed into a flame fest) was locked. My guild flaming “noobs” about their apps went against everything I tried to preach about being kind and respectful to fellow players and guilds. This open app process would come to an end. I would handle it from that point forward.

• “The Five Dysfunctions...” showed me that the team needed to speak a common language. The raid team’s disharmony was sad and pathetic. It grew from (among other reasons) a generation gap; players of vastly different ages not even agreeing upon basic fundamentals. 38 year old players had a very different perspective on life than 17 year olds. If they couldn’t see eye-to-eye on generalities outside the game, how could I expect them to form a cohesive team in-game? I imposed an age limit of 21 to diminish this generation gap. It wasn't about maturity--it was about improving our alignment as a whole.

• Ater had taught me the value of acknowledging a player’s contribution, and reminded me that players of different skill levels warranted hierarchical recognition. Players of poor quality fostered animosity among the team. Stellar players resenting foolish ones drained everyone’s energy, and performance suffered as a result. Failing players could no longer be allowed to justify their behavior, and star players deserved priority over these mediocre folks. To solve this, I mapped out a hierarchy of ranks, each with its own requirements, rights, and responsibilities. Now, there was not only a clearly defined set of prerequisites that needed to be completed in order to set foot in a raid, players who exceeded them would be granted additional rewards and perks within the guild framework. Now, there would be “Raiders” for general rotations, to come and go as they wished, and “Elite” for fixed rotations, whom I expected to be present every week and would be the rock stars of the raid team. The beauty of this solution was that the fixed rotation was seen as a perk to the player, because they wanted to be there every week. And, by enforcing the attendance of the Elite, the overall performance of the team would remain high, instead of the sine wave of the past.

• Players that treated our guild like a revolving door were murder for the progression team. Joining our team, gearing up...and then never setting foot in another raid again not only wound me into a ball of seething hatred, it tore team morale apart. I had a responsibility to provide some incentive to keep stellar raiders returning to progression. In a somewhat controversial move, I introduced a change to our guild loot system, based off the aforementioned Elite rank. Players who gained the Elite rank by proving their consistent reliability and stellar performance would not only gain a guaranteed a spot in our raids, but would earn the option of a 1st-round bid, so that fleeting new members couldn't swoop in, bid and win the most powerful item in the instance, and hit the road the next day. This perk further incentivized players to outperform, and provided me with an additional layer of defense against cattledrivers; an in-joke we called players that geared up via our raids, and then left us high-and-dry.

• Not everyone that raided could hope to become Elite. Perhaps they weren't the greatest players in the world, or maybe not the most well-liked...but they still played a valuable role, and ought to be recognized for their efforts, even by contributing in some capacity without raiding. My vision of the new progression team would be comprised of a core of Elites, but it would be the Raiders (and others) that would allow us to continue to churn a rotation week-to-week, granting our members the schedule flexibility we committed to delivering. So, how would I recognize those non-Elites? I instituted the ability to earn a temporary “glory” rank for going above-and-beyond the call of duty, regardless of raid commitment. We would make a big deal about their contributions and assistance to the guild, both on the forums, and in-game with a special rank that granted access to the officer channel, additionally gaining the 1st-round bidding rights of the Elite rank, so that even non-hardcore players might be given a chance to shine. We’d name these players “Avatar”.

Zanjina, my main during The Burning Crusade

The changes were significant. On paper, it read like an employee handbook. Was I going to scare people away? Would they look at this restructure, think it was some sort of joke, and walk away, pointing and laughing? I had to take a deep breath and make an important decision. Up until that very moment, my biggest fear was failure; that the guild would be seen as a laughing stock in retrospect, that we weren't able to accomplish anything of any value. I didn't want the entire four years to have been a waste of time and energy. 

It was time to come to terms with this.

I thought to myself, there is a very real possibility that these changes will cause the end of the guild. You have to be willing to accept that, be prepared for it, and be ready to move on.

At the precise moment I realized this, I gained a new outlook on my ability to lead; I was overcome with a sense of confidence and direction. All at once, the cloudy path ahead became crystal clear.

--

I returned home from my summer vacation, posted an announcement hinting to the changes that were planned, and began to draft up the first post that would pave the way: Who We Are, and Who We Are Not.