I’m pretty sure that by now, you are certain that I’m male, that I have a penis, and I most likely have hair covering the vast majority of my body. If you’re still uncertain, I definitely need to work on my roleplaying skills.

This is where I play with your conceptions and throw a curve ball, by telling you that I’ve portrayed myself, at other times and in other places, to be female. Successfully enough to have men fall for me, to receive gifts, to be brought into another girl’s circle of confidence.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve never done this in real life. Being 6′5″ (196cm) with a goatee and vast amounts of body hair normally prevent all but lobotomised people from believing I’m a girl. I’m talking online — a few MUDs, and a couple of MMOs.  In the MUDs I played overtly female characters (it’s very easy, when you only have descriptive text to define who and what you are). I’ve always been gifted with words, so weaving them together to form a believable female persona wasn’t really a challenge. Normally the characters would start of androgynous and slowly develop a sexuality as I got a feel for how other girls (well, they might’ve been girls…) handled themselves.

This whole boys-playing-girls thing (which is/was very common with MUDs) can lead into some interesting and not-so-ideal situations. Take, for example, sexual interactions. I know on at least one occasion, I was seduced by another guy playing a female character. I don’t know to this day if he seduced me because he thought I was a hot girl, or because he had worked out I was a guy. The fact that he was playing a gay character probably suggests he knew I was a guy — but who knows. The other problem is when you finally have to ‘come out’, which is what happened with my WoW experiment:

I created my first WoW character back in 2005. At the time I’d just finished my degree, and a few weeks away from graduating. I’d successfully not started an MMO during my time at university (I’ll tell you some other stories about my gamer geek friends another day, and how they failed their degree…), but considering my degree title was ‘Computer Games’, I figured I should probably do some… research into the field of MMOs. Yes, I started WoW as a study to find out what made World of Warcraft dominate the market (and really, at 11.5 million subscribers, it’s MASSIVE).

With a new game, and a new level of understanding for how online communities work, I decided to up the challenge and roleplay a girl, playing a boy. It was a whole lot more delicate (and more fun), because I could outwardly be masculine, but have some deep-seated female traits that would only come out in quiet, private chats with other players. After 2 or 3 months, I had about 50% of my friends certain I was a girl, and the rest totally unsure about my gender.

The experiment came to an abrupt ending when I finally had to use my microphone (damn raiding!) and my squeeky falsetto voice wasn’t quite believable enough… I gave it my best shot though, but alas, the persona I’d worked so hard to develop came crumbling down around me.

So I’m a boy… at the moment.

Anyway! We’re off to London soon, to see a play. I’ll leave you with another nice photo that I took yesterday (and promptly submitted to National Geographic… well a man can dream, right?) It’s entitled ‘Sucks to be a Duck’…

Sadly, it’s true. While 40% of all games players are female (a rather large percentage that often shocks some people), only 15% of them play games like World of Warcraft (WoW).

I think this is probably because of the perceived element of competition in games such as WoW or Runescape (another online game). Girls tend to stay clear of the male stomping ground and focus almost entirely on ‘god sims’: games which give the player complete control over the denizens of a virtual world, such as The Sims — which is, incidentally, one of the largest selling games of all time. The female gamer market share is something most game developers can only dream of capturing. Another popular genre for those lovely female gamers are ‘dress up’ games, where there is more emphasis on a character’s appearance — there’s even a site dedicated to finding such games! The rather cutesy look of the site is probably an indication of the target audience.

Moving onto a more specific area — online gaming –  Nick Yee’s research (The Daedalus Project) dwarfs every other body of work on the topic, even if its objectivity is hotly contested by many other academics. There are simply too many interesting statistics available from the project so I won’t bore you with them, but poke around if you’re interested in finding out more the new and exciting breed of online gamers — gamers like me.

The only pertinent statistic, is that 35% of all WoW characters are female — and only half of those are actually played by girls in real life. Not only does this mean that only 15% out of 11.5 million players are female, it also means that 50% of all female characters are being played by boys. Now, gender-bending isn’t a new thing! Tt’s pretty common in online games, where you interact with tens or even hundreds of people each day, and playing a female can give you a certain… edge. Female characters are given gifts, they receive beneficial treatment and generally have a much easier and enjoyable gaming experience than males. Someone is much more likely to stop and help you kill some big, gribbly beasty if you’re female. (Isn’t gribbly the best word ever?)

All of these things are real life phenomena too –  this is just one example of virtual worlds imitating real life.

Sadly, in my guild, we only have about 5 girls (well, that I’m certain of), out of about 150 people. That seems a fair bit below the 15% Nick Yee suggests. On top of that, I think only 1 of those girls is an actual ‘free gamer’, and not in the guild purely because their boyfriend is there.

So, this is my attempt to drive more girls to online gaming in general, and my guild in particular. While it’s true that many people play online games like WoW for the competition, and being first, many people play just for the fun. There’s also lots of dressing up you can do, with thousands of aesthetic choices you can make to your character. I guess it’s by no coincidence that most girls prefer ‘Tolkein fantasy’  — they identify easiest with those lithe bodies and pointy ears, right? But still only 15% are female! We must increase that number! For geeky men like me all over the globe!

I think the problem is, at least for a hardcore guild like mine, is that the guys that I play with simply don’t get out. They don’t meet anyone, because games like World of Warcraft require a certain amount of time investment that makes socialising outside of the game a little difficult. I guess, considering women are much more social creatures than men, I’m not drawing a very good picture here. Let me recover with a pretty photo of my character:[SinglePic not found]

See, isn’t it PRETTY? A dragon! and swirly… magical things! Just ignore the skeletal dragon in the background.

Anyway, as I was saying, as the guys don’t get out much, they don’t get girlfriends — or at least socialise with girls. Without some kind of female contact, it’s quite hard to become socially adjusted — and you have to present yourself as a well-adjusted guild if you want to woo those few female players.

Girls just don’t appreciate it when they first thing they see upon joining the guild is ‘Argh, I’ve got itchy balls.’

So, girls, start playing an online game and adopt a geek today. Teach us the arts of grooming.

Today is a day of change, after all.

As a corollary to my post earlier today, this video highlights why girls need to play online games, like World of Warcraft.

And boys, do your bit to fight rapidly-strengthening stereotypes. Don’t tell girls your penis is like an acorn attached to your torso.

Well, a large portion of my life at least. Not quite all, but… an uncomfortably high percentage of it.

Anyway, I’ve started a serious series of posts, about being the guild leader of a successful World of Warcraft guild.

This is obviously a series of posts aimed at gamers in general, and WoW players in specific. You might find it interesting if you’re an outsider looking in — a girlfriend of a WoW addict perhaps, or maybe someone that’s interested in picking up another game to play! It will focus on tips and tricks for up and coming guilds, the politics of WoW guilds (and online communities), and it will hopefully provide an insight into the inner workings of a successful guild leader.

It has its own category, which you can find on the right, and its own RSS feed — take a look, if it tickles your fancy!

In my previous entry I spoke about WoW itself. Hopefully drew an illustrative picture of the most successful multiplayer game of all time (and probably for the next decade, or until Blizzard’s next-generation MMO is released). It’s quite important that you understand just what WoW is before you can hope to ‘conquer’ it. You need to know what makes the game (and gamers) tick; you need to know what keeps people subscribing, month after month.

‘What does this have to do with leading guilds?’ I hear you ask. Everything! Almost everyone that plays WoW belongs to a guild! Ultimately, whether the players like it or not, it’s the guild leaders that have their finger on the button. It’s really is entirely up to guild leaders to make the game enjoyable for the players. Sure, Blizzard also has a commitment to make the game playable and fun, but without the glorious, omnipotent guild leader not much would ever get done.

So, leading on from there, I’ll try to outline the basic role of the guild leader: what a guild leader has to know, and do, to keep his guild heading in the right direction — be it onwards and upwards to #1 in the world, or just to provide a safe, fun environment for raiding and questing.

As a guild leader, you need to know why your guildies continue to play the game. Is it out of loyalty? A sense of competition? Are they playing because of real life friends, or family? Perhaps it’s a mix of all of these elements — or perhaps it’s just to escape from real life. The escapists tend to be the ones not in guilds though; they’re lone wolves, just trying to play their own little removed-from-real-life game, they won’t be discussed in this entry (escapism should be talked about at length in its own entry).

It varies from guild to guild (depending on their purpose), but each and every guild will have a distinct drive, that in turn dictates why its members continue to play and stay active. When that drive is lost, for whatever reason, a guild leader needs to be able to react quickly. He might have just a few minutes or hours to gauge the current feelings and emotions in the guild, analyse the situation and think of a solution before someone leaves the guild — and as you might all know, or have guessed, when one person walks out it can start an unstoppable avalanche.

So what makes various types of guild tick? What gives the members of a given type of guild the urge to play and win? I’ll try to put my finger on the nub. I’ll try to define the characteristics of each type of guild, and what their players require — and desire — to keep them interested and active.

The Hardcore Progressive Guild (HPG)

The HPG makes up for the tiniest percentage of WoW’s player base. A lot of people might perceive themselves as a hardcore raider, but the fact of the matter is that only about 2% of guilds clear all of WoW’s content in a timely fashion — sometimes even lower for ‘end bosses’ like Kil’jaeden and Kel’thuzad. This is the bracket that describes most of the world top 100 or so — Nihilum, Method, SK Gaming — HPGs are the only guilds even approaching ‘celebrity’ status.

HPG Member Traits

• Very high activity — 30 to 40 hours a week is not unusual. 60 hours a week is not as rare as you might think.
• Competitive nature — they are usually playing at this level because they think they are, or want to be, the ‘best’ of their class on a given server, or even in a territory (EU, US, etc.). These guys are playing to WIN; not second, or third place — first.
• Generally young adults — 18-25 is the usual age-group here. Students at university. Students that have dropped out of university. You can occasionally get a younger gamer, if they manage their homework effectively! You might see some ‘real adults’ with jobs, but they are quite rare. These players are often quite happy with five 4-hour raids a week.
• Impatient – generally they are impatient. They want to be moving now. They don’t want to wait for the next raid! We should be raiding ALL the time! If you’re not moving, another guild might be catching up! While they might be impatient, that doens’t mean they lack focus — they can often focus on performing the same repetitive tasks for hours and hours.

The guild leader of a Hardcore Progressive Guild really has the worst ‘job’ in WoW. You know it’s bad because it’s actually referred to as a ‘job’ (some top guilds have been known to hire professionals to manage their guild logistics). There is little pleasure derived from leading a HPG, other than that warm feeling inside when you’ve moved up another rank in the world, or you’ve beaten the competition on your server. It’s a thankless task, unpaid and with minimal rewards. By far the most common reason most guilds of this type disband is because the guild leader goes on a holiday, never to return. Or he just quits. Or he gets a girlfriend. So how does this poor bastard keep a HPG happy?

• Progress – Progress of any kind. Even stating there is progress when there might not actually be any: ‘Hey guys, we got one more mob down than last time!’, or ‘Hey, we did this in one raid less than our competition!’ Really, anything to make it look like you’re working well, and progressing. Of course, if you’re making real progress that’s the one sure-fire way of keeping your guild active and healthy.
• Move quickly – Don’t spend time waiting for people that are AFK (Away From Keyboard). In fact, remove constant-AFKers from the guild (or raid team). They are awful for progress, the raid’s morale and they simply waste everyone’s time. Moving between instances in a timely fashion is also a good practice. Keeping the pace up through a raid is probably the most important thing you can do, as a guild and raid leader; kicking a slow person from your raid is likely to guarantee you the love and adoration of everyone else.
• Know how to handle people – You are generally dealing with emotional young adults. You will often find yourself dealing with people lacking in social skills. Hardcore players are normally quite a handful — they don’t get out a whole lot, so their social skills can be underdeveloped. Often they struggle to put logical arguments together. This is another subject for another day though!
• Fairness — Almost everyone in a HPG wants to be the best. They want their hands on those shiny, epic loots when they drop, before everyone else. A fair loot distribution system is key (and again, another topic for another day).Being even-handed as a guild leader is always important (for every kind of guild). The problem is, everyone on the Internet thinks they have a valid opinion. It’s your job to play arbiter — High Lord Justice — in almost every argument that pops up in a HPG. You are probably the only person that every player in the guild fears and respects at the same time, and thus it’s really your job to make sure everyone feels like they have a place in the guild. A surefire way to lose members is to make someone feel like their opinions and input are inconsequential to the guild’s progress and well being.

Each of these topics will most likely have to be broken-down in future entries, but as I’m a hardcore progressive guild leader myself with a lot of experience, that shouldn’t be a problem.

The Raiding Guild

This is your standard raiding guild. This could be a group of real life friends, or a casual guild thath as finally decided to take the step up to 25-man raiding content. This is a large group of players — about 30-40% of all WoW subscribers. These players might not have started the game to raid, but Blizzard’s continued efforts to make all of the facets of the game approachable and easy mean that almost everyone has tried raiding. Most continue to raid once they’ve had a taste of the loot and glory that comes with it!

Raiding Guild Member Traits

• High activity — While not as active as the HPG members, raiding guild members still play the game an awful lot. They might not play for as many hours in one sitting, or they might have a time constraint on when they can play, but they still play a lot — 30 hours or more a week.
• Less competitive — These guys tend to raid because it’s a natural progression of their gaming experience. They’ve cleared all of the 5-man dungeons, so now it’s time to clear the 10 and 25-man content. They don’t care much about when they finish it, they would just like to finish it… some time.
• Less-defined age range – You are more likely to find school kids and people that work full-time jobs here, though guilds tend to be centered around one age group or the other though. It’s quite common to find guilds that raid later at night, to cater for those with jobs — or run early evening raids, for kids that have to go to bed early. Of course, the largest gamer demographic (18-25) is still prevalent here, perhaps they’re less competitive, or just gearing up ready to move to a more hardcore guild. Or maybe they are trying desperately to not fail their degree!
• Quite patient — These guys are actually pretty patient. They’re quite happy to wait for AFK players, especially if it’s a guild made up of real life friends. There’s no real rush — they’ve had to struggle through 5-man dungeons with a slew of disconnectors and AFKers. They might get sick of it one day and step down from raiding, though.
• Not so loyal – These guilds tend to be filled up with people that are just looking for somewhere to raid, or somewhere with some green guild text. There’s nearly always some guild on a server looking to recruit; sadly, players picked out of the trade channel don’t tend to be the most loyal guild members. Players in this category will often drop their guild very quickly if offered a place in a hardcore guild (even if it often turns out to be a bad decision).

Being a guild leader for a standard raiding guild is a lot easier. Players tend to manage things themselves — those that want to farm a little extra will do so on their own, without your intervention. Conversely, in this category there will be those that won’t farm for raiding consumables no matter how hard you shout at them. Disputes are often sorted out quickly with an /ignore, or someone leaving the guild. What are the best ways for a guild leader to manage a raiding guild?

• Patience is a virtue — Progress isn’t quick in a standard raiding guild. It comes eventually, after many long, arduous raids. You need to be able to keep your cool for long periods of time.
• Be nice — You aren’t dealing with highly-competitive people that can deal with constructive criticism. Many players simply don’t care if they aren’t very good. You really won’t gain anything by telling them that they’re shit. Your best bet here is to do some hand-holding: ‘Watch how I do it…’, or perhaps compile some links of ‘how to play X class’ and put them on a forum.
• You’re not God – raiding guilds don’t often become spiritual communities (a very tight-knight group where your fellow guild mates feel more like family members than online buddies) like their hardcore brethren. You can stamp your foot and shout like a madman all you like, but people are very unlikely to actually pay any attention to you. It’s better to lead by example, or just try to moderate guild chat. Or draw up some nice rules for guild behaviour on the forum.The rare exception is when you have an ‘ex hardcore guild’ that has fallen fromgrace, and the top rankings, but the guild leader still thinks he is a force to be reckoned with. This is the disgruntled emperor that has lost his empire; the kind of guy that beheads people just for fun, to prove he’s still Got It.
• Fairness — The same rules as the Hardcore Progressive Guild applies here. You need to be really damn fair, especially when distributing loot. You might even have to be more fair because loot means even much more to the member of a raiding guild. Those lovely little blocks of pixels aren’t quite as common in a raiding guild, so they have a higher value! While it would be quite rare to see someone quit over loot in a HPG, assigning an item to the wrong person in a normal raiding guild can result in all sorts of trouble. A good DKP system is a requirement.

I should add that not all raiding guild members are disloyal. They won’t all leave the moment an opportunity for easy epics arises. There are many strong raiding guilds that never stepped up to the hardcore plate — often they are formed of online communities that pre-date World of Warcraft, or they are just groups of friends that picked up the game to play with each other. Some players really are just very loyal. No matter how likely the ship is going to sink, some players will really stick by the guild until it finally disbands.

The Casual Guild

Finally, we have what represents about 50% of the WoW playerbase — casuals. This is a phrase that’s commonly used by hardcore raiders in a derogatory fashion (’Oh, he’s logging out after only 4 hours… what a casual!’), but I use it here to describe the players that are casual gamers. These are the players that can only play an hour a day, or perhaps a few hours on weekends. They are married, have large work commitments, or they just don’t enjoy sitting in front of a computer for hours on end.

Leading a casual guild is a bit of a misnomer: you don’t so much lead as… guide. And recruit. Some casual guilds are so large that they won’t even know who their guild leader is — you as the guild leader might only play a few hours each week!

Casual Guild Member Traits

• Low activity — Casual gamers tend to play from zero to 10 hours a week. 1-2 hours an evening, or an occasional weekend binge, if the significant other is out of town.
• Their time is sacred – Just because they don’t play much, doesn’t mean they don’t care! They normally want to get a lot done in their small time online and so they really have no patience for timewasters, or timewasting. It’s kind of ironic though, as they are the most likely kind of player to disconnect without warning if  ’someone knocked on the door’, or ’sorry, important phonecall’.
• Every age group – Almost anyone from any walk of life can be a casual gamer, but they do tend to be either very young, or old (over 40 — I know it’s not actually old, but it is for the sake of gaming!). There’s normally a caring parent metering the amount of hours they can spend playing, or they are married and not ‘allowed’ to play more than a certain number of hours a week. Unless the significant other is out of town… then all Hell can break loose. What they don’t know can’t hurt them, right?
• Loyalty? What’s that? – For these players, a guild is just somewhere to hang out, chat, and pick up players for 5-man dungeons. If someone accidentally rolls on your item, you’re more than likely going to leave the guild. The exception is if a casual guild grows towards a casual raiding guild (1 raid a week, often on weekends) — then the players are likely to be very loyal to the hand that feeds them epic items. Casual raiding guilds very rarely work out though; it’s just too hard to keep it together especially with casual officers.

You’ve probably gathered that you can’t really lead a guild of casuals. They come, they go. You can’t reliably predict when they’ll be online, so you can’t really plan any kind of guild event. There are however a few things you can do to grow the community and keep everyone happy:

• Recruit — The key to a casual raiding guild is the size of its roster. You need enough players online so that there’s always enough people on at each level range to find questing/dungeon-crawling groups! Casual guilds are often ‘levelling up’ guilds, so you need a vast number of players to hope to have 5 characters of any given level.
• Make some rules – It’s very easy to just have a free-for-all guild where anything goes, but you might find you receive a position reaction from your guild members if there are basic ground rules. No swearing, as there are kids in the guild? Each person gets 1 item of loot from a dungeon? No ganking of lowbies? Don’t be rude to other players? Rules like that can generate a good reputation for your guild — it can create a guild that casuals aspire to be in.
• You can be picky – As I said earlier, casual gamers make up the biggest portion of players in WoW. There’s no shortage of people that you can recruit into your guild, so it doesn’t hurt to choose who you invite! Pick up the people that put some effort into speaking like a human being. Recruit the players that stop and help you with whatever you’re doing. Invite the players that offer to pay you for a service, instead of demanding it for free. You are trying to build a guild that is fairly autonomous, as you probably won’t play the game a lot — the best way to do that is to invite other responsible, helpful players; the kinds of players that always ‘have time’ for other people.
• Get a forum – This goes without saying for every type of guild, but it can be especially useful for building a successful community out of players that don’t otherwise interact with each other a lot. You could have threads that allow people to share ‘the best places to level’, or ‘good addons to use while levelling’, or ‘your class role in a dungeon’. Anything that encourages people to interact and share their views on a topic is a good thing.

There’s Lots More

I’ve touched on a lot of topics that will need to be fully explored at a later date: community building, DKP systems, how to survive when the ‘going gets tough’, and generally ‘coping’ as a guild leader — it’s hard to not be afflicted and aborbed by a God complex if nothing else! There’s also a gap between the Hardcore Progressive Guild and the standard Raiding Guild — the guild that is trying to become hardcore. They all deserve seperate entries though, so stay tuned!

If you have any questions about the issues raised here, I’m more than happy to answer them. You can ask them in a comment, or email me using this form.

Virtual worlds like World of Warcraft have long been known to mirror certain aspects of real life. It has often been supposed that people play games like World of Warcraft exactly because of that fact; some elements are so comfortably similar to real life that it makes the gameplay experience a lot easier to adapt to.

A game that is completely foreign to gamers would have a very limited appeal. We can embrace and enjoy the known, with a small amount of unknown thrown in to spice things up. The inverse is often quite disturbing — it’s hard to enjoy ourselves if we can’t predict with some kind of certainty what our future holds.

While there are many facets of online games that I could look at, I’m going to look at one that I’m very intimate with: social and power structures. With Patch 3.1 and Ulduar fast approaching, and the promise of some taxing content, it would definitely make sense to ensure your guild is structured in a way to support strong progress and a thriving community. From guild leader through to the grunts and peons of the guild, I’ll try to break down what makes the difference between a good guild and a truly great guild.

The structure of a guild

WoW, like real life, has a very well defined social structure. While there is an over-arching hierarchy for an entire server, I’ll be focusing more on the structure inside a guild.

What real life structure does a guild most represent? A large solely owned company, or perhaps even a small autocratic country. There is often a single leader, a board of executives or advisors, department chiefs and then the workers or citizens themselves. These real life roles map perfectly to the ‘common’ ranks you will find in a guild.

The Guild Leader

Real world equivalent: Tyrant, Dictator, Monarch, Pope, President.

At the top of every guild or society you will have an ultimate leader. In rare cases this can be a title without the attached powers or responsibilities (such as a ‘token monarch’ in Britain or Sweden), but almost always this will be the the primary decision-maker in the guild. Guilds are very much like smaller autocratic states in that there are often other roles filled out — executives and advisors — but the leader always has the power to veto any decisions made, and to enact new rules (laws) as his fancy and whim dictate.

As I touched upon briefly in other articles, some guilds might have more than one leader — there might be 2, 3 or more if formed out of a group of real life friends. In almost all guilds this is a single figure, though. Many people play games like WoW for the power it gives them over other humans…!

Primary Tasks

• Decision maker — I’ve discussed it in previous articles, but the primary role of the leader is simply to make decisions. Good, bad or ugly, the decisions have to be made in a timely, and hopefully fair fashion.
• Chief justice — The guild leader plays the arbiter and justice maker in almost every argument that raises above normal every-day strife.

If you are interested in the other roles of the guild leader, just read some of my collected writings — that’s what this blog is all about!

Assistant Guild Leaders

Real world equivalent: Vice President, Home Secretary, Joint Military Chiefs, Secret Police Chief.

Behind every great leader there are great advisors. Even in fully autocratic states leaders know that they simply can’t govern an entire country (guild) on their own. They can’t keep track of everything that’s going on. They can’t keep abreast of every eventuality or developing situation; there is simply so much to do, so much going on.

While a guild, being a small subset of real life, is relatively restricted in what actually goes on, it can still be very hard for a guild leader to keep his finger in every pie. Factions might develop amongst nationalities, or perhaps a raider harbours resentment that he refuses to tell the guild leader about. This is where your assistant guild leaders — your most trusted advisors — step into the fray. They are distant enough from the leadership that they can see situations from a different angle, and discuss problems with members of the guild that the guild leader might normally have difficulties with.

Primary Tasks

• Secret police — There’s a lot of stigma attached to such a phrase, but it does best suit their role of ‘information gatherer’. Assistant leaders can get into places that the guild leader can only dream of. They can play the good cop to the guild leader’s bad cop. They are the guild’s rottweiler!
• Decision making — In the guild leader’s absence the assistant guild leader inherits the mantle of decision making. You’re not expected to be as competent as the guild leader, but they should certainly try to limit the number of people that leave the guild during their temporary reign!
• Management — It’s common for assistant guild leaders to get lumped with tasks like DKP management, or recruitment. It will vary though, from guild to guild, guild leader to guild leader, and the size of the guild.

Class/Role Officers

Real world equivalent: Department of Defence, Education Secretary, Senator.

At the bottom of the leadership pyramid we have the class and role officers. Varying form guild to guild, you might have one per class (Hunter, Priest, Warlock…), or perhaps only one per role (Damage Dealing, Healing, Tanking…) although I propose that class officers are a better way to go about it.

These are more of your ‘every day’ officers. Unlike their real-world counterparts, they will have quite limited responsibilities — their class, or role. A hunter class leader might purely be in charge of making sure hunters operate well during raids. The most an officer at this level would do would be the management of recruitment for his class. It is through close contact with class officers that a guild leader can best judge how upcoming raids might be — if there might be a shortage of players, or how recent changes made to the game might impact the guild.

Primary Tasks

• Know your class/role — It’s rather obvious, but a class or role officer must be the master of his job. He becomes the authority for a sizable fraction of the guild so he better be damn good at what he does. The class officer definitely needs be on top of all the latest developments, macros and strategies.
• The guild/raid leader’s crutch — During raids their primary role is the support of the guild or raid leader. When discussing strategies for new bosses it’s their job to suggest better methods of execution. It’s their job to say what is and is not possible for your class. Can we reach those DPS requirements? Do we have a working healing strategy? Are the tanks mitigating as much damage as possible? It is their job to support the leader’s knowledge of your class — it’s impossible for the leader to know everything, that is why he has officers!
• Recruitment — Many guilds use their class/role officers to manage recruitment. Normally this will involve the guild leader saying ‘We need more of X class!’, and the respective class leader running off to find more awesome players. As the authority of their class/role in the guild, they are obviously best suited to finding more good players!

Members/Raiders

While at the bottom of the pile, members and raiders are by no means the least important people in the guild. They make up the majority of the guild or group; they are the civilians and the soldiers. Canon fodder! A good leadership is nothing without a happy, loyal gang of followers. You can craft a fantastic DKP system and install a great forum, but without an actual group of players to do the healing, the DPSing and the tanking… you have nothing!

Luckily, a member’s list of obligations is short and sweet:

Primary Tasks

• Don’t quit – ‘Huh?’ Yeah — the worst thing you can do to a guild is quitting; either the game, or leaving to another guild (which is even worse!). A member/raider is an investment to the guild — the leadership is investing in you by gearing you up and teaching you strategies. You might feel like you own the gear on your character, but just like in real life, there’s always someone that thinks they own you. It would be like training to be a doctor in your home country, and then seeking work in another country. It is for this reason that loyalty is probably the most valued trait of for a member — of any group.
• Know your role — Your primary role in the guild is often defined by the grounds of your recruitment. If you were recruited to be a great tank, it is obviously your responsibility to become a great tank! You need to research what must be done to perform your role successfully. Members should also maintain very good communication with their class/role officer.

A real example — a successful WoW guild

Like my other articles, I am talking entirely from experience. While I do have some degree-level education on the topics of sociology, anthropology and gamer psychology I am going to stick to real, applicable proof for this example. This section is going to focus on what I have found to be workable and true in the leading, success and ongoing survival of my guild over the past 4 years.

There have been many iterations of our guild structure, but the past 2 years have seen it remain virtual static. Those same 2 years, with a combination of strong leadership, durable structure and an environment in which a community can thrive, have seen a rise from 600th to 30th in the world.

From top to bottom then:

• Guild Leaders — We run two guild leaders of equal power, much like an ancient Roman Duumvirate. Historically, one would be a military leader and the other a civic leader. The idea here is that both leaders have the power of veto — nothing can occur unless both leaders agree. This small amount of bureaucracy has saved us a lot of pain over the years. If one leader steps out of line, the other can quickly move in to rectify things. If members are afraid to talk to one leader, the other can do the listening. You would be correct in relating this as the famous ‘good cop, bad cop’ setup.
• Assistant Guild Leaders — We run three assistant guild leaders. A neat number that brings us up to a council of five, for any decisions that might impact the whole guild. Assistant guild leaders have all of the powers of a guild leader, but obviously can’t veto a guild leader’s decision. Our assistant guild leaders play advisory roles:
  • DKP Advisor — I told you DKP and loot distribution were important! One assistant guild leader focuses almost entirely on our loot distribution system, with a side-interest in making sure consumables are prepared for raids. This is the guild’s ‘economic advisor’.
  • Casual Advisor — We’re a large guild, so having someone that can keep in touch with the casual players and alert the other guild leaders about any pertinent issues is vital.
  • Political Advisor — Or as we like to call it… ’secret police’: the rottweiler of the guild. The vicious dog that tears things apart until he can see what’s within. He has a good sense of smell; very good at picking up on problems that might arise in the immediate future.
• Class Leader — 1 officer for each class in the guild. While their role might include the overall well being of his class in the guild, each of these officers are also hardcore raiders. They know their class very well, and are in charge of recruiting. They must be very active players, always looking for new and better ways to play their class, and of course keeping an eye out for possible recruits!
• Raiders — This rank is split into two: ‘pro raiders’, and just ‘raiders’. The titles are just that though — titles. If a raider maintains almost perfect attendance and is the true paragon of raiding, they can be promoted to ‘pro raider’. We try to maintain 3 or 4 raiders of each class, for per 25-man raid. I will discuss building successful raid groups in a future article!
• Member — Everyone else in the guild falls into this rank. Casual raiders, casual players, friends and family — they’re all mixed up here. Raiders that have also let their attendance drop, or can’t raid due to real life problems also find themselves at this rank.

The ranks worth noting here are the officers — guild leaders, assistants and class leaders. Every guild has the member rank (obviously!), but I’ve seen a huge variation in the actual leadership structure in guilds. Some have only 3 or 4 officers, and some have assistant class leaders, PVP officers, profession officers… sometimes as much as half the guild!

I’m not saying that they are necessarily bad structures, but they do have some inherent weaknesses that our guild structure avoids. In my previous writings you’ll note that I put a lot of emphasis on fairness and communication, and that’s what our structure provides. There’s always someone for a member or raider to talk to. There’s always someone for a class leader to talk to. And then at the top, there’s 5 people that always try to reach a consensus so that when changes are made they never have a negative impact on any aspect of the guild.

The only real weakness of our setup is that it requires a lot of good people. There’s certainly a lot of bureaucracy built into our system, which means most changes happen incredibly slowly. One of the two guild leaders can always change something quickly if there’s some urgency, though. We’ve found that ’slow and steady’ has served us well over the years. Radical leaps have normally not gone down very well and normally destabilise the core of the guild — and at the end of the day, progress in earnest, year after year, can only come with a stable guild.

Notes

The guild structure we use is actually very similar (if not identical) to the system used in the early Roman Republic: Consul -> Praetor -> Quaestor. This system is also used, albeit with different naming, in almost every republic today. The only difference we made was the dual leadership, rather than one primary leader. We felt that given the ‘egoistic escapist’ nature of online games that two leaders could keep each other balanced and focused.  Online, with very few checks and balances, the power one wields in a large guild can grow out of control; and that’s where the second leader steps in to sweep up the mess.

Something should also be said about purely autocratic, tyrannical guilds — guilds with only one real officer, with perhaps 1 or 2 of his ‘chosen’ playing minor roles in his leadership. History has shown fairly authoritatively that autocratic states rarely have much long-term stability. Guilds lead in a similar fashion normally suffer the same fate. They never quite reach the state required to drive a healthy community, and thus progress. They might do very well in the short term, with the entire guild membership unified and polarised, whipped up into a fervor behind the guild leader’s vision, but it’s very much a temporary high.

Don’t forget, power corrupts!

If you have any questions about the issues or topics raised here, I’m more than happy to answer them. You can ask them in a comment, or email me using this form.

Since the start of this series of ‘Life as a guild leader‘ articles I’ve received quite a variety of questions both here on the site and via email. With a little break from the norm, I’m going to answer these questions publically, so that hopefully everyone can learn from the trials and tribulations of other guild leaders.

I’ve removed any incriminating and identifiable data so don’t worry, if you’re one of the people that sent me a question!

I have questions from very hardcore through to casual ‘we met in The Barrens and are currently working our way through Wailing Caverns’ guilds, but first I’m going to answer some raiding-oriented questions:

My guild is at that stage where we’re not quite sure if we’re hardcore, and we’re not quite sure if we’re regular raiders. The serious players are pulling us towards the hardcore side of things, but we have a lot of ‘oldies’ that would rather remain a normal raiding guild. What should we do?

One of the questions that plagues the membership of almost every WoW raiding guild: Are we hardcore? Do we want to be hardcore? There’s unfortunately no simple answer to this one. It will probably come down to one thing though:  does your guild leader have the time and energy to propel your guild from regular raiding through to hardcore progressive raiding. Obviously active class leaders can help a lot with the transition, but at the end of the day it’s the drive of one person putting in hour after hour to ensure you have a stable platform for hardcore raiding that will make the difference between success, or failure.

Someone has to set up a good website, a DKP system, a set of rules — this is nearly always the guild leader! If you want to make that step-up from server 10th to the top 3, someone has to put in the hours. Whether a group agreement is made by the officers, or the guild leader agrees to put in a lot of extra effort, one thing is certain: a lot of labour goes into building a hardcore guild. I’ve written some other articles on the topic of leading a hardcore guild, which you can find in the archive.

If you think you have the balls and the time to make a hardcore guild, the next question to ask is: Do we have the players? It is certainly guaranteed that you will lose your casual players if you become a hardcore guild. Likewise if you remain a regular guild, you will lose your hardcore players to hardcore guilds! As World of Warcraft is an easy game, it’s not normally hard to find raiders, but it does require rigorous recruitment to find raiders that can play unhindered and unmolested for 4 hours a night, 5 days a week.

If you have the players, and someone that’s willing to put in the effort of recruitment and logistics (making sure people turn up for raids is hard), you simply need a good DKP system and you’re ready to rock!

Is it better to lead a guild with an iron fist, or to take a more laid-back position? Should I ween out the weaklings myself, or should I let natural evolution take care of it for me?

This likely comes down to how your guild was formed. If you are a relatively new guild where the power structures are weak, with nonexistant or newbie class leaders, leading with an iron fist is probably the only way to go. Someone has to grab the reins and dig their spurs into the guild to drive it forward — and that person is the guild leader. As the structure of the guild develops and a successful hierarchy forms, a more laid-back position can be assumed. Issues will bubble up through class leaders and perhaps to assistant guild leaders before they finally get to you. In mature guilds problems tend to solve themselves through discussion and peer-pressure — just like communities in real life — and it’s likely you’ll only have to step in with your fist of iron if things get really out of hand.

If you lead a developed guild with an unwavering, unerring view on things, you might find that your guild becomes stale and lifeless. Tyranny is generally very poor for the development of society or culture — you want your members to be able to voice their opinions and feel at home! A community is only as strong as its members…!

What’s the best way to judge if you have enough raiders to raid successfully over a period of time? Is there an ideal number of each class that prevents burn-out, but also limits drama when people don’t get invited?

With Blizard’s new ‘bring the player, not the class’ initiative, it’s hard to pick exact numbers. Assuming Blizzard continue to provide a ‘fair’ experience for each class (i.e. encounters that favour each kind of tank, DPS and healer), you can’t go far wrong with the following numbers, broken down into class and role, and starting with the tank classes:

• 3 warriors — 1 tank, 2 DPS/tanking hybrids
• 4 paladins — 1 tank, 3 DPS/healing hybrids
• 3 death knights -- 1 tank, 2 DPS/tanking hybrids
• 4 druids — 1 tank, 3 DPS/healing hybrids

With this setup you have 4 available ‘main tanks’ — a number you require, assuming each raider maintains 75% attendance. Three tanks is the ’standard’ 25-man raid tank alotment, according to Blizzard — you have plenty of hybrids if you need to fill in an off-tanking role for whatever reason, though

Moving onto the pure DPSers (Rogues, Hunters, Warlocks and Mages), it’s fairly straightforward: 3 of each DPS class.

This leaves just the shaman and priests — 4 of each is a good target. Shaman, with so many juicy buffs, tend to do a lot of respeccing. Priests, as the jack of all trades (well, except for tanking…) can fill any remaining gaps nicely. It’s not uncommon to see a guild with 5 priests, or with 0, depending on the strength of their other healers!

This gives you a total pool of 34 players, which assuming raiders maintain 75% attendance is about 26 players online at any given time! In reality though, you will tend to have either too few or too many people online — that’s when a rota system can come in handy! If you have 4 raids a week, 1 druid can skip a single raid each week — as long as the other 3 promise to turn up!

In general, with these kinds of numbers, assuming 75% attendance, you will be able to maintain healthy raids with a minimum of ‘invite time’ drama. An attendance closer to 80 or 85% is obviously more desirable on ‘progress raids’ where you might want to make switches — but hopefully with Blizzard’s new initiative that won’t be a requirement!

One last question:

Morale’s really low in our guild at the moment. We never really recovered from the complete cock-block of the later bosses in Sunwell Plataeu, and now this easy-mode grind has taken us in the other direction — now we’re done with things in one night, everyone logs out, and we don’t see each other until next week. I’m worried that when Ulduar comes we won’t have the teamwork we once had. Help!

This is a remarkably common problem, especially amongst guilds that didn’t quite become a hardcore progressive guild (i.e. number 1 on the server, or close to it). You’ve pushed incredibly hard, often to the point of breaking and eventually giving up; or going on a  ‘raiding break’ as some guild leaders like to diplomatically call it. It often happens on pre-nerf instance end bosses — C’thun at 60 and Kael’thas/M’uru  at 70 — where only the very top guilds will have the skills, endurance and reserves of morale to get the kill. We’re talking tiny numbers here: about 150 guilds killed Kil’jaeden — maybe 4,500 people out of a few million.

Quite simply, if you haven’t quite got what it takes, your guild will at the very least lose a bunch of players to burn out. At the very worst, enough people won’t turn up at the end of the raiding break and the guild will fold. So then, how best to prevent that burn out? It’s remarkbly simple: don’t push it beyond breaking point. The only problem is knowing where that breaking point is! Normally it’s when people start turning up late, or you begin wiping more rather than less. If you find yourself bringing new people to the raid each time, that’s a good sign too.

Ultimately you have to judge how strong the guild feels. Is Ventrilo becoming a graveyard during raids? Are people losing their temper at the tiniest and inconsequential mistakes? Are people making more and more odd excuses in the raid-skip forum thread? Any and all of these are signs that you’re pushing it beyond the threshold of your raid group. Just remember that those pre-nerf bosses are only meant to be done by the very top guilds — Blizzard always nerf them at a later date for everyone else to do them! If you haven’t got what it takes, don’t push it. Wait for the nerf! Even if you’re not #1, at least you’ll have a guild and your community at the end of it!

The second half of the question, regarding the dumbing-down of content in Wrath of the Lich King, is slightly harder to answer. You could embrace your inner casual (Blizzard certainly seems to encourage it), or you could encourage the guild to level alts together. PVPing is always good, both arenas and battlegrounds; they keep people talking to each other, and it’s a whole lot more ‘reactive’ than the current content available to us. The other option is to play other games! Left 4 Dead and DOTA are the two current favourites of my guild: both require a lot of teamwork and communication, and both are excellent time-sinks if you are looking for cooperative games like WoW, but don’t require 25 people!

If you have any questions about the issues or topics raised here, I’m more than happy to answer them. You can ask them in a comment, or email me using this form.

Apologies for the long-winded title; it’s actually quite hard to find a subject that gets right to the point. This isn’t about triggering a particular emotion in gamers — not directly, at least. It’s also not about how ‘emotional’ gaming can be — we already know that playing games can be an intense experience that can warrant a massive gamut of emotions.

This entry’s about your avatar — your character, the model that represents you — and the emotions that it can, or as the case may be, cannot display.

Emotions have long played a vital role in communication and human interaction. We smile and raise our shoulders a little when we’re happy; we frown and slump when we’re sad — these emotional keys are a form of communication in their own right: body language!

Beyond subtle muscle shifts we also have emotive reactions that we’re less aware of: we blush when we’re embarrassed or caught lying; we raise our voice in anger or petulance. Most importantly though are the muscles groups on our face: the flaring or contraction of our lips and eyes, the furrowing or raising of the brow — each of these actions, or reactions, are ‘programmed in’ genetically and almost impossible to alter. It’s these same minute movements that we’re (often unconsciously) reading in the face of whoever we’re talking to. It’s these tiny twitches in someone else’s face or body language that can trigger our own involuntary responses: that momentary curl of the lip might be all the indication you need to run away quickly.

This ‘hunt for emotion’ as we communicate with other people is so ingrained that online communication has always felt a little… distant. Internet veterans are cautious, aware that without body language their words can easily be misconstrued. Newbies often blunder, forgetting that no one can see the ironic smile on their face. There’s a reason emoticons , *asterisks*, CAPSLOCK and _underscores_ exist: to convey emotion! It’s clunky and slow compared to body language or facial expressions but it’s the best that we have.

Why, twenty years after the first text-based world, are we still communicating with such basic tools? Some early games like LegendMUD had ways to inflect mood into your conversation through expansion of the verb sets (’say alts’) but since then… nothing. In graphical virtual worlds a couple of games have tried to incorporate moods (notably Star Wars: Galaxies and EverQuest2) but still they were still primarily low-tech text-only executions, toggles: /angry, /sad, /afraid, or parsing exclamations and queries.

Why are we still running around in virtual worlds with emotionless, gormless avatars? In single-player games it’s almost the state of the art, the bleeding edge! ‘More realistic than ever before!’ the developers cry. What makes the games more realistic? Interaction with the game world: physics and realistic NPCs, or in the case of virtual worlds, other player avatars. You only need to look at the success of LittleBigPlanet — a very simple platformer with oodles of delicious detail and bucket loads of charm and a very diverse emotion system.

For a market segment that generates almost all of its appeal (and revenue) from the immersive quality of virtual worlds it’s amazing that there isn’t yet a virtual world that has the power to model emotions through various facial expressions and body poses. You could even go one step further from the toggle system and parse complex emotions like sadness, apprehension and lust out of chat. Then there’s the character state itself: in battle your avatar would grimace upon being hit; a healer would smile upon saving a party member.

Are we simply being held back by World of Warcraft’s ancient graphics engine? Surely it’s time for realistic, immersive emotions in virtual worlds.

Further Reading

• Some work into avatar puppeteering in Second Life which, unlike WoW, actually has some built-in facial expressions
• Bob Moore’s presentation from the Austin GDC 2008 has a more-scientific, sociological look at it under the header ‘Challenges in Avatar-Mediated Interaction’