Today, someone made a respectful and polite comment, that was ever so slightly a critique, related to one of our trial members in Syzygys. The comment implied that the leadership of the guild may not have done enough to give that trial member feedback, about what they needed to improve and so on. And it implied that if the trial did not do well, it was because the leadership did not provide the feedback needed. And I felt… ahhhhh…. it’s been awhile since I’ve seen this sort of a comment, maybe a few months. But I used to receive comments like this every day.

Comments like this are usually true. Leadership of guilds can always give more feedback to trials, and make their potential path towards full membership more structured and clear. I agree that this could have been handled better by the leadership. But this truth exists in a vacuum.

This truth doesn’t consider the fact that to do this, leadership needs to find manpower and time, and that neither are easy to come by. If the current leadership isn’t already finding the time to do it, assuming the leaders are like me and like shandare, who take their leadership responsibility extremely seriously, it probably means the current leadership simply doesn’t have the time or the mental bandwidth to do it, and have other, higher, priorities. This means the only way to make sure it happens is to find more manpower, which means finding another officer to play the role of provide-often-negative-feedback-to-trials-to-push-them-to-improve. It is already very difficult to find someone who can be tactful enough, but is made much worse by the fact that any time someone is promoted to officer, other potential problems may crop up. Someone else may feel like they deserve to be an officer, so why weren’t they offered the opportunity? Or the new officer may be perfectly good at providing trials feedback, but will also add stress to the current leadership by perhaps being opinionated about something else altogether (I have almost never had an officer who did not add to my stress).

The truth of leadership being better if it gave trials more feedback also doesn’t consider that many can pass their trials without this sort of feedback. Indeed, most of our trial members have been able to show us why they are worth promoting without requiring this sort of feedback. WoW is a game where there are many obvious and overt measures of performance. How many damage numbers or healing numbers one is able to produce is an obvious one. The ability to rarely die during a boss fight is another obvious one. These are measures any raider uses pretty much as soon as they start raiding at all, much less before they attempt mythic raiding, the most challenging and competitive form of raiding in this game. Any trial that can do high numbers and rarely dies is likely going to be promoted, unless their personalities seriously clash with the guild. If a trial sees that when they are brought in, their numbers are not particularly high and they do not have a very low death rate, it certainly can be made clearer by leadership explicitly telling them this is a problem, but most really don’t need to be told, and indeed most go out of their way to try to prove to leadership that they can perform well and ask for the chance to show it.

And, at least in my case, people in the past making this sort of comment didn’t consider the fact that it can really add up when I am constantly inundated with these types of truths, day after day, implying that there was always something I could have done better. It can really add up for any leader who takes their leadership seriously, unless I suppose their egos are so huge they never consider they could have done better. But it is hard to maintain that delusionary level of confidence that you are always blameless if you are constantly being told what you didn’t do well enough on. And it is pretty well established that if a person is constantly barraged by criticisms, it is hard to maintain a healthy mental state. It is perhaps a reason why, in time, every single guild master I know comes to find the guild master job completely soul-sucking.

I personally have not seen much of this type of comment, implying that people need to go above and beyond or be responsible for others’ failures, for a couple months. Hopefully, shandare doesn’t need to privately contend with that sort of comment often. And perhaps he is more resilient to it than I was, and can handle it better, even if it is a constant barrage. At any rate, he was good enough to shoulder guild mastership and allow me to evade that stress this time, and I am so immensely grateful for it. Now, I only see this sort of comment rarely. And with therapy, I am better equipped to recognize how this sort of critique crosses boundaries by making one person’s problems another’s responsibility. Now, instead of it building up again and causing me harm, it’s just a little reminder of another time.