3.39. Flying the Red Flag

Mature fills in on a Team Starflex clear of Ulduar,
earning "The Secrets of Ulduar (10 Player)",
Ulduar

What It Feels Like For a Raid Leader

Failing is, apparently, a subjective term.

Cheeseus' observation was wildly askew from my own, his intentions and motivations deeply affected by his past perceptions of hardcore raiding. I assumed this would be a challenging point-of-view to alter when I brought him on as raid leader -- but to see his attitude remain unwavering in the face of all that we had done was a tough pill to swallow. In his funk of failure, we were surrounded by evidence to the contrary. Five meta achievements remained on Glory of the Ulduar Raider (25 Player). Work would begin on Trial of the Grand Crusader that week. Plans were already set into motion as to how we would leverage the guild's resources and assign the next legendary weapon. Two fully equipped 25-Man raids were running on entirely different schedules each week. No bickering or in-fighting. No pending exodus. Morale at an all-time high. My inbox flooded with guild applications. And losing absolutely no one to further progressed guilds. To be quite honest, it was one of the first times in the history of Descendants of Draenor that we had very little to regret.

"I think we are a huge success in the grand scheme of raiding guilds that walk the casual line very closely. What would you quantify as our 'hard failures'?"

Cheeseus was very quick to point to the fine print.

"No hard modes, save those that have been nerfed."

His former days of Sunwell clearing were catching up with him. In our eyes, it was as different as night was to day. Reflecting upon our earlier years of wiping to trash, the rubber band had been pulled back, sling-shotting us forward into a new world where raiding was our oyster. But this gratified picture of our history came through misty, jaded eyes. Eyes that had bled and suffered; that had dealt with the loss of good people to reasons that were still tough to deal with. We'd scraped the bottom of the barrel and felt our egos singed and depleted. Today, Descendants of Draenor had been given new life. We were humbled to call ourselves a successful casual/hardcore raiding guild without having our moral compass spinning like a centrifuge in the process.

These things mattered little to an ex-hardcore raid leader.

The eyes of a rogue that drove his blades deep into Kil'jaeden saw a very different picture of the World. To Cheeseus, guilds like Enigma and Inertia should have been stomped into the dirt months ago. Every man, woman, and Ben in the guild should already have their Iron Bound Proto-Drakes, and be listed in the top ten of the world first raid completion leaderboard. Any attempts to justify poor play should be met with swift and brutal justice. Through these stilted eyes, the many successes Descendants of Draenor enjoyed were clouded by a fog of self-doubt. He saw no great successes; the minutia of realm-first losses crackled through his neocortex like a storm.

I slammed a wall-of-text into the IM window in an attempt to win back my raid leader.

Descendants of Draenor holds the #1 spot on
Deathwing-US for 10-Man (July 2009) as a result
of The Eh Team (Full Link via Wayback Machine)

The Adult Diaper Award

"We're never going to be at a level where we can compete with a guild like Enigma. You have to set your expectations appropriately when comparing our progress to others. Their people, their hours? It's unrealistic to measure our failures against a hardcore guild's successes. Try to remember that there are still guilds out there who can't get past Kologarn. Besides, I gauge guild success on many other criteria, beyond hard modes. Do my guild members work well together and treat each other with respect? Are they constantly bitching about loot or are they hyper-focused on getting content completed? Is it a pleasure to log into the game and Vent and hang with them throughout the week, or would I rather go sort my sock drawer?"

Before he had a chance to respond, I cranked it up a notch in an attempt to identify his personal contributions to our success.

"And in the 10-Man dept, chief...no competition, you've pushed the guild's name up to the top of the charts. You should be very proud of your accomplishments."

Telling an ex-hardcore raid leader that he is successful in 10-Man raids is like congratulating someone on not shitting themselves in public. As much as you'd like it to be a compliment, it isn't.

"Eh, I dunno. I feel like a failure. Between you and I, I'm having serious doubts about if I want to continue to raid lead or not."

I braced for the impact.

"I was hoping that a little break over BlizzCon would help recharge the batteries, but I'm already finding myself logging in on Friday/Sunday in a shitty mood, with a terrible mindset, only to get assailed with Taba's witty 'Cheese has a stick up his ass' followed by 4 hours of retardation over vent, Crasian's hypocritical love of Enigma and what they do, Omaric's suggestions to fix things that aren't broken, Six's 'I don't know why Cheese is being stubborn, I'll talk to him during the week', followed by him crying, then crying over my crying for having to put up with their shit. Then we have retards in raid who not only cause headaches by being there, but also make more 'drama' in officer, which is more fun."

Comes the crushing blow.

"I dunno, I'm trying to work my ass off, but for all the hours I'm putting in, I'm getting nothing but shit-on and people doing whatever they want to anyways, so I don't know how much longer I can put up with it."

It was apparent now that the stability of The Eh Team wasn't as sound a structure as we all assumed of the rock star 10-Man. Political dysfunction was bleeding into the 25-Man and causing Cheeseus' contempt towards our "lackluster" performance to grow like a weed. In turn, he hyper-focused on the 25-Man progression raid and its inability to reach perfection. And then blamed himself.

I turned my head to the side, the shadow of one of my office mates catching my eye, and as they moved on toward their desk, my gaze darted to the window a moment. I stared out, ignoring the view and weather, turning my thoughts inward to try to approach this problem, these million red flags flying in every direction. Do I try to work on individual members of The Eh Team and turn them around, thereby granting Cheeseus some slack? No, this was a bad proposition -- a short-term Band-Aid that might cover the bleeding now...but was certain to fall off the wound down the road. Pouring all of my energy into 'saving' Cheeseus would be fruitless and naive. The game plan shifted to that of contingency. Priority one: vet a new raid leader and get them ready to take the reins asap. He hadn't pulled that ripcord yet, but when he did, I had to be sure the plane still had a pilot.

Guess Who? by Milton Bradley

Bored Games

As it always has been, options were limited in the raid leadership department. I needed someone with staying power; clearly, this was an attribute I misread in Cheeseus. My mind flipped through various pages of in-memory guild profiles, names and faces of characters whirred by like a Descendants of Draenor rolodex. It should have been methodical, a careful scientific process. The psychologist puts his feet up on the couch, pipe lit, reviewing all the human conditions of his patients. He draws smoke into his lungs, and attempts to decipher their goals, their dreams; their integrity, motivations, and biases. I had no such piece of paper resting in a frame on my office wall, nothing to demonstrate I possessed any expertise in reading people and understanding their bizarre behaviors -- their ability to take logical, rational arguments and break them into pieces like a spoiled child abusing toys. I only had my gut. My experiences. My learned lessons of the past. And a general sense that I was heading in the right direction...

...which made my decision-making a little less clinical, and a little more like a game of Guess Who?, Descendants of Draenor™ Edition.

I looked at the freshly set up board in my head, a mix of Elites and officers, and walked the criteria list in an attempt to nail down the next mystery guest. Have they been with DoD a long time? I started flipping faces down: Sixfold, Mangetsu. Have they demonstrated a tendency to lead on their own? Down went Gunsmokeco and Sir Klocker. Have they red flagged me, giving me any reason to doubt their integrity? I reached for the Bretthew card, hesitating only due the incredible turnaround and track-record he'd been maintaining since his return. Tongue in cheek, I flipped his card down. Can they commit to every instance on our raid schedule? Down went more faces. Have you demonstrated expertise in a myriad of classes, not just your main? Another face hit the dirt as I flipped Jungard down. I sat back and looked at the dwindling faces that were left: Neps, Omaric, Dalans.

And then, I remembered Shadowmourne.

Whomever I chose for the next raid leader would most likely be the one to wield the legendary axe first, following in the same footsteps as Neps did with Val'anyr. I looked back at the board.

Do they use a 2-Handed Axe?

Down went the priest and the druid, both of whom had enough on their leadership plate. The last picture stared back at me.

Omaric.

---

"Omaric, got a few minutes?"

"Yeah, gimme a sec. Just finishing this dungeon on Ikey bear. I'm really digging the druid now, think I've decided I'm gonna make it my main."

Well, isn't this nice?

3.12. The Next Raid Leader

The 25-Man Progression team hovers
near Alexstrasza after defeating Malygos in
The Eye of Eternity

Cheesy Conversations

I thrived on predictability, and the morning ritual fell into just such a rhythm. I’d leave the house around 6:45am with my son and daughter packed into the car, heading four-and-a-half miles south toward 6th and Clermont. I opted to go by way of Monaco Parkway, as Colorado Boulevard was often thick with congestion. After the kids were hugged and left at their school, I looped back to Monaco, and drove another eleven miles, doing an easy 55mph through residential areas. The stresses of I-25 were bypassed in this process, and it gave me time to think. I’d arrive at the office, get settled in with a cup of coffee, begin reviewing work E-mails for the day. Keen on multitasking, I’d fire up Chrome (having only been released as a new browser a few months prior), and load up MMO-Champion.com, the Descendants of Draenor forums, our raid sign-up site (powered by phpRaider). And to wrap up the morning ritual, I’d fire up my IM client, Pidgin, which allowed me to keep connected to a number of networks at once, in this case, a combination of ICQ, MSN, Yahoo! and Google chat. As soon Pidgin loaded, the morning ritual was officially complete, as the ‘pang’ of the first instant message arrived:

9:07 AM Cheeseus: Morning.
me: Morning
Cheeseus: What a fucking weekend, eh
me: Yeah, that was bizarre. We just barely squeeked out Maly6

Cheeseus and I had fallen into a regular pattern of communication. Separated by a distance of about 1,700 miles, I in the Rocky Mountains where John Denver made his home, and he in the cold north of Canada where I spent the first 20 years of my life, we worked. While I built web applications designed for oncologists to stay atop their accreditation, Cheeseus would prepare intricate, isometric schematics of gigantic oil rigs which construction teams would read and fabricate. Our lines of work fell into two vastly different areas, but both required us to apply our expertise so that people could consume without confusion. Physicians are widely known as a type of user that struggles with technology (ironically), any unfriendly forms or error messages will frustrate them and turn them away. I worked with my team to tread carefully through this minefield and make our website as easy to traverse as possible. Likewise, technical clients wanting to construct a massive derricks pepper their blueprints with extraneous and often confusing detail, lacking knowledge of standards. Cheeseus similarly worked with his team to unclutter these details, stripping away ambiguous terminology, refining the blueprint until it was up to his company’s high standards: easy to read, easy to follow, easy to build.

Two vastly different career paths, yet we were both tasked with making other people’s jobs easier, preventing confusion and reducing mistakes.

Day-to-day, Cheeseus and I conversed. Since he and Sixfold had joined the guild a few months earlier, we had developed a very good working/gaming relationship. By day, we chatted about what was going on in our lives, how work was treating us, and what news had leaked out about our shared gaming interest. By night, I death-gripped Malygos’ power sparks to the raid’s feet while Cheeseus eviscerated them, turning the Aspect’s own power against him, slicing and dicing with arcane-laced weapons. The unique rhythm he and I maintained from day-to-evening led to a proliferation of chats. In the past, I was only able to count two that regularly spoke to me outside of the game: Ekasra the Shaman and Wyse the Mage. The volume of conversations Cheeseus and I engaged in very quickly surpassed those two combined.

The 25-Man Progression team is
captured in Kel'Thuzad's chambers,
Naxxramas

A Council of One

Our early discussions centered mostly around him getting acquainted with the feel of the guild, and sharing his observations with me about the previous night’s raid. But as the weeks turned to months, we dove much deeper into each other’s psyche. He had an affinity for logic puzzles and games, and applied this love of math into his theorycrafting. We spent several months just debating the marginal increases or decreases in DPS by tweaking Hit and Expertise values. We even went so far as to put together a makeshift calculator that would examine a player on the Armory, extract their stats, and begin going through pseudo-combat loops, letting us play with hit and expertise values to see how marginally the damage fluctuated. But, a topic that we continued to touch on, time and again, was the topic of loot distribution systems:

11:41 AM Cheeseus: More to the point, how do you feel about needing to "bid against others" for similar loot? I'm still uncertain as to my opinion on the matter, and it just seems like it may do more harm than not, so the opinion of someone who's experienced it for longer, such as yourself, would be great.yourself, on
11:42 AM me: Can you give me a more concrete example?
11:46 AM Cheeseus: Just in general your system isn't quite like the others I've experienced. In my first guild Omen it was /ra open bidding, which was a nightmare, followed by a set price, each boss is worth X dkp whisper in bid system, which obviously favored vets. My last guild was a set price, diminished dkp after... 5-10 kills system, which overall seems like the best system I've yet to encounter. I've also helped my friends make a "suicide" system for their guild, and that seems to go well , though I do see the downfalls of it. I'm just wondering your opinion on your system.
11:47 AM me: /ra is garbage. Rewards nobody but people that are lucky. Should be self-explanatory how I feel about that.
Our 1st system was fixed-priced zero-sum.
It was an administrative nightmare.

We discussed the merits of "randoming" loot, of fixed price systems, and of get-to-the-back-of-the-line “Suicide Kings” style systems, and I was dissatisfied with most of them. When I pried deeper, Cheeseus revealed his favorite system: Loot Council:

2:13 PM Cheeseus: I've always been a fan of the idea of a loot council, because I'm rather pro communism ideology, but it's too easily corrupt/not impartial.
me: I'll never go loot council so you can scrap that idea now.
2:14 PM it will only take one day of me to be pissed off at some fuckface to deny them an upgrade and the system will have fallen apart
Cheeseus: Oh, I know. It would never work, just as communism would never work in the real world, but if you look at it on paper, isn't it an excellent idea?
me: yes it is excellent
if it were 24 of my close friends i would do it in a heartbeat
but that's simply not an option
Cheeseus: It's things like that that make me sad with humanity
2:15 PM me: Aye. 

Cheeseus was a staunch supporter of Loot Council, because his experiences with it worked well for his raiding teams in the past. These players were tight-knit, hardcore, wrecking The Sunwell Plateau multiple nights per week. Hardcore guilds benefit from loot council because they churn very few people through their roster, leadership typically has a very good handle on who the contributors are and where they fall in line. Loot Council works for two types of guilds. The first type is Dictatorship which is easy to administrate (“If you don’t like it, get out”) and players obey because they value their place in a hardcore roster and the prestige they gain from it. The second type of guild it works for is a guild of close-knit friends, people who know each other by name, and are possibly friends in real-life...

People who have to face each other and the consequences of their actions the day after loot distribution becomes corrupt.

I staunchly opposed this distribution method and although he favored it himself, Cheeseus agreed with me on the reasoning: Loot Council is too easily corrupted. It only takes one bad day for the loot distributor to be pissed off at a player, to bias his judgement just enough to issue loot out to someone else unfairly. DKP is a pure numbers-based system, directly representing a player’s contribution to raid progress as a whole.

You don’t issue rewards by how you feel, you issue them by the measurement of accomplished goals.

These conversations involving the mathing out of character stats, of the ethics surrounding loot, and our analytical approach to closing gaps in our raiding efficiency invoked a feeling of deja vu whenever we’d engage in such chatter. As the weeks carried on, Cheeseus grew to remind me more and more of someone I’d had these conversations with before.

He reminded me of Blain.

Cheeseus shows off his Twilight Drake,
alongside the 25-Man Progression team,
Wyrmrest Temple

The Plan 

I came to see this correlation between him and my now defunct Raid Leader of three years with increasing clarity. Like Blain, he expressed little interest or empathy toward the “plight” of the casual player, but where Blain’s perceived “assholiness” came from a core ideology of speaking the unvarnished truth, Cheeseus’s inability to mediate drama was more rooted in apathy. The reasoning was moot. I never expected Blain to handle such issues, and wouldn’t expect that of Cheeseus either. Blain had a passion for pushing the boundaries of what a player could do, smashing their preconceived notions which only served to limit them. Like him, Cheeseus felt our raid team could be so much more. We were disconnected, and lacked a central leader to follow:

12:05 PM Cheeseus: My strength has been, and always will be raiding. When I raid I want to spend minimal time on trivial things, and to (quickly) overcome new encounters. Though theorycrafting, out of game resources, and my knowledge of WoW I formulate effective manners of overcoming new content. Regardless of my position in the guild, I’m liable to do such.
What DoD needs to succeed (more) is one voice to follow. Discussion of strats with a collaboration of different people works well, as demonstrated by our 3D discussions, but when in raid we need one person to call the shots and to adapt the plan(s) as needed to obtain success.

His intentions were clear: Cheeseus felt he could fill that role of raid leader. He had already proven he could walk-the-walk, performing weekly in our raids, and demonstrating the expertise we needed in a leader. He’d solve those problems that plagued us; we’d have better focus, clearer calls, less ambiguity surrounding battle rezzes, less confusion around Bloodlust. But, a promotion to Raid Leader this early in his DoD career was a conundrum I had to put serious thought into. Promoting too early might generate animosity among those continuing to climb the ladder to Elite. I learned my lesson long ago about double standards and wanted to avoid them at all costs.

But I could start with Avatar. 

Avatar had fringe benefits. It would give him an opportunity to flex his raid leadership muscle in officer chat, adding his observations to the collective pool. And to the guild, he would be recognized simply as another new contributor to the guild who was going above and beyond the call of duty. Meanwhile, I was free to continue to twist the administrative dials as we headed for 3.1, rearranging our leadership structure to support Role Officers. Once 3.1 arrived, along with a fresh tier of raid content, I’d be in the best position possible to etch these structural changes into stone. At that point, the path for Cheeseus to be promoted to our next official raid leader would be unobstructed. It made sense and it was still by-the-book. So, Cheeseus became the next earner of the Avatar rank. And it came not a moment too soon.

Five days before Cheeseus earned Avatar, Blizzard made an announcement about the forthcoming 3.1 patch: Heroic: Glory of the Raider would lose its Black Proto-Drake award. The clock was now ticking, and the 25-Man Progression team needed every bit of leadership it could muster.

3.11. Meritocracy

Mature, assisted by the guild, finishes off "For The Horde"

The Missing Piece

The team wasn't quite whole.

Naxxramas, The Eye of Eternity and Obsidian Sanctum were being gutted on a weekly basis. The adrenaline shot of a new expansion was still flowing viscerally through our veins. The re-envisioned raiding approach Blizzard was trying with Wrath allowed the team to tear the instances apart faster than a noob dying in the fire. DKP was being collected, and the loot distribution grew larger each week. And, we had a healthy mix of old and new faces stepping into Necropolis each week with us. Conversations in vent were positive; one might go so far as to say they were enjoying themselves. Death Knights added a unique and interesting set of mechanics to our progression; I was having the time of my life playing the role of a Tank. Wrath was fun, and we were having fun raiding together.

But we weren't quite whole.

The officer pool was cooperatively leading raids week-to-week; a combination of myself, Dalans, and various officers that remained. It was working, but I attribute our early wins to the severe lack of difficulty in the entry-level raids. It was easy to lead-by-committee when the margin of error was high. There were notable deficiencies in this model of leading raids. Messages get mixed. Communication isn’t as precise as it could be. We would be ratcheting into Patchwerk, quickly approaching his final 30%, waiting for that call for Bloodlust...and the call wouldn't come out.

“Should we BL?”

Awkward silence, followed by an irritated Dalans responding, “Yeah, just do it.”, wondering why raiders just couldn't think for themselves for a change. It had nothing to do with being a proactive thinker. It had everything to do with the norms we had become accustomed to for four years, conditioned by a Rogue named Blain to stay silent, focused on task, and not do anything impulsive, but instead, to follow directives. Players with a propensity to make their own judgement calls on-the-fly often proved to us in the past that they had no idea what they were doing. Furthermore, it undermined authority. This served up a double helping of fail salad; players would feed off this behavior and begin to contribute their own bad judgments  systematically pissing off the raid leader and contributing to his own burnout. The good news is that Blain whipped these boys and girls into shape, training them to only respond to the pavlovian bell of his voice.

That bad news is that in the absence of that voice, players executed raids on auto-pilot, almost as oblivious to the fine details of the raid as the mindless scourge whom they were slaughtering.

The lack of a central voice bothered me. It wasn't terrible now, but I feared it would soon grow like a cancer if left alone. Leaving things alone was how I had handled many issues in Vanilla and TBC because they were uncomfortable or I was unsure of my own leadership capabilities. This time around, however, I wasn't leaving anything alone. This time I had a plan, and I had baked that plan directly into the guild’s ranks.

Mature earns "Dressed for the Occasion" while
chatting with Mcflurrie

Quest of the Avatar

Part of the revised game plan for DoD was to begin acknowledging guildies for their exceptional contributions to the guild. Rewarding players built upon the foundation I attempted to reboot at the start of the second expansion. I realized that DoD was always going to be comprised of a mixed bag of faces, from those that logged in once a week, just to say “Hi” and check their auctions, all the way to the other extreme, tenaciously tweaking their characters for ultimate efficiency. I introduced the “Avatar” rank as a way to allow a guildy's peers put in a good word for one another, to be recognized for the efforts and to remind them that they played a vital role in the guild, no matter how small their contribution may be. This list of opportunities to demonstrate goodness was infinite, and so I was eager to see how players would take this challenge on. The initial results were impressive, but at the same time, made it very clear I needed to put much greater thought into Avatar’s ramifications. 

My guildies had a tendency to surprise me.

First on that list was Mcflurrie, an older player in the guild, who had been raiding with us since The Burning Crusade. Mcflurrie had performed a random act of kindness; after hearing that another player was struggling to find good upgrades as the result of some combinations of bad luck in drops, and low DKP, Mcflurrie offered his own DKP pool up to the player to bid on the item, which was as good as a purchase. It was extraordinarily generous (as raiders typically hoarded their DKP worse than gold), and although I felt it was a shining example of the kind of behavior I wanted to see in players, it also set a nasty precedent for players to collude with one another down-the-road. I awarded Mcflurrie Avatar for his generosity, and then amended the loot rules so that players could not spend DKP on each other. Letting players gift loot to each other bode ominously. I wanted it avoided at all costs.

Next on the list was Shimerice the Paladin, who opted to donate to the guild’s Ventrilo hosting fund, something that had rested solely on my shoulders since Ater handed the server over upon his exit from WoW. This generosity helped a lot, as many players had come and gone without making any effort to contribute to my costs, which included the Vent server, domain name registration, and web hosting -- all straight out of my pocket. There was a bit of a concern about awarding Avatar to players who provided monetary support to the guild; the act tended to weave back and forth across the ethical bridge without firmly landing on one side. I didn't want players to feel like they could buy their way into the rank, but at the same time, wanted to acknowledge them for helping out the guild. Again, as with the Mcflurrie situation, I let rank award go out, and then reminded players that they would be unable to “buy” their way into the role. This would become especially important when the first Elites were promoted, and my 1st round bidding rule became active.

The ethics involving a player “buying” their way into a role that would guarantee them a shot at loot before anyone else had no ethical ambiguity to it -- it was wrong. And when players offered to donate in the future, they got the hint. Bheer proved this when he offered to pay for a registered account at WoW Web Stats, which is what we used to analyze our performance at the time. He paid the for the account, and respectfully declined any Avatar award or promotion, and I humbly thanked him for his support. Other players would continue to contribute in this fashion without gaining notoriety, and I was thankful that the “hint” had taken, and that contributions were greatly appreciated.

Mature completes his one-billionth Alterac Valley,
earning him "Hero of the Frostwolf Clan"

Taking the Spotlight

On the surface, Avatar was meant to provide acknowledgement to players of all shapes and sizes, of all degrees and measures of contribution. I wanted it to be clear to DoD that you didn't have to be a raider to earn the title of Avatar; there were many ways that casual players could be identified by their peers for random acts of kindness. To this end, Avatar met that need, and many different styles of player earned a shot at sitting high up in the DoD leadership court, hanging out in officer chat. This was the publicly announced reasoning behind the Avatar rank, to foster camaraderie among the players and return us to our "family friendly" roots. But, I had a nefarious hidden agenda behind the Avatar rank, one I kept close to the chest: players that both raided in Progression and earned Avatar were going to be closely scrutinized for a promotion to Elite. It would grow to become one of those “unspoken rules” like those in Hollywood, where the Oscar for best Director was almost a guarantee that their movie would go on to win Best Picture. It wasn't a 100% given...but you were going to see a pattern.

Following Shim’s award, Arterea the Priest and Omaric the Warrior were next on the list to earn Avatar. Both were continuing to be positive, friendly, well-respected members of the DoD community. And both were proving themselves to be extremely talented behind the raiding wheel, consistently excelling in each respective department, and not hesitating to share their knowledge so that others would learn and grow as well. And, it was not long after those two that Kelden the Shaman earned Avatar, proving that he was consistently pushing his ability to heal to absolute maximum. It dawned on me during Kelden's Avatar award-ship that he had applied to DoD not once, but twice; the first time he had been turned away as his application was for that of a Rogue. We were heavy on melee and had no room for him, yet he persisted, and applied a second time as a healer, which got his foot in the door. Now he was proving he could play the role we needed, and continued to deliver exceptional healing as we scratched achievements off the to-do list.

In the back of my mind, I already had plans for all three. Art and Omaric would going to be seeing Elite very quickly, and I had been starting to weigh heavily the concept of switching leadership from Class Officers to Role Officers. We were already short in multiple departments, from a class officer perspective, and it made more sense in the days for 40-Man raiding. In fact, you were crazy if you weren't delegating management of each class to an individual person when 40+ players needed to be coordinated. Those days were long behind us, and many classes lacked an officer now. Pondering Role Officers made sense, gave us more focus, and kept the raid team more closely knit. If I were to make the change, Kelden was first on my list to promote to Healing Officer. For the most part, I kept the majority of these thoughts to myself, sharing them only occasionally with Dalans. He was on board and enthusiastic. Dalans had long held we suffered from too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen syndrome, so the prospect of downsizing most certainly gave him the kind of twisted satisfaction felt when the executioner approaches the chopping block.

With regular Avatar rewards being doled out, and the picture of Elites and Role Officer promotions growing clearer each day, I was confident that a Raid Leader voice would soon make itself known to me. The moment it did, I’d pounce. I had my own gut instincts on where this voice would come from, but running a guild can’t come from intuition alone. My leadership days of leaving things alone to self-mend were well behind me. Thanks to Avatar, players were pushed out of the line of conformity into a spotlight where they could be recognized. Spotlights have a way of showing you who has potential to fill that role.

Unsurprisingly, the voice ended up being exactly who I predicted.