Motivation

You know how some people are very casual about playing World of Warcraft? They play alts and enjoy the game and aren't pushing hard to really raid hard core or anything. They take the game as it is and smell the roses and all that. I'm kinda one of those people mostly. But, I'm not talking about them at all. Today I'm talking about the people who are seriously looking to get face to face with Illiden.

Those people, whether they are in a serious twenty hours per week guild or a more casual raiding guild, require one major attribute to be successful. Motivation. WoW is not the kind of game that you just go from point A to point B in. The game is pretty flawed in that it does not draw you a map on your class, your role, or your next step in getting to the high end raiding content. There are no signs at the end of Karazhan that say "Now that you have this and that gear, go to Gruul's Lair!" There's no sign outside any of the instances that say "You must have this much healing to ride this ride!" And there is nothing in the game that tells you how to play your class the most optimum way. So, how do people go from the basic quest completion and killing mobs to participating in twenty five man raids and being a productive group player?

The people who switch to that raiding level of performance are very motivated to squeeze more performance out of their class. They are going to use lots of tools to grade their abilities and help them compare themselves to other people who are performing better. They look at a WWS report, for example, and instead of saying "this other rogue is better because they are sword specced", they say "maybe I should find a way to switch to sword spec so I can do more damage". One type of person makes excuses, the other sees a way to perform better. In my experience, this is the fundamental shift in attitude someone needs to make in order to be better at raiding. It means using WWS, reading forums, doing research, and grinding faction and gold. Those things are work, but when you are motivated, they are steps towards your goal.

So, how do you convey this concept to people who want to raid seriously, but still have no motivation to do the work, and don't have a correct attitude about self evaluation? For myself, I look at the work involved and I look at my free time and I can honestly decide if I feel I can raid seriously based on that. But if you have lots of free time, but no motivation, it's easy to delude yourself into thinking that something else is holding you back. While I think there are a few times when you need other people to help you, usually I feel the only thing holding someone back is themselves.

As for answering my own question, I have no idea how to get people to make the jump in how they think. I'm not sure anyone can change how someone else sees things.

Why do the tools suck so bad?

Blizzard recently added guild banks. Sure, guild banks are awesome and they remove the practice of keeping tons of junk on someone's personal mule account, but they are a security nightmare. Managing ranks and access to bank tabs is done through a pretty poor interface.

As my guild has grown, I have seen the need to add some more ranks just to manage access to the bank and give people more control over promotions, etc. You can't add a rank in the middle, you have to add a new one as the lowest rank. The lowest rank is the rank all new members join at, so you need to do the membership shuffle. Moving everyone in your guild down a rank. Time consuming and not a fun thing to do in the game. Something as simple as adding a rank can net you several hours of monotonous clicking, the kind that won't get you any XP or gold. Blah.

I also want to give out the ability for officers to withdraw cash for buying raid supplies or payout out for contests and such. But our guild doesn't let people repair out of the guild bank. Right now the guild management lets me restrict people to only being able to pay for repairs out of the guild bank and not withdraw cash. The exact opposite of what I need to do. So, there are always issues where someone accidentally clicks the wrong button and they have to pay back the costs to the bank. It's the little annoying bugs that often end up being the most frustrating.

There are a million other things in the game that I know Blizzard will spend time fixing and balancing. I understand that. But guilds are practically a requirement for playing the game beyond hitting the level cap. These guilds aren't going to run themselves. Making it easier to manage a guild and keep the bank secured means pleasing the minority of people who are pouring their time and effort into providing a better game experience for Blizzards customers.

It's not all bad

Sometimes things in a guild "just work". You get some good officers, or maybe after some bad runs with recruiting you find some really good people to join up. And then you hear some little thing that makes you feel like you are playing a game for fun, and not enduring your second job.

For me, it's usually one of two things. Sometimes it's a regular member who has joined our guild and I hear them comment about how much fun the guild is. Or how glad they are that someone else in the guild hooked them up with some materials to make a nice item. Or that they are just glad that when something dropped, no one yelled at anyone else. And then there are the officers in the guild. Taking an idea and running with it is the typical thing that floats my boat. They'll spend some hours polishing a policy post so it is very thorough and well written. Or they take the time to help someone, even though the person getting the help is a jerk and will never return the favor. And most importantly, when I am burned out, or pissed off, or upset, they don't bail on me and usually are running the guild while I am taking a break.

These moments are the times when being a guild leader is not all bad. Sure, it's usually just the eye of the drama-cane du-jour, but it's still the same blue sky up above.