Now, you definitely do not have to be a leader to do this, although I feel it is the responsibility of every guild leader to do it.
When you look at your raid, think to yourself, how can you make this raid better. I can only assume that when leading a guild, you would like your guild to be constantly improving. Whether its constantly getting new blood in, recruiting better members, getting more geared up as a whole, getting more experience working together, etc, you want to see these things happening to make your team play better.
Well, much like a professional basketball coach will do after and before games, a very helpful way to improve your team is simply to review the footage from the night before. Now in Warcraft, its difficult to get a fraps of everyone in your raid... in fact, it's darn near unreasonable to do it. But there is a tool out there that exists called WWS-- Wow Web Stats.
It works very simply... anyone in the raid can activate a combat log. It's built into the game.. you just type /combatlog. What this does is it will output all your combat data (and everyone in range) to a text file, which you can then process in WWS after. WWS is a 3rd party program (a Java web application actually) that can parse that combat log that you just took. It goes into some very very good detail, so you can find DPS holes in your raid, or find strategic errors, or just find slacker members.
http://wowwebstats.com
Now how can you use this tool to help your raids? Well, 1st off, try to download an addon or something like "LoggerHead" which can extend the range of your combat log to 200 yards (default is like 45 yards or something small like that..).
Then just follow the directions on the website and start putting up logs. The important thing is to use this to compare both members inside your raid, and to other guilds logs.
If another guild's rogue can do 1400dps, but your guild's rogue can only do 800dps on the same fight... look into it. One would naturally assume gear, but if you look deeper into it, that might not be the case.
If comparing between gear disparity worries you, its ok.. stop comparing with the top 10 guilds in the world. If your guild just killed gruul, keep paging back until you find a dps log that looks close to yours, and see if there's anything they did slightly better than your guild.
The point isn't to use this as some sort of pissing contest to see how good you are compared to others.. it's to use this as a real tool to try to find DPS holes, problem raiders, etc, so you really have to get into the mindset of using this tool to find what part of your raid to devote more time to.
I mean, if on a whole, you see that your shadowpriests are doing only 650dps on a fight where typically other shadow priests in full Frozen Shadowweave are achieving 950dps on, then it's time to examine what they're doing differently, and how to improve that. Is it DoT uptime? Spell/dps cycle? Meta gem or gemming problems in general? Lack of consumables used? This tool can help you a lot, and it has certainly helped my guild tremendously.
Showing posts with label leading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label leading. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
What I've Learned Running A Guild.
Preface: Short warning here, this post may end up turning into a rant of some sort, but that's what I do best!
Now I don't claim to be the best guildleader ever. In fact, I can probably name a few of my shortcomings as a WoW guild leader (and I will later), but I will try to at least bring some light on some things I found to be important... can you apply these lessons in life? Maybe in some context. But here it goes.
1) Understanding your members
Everyone who joins your guild has their own reason for joining. They chose your guild because your guild can offer them something another guild couldn't (whether it was the people, the raiding times, the raiding positions, the pvp groups or hell, maybe you're the only guild he could get into).
Understanding where your members come from is a pretty important part of keeping your guild happy. Now you might think this is overanalyzing the situation (and maybe it is), but generally speaking, you want to try to keep as many people in your guild happy, without compromising someone else's happiness in the guild. If you want your guild to run smoothly, you want to be able to continue offering to that person what they originally joined your guild for. In many cases, you cannot control that... like you can't control friendships. But if you're trying to run a successful raiding guild, you have to cater to their needs (especially your MVP) and work with their personalities.
You know, I have a few emo players that I put up with. I have a few people who just have no skills at all, but high attendance. I have players who refuse to login for a boss where he can't get any decent loot. I have players who will only show up to a farm boss. Should I throw them all away? I mean, a lot of these quirks can hurt your guild if it happens at the wrong time. Honestly, my approach to this (may be different than how others approach it), is that I can still get value from these players. As long as you have a fair and structured reward/consequence system that reflects these types of behavior (be sure not to be too draconian). When these players do decide to play nice, you can extract a lot of value out of them.
2) Befriending your members (or not).
There are people in my guild who can't stand me. I'm a number cruncher. I check WWS logs after every raid. I theorycraft at work. I can be a smartass... I've read hundreds of pages of other people's experiences with different encounters or dps strategies. I tell them they're playing poorly.
Well, how can I be friends with everyone in the guild if I do things that not everyone likes? Well, I can't. I try to be friendly with everyone in the guild, but it just can't happen. But there is something very important that does need to happen... everyone in the guild needs to respect you to some degree.
No matter how much they hate the fact that I'm often quoting how 20 other guilds do something better than we do, and how they do it, the fact is that at least at some level, they respect the fact that I'm actually going out of my way to IMPROVE the guild. So while at some level some people might find me as an overbearing leader, they also realize that nothing I do is going to be for the wrong reasons.
Which brings me to another point..
3) Maintaining respect.
It's extremely important to maintain the respect of your peers. Things fall apart when they will no longer trust you. There are many things you can do which help destroy that trust, and most of it has to do with the level of corruption that sometimes takes place amongst leaders.
You should always remain fair on loot. Just because you're leader and you invented all the loot rules doesn't mean that you can do whatever you want with the loot. You have to follow your own rules too.
There is no perfect loot system, and I understand that. In our own loot system (we use an auction system), there are times where I can see if the auction closes as-is, there would be a serious misallocation of loot for the purposes of raid progression. So while I retain the right to override bids in many situations, when I do so, I prepare myself to justify it in detail to all the other 25 witnesses in the raid... not doing so will quickly make it seem like abuse of power, even if it was clearly for the sake of the guild, and not b/c of some hidden agenda.
And even then, you simply can't justify everything with "it's what was in the guild's best interest". Going back to point #1, you have to know your members, and there has to be some sort of balance between rewarding long time members and doing things solely for the sake of progression. While many times those 2 coincide and go hand in hand, you have to strike a balance for the times when those 2 do not align exactly.
You should also respect other people's time. Just because you're running a tight ship and constantly rotating people in and out, you have to respect the fact that someone really wanted to show up and logged in at 6pm for a raid spot. Even if the player is subpar in someway, and some better player logged in at 7pm, and you want to boot the other player out for him, you have to respect the fact that one guy was on time, and the other wasn't, and either ask nicely, or work something out between the two. Not respecting that players time and effort is a quick way for him to lose respect for you as well.
4) Leading by example.
In the end, it really can't help if most of your guild thinks they can do things better than you can. In order to maintain any sort of control over the guild, they have to trust that the advice and orders you're giving are somewhat accurate. They also have to see that you're practicing what you're preaching, otherwise, they'll just head for greener pastures.
If you yell at people about attendance, you can't be sporting a 45% raid attendance yourself. If you're complaining about lack of consumables used, you can't be going to raids potless/flaskless. If you're complaining about people's DPS, you can't be sitting at last place yourself. This is probably the most obvious point, but it's still one of the most important.
Now I don't claim to be the best guildleader ever. In fact, I can probably name a few of my shortcomings as a WoW guild leader (and I will later), but I will try to at least bring some light on some things I found to be important... can you apply these lessons in life? Maybe in some context. But here it goes.
1) Understanding your members
Everyone who joins your guild has their own reason for joining. They chose your guild because your guild can offer them something another guild couldn't (whether it was the people, the raiding times, the raiding positions, the pvp groups or hell, maybe you're the only guild he could get into).
Understanding where your members come from is a pretty important part of keeping your guild happy. Now you might think this is overanalyzing the situation (and maybe it is), but generally speaking, you want to try to keep as many people in your guild happy, without compromising someone else's happiness in the guild. If you want your guild to run smoothly, you want to be able to continue offering to that person what they originally joined your guild for. In many cases, you cannot control that... like you can't control friendships. But if you're trying to run a successful raiding guild, you have to cater to their needs (especially your MVP) and work with their personalities.
You know, I have a few emo players that I put up with. I have a few people who just have no skills at all, but high attendance. I have players who refuse to login for a boss where he can't get any decent loot. I have players who will only show up to a farm boss. Should I throw them all away? I mean, a lot of these quirks can hurt your guild if it happens at the wrong time. Honestly, my approach to this (may be different than how others approach it), is that I can still get value from these players. As long as you have a fair and structured reward/consequence system that reflects these types of behavior (be sure not to be too draconian). When these players do decide to play nice, you can extract a lot of value out of them.
2) Befriending your members (or not).
There are people in my guild who can't stand me. I'm a number cruncher. I check WWS logs after every raid. I theorycraft at work. I can be a smartass... I've read hundreds of pages of other people's experiences with different encounters or dps strategies. I tell them they're playing poorly.
Well, how can I be friends with everyone in the guild if I do things that not everyone likes? Well, I can't. I try to be friendly with everyone in the guild, but it just can't happen. But there is something very important that does need to happen... everyone in the guild needs to respect you to some degree.
No matter how much they hate the fact that I'm often quoting how 20 other guilds do something better than we do, and how they do it, the fact is that at least at some level, they respect the fact that I'm actually going out of my way to IMPROVE the guild. So while at some level some people might find me as an overbearing leader, they also realize that nothing I do is going to be for the wrong reasons.
Which brings me to another point..
3) Maintaining respect.
It's extremely important to maintain the respect of your peers. Things fall apart when they will no longer trust you. There are many things you can do which help destroy that trust, and most of it has to do with the level of corruption that sometimes takes place amongst leaders.
You should always remain fair on loot. Just because you're leader and you invented all the loot rules doesn't mean that you can do whatever you want with the loot. You have to follow your own rules too.
There is no perfect loot system, and I understand that. In our own loot system (we use an auction system), there are times where I can see if the auction closes as-is, there would be a serious misallocation of loot for the purposes of raid progression. So while I retain the right to override bids in many situations, when I do so, I prepare myself to justify it in detail to all the other 25 witnesses in the raid... not doing so will quickly make it seem like abuse of power, even if it was clearly for the sake of the guild, and not b/c of some hidden agenda.
And even then, you simply can't justify everything with "it's what was in the guild's best interest". Going back to point #1, you have to know your members, and there has to be some sort of balance between rewarding long time members and doing things solely for the sake of progression. While many times those 2 coincide and go hand in hand, you have to strike a balance for the times when those 2 do not align exactly.
You should also respect other people's time. Just because you're running a tight ship and constantly rotating people in and out, you have to respect the fact that someone really wanted to show up and logged in at 6pm for a raid spot. Even if the player is subpar in someway, and some better player logged in at 7pm, and you want to boot the other player out for him, you have to respect the fact that one guy was on time, and the other wasn't, and either ask nicely, or work something out between the two. Not respecting that players time and effort is a quick way for him to lose respect for you as well.
4) Leading by example.
In the end, it really can't help if most of your guild thinks they can do things better than you can. In order to maintain any sort of control over the guild, they have to trust that the advice and orders you're giving are somewhat accurate. They also have to see that you're practicing what you're preaching, otherwise, they'll just head for greener pastures.
If you yell at people about attendance, you can't be sporting a 45% raid attendance yourself. If you're complaining about lack of consumables used, you can't be going to raids potless/flaskless. If you're complaining about people's DPS, you can't be sitting at last place yourself. This is probably the most obvious point, but it's still one of the most important.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
My history and learning experiences from running a guild.
Now, I'm not going to claim to be the best guildmaster in the world, b/c I'm pretty certain that there are people in my guild who really don't like me, or think I do an overall poor job.
I think I can safely say that those people are in the minority however.
While I haven't been a guild leader for many years or anything, maybe I'll give a short history on my leadership background before I start dishing out anything you may or may not think is even worth reading about.
To be honest, I never really cared for being a leader, but I did join an one of the most elite guilds on the most popular server in DAoC (Guinevere at the time). That guild was Knight Templars. They were a small elite guild that was extremely elitist at the time. Unfortunately, I had major issues with the way the guild was run. There was way too much favoritism playing out, and there were cliques forming that were imo unhealthy. Which didn't stop me from trying to break into ALL the cliques, but eventually, I just lashed out at everyone for propagating this crappy behavior and eventually got myself kicked out hehehe. Learning experience #1 anyways.
I joined a PvP server and befriended a player who eventually created one of the largest and unwieldy zerg guilds I'd ever seen. With guild sizes typically around 15-25 in DAoC, this guild hit the member limit @ 230. Now this guy wasn't an extremely skilled gamer which became evident, but his ability to manage this 230 man zerg was simply amazing. His zerg leading abilities literally floored me and I decided that no matter how skilled you were, if you were a strong leader, you could achieve successes far beyond what anyone could accomplish on their own, no matter how skilled. Which kind of makes sense in RL... the smartest people, most skilled people aren't necessarily the richest. It's the people who are in charge who always make the most.
Anyways, I became an officer in that 230 man zerg guild, and just picked up leading tips from him (sure enough, he went on to form his own web startup and cashed out after being bought).
In WoW, I didn't have any intention on leading anything, simply to come and PvP with my friends. Eventually, realizing that this was more a PvE raid game than it was a PvP game, I joined a medium sized elite guild, and it just sort of happened b/c I was unhappy about the way things were being run. Fast-forward to now, I've been leading our guild successfully (imo) for about a year now, and I think we're as strong as we've ever been. Obviously the success of our guild is completely due to the hard work of our members, but I'd like to think that I've helped foster an environment conducive to not only the performance of our raid members, but to create an environment where we could introduce new people in without feeling overwhelmed as being the outsider (obviously, the secret to keeping a hard-core guild running so long is to have good new players trained, then coming in to full member status to replace the people retiring).
I think that also helps with why I feel like I'm successful at doing this. I didn't start this guild, and I was a grunt for the most part. But b/c of my experiences from my 1st DAoC guild where I got kicked out for being too forward on my problems with the guild, being constructive led to gradual acceptance from the guild leadership to eventually me taking over. It's also b/c I've had so many issues with the way guilds were being run that I don't allow it to completely corrupt the way it is lead, and how I still hold my basic principals pretty dearly.
Anyways, I thought I had to put this out before anyone started blindly asking where I came from. I'll do an actual post detailing what values I use to run a guild, and in what order they come in.
I think I can safely say that those people are in the minority however.
While I haven't been a guild leader for many years or anything, maybe I'll give a short history on my leadership background before I start dishing out anything you may or may not think is even worth reading about.
To be honest, I never really cared for being a leader, but I did join an one of the most elite guilds on the most popular server in DAoC (Guinevere at the time). That guild was Knight Templars. They were a small elite guild that was extremely elitist at the time. Unfortunately, I had major issues with the way the guild was run. There was way too much favoritism playing out, and there were cliques forming that were imo unhealthy. Which didn't stop me from trying to break into ALL the cliques, but eventually, I just lashed out at everyone for propagating this crappy behavior and eventually got myself kicked out hehehe. Learning experience #1 anyways.
I joined a PvP server and befriended a player who eventually created one of the largest and unwieldy zerg guilds I'd ever seen. With guild sizes typically around 15-25 in DAoC, this guild hit the member limit @ 230. Now this guy wasn't an extremely skilled gamer which became evident, but his ability to manage this 230 man zerg was simply amazing. His zerg leading abilities literally floored me and I decided that no matter how skilled you were, if you were a strong leader, you could achieve successes far beyond what anyone could accomplish on their own, no matter how skilled. Which kind of makes sense in RL... the smartest people, most skilled people aren't necessarily the richest. It's the people who are in charge who always make the most.
Anyways, I became an officer in that 230 man zerg guild, and just picked up leading tips from him (sure enough, he went on to form his own web startup and cashed out after being bought).
In WoW, I didn't have any intention on leading anything, simply to come and PvP with my friends. Eventually, realizing that this was more a PvE raid game than it was a PvP game, I joined a medium sized elite guild, and it just sort of happened b/c I was unhappy about the way things were being run. Fast-forward to now, I've been leading our guild successfully (imo) for about a year now, and I think we're as strong as we've ever been. Obviously the success of our guild is completely due to the hard work of our members, but I'd like to think that I've helped foster an environment conducive to not only the performance of our raid members, but to create an environment where we could introduce new people in without feeling overwhelmed as being the outsider (obviously, the secret to keeping a hard-core guild running so long is to have good new players trained, then coming in to full member status to replace the people retiring).
I think that also helps with why I feel like I'm successful at doing this. I didn't start this guild, and I was a grunt for the most part. But b/c of my experiences from my 1st DAoC guild where I got kicked out for being too forward on my problems with the guild, being constructive led to gradual acceptance from the guild leadership to eventually me taking over. It's also b/c I've had so many issues with the way guilds were being run that I don't allow it to completely corrupt the way it is lead, and how I still hold my basic principals pretty dearly.
Anyways, I thought I had to put this out before anyone started blindly asking where I came from. I'll do an actual post detailing what values I use to run a guild, and in what order they come in.
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