Though I had considered skipping heroic farm to push harder on mythic bosses, our failure on Ursoc the week before (on 10/03) showed me we needed gear too badly. Without having done splits we were behind. However, frenzied recruitment had landed us with 30+ good people, so my strategy was to go into heroic our first raid day (10/04) with 30 people, and funnel gear into the 20 I planned to bring in for Ursoc. Not too long before our raid, Abc texted Amber about a personal emergency that would keep him away from the game for a week. Looking back I feel very lucky this happened when it did. The failure on Ursoc the last day of week 1 could very easily have been magnified and used to lower morale. But thankfully, Abc was not there to make everyone feel bad. Not that guild drama and problems did not occur, but none of it carried the same weight drama from Amber’s clique did, and it was a great week.
Before the week officially started, though, I now did have plenty of issues to deal with, stemming from the fact that we had 30+ people. With a larger community, it would be a bit harder to be aware of everyone’s intentions. For example, there were a few people joining from a different guild called TRD that had fallen apart (keeping a guild together has always been difficult, if the leaders cannot stomach it anymore, there will often be 15 or so people who will need to look for a new guild). Most people from TRD went to a guild led by a player named theguv, who I then found out had a notoriously bad reputation on our server. The rumor was that during previous raids he had split his people up to join various guilds in order to learn their strats and get their gear, and then they all quit at the same time (crippling the guilds they had joined) so that they could reunite and, using the gear and strategies they had poached, skip ahead in rankings. This was the closest we had come to interacting with anyone in theguv’s sphere, and though it did not mean our recruits were planning to do the same to us, it was something that we needed to watch out for, and I at least needed to spend time talking to those recruits so they knew my concerns and could show me why I should trust them enough to give them loot.
Another issue was that, with so many raiders in guild now, we needed more guild funds to ensure we had the consumables and guild repair gold we needed. It was still the start of the expansion, and every time at this phase of an expansion, necessary consumables would be incredibly expensive. Many people struggled to have enough gold to support their own consumables, and I much preferred people spend time online getting gear and experience (so we could make dps checks), rather than spend time making gold. Therefore, we decided that during the weekends (between our 3rd and last raid day), I would lead “sale runs”. These are when you find people who do not have the gear or ability to kill bosses with their own guilds, and offer to “carry” them through the raid, in return for in-game gold. This means that you need a group of guildies who are strong enough to “carry” others, and you need to find buyers. Since we were not going to use official raid times to do these sales, they would be optional, and it would require effort on the part of the leadership to motivate people to join, even though it was for the benefit of every raider in the group. It would also require a lot of effort on the part of the leadership to spend hours online doing nothing but trying to find buyers. The officers would need to spam in the general chatroom of the server something like “<Syzygy> 2/7M selling personal loot Heroic Emerald Nightmare. Private message for more details”. They would need to sit there for hours and spam every five minutes or so, then talk to whatever stranger saw the advertisement, and work things out with them. Since things were hard to work out (people often may not be willing to pay the amount we ask, we were a new, unknown guild after all), it was an extremely dull and thankless job. Amber and Jacl were in charge of dealing with it, and I know Judy and Isam helped. To this day I feel extremely fortunate that it was one burden that was lifted off my shoulders. Of course, there eventually were problems that arose when people complained that the officers did not find buyers who were paying enough, thereby were “wasting the time” of the guildies who joined the sale runs. And of course there were problems with guildies feeling just in general that they were doing us a huge favor in participating in that run. So goes the usual problem in WoW guilds: it takes effort and energy to maintain a guild, and most people only want to reap the benefits of the effort others put in.
Yet another issue I had to deal with was choosing who would get funneled gear in the heroic farm run our first raid day. This meant I was going to have to create a clear ranking of strongest to weakest players for mythic Ursoc, and it also meant I would need to start preparing weaker members for the idea that they would start receiving lower priority (for gear, and also for raid spots). This was difficult for me, because unfortunately a lot of the weaker players were people who had followed me personally for months or years, and were people I cared about. I had warned everyone when we were building the guild that performance would always matter the most, but it’s one thing to hear the concept in a guild meeting months earlier, and another to have it applied to you, to be told that the new people do better than you and you’re going to start receiving lower priority.
So with that backdrop, our first raid day started. We went in with 30 people, and funneled gear to about 20 of them. As predicted, this did not go over well with some of my more veteran raiders. One of them, called faxmachine, got so upset over a recruit receiving gear that he wanted for himself, that he “rage quit”. Rage quitting usually applies to someone being so upset they log off in the middle of raid. Faxmachine’s rage was on an even higher level. He left the raid, then left the guild. Then he swapped to each of his alt characters in guild and left on each one of them. Then he removed everyone who was his friend in guild from his friendlist. This was all done in the middle of our raid, when we were running from the boss we had just killed (the one where he did not receive the gear he wanted), to the next boss. He was obviously in the wrong, both in his feeling of entitlement that he deserved gear even though he did not perform as well, as well as in the way he dealt with the situation. However, before this happened, faxmachine had been with me for about a year. During that year he had always been the most consistent and loyal player. When I led PUGs, I would often log on and start building the group a full hour before my stated raid time. The more people who joined up early, the faster and better we could build the group. But when you join a raid group early, there isn’t anything else you can do in game. Faxmachine would always be among the first to join. He would always be there for anything I needed. It was a blow to me to see how my policies in pursuit of making my guild stronger could hurt someone who had been so good to me for so long. Hurt him so much he felt the need to make such a huge statement of his anger when he rage quit. At that time though, I couldn’t dwell on it: I had a raid to lead, so we continued. Since we had 30+ people, with Abc out and faxmachine rage quitting, I was still able to keep the raid count at 30, which meant we could still get more loot and funnel what was needed to the core 20 people. After clearing heroic, we had time to go into mythic and rekill the first boss (with only 1 wipe). With the extra gear we had now, and apparently from the extra work people put in after failing on Ursoc’s dps check the night before, our raid damage had improved by leaps and bounds. From the standpoint of a raider, it was a wonderfully smooth raid night.
The next day we rekilled the spider boss (the only other boss we killed successfully the week before). Then we went to Ursoc. And we one shot it. ONE SHOT!! Just two days earlier, we had 21 wipes and everyone knew we simply could not do it because we did not have the damage numbers. Two days later, on this day, we one shot it! The extra gear from the 30-man heroic raid helped immensely, and the fact that our failure before was used as a positive force to drive people to work hard was a big plus too. Our world ranking had dropped to 370, but no one cared. In truth, anywhere within the top 150 to 500 guilds of the tens of thousands in the world belonged to the same very high ranked tier, and was already much better than to be expected from such a new and inexperienced guild. We had killed 3 out of the 7 mythic bosses, and this was early on in week 2. We then went back to the Dragon boss to practice. We wiped on it 10 times that night, but felt positive about it for the next day.
The next, and third day of our raid week, we wiped 28 times on Dragons. Amazingly, no one was upset. Though I had hoped to kill it that day, no one sarcastically said “great progression guys!”, no one griped about how much we sucked, and no one was lowering morale. As I had said, I was extremely lucky that Abc was out that week. It was the start of the weekend again, and this time I could enter it without worrying about Abc, and without feeling as much pressure to spend 12 hours a day every day recruiting. Also, my monitor was due to arrive soon, so like the week before, I was delighted to have a few days off when I could feel good about things.
Of course, a leader’s work never stops. Though I did not need to recruit as much, nor worry about Abc for the time being, my new officers had been in power for a week, and they raised various whack-a-mole issues for me to deal with. Simultaneously, I had to start reaching out more to my other veteran players that I felt were less strong, and let them know they would be sitting more. I absolutely hated doing that. I had to do it to Jacl, my officer, who is my closest WoW friend, the person I trust the most in the game. I had to do it to Xanort, a player who had been with me for a year, like faxmachine, and was just as consistent and loyal, but better, because he was a complete team player and would always prioritize the guild’s needs over his own. He also always fully supported my assessment of what the guild needed, even if it was to his own detriment. I had to do it to Fluffed, a player whose sacrifice for the guild was what in part made his performance weaker: the guild had asked him to swap to different main characters for the guild’s needs twice, and thus he was on characters he was less comfortable with. There were others that I did not want to sit, and had to sit too. But these three stood out the most, since I valued them the most as human beings, and knew were people who had contributed more than almost anyone else to the guild. Eventually, Jacl would stop raiding entirely, though he would contribute as the guild banker for as long as I was there. Down the road, I created a second group in large part for Xan and Fluffed, and as time went on they both showed themselves to be strong raiders, and it is one of the very few things that makes me happy when I think back on my time as a guild master in WoW.
As for the whackamole officer issues, three of my officers expressed discontent about something or other over that weekend.
Judy’s Issue – Judy was very insistent that we swap a dps for a healer for the Dragon fight. Some of her friends’ guilds who killed it already told her it became extremely easy when overhealed, and she was fully sold to the idea. However, I also had friends from guilds who killed it who insisted that losing any dps would be a bad thing. It is the eternal WoW strategy debate: do you lose a dps to gain a healer, thereby having less people die and having a safer fight; or do you keep a dps and have less healers, thereby killing things faster and possibly skipping mechanics? Since we did not kill Dragons on our 3rd raid night, emotions within the officer group were a bit higher, and opinions stronger. Though Judy had always been supportive of me, even when I did not follow her advice before, this was the first time she was quite so adamant about her opinion (much like Amber always was), and I did not know if she would take it badly if I did not take her advice (much like Amber often did). I would later learn that these thoughts were unfair to her, that Judy was not the type of person to start undermining me just because I disagreed with her and did not follow her advice, even if she had strong opinions about them. But either way, at the time I was worried, and tried to dissipate the situation by asking Ultra for his opinion as healing officer, and with his support for underhealing the fight, we did not follow Judy’s advice.
Ultra’s Issue – Ultra was the type to care about things like ranks. He was wanted certain people promoted to certain ranks, and others demoted. Now, I cared zero about ranks in WoW, as they are mainly labels only. Nobody is going to make more money from having a higher rank. And I knew myself well enough to know that I was not going to ignore anyone just because their rank was lower, nor was I going to blindly listen to anyone just because their rank was higher. And since I made all the ultimate decisions in the guild, guild ranks really did not have much effect. But people like Ultra, and some others in guild, do care about ranks. And this is where promoting and demoting people may cause problems. If you cared about ranks, you would wonder why you’re demoted (if you are), or why others are promoted when you aren’t (if that happens). In fact, when I gradually empowered officers to change ranks in the future, it did create drama for precisely this reason. Drama that, ultimately, I had to deal with personally. 
I started having slight concerns about Ultra from this. Of course, it always concerns me when people make a big deal about titles, instead of focusing on content. But that was really not a big deal. What truly concerned me was Ultra’s way of doing things: he mentioned that Amber agreed with him before he mentioned this to us, that she would back him up. To me, this was playing politics instead of discussing the idea for its merits. Another area that concerned me was that Ultra cared quite a bit about Ceony at this time (he was the one who promoted her to core raider), and Ceony/Carain/Allie was another member of Amber’s clique who had previously behaved in selfish ways, and who I knew was often mocking me behind my back. Not that any of these concerns weighed down on me at the time, they were just heightened awareness about potential future problems I might have with Ultra. And yes, they did become actual big problems in the future, problems that poisoned my healer group for months into the future, even beyond when Ultra eventually flaked out and stopped playing.
Asterix’s Issue – One day during this weekend Asterix came to talk to me on Discord. There were ideas he wanted to implement, and he felt he needed to help me be a better leader by telling me what he saw as some of my weaknesses. Asterix cared a good deal about rules and regulations. He felt we needed to write out a rulebook, one that covered everything that was expected of raiders and recruits. One that gave recruits a clear guideline about how to be promoted to a core raider. He felt that my not making this a priority was a weakness. He also felt that I was too nice, that I needed to put my feet down for whatever policies I had previously declared. He used my giving up on splits as an example of my not enforcing my own decisions and rules, and said that things like this make people lose respect for me, because they will believe my bark is worse than my bite. In the future, he believed I should just put my foot down and say: “What you want right now does not matter. We had agreed this was what we were going to do before, so that is what we will do. End of story.” He felt that I needed to make changes to my leadership style, to become more authoritative, and that I needed to modify the guild environment to become more clearcut and rule-based, like that of a large corporation. He felt that unless I made these changes, our growth as a guild would be limited, and we would never go far. I could see the merits in everything he said, but it clashed with my personality. I am not a by-the-rules type person, I believe in doing things because they make sense, not because they were written down. I also preferred to earn my authority by showing people I can be trusted to make good decisions, and I believe fully in convincing people to follow what I say by explaining my reasoning, instead of by pulling rank. I would not have done well in a military environment.
So this was where my first, scalp-tingling week, bolstered me. Despite feeling dismayed to be told that my leadership style would stunt us, after the far more painful experience of that first week, seeing that I was able to shepherd us through and help us achieve things no one thought we could, I was able to feel confident that my way of doing things was sound. If I had put my feet down about the splits, I am quite certain all of Amber’s clique would have left, and I would have let my guild down by losing many of our strong players and not being able to provide enough people for a raid. I felt that I was correct in not rigidly following any rule, instead in modifying and adjusting policies as I learned more. However, in spite of my confidence at the time, I cannot say objectively, even now, if Asterix was more correct or if I was. I can only know what happened when I followed my own way of doing things. It is perfectly possible that if I had followed Asterix’s way, who knows maybe Amber’s clique would have left late enough not to hurt us, and maybe the poison from that clique would not have spread as much. And this could apply to any number of issues that would crop up over the course of the following two years. Maybe I would have suffered more by sticking strictly to the rules even at the cost of losing people, maybe I would end up with very very very few people and no raid. And then again, maybe I would have suffered less by sticking to the rules at the cost of losing people, maybe the authority I would have derive from that would keep others around more.
On top of this, I was busy establishing our guild’s reputation. The more positive the reputation, the easier it would be for us to find good recruits. This meant I needed to handle the sales run for the weekend well: check with Amber and Jacl about buyers, ensure we had enough guildies to sell a smooth run and to build our reputation as a strong guild. I also was wading into the bigger community of WoW mythic guilds, since we had become such a popular guild to join. At one point that weekend, because I have always believed in transparency, I had wondered if I should reach out to the guild masters of recruits who wanted to leave them and join us, to establish relationships with them and to show that I did not actively poach their players. Luckily, I did not do so. Amber showed me that it was absolutely not the type of thing that was done in the community, and that I was more likely to be viewed as coming to gloat than as trying to establish any good relationship. It was for things like this that I had wanted Amber as my guild officer in the first place: her understanding of the culture and norms of the community was something that I felt was indispensable. I was, after all, still a noob.
Then, towards the end of the weekend, drama erupted, yet again. This time everyone knew of it, as Tygor (one of my long time raiders) and Amber had a very very public fight. Apparently Tygor was saying offensive things like “bitchy girls all have dyke haircuts”, using terms like “libtards”, talking down women in general, and also revealing himself to be a Donald Trump supporter (this was less than a month before the 2016 US Presidential election, polarization had wormed its way even into a video game). Amber and Allie were apparently Hillary supporters, and they were extremely angered by what Tygor was writing. So Amber started arguing with him, and they got into a very, very nasty spat. I felt Tygor was out of line, but I also could not understand why Amber would try to escalate the situation. Tygor was one of our stronger players at the time, and despite what I was told about his sexist rhetoric, he had been far more respectful of me than Amber’s clique had been, nor had he ever used terms like their clique did that had sexist undertones like “she got her claws into the guild”. Anyway, the spat between Tygor and Amber created discord within the guild, and I have since learned that public drama like this can drive people away (similar spats in the future have prompted future officers of mine to say “they cannot believe the level of drama within this guild, surely no other guilds are as bad as us”. Future officers that also left me in hurtful ways. But this is over a year later). Later, Asterix talked to Tygor, and Tygor apologized. Really, Tygor is the quintessential troll who likes to say things that shock people, but although his words offend, his actions tend to be respectful. Though Asterix and I knew this about Tygor, people like Amber and Allie didn’t, and they interpreted my lack of a very public punishment of him as my condoning, even promoting, misogyny. I have wondered since if I was not wrong to publicly make a big deal out of Tygor’s words, to make clear that we were not a guild that condoned that sort of thing (though it has never happened since, despite my not publicly flogging Tygor). Almost a year in the future when someone else stepped out of line and my officer at the time very publicly yelled at them, what I feared did come about, and they and their entire group of friends stopped wanting to play. In situations like this, it is always hard to make the call. But I was disappointed in Tygor for creating drama out of nothing (drama that did lead to Amber’s clique telling some potential recruits to not join us because I was misogynistic, as well as affecting some already in guild to feel that I was like that). I was also disappointed in Amber’s method of escalating the situation and making something that could have been a non-issue, dealt with privately, into something very public and disruptive to the guild.
So a constant stream of issues that weekend. And with that, we entered our last raid day of the week and….. we killed the Dragon boss. Difficulties that seemed insurmountable just three days ago were overcome with just some time for the raiders to absorb what mistakes they had made and find ways to improve, as well as time for them to get even more artifact traits. Despite the drama, the discontent, the myriad issues, we were now nonetheless 4 out of 7 mythic bosses down. It was amazing. Less than 500 guilds in the whole world were able to achieve this at this time. Only 3 weeks on from a raid where I was told “we were a disaster”, a place “all good players should leave as soon as they can”. I was not going to let such greatness pass uncelebrated and unexploited. I wrote a speech in our guildstuffs channel: I wanted to use our situation not only to make us feel good and raise morale, but also to shield against any other potential discouragement for the following week:
Lijiworld 