I’ve been thinking a good deal about what I used to need to do as a raid leader, and in what way I was good at it. I figure I can parse a video of a successful first kill, and use that to analyze raid leading. Part (I) will be to explain my UI to non-gamers. Part (II) will be to go through moments in the video, explaining what I am looking at, and what I am thinking, at any given time.

Continue reading →

My last post concerning my experiences in WoW was September 1, 2018. That would be nearly 7 months ago.

I read an article in the New York Times about procrastination (link below). The gist of it was that procrastination is a result of being unable to overcome the short term negative emotions associated with the task. This inability trumps all rational assessment about how kicking it down the road will just make you feel worse, as well as rational thought connected to knowing that the task itself is probably not as big a deal as our feelings are making it.

So, I feel like that very accurately portrays my situation with writing about my experiences in WoW. The negative emotions I have associated with the next chapter of things are multi-layered. Continue reading →

I’ve been playing diablo 3 recently, and I find myself raid leading…. myself. In my solo runs. I also find that raid leading myself makes me perform better.

“Move, move! Dude! What’s taking you so long?!”

“Remember, your cd hasn’t come up yet, so be careful here!”

“A lot of ranged mobs here, don’t stand still or their arrows and fireballs will hit!”

“Ok, you have one cheat death and a potion available right now, go hard”

“Dude, you have to kill something to spawn an oculus rune soon, fire cycle is coming up!”

I literally say these things to myself as I play. Good thing only my cats are at home and they already know I’m crazy.

What is it about actually saying these things aloud that makes me perform better though? I don’t think it’s hearing the words being said, because my reactions have to happen about when I’m saying the words; not after. I think maybe “raid leading” forces me to be more aware of what’s going on, maybe? When I’m silent, I think perhaps my level of focus isn’t as high, and I’m more likely to just react to what happens instead of realizing what’s going to happen ahead of time and preparing for it.

For the past month and a half, I’ve really been resting. And it was like the stress of the past few years never even happened. Life was so relaxing and so nice. But I suppose you can’t be depressed and stressed for two years and have it just go away with no residual effects.

All of a sudden today, for no reasonable reason, I can’t stop crying, and feel like I don’t want to live again.

In many ways, these two things are very similar. Both require managing people (in my guild I usually managed from 25 to 50 people at any given time). Both require that the leader needs to go all out to maintain things, otherwise you never know when things will fall apart. Both require that you make people believe in you, so even in tough times (and maybe 99.99% of guilds and startups will go through these) people will stick around long enough for things to get better. Both are fragile: people quitting, leaders burning out, setbacks in goals… any of these can result in the failure of the organization. Both require leaders that are resilient, diligent, able to overcome disappointments and setbacks, willing to learn, willing to work with people, etc. Both force their leaders to develop any of the above skills they start out lacking. That is, if either of them are to result in success.

There are differences too. Continue reading →

When I was a guild master in WoW, I poured so much of myself into the game that all the rest of my life got put on hold. Family and friends in real life got used to seeing me only once in a blue moon. I pushed back all sorts of things I’d been planning to do for the two years as well.

Now I’m doing it all in a rush. I’m seeing friends again in normal social gatherings. It feels very strange to do something that has no tangible benefit to my goals. Before, I scheduled time with friends every few months as a need-to-stay-in-touch sort of thing, so it would double with dinner, since I needed time to eat dinner anyway. Now I’m actually spending whole afternoons with friends just hanging out. And I got my second cat. Since she’s only about a month old it’s sort of like taking care of a baby, I wake up every few hours, when she cries for company or food, and stay with her a few hours before she’s willing to go back to her bed. And I’m finally watching the last few seasons of Big Bang Theory.

And as real life continues, in a lovely way, it gets harder to wrench my mind back into the throes of guild mastering.

I still plan to, want to, write out my experiences. Even in writing out some of the stuff from before, like my frustration with people not realizing they’re being bullies, or my frustration with my officer treating me with condescension and not being willing to cooperate with me… this has already helped me feel a bit better about things. When I finish writing down what happens, I feel like I’ve gone through everything and found closure and relief. It lessens the repression, and feels like quite the healthy thing to do.

I just have to get myself to wrench my mind back and do things.

But right now, Lua is meowing for attention…

Sometimes I kind of wonder if what I’m doing isn’t incongruous. I want to rest, because I was so stressed out for so long by things in WoW, and yet I also want to write about all these things that stressed me out. My general schedule this past month has been to wake up, yoga/work out, breakfast, write until late afternoon/early evening, prepare then eat dinner, go for a bike ride, then relax for the last couple hours of the day. It’s been restful. I’ve been able to use some of that time to watch movies, have sex, read books, hang out with people. And I wonder, if in this state of mind of restfulness and peace, if it prevents me from being able to do my writing.

My writing is about to enter some of the most unhappy parts of my WoW life. I have to read through and remember so many things that caused me so much stress and discouragement. I have to re-enter the frame of mind where I feel that everyone finds me to be a worthless person, and maybe they’re right. It’s jarring, to transition from the peace of mind that is in my current daily life, to the distress and discord pervasive throughout my time as a guild master in WoW. So, these past few days, I’ve been avoiding it. And even when I sit myself down in front of my computer, to look through the conversations I had at the time, my mind swerves away from it, and it’s hard to move forward. Like a writer’s block, but not one where I lack creativity or an ability to express myself; it’s one where I lack the strength of mind to leave my current comfort zone and return to that mind-space of dissonance, doubt, and maybe development.