Shadowwolf's Den

Been a while since I posted last, figured Id try and put at least something up here.

While browsing around the net a few weeks ago, I came across another WoW player Blog with a bunch of bullets on what makes for a good guild leader. In addition to a bunch of…well crap that this person was spewing, on another post about guild rules, mainly talking about loot rules, this person made it seem like abusing guild loot rules and looking for ways to stack it in your favor was a good thing. Needless to say this ticked me off quite a lot. How anyone can justify being an asshole to other people in a guild for the sake of “bettering their gear” is just disgusting, and to hear that same person try and point out good qualities of what a good GM is, well…lets say I don’t put a lot of faith in their opinion on anything after the loot crap. To be honest, the whole post looked more like a rant about this persons unhappiness with their own GM rather than an informative post about good leadership qualities. Out of avoiding kick starting a war with another blogger, Im going to refrain from linking to that article.

Anyhow….

I’ve lead this guild for over 4 years now. Over the course of that time, I’ve learned a lot of stuff. This was in fact my first time being a leader of a guild. I’ve been a leader in other areas, in the Marines, my own company, a department within a large corporation, etc. I’m no stranger to leadership to say the least. What I did when I first started out as the GM for Twilight was try and apply those traits and knowledge from those experience in leadership to being the GM, and I can sit back and point out what did work and what ended badly. I thought a good way to express not only how I view the position now, and how I viewed it then, plus provide some insight to why I lead like I do would be to talk about those successes and failures.

Start a Guild for the Right Reasons

Honestly, when this guild started out, it was formed out of frustration from being in another raid guild. I was extremely unhappy about some of the leaderships traits and actions in a guild I was an Officer in with a few other folks who helped me found this one. I saw things like favoritism, personal abuse of the bank, a general wave of uncaring of the other Officers, etc. Things that all inevitably led to that guilds quick demise.

When I started out, I didn’t really intend to “run my own”, I just wanted a better choice than what I was currently stuck with. At the time, on Alex, there wasnt a guild that fit what I was looking for. 99.9% of the guilds that existed then were all raid-centric. All about progression and not really a laid back environment so my options were pretty limited. I didnt want to be pressured into participation or being in a raid, or even having to be forced into a specific role on raids. I wanted flexibility and freedom, something in which none of the guilds I looked at seemed to offer. Logically, the other option and pretty much only option was to start our own with the folks who left the raid guild I was in with me. We all pretty much sought out the same thing and I get handed the driver seat.

For those seeking leadership of a guild or looking to start a guild, I cant stress enough, do it for the RIGHT reasons. What I listed above is the right reason. If you want to simply start a guild cause you think you’ll have a better time getting loot, or you like being “in charge” or other trivial reasons, don’t. You’ll regret it because I can tell you right now, being a GM is A LOT of responsibility to do it right and for the long haul. If you want your guild to be in any way successful in anything it does, you need to be ready to do what’s required because success starts at the top. If you don’t start things off right, its doomed to fail before you even get going.

It’s Not for Soloists

You cant lead a guild alone. It doesn’t matter how large or small you intend it to become, doing it alone is insanity. This means you need Officers to help you. Depending on how large your guild becomes or you want it to become also depends on if you should break up your leadership down even further to include Veterans or some other “rank” to aid in the running of things. I can say that one of the things I learned in these last 4+ years has been that empowering your membership and your Officers will not only keep your ass out of trouble, but make your life all that much easier in the running of your guild.

Sometimes Officers or you being the GM can be intimidating to other people, mostly more timid or new guild members. Sometimes they have a question or problem and they don’t believe it to be worthy of an Officer’s time or the GMs time, so they keep it to themselves. The problem with this is that sometimes this problem can mushroom into a larger problem that becomes more difficult to deal with than if it had been brought up earlier. Having empowered members like Veterans can be of a huge value here where people may feel more comfortable going to a Vet about the issue, and then the Vet can make a determination of if its severe enough to bring up to the Officers of the guild to get involved in. Your guild membership is your world, you are there to help them and insure they feel safe, secure, and happy within the game. In return, they need to be able to feel they can talk to you about stuff that bothers them or comes up so you can give them advice or help them out if they cant fix it on their own.

Don’t be a dictator that tries to rule with an [Iron-Molded Fist]. It wont work, and if you try, you’ll only end up pissing off your members and frustrating yourself. Plus…people can always leave for other guilds and if you try to be a raving lunatic dictator, they will leave. Then, whats the point of being a GM of a guild with no members or one that no one stays in long. You don’t want your guild to have a revolving door with regard to membership so spread the responsibility around.

Put Others Before Yourself

This one is where a lot of GM’s fail hard. Understandably its not easy to do. Lets face it, you pay to play this game like the rest of your members. Sometimes you are going to want to be a little selfish about how you do things and that’s where problems can come into play. So many GM’s think that because they are the GM, they deserve some sort of higher priority on things. They tend to place themselves above the other members in some way, be it with loot, raid participation, whatever. In turn, when GM’s start doing this, it has a side-effect of trickling down to the rest of the guild leadership and sometimes even further down the chain to long term members. This is where elitism breeds and that’s bad for a guild. Its like a cancer that starts to erode away at a guild from the inside and will eventually kill it. This aspect of being a GM is a hard one to find good balance in. Personally, I put everyone above myself too often and end up screwing myself over more often than I should. I’ve been graced with good guild members who see this though and end up passing things to me, usually in a forceful way to make up for when I go too far in the service of others.

It’s your job as GM to make sure that the guild you’re in charge of runs smoothly, has little to no drama, and everyone continues to enjoy themselves as members of it. Can you please everyone all the time? No, you cant, and you’d be a fool to try. What you can do is find a happy medium to it though, finding compromise when you can and if applicable to meet things halfway. You also shouldn’t break yourself or your sanity to do for others and ignore your own needs. A good example is loot. While its nice as the GM to pass to your members on things, you end up screwing over your effectiveness on raids and in groups if you do it too often. You need the upgrades as much as everyone else does, and sacrificing those needs to everyone else all the time makes you a liability on those runs eventually. It’s okay to be a little selfish with that regard, but just don’t ever go too far with it.

The other aspect of this point is that sometimes this means doing things even if you really don’t want to. If a large group of folks wants to do something, but you don’t really want to however it requires your involvement to get done, do it. Don’t hesitate, don’t skirt responsibility, get off your ass and do it. Its part of the responsibility that comes with being a GM. Yes, sometimes it sucks, but you need to put it into the perspective of it being for the betterment of your guild if its something you don’t want to do.

Humility

You are the GM yes, but you aren’t any better than the rest of your members. Lets be honest, any yahoo can start a guild and be a GM, whether they are good at it or not is a different story completely, but the only difference between you and your membership is that you chose to lead, they for whatever reason chose not to. That’s it, nothing less nothing more. The defining difference in the GM of a guild and the rest of the guild is the choice to lead it. Any one of your members can very easily choose to do the same as you and start a guild on their own, and there is really nothing that says they cant lead your guild either. Just remember that, don’t place yourself above others, be humble.

Now…this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t command some level of respect. There are a lot of sacrifices as a GM that you will end up having to make that some of your members likely will not, some will be seen by members, most go unseen. Because of that, your members should show you a level of respect, that is if you return that respect. If you treat them like crap, then no, they wont respect you, like any position of leadership, its honestly no different in that regard. Should they kiss your ass? Hell no they shouldn’t, and if you believe they should then you are not right for the position. At the same time though, if you pass instruction along to your members on a raid, about a guild rule, or something, they should have enough respect for you and the guild as a whole to follow that instruction provided its just.

Part of humility is also admitting when you screw up or are wrong openly and freely. This goes a long way in defining your character as a person not just a GM, and being able to openly admit when you fuck up, that’s respectable by anyone. It shows strength in your character and your abilities as a leader, to know you don’t come without some fault, and if and when you do screw up, make good on fixing it. Don’t let it stagnate and try to dust it under the carpet, fix it and fix it quickly and correctly. Shit happens, and we all make mistakes, it comes with life, and if you try to act like you never make a mistake or pretend like the ones you do or did make never happen, then you undermine your legitimacy and integrity which then will cause your members to lose respect for you. If you cant be trusted to admit when you make a mistake or fix that mistake, then how can you be trusted to run a guild so many others depend on you to do? Simple answer to that is you cant. Trust goes a long way and anything you do to show your guild that you are a worthy person for them to instill that trust in so they can rely on you for enjoyment and fairness will end up making your guild last the long haul.

The Value of Being Impartial

This is another tough concept for a lot of folks. I can honestly say that its hard for me to this day to keep this at the forefront of every decision when conflicts arise and require the intervention of a GM. You’re a person with beliefs and opinions like everyone else, and sometimes those will creep up and get in the way of you making decisions. You HAVE to, absolutely have to remain impartial as best as you can on things. The moment you start allowing your personal beliefs, dislikes or superstitions creep into the decision process is the moment you start opening your guild up to that Drama monster. Your members and sometimes your Officers too will sometimes be influenced on some things for various reasons. It’s not a bad thing if they do, its just the natural course of things. You as the GM have to do your best to remain impartial and look at all the outcomes or decisions fairly and decide whats best for the guild if this happens. It is truly hard to do and no one is perfect, but the closer you stay to walking the line of equality, the better off your guild will be.

Sometimes decisions will be unpopular, but in the end you need to do whats best for your guild, not whats best for a small group of people or yourself. I’ve said it a few times before, you cant please everyone all the time, and its up to your members to decide that if a decision they don’t like is worth sticking out, or moving on. It’s a shitty reality, but its the truth. Sometimes you will lose members, it happens, and trying to make drastic adjustments to please 1 or 2 people isn’t worth the potential damage it can do in the long term.

Do The Right Thing Even If People Hate You For It

One of the things people don’t prep you for being a GM is that you will be hated more than anyone else in the guild when people are pissed off. It’s common behavior for people to focus blame on other areas, and since as GM you’ll be in a sort of a high profile position and prone to be the focus of hatred if people are mad at something about the guild. 99.9% of the time its nothing you’ve necessarily done to cause this anger, its usually them just being pissed because they lost a roll, didn’t make a raid sign up, something that you had no direct influence over or intention to cause grief with. Unfortunately you are the embodiment of the guild in single form since the guild itself is not a living singular entity on its own. Its common for people who harbor hate on you for silly stuff like this to basically be pissed that things aren’t how they want exactly and instead of facing up to the possibility that perhaps the guild isn’t right for them, they will turn that hatred on you. It happens, you kind of have to deal with it. This was something no one ever prepared me for when I jumped into this role. It kind of caught me off guard how someone could hate my guts for them being unhappy here for other reasons.

At the same time with this, it means like I said above, doing the right thing for the guild regardless of popularity points. Being GM isn’t a popularity contest and you cant try to make it one or you’ll doom the guild to failure. There are however balances with whats an unpopular decision and whats a right decision. Lets face it, if the majority of the guild disagrees with something, the chances are high its not a wise move and you shouldn’t do it. Your job as GM is not to force your will on the guild, its about looking out for the best interest of your guild members and the guild overall. When I say doing things that are unpopular I mean for some people in your guild. Not everyone is going to agree 100% to things, that’s the way it goes with any community, but sometimes some decisions that are best for the majority will piss off a minority. If you can find a compromise to it and meet both sides halfway without undermining the goal or causing more problems, by all means you need to do it. You have to face the fact though that sometimes some people might be unhappy with a decision. With every decision you make you should think about what kind of impact its going to have on the guild and if its the best decision for its members.

Open Up, But Not Too Much

This is one I had a hard time with. For various reasons, I am by nature a private person. I don’t open up easily in my everyday life let alone online. Unfortunately, if you don’t show you are a regular person like the rest of your members and let them become comfortable with you as the GM, it creates problems. For starters, people will have a hard time trusting you. Its difficult to trust someone you barely know, and in an MMO like WoW, most everyone barely knows everyone else. We see the online avatar’s we use in the game and the personality that comes through in chat, sometimes voice like Teamspeak or Ventrilo, that’s about it. Text chat unfortunately doesn’t convey emotion or personality very well, it leaves a lot open to personal interpretation which isn’t so good.

You want people to be comfortable around you, comfortable speaking to you, but at the same time make it clear that you are the GM and have responsibilities to the guild as a whole above individual members. Its a hard balance to learn, and honestly, after 4+ years I’m still learning it. Back in the Marines, as a leader of others I didn’t have a need to get down and relate to those under my charge, in fact, in a military setting, its discouraged as they consider it fraternization which depending on the severity of it has a way of undermining your authority as a leader. There are some truths to this notion, however like anything, taken in an extreme its not exactly good either.

What I’ve found is you have to be friendly. You cant isolate yourself despite any beliefs on privacy you have, in order for people to warm up to you, you have to let them get a little close. Now, I’m not saying you’re required to meet them all in person, buy them drinks, or pass out your phone number, address and other vital personal info to the whole guild, but be a human being. There’s always a danger like I said in extremes, and opening up too much can backfire on you big time. At the same token, closing people out too much can also backfire on you (something of which I learned first hand in this guild not too long ago). I’ll give you examples of both extremes:

Opening up too much undermines your authority when the situation arises you have to be that authority figure. Sooner or later you’ll have to gkick someone, or issue some form of disciplinary action on someone in the guild, it’s inevitable. If you open up too much and get too chummy with the membership, they wont respect that part of your responsibility. It will be more or less an attitude of “I don’t have to listen to you, you do some screwed up stuff too which isn’t any better than what I did.” type of deal.

Closing everyone out too much has the same kind of effect in an opposite way of getting there though. If people don’t “know” you, they don’t trust you. Putting faith in someone blindly isn’t an easy thing to ask. When you shelter yourself or firewall yourself from your members, people begin to grow suspicious about you and it works in a similar fashion as being too open where it undermines your authority. They start speculating on things about you, start to become wary about your motives, etc which is no good.

Again, this is a portion of being a GM I’ve learned a hard lesson in and still am figuring out as I go. I don’t think anyone could ever have the right answer to how much is too much relation and how much is too little in this area. I can say that technologies like Teamspeak and Ventrilo can do worlds in helping you be more personable to your guild members. People can hear your voice, and they can hear inflections, tone, laughter, etc which gives people a better impression of you than text alone ever could.

You Are A Diplomat

The last thing I want to point out is that as a GM, you’re a diplomat. What you do and how you behave not only shows other people on your realm what they can expect from your guild, but it sets the tone for how your guild members behave as well. I cant tell you how many guilds I’ve come across where the GM is a complete asshole, arrogant, stupid, mean, you name it. Sadly, I see the same qualities in the members of their guild. People tend to gravitate toward other people of a similar personality, be it in real life or in virtual life, its all the same. So if you as a GM act like a complete tool to everyone, then your members are going to likely be people who do the same, because they see you doing it.

Everything you do is under a microscope. Not just from your own guild members, but others who are outside of your guild. Its another downside to being a GM, you cant unload on people as quickly as you may want to when they piss you off. You kind of have to be political in that sense where you keep your temper in check. Yea, there’s times where the gloves can come off, but you want to make sure you don’t do it often and pick the proper moment. Doing it too much and people will get the wrong idea, and doing it too little and people will think they can walk all over you.

Stand up for your guild and your members. If another guild or another person outside your guild is screwing with one of your guild members for no reason, get in there and defend them. Don’t leave your fellow guild members hanging out there alone. Stick together and you’ll earn respect that way. At the same time, if your guild member screws up and another person outside brings it to your attention, do the investigative effort to see what really happened and if they did wrong someone outside of the guild, take steps to make it right. Reputation even in a virtual world like WoW lasts a long time. It’s very easy to screw it up but its very hard and takes a long time to make it good. If you have a member being a jackass on purpose to other people outside the guild, have a talk with them, do what you can to get them to behave, but in the end if they don’t, don’t be afraid to remove them. Being a good guild is not only about being nice and getting along with each other, but getting along with others outside the guild as best as possible. If someone is being a jackass to others outside the guild, chances are they are being a jackass to people inside the guild too and you just don’t know about it yet.