I was really nervous before our first raid day. As I had mentioned in my Doubt and Fears post, most of the strategies I had used in the past came from ones developed by other guilds who had already done the fights. This felt like the first time I had to raid lead a group while myself being completely unfamiliar with the fights (I had done it with the first boss of HFC, but that was 4 hours of wiping the first night, then 4 hours of study after it, before I could come back and make it easy. There is no way in hell my guild would have allowed us to go through that, as will be shown by the aftermath of this first raid night). To help myself prepare for it more, since we were starting on heroic difficulty, I stayed up the whole night before raid (I live in Asia, so Syzygy raids happen during my mornings, but the raid itself opens up maybe 10 hours earlier, during my nighttime), and PUGged the new raid, Emerald Nightmare, on normal difficulty. Just so I had a basic understanding of the bosses and mechanics.

After much PUGging, morning came, and our first raid as Syzygy started. We were doing splits runs, so half the group was on alts, and the other half was on mains. Remember that the point of split runs was to get more gear, and the larger the group was, the more loot would drop from bosses. Remember also that we had less than 20 capable people at the time, so to ensure we had more gear, I was bringing in players I knew were too weak. So, not only was I to do my first raid in Syzygy without the benefit of being able to learn from others’ strategies, I also was going to lead a group that I knew overall was going to be weak. I was scared. Running on adrenaline because I had had no sleep, and SCARED.

We killed 2 bosses on heroic that night. The first boss we killed we ranked World 187. The second boss we killed we ranked World 33. We did not kill our third boss. If you’re a WoW mythic raider, you’d scoff at my caring about the ranks during this week 0 (when mythic isn’t out yet, and the race hasn’t officially started, these ranks get overwritten in no time). If you know me, you’d also be bemused at why I’m writing down ranks when I have rarely paid any attention to our ranks. The reason I looked up the ranks is to give an idea of where we stood at the end of our first night, in comparison to the tens of thousands of other mythic guilds. So the ranks seem to put us at a decently good spot, but our night wasn’t exactly the easiest. We had a weak team, which means we did wipe when wiping wasn’t necessary. On the first boss we wiped 5 times before we killed it. On the second boss we also wiped 5 times before we killed it. On the third boss we wiped 11 times total (the 11th time we got it down to 4%), and then raid ended.

So, that night wasn’t great, but it wasn’t that bad either. Most other guilds that were World top 300 or so also got 2 bosses down that first night (they chose to do a different second boss), though I don’t know if many of them did split runs or brought in people they knew to be weak. It’s probably safe to say, though, that few of them almost fell apart because of that first night.

After that first night, Amber came to me to tell me that our raid night was a disaster, that it was un-fun, that people didn’t want to raid anymore (she said she always wants to raid and even she didn’t want to raid anymore), and that the only way to remedy this was to stop doing split runs. I was shocked. I knew it wasn’t a great raid, but it certainly didn’t seem to be quite as horrible as she described it. If anything, with the fact that half of us were on alts, and that we had to bring in some weak players, and that we were a completely new guild doing our very first run, I thought that we had done decently.

How Amber talked to me that day after our raid was the moment that threw me into high alert about Syzygy. It made me feel that any moment when things weren’t great was a moment when things might fall apart. Since that moment, for the subsequent 2 years that I led Syzygy, I have been unable to feel any peace of mind. Also since that moment, I have felt that this guild, this place I work so hard to make into a good home for so many, would not be a place where I could be happy. Of course, at the time I didn’t think this, and one would think that the growing pains of starting a community like this wouldn’t last forever. I can say in retrospect that this really is so: I can pinpoint the beginning of my stress in Syzygy down to this moment when Amber came to tell me that a mediocre raid with us was a disaster and even she no longer wanted to raid, and I know for the next two years, even when things settled down and we became more established, barely a week went by when someone wasn’t essentially telling me how much of a disaster I, or Syzygy, was.

But back to my conversation with Amber. I didn’t agree to follow her suggestion that we stop doing split runs immediately, in large part because I knew many of those who were my old and loyal PUG members were not upset, in fact they were still hyped about the night. I had ended the raid night at the correct time (mainly because Carain, one of Amber’s people, had said before that she would not accept us going overtime), but really if we had put in one more attempt we might have killed the third boss (we were at 4% the last attempt, and our progress on the boss had been decently steady). Those raiders were a bit put off by my ending the raid at the correct time if we were so close: they wanted to spend more time at it, they were excited with where we were. When I raid led PUGs before, I wasn’t restricted by having members of my raid refuse to go late if we were close, so the members who had been with me for awhile were used to my pushing my groups forward to keep going at it! keep going at it! we’ll get it soon!!! They had a similar attitude towards split runs: they knew it would mean they’d have to push themselves hard and deal with difficulties, but that’s what they thought they signed up for with me. So, I knew there were people in Syzygy that wanted to see the split runs through. With how Amber phrased things, I assumed her clique didn’t want to do the split runs (only one of them had put in any effort for it), so it looked to me like some people wanted it, and some people didn’t.

Amber was perhaps surprised that I didn’t immediately follow her suggestion (she later told me that she has a lot of experience leading guilds and her advice would always be for our good, so I should trust her judgement). As our conversation continued, we got  more detailed with what we discussed. I asked her exactly why she felt the night was such a disaster, and she said we should only have taken maybe 3 wipes before we killed the bosses (remember we took 5 wipes, and the last boss we attempted was 11 wipes with no kill at the end). This surprised me, because all mythic guilds go through progression on at least one boss that takes over a hundred wipes, so I didn’t see how an experienced mythic raider would think 5 wipes (or 11) was too much for her to stomach. She explained that people were messing up on the same, simple mechanics too often. An example we discussed was a player called Theren (one of the ones I knew would be too weak, but I brought in anyway to increase the amount of loot that would drop for us). On the third boss, out of the 11 wipes, 3 were caused by Theren messing up on something that should be decently easy to avoid. In Amber’s way of thinking, Theren should have been sat much earlier, and if everyone was on their mains and no one on alts, we would’ve been able to kill the boss and not go through all 11 of those wipes. In our discussion I said maybe I should have sat him when he wiped us the second time, so we wouldn’t have had to deal with the third time that he wiped us. I said that, but privately I felt she was being unreasonable, since at best that would have saved us one wipe attempt, and he was already the weakest player that was causing the most problems. Almost every other wipe was someone else, sometimes the strongest players, making their first mistake.

Overall it seemed that Amber’s point was that there were many people who felt the raid was not successful, and we needed to stop doing split runs so we could go in with our strongest assets, and pull morale back up. This is probably when what happened between her clique and keith would bring about its first consequence. I felt that she was representing the desires of her clique, and didn’t care about the desires of the rest of the guild. It bolstered my conviction that she didn’t represent our whole guild and I couldn’t just blindly following her advice. In our conversation I asked whether they still had their private skype chat going, and she said that they didn’t do skype calls during raid, but that yes they had their private chat, and it’s why she was so aware how upset they were with the raid night. When I floated the possibility that it was only her friends from Check Please that were upset, she mentioned 3 others who were upset (1 of which was a PUG member who isn’t a part of our guild, but came in that day because we needed people). The ones she mentioned who were upset stood out to me as also being people who didn’t care about our guild (Sunstep didn’t bother with a second character at all and had caused trouble already, and Tranquility had been looking to hop to a different guild weeks ago). Essentially, I felt that she represented people who weren’t bothering to be good guildies to us, and that she was so immersed in their thoughts that she wasn’t able to recognize that the rest of the guild was fine with where we were, that calling our raid ‘a complete disaster’ was rather an overstatement. The idea in my mind that she would prioritize the interests of her clique over that of the guild was planted in how she dealt with the situation with Keith, and set its roots deeper at this time. As a result of this, I was not surprised that when I didn’t do what she or her clique wanted, she didn’t seem to feel it necessary to work things out with me. With Noci getting really busy with his real life stuff (he later stopped raiding, though he continued helping with guild gold stuff for the entire time I was guild master), I started really feeling that if we were to succeed at all, it would all be on me.

In the end, I asked her to try to calm things down in her clique, and said that we would be continuing the split runs at least for a second day, before we make any decisions that would end up wasting the work so many people put in for the split runs. But that if ultimately we needed to stop that we would do that. I asked her to give me a chance to work things out.

That conversation was stressful to me. I came to believe that parts of Amber’s clique would very likely leave if we did split runs the second day. I believe that day was also the day when Sunstep came to me to tell me that he wasn’t going to continue with us (remember we didn’t even have 20 people at this time, which means losing anyone else was disastrous for us), that all good players should leave because that would be the smart move for them (in fact he had told other strong guildies they should leave), rather than to stay at a place destined to fail. He may have said all that a day or two later, I don’t really remember, many of those conversations of people telling me how disastrous we were blend a bit together in my mind. What I best remember is that all those things said to me galvanized me into thinking: no one is going to help me, but I WILL NOT LET US FAIL. I know that that week I did not sleep at all (I would try, then realize it was useless and get up to do something useful), and I perhaps ate a spoonful of food a day. I’ve read since that many entrepreneurs go through this: a time when the stress of the new company is so enormous that food becomes sawdust and sleep unattainable, and every moment is a moment of controlled panic. I know for the rest of the week, I would spend hours and hours in PUGs, to try to find people who were decently strong and were looking for a new guild. I remember guildies calling me a machine for how much time and effort I was putting into things. I didn’t think I was a machine, I just felt I had to do all I could to not let my new baby guild die its very first raid week.

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Below is screenshots of my entire conversation that day with Amber, for anyone who wants a more unbiased understanding of what was said. Fair warning it’s extremely long. Also, CP = Check Please. Allie = Carain (one of Amber’s clique). Amt = the PUG member who joined us for that one night but wasn’t actually a part of Syzygy.