Dancing with Gevlon once again

Haven’t we danced this dance before? The thought passed my head after a post of Gevlon last week. Once again we’re into the guild discussion. Do guilds have any other purpose than hosting Morons and Slackers who can parasite on naïve carebears who carry them through content? Are you better off just watching for your own interests, doing things in a coldhearted, rational goblin way?

You could ask yourself what the point is to discuss those things. There isn’t any objective truth out there to be discovered, just different approaches to the game. We have different reasons for playing it, different expectations, we get our kicks from different things. I don’t get a big kick out of ganking other players. To others that’s the essence of the game. Gathering gold will never be a major goal for me. Making a fortune on selling something doesn’t give me the rush of joy and entertainment to motivate me to pay for my subscription. On the other hand I don’t think Gevlon could ever understand what a joy it is when you step by step, wipe by wipe get closer and closer to a first kill as a guild. It’s a long journey and sometimes people make stupid things. But you tolerate those flaws, you support each other, you learn from each other and finally you succeed – not in the company of some strangers you’ve never met before and never will meet again, but with people you have laughed with, cried with, quarrelled with, people whose voices you recognize. To some gamers a one-night stands is fine, it’s all they’re looking for. Fine. PUG it and enjoy yourself. I want more.

A look at the conveyer belt worker
Yeah, we’ve definitely discussed this before. But here we are, dancing once again. This time Gevlon has written a post where he compared WoW to simple work at a conveyer belt, requiring you to do nothing but to follow a manual. Every worker is replaceable, and if I’ve understood Gevlon correctly that makes it pointless to try to apply management thinking on this. The workers are like machines and should be treated like such. If someone gets broken – replace it. If some player doesn’t deliver the dps you would expect – trash him and find someone else in LFG. Don’t bother trying to make him improve – there are dozens of them waiting to be let in.

This way of looking at the staff seems quite old fashioned to me. I don’t think that even McDonalds will see their employees that way. I come to think of a post that Gevlon himself wrote a little while ago, where he actually pointed out why you shouldn’t look down on people keeping those kinds of jobs. They aren’t necessarily less intelligent than white collar professionals and they definitely should be treated with the same respect as anyone else.

When I’ve been in a leading position I’ve always looked for the potential in my co-workers. There’s so much to be brought out if you just bother to look for it and to encourage it. Try to see the hidden gold within other people. Give the plants some sunlight and water and they will grow amazingly. And nothing, absolutely nothing is more rewarding than to see the process, knowing that you helped to enable it.

If you look at your employees as changeable units, they’ll behave like that. They’ll deliver what the manual asks them too (hopefully, but they’ll probably try to cheat on you if they can). If you treat them as valuable members of the team, people that you trust work together with, they’ll try to live up to and even exceed your expectations. The conveyer band worker can surprise you if you just give him a chance. He may be the one who finds out a clever solution for improving the manufacturing process. He may step up as a leader when something unexpected happens.

I can’t tell how McDonalds look at their staff, but I’m pretty sure that many “conveyer belt industries” bother much more about group dynamics – not only for their engineers, but for the whole team, than Gevlon does. And I think it’s necessary to do so if you want to run a business that is sustainable over time.


Why bother?
Now let’s jump back to WoW and guild management. I think Gevlon and Tobold are right when they say that it’s possible to succeed as a raiding guild without bothering about group dynamics and using the full potential of forming a strong team, building on trust and mutual dependency. The instances in the current game can be cleared with pretty crappy management where you look at other players as tools rather than as co-workers. And since it really takes an effort to be a good leader and to create a strong team, why go the hard way if you can get by with less work?

I see several reasons. One is that I think you can save yourself time and effort in the long run. Yeah, initially it takes a lot of work to build up a healthy raiding squad. But once you’re there you’ll see much less of guild drama, which otherwise is pretty common and a pain to handle. You’re less likely to end up in a guild split where the person handling the website or the TS server suddenly leaves, leaving everything in a mess. You’ll also have less rotation of players, meaning that you’ll need to spend less time recruiting to fill the gaps.

A second reason to bother about developing the group rather than just kicking the machine parts that don’t deliver enough dps is that you can learn something from it. WoW is a fantastic sandbox where people who’re not in leading positions at their real life work get a chance to try what it’s like to be the boss. It’s exactly how Tobold expressed in a reply to a comment Gevlon gave him to a post about some guild drama Tobold just had experienced:

The skills you'd need to motivate an underperforming raid group, instead of just kicking the weakest guys out, are skills which would be useful if you ever got into a management position at work. Being able to get along with people has a value, 3.5K dps on Patchwerk hasn't.

Social more than a flavour

Finally: I know by now Gevlon that you don’t value the social aspect of the game much at all – at the most it gives you some “flavour” as you put it. I think that many players appreciate it more than that. It’s a misconception that the social stuff is just something that casual or even careless and poor players value, that “hardcore” and “serious” players don’t care. I actually think they do.

Of course serious players care about skill and gear if we’re for instance evaluating a new application to the guild. If the player is at a completely different level it won’t work. But the applicant also must fit into the team or we’ll fail. Once we get to meet the WotLK equivalence of Archimonde, it will show. Spending night after night wiping, learning a new encounter can be quite satisfying and rewarding if you’re doing it with people that you trust and like. It can equally be a pain if you’re doing it with a bunch of goblins who don’t give a damned about anything but themselves, no matter if they follow the “conveyer belt manual”.

It would be interesting though to see an experiment. Two players starting from scratch at a new server with new characters and no network. Both are given the task to “beat the game” in the sense that they kill the hardest raid boss, in the position of being the raid leader. One will act like a goblin, looking upon other players just like any ore or cloth drop – as resources to be used for your own winning. The other one will apply ideas about group management, systematically building up a strong raiding team, considering aspects such as group dynamics. Who would succeed best?