4.26. All Good Things

I am unemployed. WTB #ColdFusion / #Flex dev. job, pref. in the Denver / Boulder, CO area, PST. #jobsearch
— Shawn Holmes (@Hanzo55) January 28, 2011

What a Ride

It wasn't entirely clear what went wrong. Some things couldn't be said on-the-record, piles of signed confidentiality documents attested to that fact. Legalese buried who was at fault or why; I'd certainly never be cleared to know it. Gossip and speculation were the only options, words muttered behind closed doors and under bated breath. While the details of how things spiraled out of control so quickly would remain left to guesses, one thing was perfectly clear by the end of it...

I was unemployed.

Dust collected up into random piles on Jerry's desk in an otherwise empty office. Jerry ran the show, took a gamble on me three years earlier, instantly ending my career rut, my six years of hell. He was my boss's boss, the one who had final say, and who also happened to share an interest in a certain MMO. I'd catch the occasional glimpse of him, winding his undead rogue through Azeroth between conference calls, and think, that's a pretty sweet gig. Calling the shots at the office, setting up a team, and getting them to make some magic happen. All with enough time left over to check on your auctions before punching out. Jerry was king of the castle and a gamer to boot. They do exist!

I remember a few weeks after getting the job, firing up our then-recent kill video of Archimonde, taken from the point of view of a shaky shadow-priest. Jerry gave a nod of acknowledgement. He saw the raid flung up into air, a few of my guild coming close to cratering -- he knew the stakes. The other folks at the office paid no attention, but Jerry leaned in and watched closely. For a brief moment, the guy that could hire and fire all day long and a simple ColdFusion developer, were on the same level. "Got some computer games goin' on over there?" came a gibe from across the cubes, "Don't look work related to me!" Jerry and I looked at each other. They'll never understand.

One year in, Jerry was gone. His work was done, the team was self-sufficient, and he was off to solve bigger problems elsewhere. I resumed my role of "the only WoW addict in the office", but was lucky enough to build a kinship with my immediate superior, "the boss" Dave. Not a gamer, but definitely a down-to-earth manager that held his team in high regard, fighting to protect us from high drama and distraction whenever it surfaced. Dave mentored and guided me those next two years, helped me take pride in what I did, told me when my work was good enough, and gave me a place to vent when I didn't see the quality I wanted from others.

The respect and trust I'd earned in him made this process all the more difficult to digest.

Negotiations between the buying company and ours had broken down. Rather than give it another go, the company chose to call it a day with some shred of dignity intact, and leave those who helped build it with a bit of severance. The team I'd grown close to over the past three years, who'd come to learn of my WoW addiction, forever branding me as the guy with the Time-Lost Proto Drake, were now divvying up the office supplies and random hardware. The trunk of the civic was crammed with so many reams of printer paper that I am still, to this day, using up the last of it. Once clear of any valuables, Dave flicked the switch on the lights for the last time, locked the office, and shook my hand.

"Well, this is it," his eyes got wide as he shifted from professional to comedian, "Relatively sucks!"

I laughed, "Yeah. Sucks a lot." I reminded him to let me know if he found anything I'd be good at. "Keep me privy, would ya?"

He waved his hand in a motion of comfort, "Aaaah, it'll be fiiiiiiiiiiiiine."

I about lost it on the drive home.

They'll never understand, Jerry

The Worst Job in the World

You'd better be damn thankful for any job you ever get. There is a lineup of people outside the door just waiting to take it from you. Mom's programming was a double-edged sword in adult life. While employed, I gave it my all, did everything I could to impress (perhaps a bit too much), and was constantly striving for recognition and approval. The downside? When unemployed, I was a mess. Distraught, unable to think straight, I barely processed the day-to-day responsibilities. "Unemployment" was a swear word growing up -- another example of Mom's tendency to bucket things with such polarity. When Jul asked if I submitted my unemployment paperwork, I lied and said I had, desperately avoiding it, pouring that energy into finding work instead.

The uncertainty of it all is what makes looking for work the worst job in the world. The knowledge of coming home to a wife and two kids that rely solely on you as the breadwinner. What if finances dry up? What if I never work again? Are we going to lose the house? Be out on the street? Fear was not an alien concept as a motivator. Fear kept me at a job for six years, trapped by self-doubt. Fear kept decent, well-played gamers returning to raid leaders that shredded their confidence and self-esteem, turning them into a joke for all to point and laugh at, living on in infamy on sites like You're The Man Now, Dog-dot-com.

Fear works, but it's no way to live.

The weeks to follow were spent with WoW on one screen and Monster.com on the other. I cared for a recovering wife, toiled over kids, and tried to focus on the biggest problems facing the guild, while images of unemployment lines danced through my mind. Resumes went out the door while I refreshed my email, waiting for applicants to respond to my questions about their ability to tank, their experience in previous guilds, and whether or not they were selfish human beings.

More than once, I wavered -- the mouse cursor dangling above the "Delete Email" button, but never actually killing the idiotic applicant. I caught myself letting some slip through, the poorly written and the badly sold -- the kind of guild applicant I'd end on sight. With my own resumes out the door and being judged somewhere else, it became increasingly difficult to axe a potential guildy for a typo or some other trivial infraction. By the evenings, I was a zombified mess, exhausted from the constant second-guessing of the very rules I swore to uphold. Where once sat a full plate fit for a king, there now lay a crusted dish of rotten food overflowing to the floor.

For weeks it bore down on my shoulders, yet I still had time to show up to raids. Every Friday, every Sunday. Like clockwork, I was online and overseeing invites, ensuring spots were filled on time and by-the-book. I kept it together, because the 25 was the life blood of the guild, and no amount of inconveniences IRL were going to put a stop to that. I kept it together because it mattered.

But I wasn't coming out unscathed.

The 25-Man team waits patiently for the
lava to drain from Nefarian's arena,
Blackwing Descent

Shuttered

Two full nights of work had gone into Nefarian, ending in depressing wipes and no perceptible progress. The hunger to clear Blackwing Descent intensified. The last encounter of the instance, in which we did battle with both Nefarian and his dead sister Onyxia simultaneously, was rough. Each of the three phases floated DoD's baggage back to the surface, mechanics long dormant were now plaguing us, long after we'd emerged from WoTLK as champions. Aggro between the two dragons in phase one, while swimming through lava to pillars of safety in phase two presented their own challenges. The structure of the encounter had an unfortunate tendency to isolate the mouth breathers, and make it very easy to point the finger at the biggest offenders.

Perhaps too easy.

Ultimately, the Nefarian encounter hinged on a player that wasn't entirely representative of the type of player I wished the roster would emulate. It hinged on a player lacking the intended proficiency, a known offender guilty of making poor judgement calls under duress, a person very good at spamming buttons, rather than staying calm under pressure. In short, a spaz.

Nefarian hinged on me. And I was blowing it.

Things went south during the transition from phase two to three. In a nod to the original Nefarian 40-man encounter, the great dragon would raise an army of dead minions that required an off-tank to collect up and kite. A meticulous orchestration was necessary. Various players did what they could to create as tight a pile of death as possible. The goal: have the minions collapse into a single spot in Nefarian's circular arena, dying in a clump, which was vital for the OT -- it meant an easy pick-up, once rezzed by Nefarian's blue flame.

Controlling them was so textbook, so understanding the mechanic was a non-issue. Nefarian's blue flame, if under their feet, would bring them to life -- and in order to ease the pain of phase three, an OT was to drag them away from said flame, keep them moving, forcing their life essence to expire. Without the blue flame, they would eventually collapse as lifeless bones, giving the healers some breathing room for a few moments. Then, the blue flame would alight once more, and the process would repeat. Textbook...especially for a tank that, at one point, was the envy of all other tanks in the game, thanks to an outrageous toolkit that excelled in AoE situations.

The minions were incorrigible. Random ones would flake off, wack healers, and kill DPS. When they weren't getting away from me, I was tripping over my own feet, not moving far enough to avoid blankets of blue flame. Every misstep, every accidental drag through fire reconstituted their undeath, and our healers were granted no reprieve.

Insayno was right. The warrior's AoE stun, Shockwave, trivialized phase three, and kiting the undead minions was cake for them. Shockwave was godly, and every raid in their right mind with a warrior tank on staff leveraged them for this particular role.

We had no warrior tank. We had me.

So, I struggled like the spaz I was, switching between Death and Decay, Blood Boil, and Heart Strike, keeping as many on me as I could, backpedaling like a cripple in my attempts to stay alive and keep them out of blue flame. My play was lackluster and rife with mistakes. Ending so many attempts in defeat gave me flashbacks to those first TBC raids I thrust Zanjina into. Dying. Failing. Contributing nothing to the damage meters. If my strategy was to lead by example, I was undoubtedly creating a raid rich with sadness and despair.

3.41. Lady Prestor Never Learns

Kerulak heals through the final moments as
Descendants of Draenor defeats Onyxia (40-Man),
Onyxia's Lair

Scooby Snacks

"Where we headed tonight, Hanzo?"

There were no shortage of options to choose from. We were two weeks into regularly farming content in Trial of the Crusader, which meant we were more than adequately equipped to work on heroics in Trial of the Grand Crusader. There was also work left to do in the titan city of Ulduar; only four metas remained in our quest to conquer Glory. Neither instance could be eliminated from the to-do list just yet. Gearing was still happening in both the main 25-Man progression, and in the alt 25-Man run. Traditionally, Annihilation had run the Alt-25 on Saturday evenings, as his schedule was much more manageable then. Unable to contribute to the progression raid as he did during Vanilla, Annihilation led a makeshift crew every Saturday night to continue to gear and vet people. Recently, he'd taken a bit of time off from the Alt-25 and handed the reins to Crasian in the interim. Even with two 25s a week, players still lacked gear, but displayed no similar deficiency of interest to raid. Having a lot of options was a good thing. A great thing for us in particular.

The "problems" of today were very different than that of Vanilla. Shutting one instance down in lieu of another wasn't going to work; the roster had too many opinions. It seemed like a lifetime ago, the hard decision I made in Vanilla to shut down AQ40 to make room for progress in Naxxramas left some of my most dedicated, hardcore folks with a bad taste in their mouth. This time around, we'd divide our time evenly, until Glory of the Ulduar Raider was complete. Amid all the greatness of these options. there were still speed bumps to handle. The side-effect of splitting our time equally between ToGC and Ulduar was that my normally consistent raid signups began to skew heavily in one direction or the other. Fridays we would come up short on healer signups, and Sundays boasted a lack of Ranged DPS. The message was painfully clear: Raiders, who normally enjoyed more flexibility in their signups, began to sign up for only the raids they wanted. And by 'wanted', I mean the ones in which bosses dropped gear they had their eye on.

It always comes back to loot.

The curious experiment unfolded; amoeba left alone in the petri dish, driven by their primal instincts. It seemed that no amount of guild camaraderie, team spirit, or acknowledgement of triumphant effort would penetrate the thick membrane of some players. No matter how noble the cause of the guild they called home, their allegiance was always to themselves first. If I didn't explicitly point it out to them, they were none the wiser -- lost in their own dreams of gearing to the tooth, unintentionally following a path that suited only them. Other players weren't as transparent. A conspiracy theorist might hypothesize that they were putting on a front, faking their dedication while manipulating the system to suit their own needs. Feign interest in the guild and teamwork...for the greater good of loot. I didn't hold it against them. Human nature is what it is and it wants what it wants. My job as the guild leader wasn't to change their minds; I already knew that was impossible. My job was to make sure guardrails were in place to keep the bowling ball from hitting the gutter.

In order to keep the signup entropy at bay, we randomized which instance we'd start with on Friday night. Until invites were complete and everyone was departing Dalaran, the evening's raid would remain a mystery, and no hippy teenagers were going to meddle in this grand plan. So, as invites finished up and the request piped in over Vent, I threw the Mystery Machine off the scent.

"Head to Dustwallow Marsh. Time to pay a visit to an old friend."

Mature tanks an internet dragon, while
Descendants of Draenor defeats Onyxia (25 Player),
Onyxia's Lair

A New Fantastic Point of View

Five long years.

It had been a five year roller-coaster ride of craziness and brutality, and for those of us still around, it was hard to comprehend. What game had any of us played for this amount of time? I couldn't think of any. Certainly, there were titles that I played on and off over the course of five years...but never one title every single day of my life. By any measurement, World of Warcraft had been a colossal success, and when some MMOs boasted a quarter of a million players on their best day, WoW had ballooned up to 11.5 million worldwide. No MMO could touch it, even though many continued to try. I had zero interest in exploring others. The story, the lore, the challenge, the raiding, and the guild were all the reasons I needed to keep coming back. To commemorate their five year grip on the genre, Blizzard threw us a surprise bone midway between patch 3.2 and 3.3. We returned to Dustwallow Marsh, and looked up an old flame. The Alliance know her as the conniving Lady Prestor, but for the majority of the Horde, we called her by her true name:

Onyxia.

After clearing familiar trash, we stood face to face with our old friend, the very first internet dragon I ever slew. Once a 40-Man raid boss, we struggled with her for six weeks during Vanilla. In between our Molten Core runs, we snuck into her lair, practicing our positioning and our healing buddy system. In those days, our raid lacked structure and consistency. We threw together whomever we could...and went. Annihilation, then in charge of my warriors, was our dedicated Fire Resistance tank, so it was decided he would hold the bird in place while the rest of us scraped away at her scales, the giant dragon batting us away like mosquitoes. Anni would often call me on the phone, ad-hoc, to see if I could jump online for Onyxia attempts, and I'd race back to the computer, log on to Kerulak, in the hopes of getting another round of loot distributed to the raid, getting them one step closer to a Ragnaros kill, one foot in the door of Blackwing Lair. There was no phpRaider, no signups, no vetting raiders, or promoting Elites...

...we'd come a long way from those days.

As we wrapped up the buffs, I examined the roster. Only a handful of original 40-Man raiders remained, and only three of them were present for our first Onyxia kill: Dalans, Sir Klocker, and myself. Turtleman had missed the first kill; both Neps and Bretthew joined later on in Vanilla. And Bheer, hmm...memory was fuzzy. I shot him a tell.

"Were you here for our first kill, back in the day?"

"Nah", Bheer replied, "I brought Kragnl a little later on."

"Ah. Well, you are still one of the original 40-Man core. It's good to have you here."

Bheer sent back a smiley. The next whisper arrived via Cheeseus.

"Would you like to do the honors?"

"I remain but a humble puppet."

He took it to Vent, "Who thinks Mature should tank her?"

A round of a booing and profanity lit my headphones up that it nearly brought a tear to my eye. Wise-asses.

"Sounds like the mob has spoken. Mature it is. Ikey and Taba are on adds."

I was still getting used to hearing 'Ikey' in Vent, but Omaric wasn't kidding when he said he was cutting over to his druid, and it looked to be official from this point forward. I gave everyone the count down, ran in and grabbed the bird by the proverbial horns. The raid cut deeply into her scaled armor while I kept her pointed in the same direction Annihilation had for so many months in DoD's past. She soon took to the air and the tiny dragon whelps swarmed onto us. Mangetsu, more excited than ever, lept into the middle of the group spamming a yell macro:

[Yell From: Mangetsu] UNGRATEFUL WHELPS, THY BACKSIDE IS WHOLE AND UNGOBBLED

The lovable nerd brought down a rain of fire on to the whelps, and within seconds, World of Warcraft began to lock up.

"Whoa whoa whoa! What the shit?"

"Losing it...I'm disconnecting. I think. Ah. Yeah. Gone."

"Fucking typical. Nice work, Blizzard. Five years and you still can't get this raid to work correctly."

"Calm down, relax. It's probably a bunch of outdated add-ons. Just deal with it."

The view inside Onyxia's lair became a slideshow as my game client choked and sputtered. Ten seconds passed by before things began to smooth back out. I glanced at the raid. Six people were offline; 24% of the raid. Years earlier, our first kill boasted a total of seventeen players dead when Ony hit the floor -- a percentage somewhat closer to 42%.

"Ok, relax, it's responding for us again. Just log back in."

One by one, those who disconnected returned to the instance, their toons re-materializing in the spot where the whelplings were destroyed. Ony was back on the ground by this point, and I already had her repositioned in Anni's old spot. The raid resumed their attacks and her health pool whittled away, ending with her giant body flopping to the cave floor in a death animation forever burned into our brains.

Killed in one pull, even with six disconnections half-way through the encounter. The ol' bird deserved better than this.

The 25-Man progression team slays Auriaya while
keeping her Sanctum Sentries alive, earning
"Crazy Cat Lady (25 Player)",
Ulduar

Indecent Proposal

Kologarn's body fell backwards, collapsing to form a bridge to the Antechamber, and our screens lit up with another achievement, "With Open Arms (25 Player)", the result of having defeated him without destroying either arm.

"I believe that's a Server 2nd."

I was a bit taken aback.

"Really?....huh. It didn't seem all that tricky."

"Well, it's a matter of discipline, really. It's easy to pour too much into the hands to free people, breaking them in the process."

We moved into position for Auriaya to attempt to knock out another meta, Crazy Cat Lady. For this strategy, Dalans and I held two sentinels each, while Taba held Auiraya, and Omaric (now Ikey), did double duty: Feral Defender tank, when it was alive, and whatever kitty DPS he could contribute to the boss when the Defender was dead. The most complex part of this hard mode, more than anything else, was still the initial pull. When all four sentinels were in proximity of one another, they one-shot even the most well-geared tanks in the game. Staggering the pull and separating them was a tricky but doable tactic to survive the first few seconds of the fight. Once in position, holding a pair of cats away from Dalans took little effort, and thanks to Death Grip, switching packs of cats with him was a breeze. Before the night was over, we had drawn a line through "Crazy Cat Lady (25 Player)", and with its completion, only three metas remained.

"Nice work everyone, that wasn't too bad, eh?"

Bulwinkul piped up, "Yeah, we knocked that one out back in May."

The Eh Team strikes again.

---

"So...I've been giving the job a bit of thought. I have a proposal for you."

"Ok...I'm listening."

"How would you feel...about the possibility of maybe having two raid leaders?"

Omaric's offer was a bit unorthodox; certainly not one I'd considered. But, there was merit in this. Perhaps they could share the weight, taking the load off of each other, perhaps their time-until-burned-out would be lengthened. It could only work if they held a completely unified front; neither Omaric nor his backup could ever once argue with one another. They had to appear to always act in unison; one indivisible unit at the head of the raid. It could work. Maybe.

"Well, I don't see why not. I suppose it depends on who your partner is. Who's the lucky gal?"

"What would you say if I suggested Taba?"

Bretthew. Mother of God.

1.5. The Idealist and the Realist

Kerulak holds his healing position during an Onyxia (40-Man) attempt.

Leadership Emerges

After only a few weeks of absorbing The Final Cut, we had become a fully-staffed 40-Man Raiding guild, and were executing bosses with extreme prejudice. We had a lot of ground to cover; Vanilla had already been out for nearly a year, and Blizzard was hard at work in preparation for the next tier of raid content, The Temple of Ahn’Qiraj. For us, it seemed a lifetime away, since two raids and 18 bosses stood between us and that next tier. Luckily, our roster had finally reached full capacity; a talented, eager set of players that were determined to raid. It was during this next year that we experienced a multitude of wins and losses, of tragedies and victories, and ultimately gave me my first real lesson in what it took to maintain a successful raiding guild: beware the double-standard.

I remember flying out to California in late October ‘05 to attend the first BlizzCon, and while I took the stage in the voice competition, busting out an impression of Deckard Cain from the Diablo series, the Descendants of Draenor raid team was back home, executing boss kills in Molten Core, earning us both credibility and gear. We also broke ground in a separate one-boss raid, Onyxia’s Lair, and began working on killing our first dragon, a raid that would ultimately take weeks and weeks of practice. I met a few of my guildies in-person at BlizzCon that October, and it was a cool feeling to be able to finally put a real-life face to an in-game character. WoW was, after all, a social experience. If I was going to keep Descendants of Draenor on the winning path, I would not only have to embrace my character’s role and responsibility in raids, I was going to have to learn more about the people behind the characters. Then, I could be certain they would work well together as a team.

During the next several months of raiding Molten Core, I noted that there were a few personalities we gained from The Final Cut that had tremendous leadership potential. One Warrior in particular had an extremely commanding presence about him. His name was Ater. He had offered to pick up the leadership reigns of Molten Core, having driven his own 20-Man Zul’Gurub raids throughout the week. Like clockwork, every three days (the reset timer for old 20-Man raids) he would rally the troops, taking the very best of the guild, and plow through the instance, with his sights set on killing Hakkar. Few guilds at that time had a Hakkar kill under their belt, and Ater felt that it was a reasonable accomplishment to work towards. It wasn't that the raid was necessarily difficult, but 20-Man Zul'Gurub fell into an awkward category in those days.

Kerulak snaps a picture next to Ater within Molten Core

Rewards Match Effort

Guilds of 40-Man raiding size were focused on much more challenging 40-Man content. To them, a raid that was half the size also meant half the challenge -- and rightly so. Those 40-Man raiding guilds that chose to tackle Zul'Gurub "as a goof" ended up wrecking the place. Gurgthock and his Elitist Jerks artificially increased the challenge by leaving nearly all the priests alive while killing Hakkar, causing the Blood God to gain a series of buffs making him nearly invincible. Without inflating Hakkar's difficulty, it wasn't worth their time. Zul'Gurub's rewards matched its effort, and in those days, the piddly blue items couldn't hold a candle to the gear that dropped out of a 40-Man raid. 

And yet, guilds that didn't boast our size or dedication to raiding simply could not put a random group of players together to do Zul'Gurub. Short of the first two bosses, High Priestess Jeklik and High Priest Venoxis, Zul'Gurub's 20-Man breadth remained out-of-reach for most casual players; any player even able to catch a glimpse of High Priestess Marli or beyond was considered a sharpshooter.  As a result, Zul'Gurub often went unfinished on servers. Vanilla's meta-game of gearing for raids was paradoxical in retrospect: To make any kind of raid progress, one required raid gear, but the gear wasn't available unless you raided. This design acted as an artificial gate to prevent casuals who had no business setting foot in a raid from even bothering. The flip side, however, was that getting your foot in the door meant exploring every option, finding any hidden tip, tactic, secret, strategy, or obscure loot that would augment your play just enough to keep it together for that first boss kill -- ones that ended with nearly the entire raid face down in the dirt. This artificial gating design of Vanilla WoW drove some players to push themselves to the absolute limit.

Ater was one of those players.

Ater was determined to execute Zul'Gurub in its entirety, since it was the only reasonable content he had a shot at completing during his membership in The Final Cut. He didn't care about the gear, regardless of its inferiority to Molten Core, he cared about the accomplishment. I heard it in his voice over our guild Ventrilo many nights -- that passion and hunger to complete content, just like any dedicated gamer who's focused on beating a game. His passion for gaming, and demonstrated leadership via Zul'Gurub, led me to hand him the wheel in our 40-Man raids as well, and it wasn't long before I promoted him to an officer rank, sitting alongside my existing DoD officers. But with his promotion also came dissent. Ater, while liked by many in my guild, held philosophies that clashed with others I put in a role of responsibility. Unfortunately, I had to bear the brunt of that fallout on my shoulders alone. 

Hanzo's alt, Oxanna the Tauren Druid, acts as
Guild Bank during Vanilla

The Basic Building Blocks

My 2nd-in-command was a Warlock named Graulm who had brought his EverQuest guild experience to the table, helping me lay the foundations for all the basics a guild would need. I originally met him in Stranglethorn Vale, while playing my Mage, Elephantine. We struck up a conversation, helped each other with a few quests, and continued to chat and assist each other over the next few weeks. During my assimilation phase, I stalked and harassed him to throw in the towel with his existing guild, and tried to make him see "the one true way". He fought me at first, but I eventually managed to sway his opinion. Once on board, it became clear his EverQuest guild-management experience would play a vital role in my learning process. While other guild members were focused on questing and clearing 10-Man Stratholme, Graulm was busy laying a foundation for Descendants of Draenor. The guild lacked structure, and leadership was essentially only an extension of the /ginvite command. He aimed to resolve that.

One of the first orders of business was a guild bank, which Graulm directed me to set up early on. Back in Vanilla, it was comprised solely of a series of alts holding items in bag space, since WoW wouldn't actually introduce true guild vaults until the first expansion. My alts, therefore, were used to store guild- and raid-related items, ferrying things like Gurubashi Coins around to players as needed. Graulm pointed out that there was more to this than purely convenience; it ensured that the management retained leverage over the guildies. He reasoned that it would keep them in line, so they would remember who was in charge; storming out of the guild in a tantrum of drama would mean walking away from earnings they themselves contributed to. An implicit psychological attachment to raid tokens would keep people loyal. Ownership, as it turned out, was a powerful motivational tool.

Graulm also identified a key flaw in my guild's forums that he felt needed to be addressed: we lacked an officer-only section of the forums. Managers needed to be able to go behind closed doors, and discreetly discuss the management of the guild. Often, this meant engaging in conversations about how to handle certain individuals. It wasn't appropriate to speak in public about the disciplinary actions surrounding a particular player in the guild. Graulm showed me that, like a business, the guild had a responsibility to conduct itself in a professional manner. Being respectful toward one another goes both ways, he reasoned, and if I was compelling the guild to follow my moral compass of treating each other with dignity, it had to start with leadership setting the example. I remember vividly the day I locked the non-officers out of a section of the forums; panic ensued. What was I hiding from them? What were we planning on doing that they weren't allowed to know? Graulm eased my anxiety. This response was expected, and was par for the course.

These basic building blocks of a guild structure may seem like common sense to seasoned guild leaders, but back then, I was but a babe in the woods. Thankfully, I was able to get Guild Leadership 101 from Graulm, and provide enough structure to conduct ourselves in a semi-coherent fashion. Up until that point, Graulm had been acting as the little man behind the curtain to which no one paid attention, but he himself knew intimately the role he played, and his value directing traffic on my behalf. And there was no one to question his authority by proxy, since he alone pulled the strings; I simply danced on his behalf.

So, you can imagine what happened when another influential leader entered the stage, one with a difference in opinion of people than what Graulm held. The effect was not unlike trying to push two magnets together. The positives didn't want to play nice, and neither did the negatives.