So far I’ve discussed in quite general terms the kinds of guilds you can see running around in World of Warcraft, why they exist, and their drives and purposes. Next, I covered in quite grizzly and unpleasant detail who the most common characters in a hardcore guild are.

Now that you know the why, and the who, it’s time to talk about how you progress as a guild. I’ve missed out a few steps here (and I will go back to them in future articles), but the question that most often plagues me as a guild leader is: What do I do now? You have a choice to make, and you have to make the right choice in a timely fashion.

This could be something as simple as ‘Do we go to A or B instance?’ but in the grand scale of things, as the leader of the guild (and the raid) you’re going to be the sole decision maker during your (hopefully long) reign. The number of times I’ve wished someone was there to help me make a decision is uncomfortably large; and we’re not talking 1 or 2 decisions a day, we’re talking 50, 100 or 200 little decisions each and every raid. Let me give you a brief example:

Do you wipe another time on that boss encounter, or do you give up for the night? If you stop now, have you spared some guild morale? Maybe you would’ve killed him on the next attempt? Are you going to lose to another guild if you don’t stay an extra hour? Will that extra hour cause unrest amongst the workers in your guild that must be up early in the morning? If you give up, maybe you’ll upset The Killers that are only there for the kill, the fresh taste of blood.

And that’s just one decision! By the end of this article, if you’re a guild or raid leader, you’ll have a much better idea of the _best_ choices to make for the ongoing survival and progress of your guild. If you’re not a raid leader, perhaps by the end of this article you’ll appreciate why us raid leaders always look like we’ve only got 3 blood vessels left – it’s because we do only have 3 blood vessels left — the others were lost in Tempest Keep and Naxxramas…

I’m going to assume, for the sake of brevity and simplicity that the guild leader is a tyrant. I don’t mean that in a bad way, I just mean that you are the sole leader of a guild and that there is little or no bureaucracy in the decision making process. Being able to make snap decisions can be vital to the continuing success of your guild, and ultimately… progress!

Types of Decision

Before I get into the ‘decision making process’, it’s good to understand what kind of decisions there are. Some have immediate impact and some are much longer-range ‘for the future’, but both will have a long-lasting effect on the guild if you get it wrong. The decisions you make in a guild (and raid) generally boil down into just a few types:

Administrative decisions

These are decisions that affect the long-term survivability of the guild, from expansion to expansion. Get one of these wrong and you likely won’t see any problems for a while, but when they do finally rear their ugly heads, it’ll be rough going. These will make or break your guild in the long-run.

• What DKP system should you use?
• Should you recruit more players before the next dungeon is released?
• Is a particular class officer pulling his or her weight?

Day to day decisions

These are decisions that have more immediate implications. Often these are to do with raiding, as that’s what your guild will often be doing on any given day.

• What kind of raiding schedule should you use?
• What dungeon should you raid?
• How do you decide on who gets invited to raids?

Immediate decisions

Finally we have the hardest decisions – the ones that you’ll often have to make on your own. These are snap decisions that need to be made within a few seconds. You don’t have the safety of a forum to hide behind for these – you have to decide now, and it better be a good decision! (The example I gave above illustrates a chain of immediate decisions)

• Do you kick a player from the raid?
• Do you deduct DKP from a player when they make a mistake?
• Do you change a boss encounter strategy after using the same one for a few nights?

What decisions are important?

Depending on the type of guild you belong to (hardcore or ‘normal raiding’), various decisions will have a different weighting: A normal raiding guild is unlikely to care quite so much about the raiding schedule, but for a hardcore progressive guild the correct schedule can mean the difference between world 1st kill or being 10th.

It is your job, then, as a guild (and raid leader) to make the right decisions for your guild in a timely fashion. I’m going to break down the decision making process for my 2 raiding guild types (go and read it if you haven’t already, as this won’t make too much sense otherwise), defining what constitutes an important decision and, by exclusion, what doesn’t.

(I have left ‘casual guilds’ out of the equation, as raiding is something they so rarely do.)

Hardcore Progressive Guild

In a hardcore progressive guild (HPG) your decisions are going to revolve around making good, instantaneous calls of judgement. Because players in HPGs are wound so incredibly tight (and really, anything could make them snap – especially The Killers or The Dramatics), the tiniest of decisions that you make today could avalanche way out of control, costing you a handful of players at a later date.

You are leading passionate players, players that play to win. That’s not to say that fun isn’t important to these players, but winning is more so – either the worldwide race, or at least the server race for a glorious ‘first kill’. Therefore, decisions that impact a player’s ability to ‘win’ are by far the most dangerous in a HPG. Here are some common stumbling blocks that you might’ve encountered, or you should avoid:

• An unfair loot distribution system — This is probably the number 1 cause of disbanded guilds. This deserves its own article, so be sure to read it when I write it!
• Cancelling raids – The single best way to get Killers to leave your guild: cancelling raids. This is why having active class leaders and a good recruitment system is very important. It also makes sense to design the raid schedule around the days with best attendance.
• Unfair persecution — This is likely to cause a lot of pain, especially if you persecute a Dramatic. You might find that the unfairly persecuted Dramatic will play the role of the politician and breed anger and distrust behind your back.

The Raiding Guild

A raiding guild is a lot slower moving but also tends to be a breeding pit of agitation and discontent. You are likely to have a lot more factions in a raiding guild – nationalities, real life friends, etc. It is not uncommon for such a guild to be ‘cliquey’ and split into the ‘hardcore crew’ that always get invited to raids, and the ‘casual raiders’ that fill the gaps. Raiding guilds are much more about the interaction of players, rather than focusing on conquering the content of the game. This isn’t to say they don’t want to clear the content; it’s more that they don’t raid enough to keep themselves occupied, so their attention inevitably turns towards… drama.

You are far more likely to have a player walk out of a raid in a ‘normal’ raiding guild. Perhaps even more so than in the HPG, you need to be very, very fair. A raiding guild is all about the structure you build, rather than the individual player skill. As such, you the common problems you’ll bump into when making decisions are:

• Unfair loot distribution — The leaders of raiding guilds tend to be slightly less ‘serious’, and see less of a problem assigning loot in the way they deem best, or ‘most fair’. You can be assured that giving loot to your real life friends before everyone else is a very quick way to destroy your guild.
• Acting above your station — In a normal raiding guild you are more of a lieutenant than a major. You are certainly leading the raid, but don’t even begin to think that you know other classes better than your own. Telling someone ‘how to play’ is a pretty bad idea. Stick to peripheral decisions, like ‘this is the boss strategy should we use’.
• Choosing the wrong dungeon – A common mistake made by raiding guild leaders is choosing the wrong dungeon to progress in. Either the raid leader isn’t clued up enough, or they are trying to close the gap between them and more hardcore guild. Skipping content and thus making life unnecessarily hard is a bad idea; unless you are trying to become a hardcore progressive guild!

How do I push the guild forward then?

By now, if you’ve read everything I’ve written, you should be quite intimate with the kinds of players in your particular kind of guild. You should know what pleases them the most (boss kills!), and what is likely to upset them quickly (unfairness!). The plan must surely be to build a guild that cultivates member happiness and eliminates any cause for unrest, or distrust in you as a leader.

The best way to quell any kind of discontent or uprising is, as you guessed from the title of this entry, progress. The best way to destroy a guild’s attempts at progress is the opposite: stagnation. It’s your job as the leader to keep things moving — it doesn’t matter where particularly, as long as it’s somewhere – to the side or hopefully forward — from where you are right now.

How do you choose where to go? How do you stop your raids stagnating?

You try to reduce the blunt trauma of raiding. Raiding is repetitive. Humans are very good at repetition, until they master it, and then it very quickly becomes boring. This is in fact why we, as humans, like to mix things up. It’s why those Dramatics like to stir the guild with a big stick and see what happens. It’s why the Killers want to try a new way of killing a boss each week. It’s why the Silent But Deadly players enjoy nothing more than theory crafting a new ‘better’ strategy.

Let’s face it: WoW is about having fun. You can try to convince yourself otherwise — ‘Raiding 10 hours a day means we’re the best!!’ — but at the end of the day, if you want to avoid massive churn and the joy of recruiting new raiders every week, the guild has to have fun. The only real questions you have to ask are: what constitutes fun for the members of my guild? What makes it a game?

Your decisions therefore must create fun. As I said in the example earlier, it’s entirely your decision: Do you go home, or do you stay for one more try? Ask yourself ‘which is more fun for the guild?’ It is sadly a question I can’t answer in definite terms; it’s about your personal leadership experience, and knowing who you play with. It’s about judging the mood of the raid, or even the guild – do you need that kill for guild morale? Or do you need to go and lick your wounds?

In my guild, there have been times when I’ve gone home, and there are those few fateful times where staying for that last try has resulted in us obtaining a server first kill. You can’t always make the right decision; you can only try and learn from experience! The only real difference today I can make the right decision 90% of the time, instead of 50%.

Endnote

You’ve probably noticed that I’ve written this article from a much more personal, empirical perspective. That’s because what I’ve written here is the ‘secret’ of how I have led my guild (with many helping hands) from a server 15th (!!) kill of Ragnaros 3 years ago, to 30th in the world (as of Patch 3.0.9). I’m actually an incredibly soft leader, nearly always choosing the ‘easy’ way out  — going home, or cancelling the raid, instead of wiping mindlessly — but as I have tried to explain: what makes a guild happy varies wildly from guild to guild. What I’ve given you here is a basic set of ground rules that can help you keep a raiding guild happy and moving forward!

Furthermore, while this article was written from the perspective of a tyrannical leader, there are perhaps better alternatives – our guild runs a ‘[dual leader]’ system, for example – but at the end of the day, the key is to be a fair and just leader. This certainly isn’t as easy as it sounds and it’s no wonder we have very few dictatorships in real life. If tyranny isn’t for you, I will explore different leadership styles in the future: tyrannies, multi-leader councils and of course… communism!

I understand this entry actually raises more questions than it answers, and for that I apologise. I will hopefully fix that with the next few articles that I write. The next one will focus on the most evil of all MMORPG beasties: the mighty destroyer of guilds… fair loot distribution!

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.

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.

If you are more interested in the players found in hardcore guilds, you might find this article more interesting.

Following on from my article on who plays in hardcore guilds, I’m now going to discuss the kinds of players you will find in a normal, World of Warcraft raiding guild. I’ve discussed tips and tricks for pushing a raiding guild’s progress, and I’ve also touched on what it’s like being a guild leader of a raiding guild, but now I’m going to try and get inside the heads of raiders. Not the hardcore, very-little-going-on-in-real-life raiders — the normal raiders. The raiders with jobs, or lots of school work to do, or even kids to care for.

Normal raiders make up about 40% of WoW’s subscription base, so obviously it’s going to be quite hard to boil down just a few player types — but I’ll try my best. Hopefully you’ll be able to spot yourself, but don’t worry if you can’t — there are always exceptions!

As with my my other article on hardcore raiders, I’ll be utilising Bartle’s player type system to give more abstract classifications of each type. I’ll also be using David Kolb’s research (further studied by Peter Honey and Alfred Mumford) into ‘Learning Style‘ — the way in which certain people learn in different ways — either through theorycrafting, wiping, or a mix of the two! Due to the less specific nature of raiding guilds (almost anyone can be in a raiding guild) some of the classifications might be a little lacking.

Enough preamble — let’s get right into the kinds of players in raiding guilds!

The 4 player types found in raiding guilds

Raiding guilds, being made  up a much larger percentage of the player base, tend to contain a huge variety of gamers. Unlike hardcore guilds, raiding guilds can contain any kind of player. The actual playing of WoW raiding content is very easy — the hard bit is the logistics and continued, 5-raids-a-week effort.  Raiding guilds consist of what’s left after you remove everyone capable of raiding in a hardcore capacity, which means you’re not generally left with very good gamers! Luckily, you don’t need to excel to progress; you just need a loyal bunch of players, and some perseverance!

What are the 4 player types? Let’s start with the most despised:

The Visitor

I thought I would leap right in there with the most hated and reviled of all raiding player types: the player that’s only hanging around for a while. The player that thinks he’s way too good to be in your pokey, up-and-coming raiding guild — you’re merely a stepping stone for the Visitor, he’s on his way to the top baby!

• Bartle Player Type: Opportunists, with a few Planners thrown in (the more intelligent ones). Maybe one or two Networkers (but they are rare, and would probably already be in a hardcore guild).
• Kolb Learning Style: Being such a variety of types, it’s hard to pigeon-hole The Visitor into a learning style. In theory, they could be any of the hardcore raiding types, just waiting for their moment to come!

The Visitor is an odd ball. They are likely to be your best gamers, as they are looking to be ’spotted’ by top guilds; but at the same time, any investment you make into a Visitor is most likely going to be a waste (in the long run!) It’s not uncommon for a Visitor to constantly remind you that he’s only in the guild while he looks for a ‘better guild’ more suited to his awesome abilities. Visitors will sometimes be complete underachievers, knowing that their efforts feel wasted on a normal raiding guild.They are probably of the opinion that they can do more damage than the next player with one hand behind their back.

What To Avoid

Visitors are likely to be prima donnas — they want special treatment for being a cut above the rest of your guild. Sadly, you probably should give them special treatment. It really depends on how keen on progress you are — Visitors could provide a quick boost in progress, but then a drop in progress and morale when they ultimately leave. Visitors are likely to be the best damage dealers in your raid (much like the Killer in a hardcore raid) — but in the vast majority of cases, there’s a reason they’re still not in a hardcore guild. If you treat a Visitor with respect, and make sure they get the loot that’s rightfully theirs, they might just hang around! They might leave and rejoin a few times, but that’s just part of the ‘experience’ in a normal raiding guild.

The Loyal Soldier

These are the raiding guild’s equivalent of the Silent But Deadly hardcore guild member — your stalwart members that have been in the guild since the start, and won’t depart until the guild disbands. If you need someone to boost you through a low-level instance on an alt, the Loyal Soldier is the player most likely to help you;  if you need some kind of old reagent, they most likely have a stockpile on one of their many, many alts.

• Bartle Player Type: Again, a large split between Scientists, Friends and Networkers — the implicit types. These are generally quiet, reclusive types that you will rarely notice causing a fuss in general chat.
• Kolb Learning Style: Likely to be Divergers. They might not raid a lot, so they spend more time thinking about their raiding experience. Reading strategies might be very dull to them, though.

We are talking here about players that joined a guild back when they were low-level and running around The Barrens. Perhaps they are real life friends of the guild leader, or they have some other emotional tie to the guild — either way, they are likely only playing the game because of the guild. Raiding is probably a relatively new thing for them — they are likely to be incredibly experienced with ‘old world’ content and dungeoneering.

What To Avoid

While loyal, don’t expect Loyal Soldiers to be the best raiders. They are likely to be ’slow and steady’, preferring to try things a few times, and then digest what just happened. They don’t want to wipe and wipe for 4 hours — they would rather crack open a beer, have a laugh with their old friends, and try to kill something by the end of the raid.

The only real risk is that their gradual accumlation of gear and experience make these quite prized by hardcore guilds. If a Loyal Soldier suddenly has the plan to join a hardcore guild, there could be trouble. They will very rarely leave, but if they do it could be very bad for guild morale — and the huge loss of experience and gear is obviously detrimental too.

The Troll

First of all, apologies to our blue-and-green skinned friends the trolls (did they have a run-in with nuclear waste or something?) I am talking here about Trolls; internet trolls. These are the equivalent of the hardcore ‘Dramatic’ player type… but unfortunately they don’t have hardcore raiding to focus their attention on. Their excess energy inevitably leaks out as trolling. Forum trolling, general chat trolling, guild chat trolling — you name it, the Troll probably spends more time talking crap than anythinig else.

• Bartle Player Type: Griefers and Politicians. Their time is probably equally spent between ganking lowbies and holding court in a major city, or gneeral chat.
• Kolb Learning Style: Raiding is a bit of a joke for a Troll — the learning style is thus a bit hard to pin down.

Sadly (or happily, if you can keep them in check!) every guild has a few of these, with raiding guilds likely to have more than their fare share. Trolling is normally a sure sign of chronic underachieving. Chances are they were once a  failed hardcore raider and had to give up, perhaps due to not having time, or simply not being good enough. Some trolls are ‘home bred’ though — they are just the cocky, social types that treat WoW more as a big, shiny soap box than a video game.

What To Avoid

Raiding guilds don’t tend to have as stringent recruiting policies as hardcore raiding guilds, so inevitably a few Trolls will sneak into your ranks. In some cases though, they are disaffected Visitors or Loyal Soldiers — bored with the game, or upset with Blizzard for some reason. Trolls are likely to be return customers — coming and going, quitting and resubscribing. Trolls aren’t a happy bunch — you probably want to avoid keeping Trolls in your raid group, incase  their sadness spreads. They might be funny for a while, but eventually they’ll get on the nerves of the other members!

The Newbie

Making up the rest of a raiding guild’s ranks are the newbies. Undergeared and inexperienced, the Newbie is a lovely blank slate, tabula rasa, just ready to be scrawled all over by the guild leader, and anyone else in the guild that likes creating an impression.

• Bartle Player Type: Let’s say their player type is as-yet undefined. They might have some tendencies, but Newbies, nowadays, are probably first-time MMORPG players, still discovering their likes and dislikes.
• Kolb Learning Style: Could be any of the four… you’ll find out in time!

A Newbie is very much what you make of him or her. WoW is an incredibly easy game, so a Newbie could easily flourish into a beautiful young raider and almost certainly into a Loyal Soldier, given time.

What To Avoid

Newbies need guidance — lots of it! Obviously it’s very much a mixed bag; you might be nuturing a Troll or Visitor, but there’s no real way to tell at this early stage. You want to avoid bringing them into contact with Trolls or Visitors, lest the early seeds of destruction are planted. Encourage the guild to communicate well with Newbies — answer their questions, help them gear up. There’s a chance they will fly the nest when they grow up, but that’s a risk you’ll always have to take in raiding guilds.

The fate of the raiding guild

Unfortunately, as the intermediate step between casual and hardcore guilds, a raiding guild is likely to be treated as a stepping stone. It’s a sad fate for the guild leader and his Loyal Soldiers, but it’s something, as time goes by, that you will come to terms with. A new instance is released; you’ll lose players. Have a large argument with a player? He’ll leave. Other than Loyal Soldiers, raiding guilds do not have great player retention — the grass is always greener on the other side, remember?

So the key, then, to surviving as a raiding guild is to convert your players into Loyal Soldiers. I have seen some raiding guilds survive successfully since WoW’s release by keeping an active core of Loyal Soldiers and steadily subverting Newbies into the loyal and adoring fold.

How best then to go about making the most of your guild and its players?

• Visitors will make up a sizable portion of your guild and must be looked after. If you are a new guild, there’s a chance your entire guild will be made of Visitors — if that’s the case, it’s the guild leader’s sole responsibility to convert these to Loyal Soldiers. In older guilds you should have a strong enough feeling of comraderie and loyalty that Visitors are either converted automatically, or they ultimately flee. Sadly, they are likely to be your best raiders — so if you wish to progress quickly, you are going to have to gear them up, and pray.
• Loyal Soldiers might be either rare, or make up almost your entire guild. When the other 3 types have quit, this is what you’re left with — a slow and plodding core of loyal members. Loyal Soldiers don’t make the greatest raiders, but they do make good officers. They are ideal at converting Newbies into future Loyal Soldiers, and as such are perfectly suited to being class leaders, or recruitment officers.
• Trolls are thankfully quite rare (because you’ve kicked them all, right?!) and merely serve as comic relief. While they’re on your side (and trolling other guilds/players) it can be great to keep 1 or 2 in the guild or raid. They are often quite smart, and won’t be awful at the game (they are quite experienced, don’t forget!) — they just find trolling more interesting than doing lots of damage, or healing properly. The moment they turn inwards and start trolling guild chat or festering discontent and spreading FUD… it’s time to cut your losses and remove them.
• Ah, Newbies… Fresh like the morning, dewy grass. Unsullied and pure, a blank slate, just waiting for a charismatic leader or Loyal Soldier to come along and teach them some tricks. Newbies are the lifeblood of your raiding guild; they must be recruited regularly! Meet a nice, new player while in a 5-man dungeon? Recruit! As I said earlier, WoW is very easy, and almost anyone with half a brain can raid successfully — they just need to be taught how to raid and what their role is. An easy-going and understanding nature will help nuture these Newbies into loyal, life-long members of your guild. The risk with Newbies is that if you don’t get to them first, someone else might — a Troll, or a rival guild. There needs to be lots of hand-holding, like with a child!

Notes

Raiding guilds have an awful lot of caveats attached to them. Raiding guilds can be groups of real life friends, or they can be formed by a lot of spam in general chat. This wide gamut of roots means that your raiding guild might be made up of completely different types to the ones listed here. What I’ve tried to do is illustrate what a standard raiding guild might contain. A guild that’s levelled together, and started raiding, or perhaps a group of friends that have recruited a few more players to do some raiding content.

Raiding guilds, due to their wildly varying roots and nature, tend to be quite a ‘hands on’ experience to lead. While a hardcore guild is generally self-governed by players that all have the same purpose — to be number one! — a raiding guild isn’t quite so lucky. Raiding guilds will lose players to other raiding guilds, and they will lose a lot of experienced and geared Visitors to hardcore guilds.

The good news is — and really, it’s good news — in a raiding guild it’s the spirit and fun of the game that keeps people playing and not the progress! Your Loyal Soldiers aren’t going to leave you if you fail to kill a boss. Your Newbies won’t be any the wiser. Your Trolls will continue to laugh and bicker, no matter how far you progress.

If you lose a player, that’s generally a good thing. It means they didn’t want to be a part of your guild and community. Do you really want a player like that in your guild? Remember, WoW is easy — in a raiding guild, everyone is replaceable! Go and find someone nicer to replace them with!

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.

If you liked reading this, there is more to read about WoW, guilds and raiding in the archive!

There is one common trait among all guilds, of every size and all descriptions: players quit. They can suffer burnout, or perhaps start a new job that prevents them from playing, but at the end of the day the result is the same: you’ve lost a member of the community, and perhaps the raid team too. In this article, I’ll try to explain the main cause of players quitting, and how to prevent it from happening in the first place!

Obviously, you can’t prevent players from ever quitting (though that would be nice!). The only way to counteract such losses is through recruitment (at least until we can have virtual children…) The method of recruitment will vary from guild to guild and server to server, but I hope to cover most of the basics in this article; I’ll even try to throw in a few ‘veteran tips’ that might give your guild a slight advantage over the rest!

Quitters

Eventually, everyone quits. Awfully philosophical, I know. At some stage, whether it’s tomorrow, or 50 years from now, the game ceases to be a game, and you quit. Humans aren’t very good at playing ‘non games’ for long: there has to be some kind of tangible improvement, some kind of fun. Without a game, what’s the point? Without some kind of competition, or some end goal to strive towards, why bother?

The real life equivalent would probably be suicide, which thankfully isn’t as prevalent as people quitting an online game: Interpersonal ties, those ties that keep you going and striving for success, are much stronger when you see and talk to someone face-to-face. There are also a much larger abundance of games to play in real life; a much vaster range of challenges and aspirations that you might one day achieve.

This is where MMORPGs, like World of Warcraft, suffer: they have a finite number of games; a limited number of possibilities. In the case of WoW, the world might be very large indeed, with a lot of possible developer- and player-created games, but at the end of the day you are still bound to the world created by Blizzard. In real life, there are almost no limitations — if you see the top of a mountain, you can almost certainly go there, even if it takes years of training. In a game, you can only go there if the designer hasn’t placed an invisible wall in the way. Ultimately, you have to play the game they want you to play.

Inevitably, when all of the content is exhausted (or you have exhausted everything that is fun), you quit.

You’re not going to stop everyone from quitting, but there are certainly some steps you can take to lessen the chances of it happening.

You must have fun

This is to both the players, and the guild leaders. You, as a player, must find the game fun. You, you grumpy, tyrannical guild leader, must make the game fun for the members of your guild! When the game stops being fun, you can guarantee that people will start quitting. It might be a slow trickle at first, but without any significant changes, that trickle will fast become a torrent of quitters.

MMOs in general, and WoW in specific tend to be fun — they are games after all! The problems normally arise when you’ve cleared all of the content and you’re eagerly awaiting the next patch from the developer. Sometimes, though, fun can be destroyed simply by wiping too much on a boss, or being demoted too many times by a power mad guild leader. I’ll break down the most common ways of destroying fun:

• Wiping is bad — I’m sure this comes as no surprise to any of you. Wiping is awfully testing on morale. As humans, we don’t mind repetitive actions, but there has to be observable progress over a span of a few wipes, or in the case of harder bosses, a few raids. Depending on the kind of guild or raid group, the average player tolerance to wipes will vary a lot, but in general wiping is very, very bad.
• Stagnation is bad – In the same vein as wiping repetitively without progress, stagnation is another huge cause of discontent. When the guild or raid is so static, so devoid of progress or simply without communication, it stagnates. People stop logging in, guild chat becomes quiet, and raids become just ‘yet another farm run’. Stagnation in itself isn’t entirely crippling, but it just happens to be the breeding ground of the next fun-destroying element:
• Drama – One of the most-used phrases thrown around in MMORPGs today is ‘drama’. Drama, in online games, is usually defined as the ‘aggravation of a situation’ and it’s often pointless, baseless aggravation too. As I was saying, stagnation is normally the cause of drama: dramatic players thrive in a stagnated (or simply stressed) guild environment. If you imagine a dark, lifeless pond, and then stir it around with a stick… that’s what drama often feels like in a guild. Smelly and nasty — and you can’t help but feel it was better to leave the pond unstirred.

These are the common causes of a drop in morale, the following discontent, and ultimately quitters. As with most things, it falls to the guild leader (or officers) to try and avoid such situations. The solutions are fairly simple:

• Reduce the impact of wipe-fests – Probably the best way to prevent player burnout is by making the hours spent wiping slightly less painful. You could introduce breaks every two hours, or you could promise only one wipe raid a week. Most guilds now provide repair funds and consumables for their raiders which reduces the strain of raiding by a huge amount. The only real cause of burnout today is ‘hard’ bosses — but if you play WoW, it sure seems Blizzard are trying to prevent the effect C’thun and Kael’thas had on hardcore raiding guilds. This article of mine has more detailed information on the topic of raiding, wiping and progressing.
• Stir things up before the drama queens can — In my previous example of a stagnated, dead pond being stirred, it was a dramatic player doing the stirring. They were adding their own bias to situations, and perhaps catching you, the guild leader, off-balance. The key here is to stir things up before the guild stagnates. Change the raiding schedule, or remove some of the raiders that have been holding you back! Perhaps organise a raid as level 1 gnomes on another server, or arrange a foot-race from Undercity to Booty Bay? It is nearly always the job of the guild leader to keep things fresh and interesting, so do it!
• Control the drama – Drama isn’t always bad! The wrong drama, at the wrong time, is bad. A bit of good drama never did a strong guild any harm, though! Depending on the ‘community level‘ of your guild, it might vary from guild to guild what you can actually get away with, but inspiring the members of your guild to discuss interesting topics can do a lot to develop the community, and at the same time is fun! Be careful with censorship too; obviously heavy anti-guild sentiment might need to be controlled, but also you might find that the rest of the guild gangs up on the drama queen — and there’s almost nothing more fun than coming together as a community to play ‘defeat the anti-guild forum troll’!Worth noting is that drama involving other guilds is always a good thing. If you heard about another guild having problems with a particular encounter, or with a troublesome raider, tell your guild! It’ll be great for morale, especially if you’ve been wiping on a boss for hours.

If you take these steps to make the game fun again — or even prevent the game from becoming boring in the first place! — you should have a lot less problems with quitters, which means you won’t need the next section quite so much!

Recruitment

Whether you’re a casual, raiding or hardcore guild, the bread and butter of your survival is recruitment. Recruitment is the only way you will continue to have fun and progress, and as such it is vital you understand how to control the ‘newbie hose’ of recruitment. You need to know which direction to spray it in, and when turn it on, or off.

It isn’t purely the role of the guild leader or officers to manage recruitment: it is something for every member to keep in mind. When your guild needs a replacement, before next week, chances are someone in the guild knows a suitable replacement. Of course, it’s ideal if each class leader knows every possible recruit, but that rarely happens (if you have a class leader that does know every possible recruit, look after them!)

Let’s start with the basics of recruitment.

When should you recruit?

Most guilds make the big mistake of waiting until too late to recruit; waiting one more day might make the difference between the life and death of your guild! Whether you’re a casual or raiding guild, it’s important to recruit before you lose the ‘critical mass’ of players — whatever that number of players might be!

A casual guild is probably even more fickle than their raiding or hardcore counterparts. If shit hits the fan in a casual guild, there’s usually very little to prevent players from just jumping ship and heading to another guild. In raiding-oriented guilds there is usually the soft, velvet-gloved, addictive allure of epics that keeps players hanging on for a little longer — but rest assured, people will pack their bags and run away; they’ll run very fast indeed if they think the guild has begun its dying throes.

When is it best to recruit then? Early.Very, very early. I’ve already written a bit on the size and attendance of raiding groups, and the best way to manage recruitment is to keep a very close eye on attendance. As soon as a player starts dipping below the desired percentage (80%) you should be looking for possible replacements. You should be incredibly cautious of ‘repeat offenders’ — those players that, seemingly by magic, skip raids over and over (usually due to real life commitments). These players will likely never be reliable, and in serious raiding guilds should be replaced!

In general, recruitment is a lot about gut instinct. After a while, you should be able to predict the ebb and flow of players: the inevitable loss of a few players after you finish an instance; the handful of players that you will always lose after the summer holiday. The start of the school year is another common event which will force you to recruit — but no matter the occasion, do it sooner, rather than later! If you’ve had to cancel a few raids, you were too slow!

Who should you recruit?

If we’re being WoW-specific, this question is quite easy to answer: you can recruit almost anyone. Other games might be harder (in fact, they’re probably all harder than WoW), so the recruitment criteria might be a little more stringent. With WoW though,  you should almost always recruit first and consider their actual abilities afterward.

The following is the order of importance for desirable traits in new recruits:

1. Not a dick
2. Can attend your guild’s raiding schedule (or whatever kind of schedule your guild has)
3. Relevant experience
4. Gear (or whether they have the right tools for the task)

Top guilds will obviously be a lot more choosy in who they pick up, but they also have a huge pool of possible recruits available to them. Most guilds can not pick and choose; they just have to take what they’re given. Most guilds should stick to recruiting friends of other members, which is often a sure-fire way to find non-dicky players and also work on the feeling of community and inclusion the same time. It’s not uncommon for top guilds to be made up entirely of groups of real life friends for this reason! Personal recommendation goes a long way; not having to rely on relatively-unknown forum applicants is highly desirable.

As I’ve said quite a few times now, WoW is an easy game. The number one reason for not succeeding, progressing or surviving is: not having enough players. Don’t fall into the same trap that so many other guilds have tried to work around in vain. You really can recruit just about anyone — as long as they’re not a dick!

Finally, how do you recruit?

This is the step that most guilds stumble on. You know you’re struggling and you can feel progress and morale slipping away. You know what kind of player would fit into your guild, but… there are no applications! Why aren’t people APPLYING? Don’t people know that we need a new mage? Don’t people know that we could be the best guild on the server if we just picked up the right tank?

Fortunately, all of these questions are probably caused by the same, easily-fixed problem: you are unknown. Yep, that’s why no one has applied to your awesome guild — no one knows that you’re recruiting. Rectifying this rather sizable issue is thankfully very simple: spam.

I know, I know, everyone hates trade-channel spam, but it really is your best tool to get the word out there that you need recruits. Make some macros and use them regularly (a few times an hour is enough!) For extra potency, send the macros to other people in your guild too! Assuming you have a good reputation, you should quickly notice a burst of fresh applications. (The exception to this rule is congested or dead servers, but I won’t go into that here.)

If the idea of spamming trade chat doesn’t appeal (and some guilds might fancy themselves slightly more ‘upper class’), you could also encourage all of your guild members to talk to their friends and poke them to join. If talking and poking isn’t enough, get them to start emotionally blackmailing those same friends — eventually they’ll crack and apply, trust me!

Posting on your realm’s forum is also a good idea (but I’m sure you’ve already done that, right?) Make sure to include all of the perks that members of your guild get, such as repair funds, raiding consumables, a forum, voice communications… and whether you have a tabard or not!

Tips & Tricks

Consider this section as ‘extra reading’, or a ‘bonus feature’. Either way, what you’ve read so far is more than enough to keep a casual or raiding guild alive and healthy. What follows is a few tips that might be of use to hardcore guilds, or for guild leaders that enjoy the politics of the game as much as, or more, than the actual raiding. These are also almost entirely for guild leaders, and probably won’t be very useful to the members of a guild.

• Maintain friends in other guilds – Being inherently social games, most MMORPG players like to make friends: buddies they can talk to when the going gets rough, or ask for advice on particular encounters. There’s no reason for your friends to all be from your own guild! Make friends with the officers and raiders of other guilds — or even other guild leaders!
• Similarly, keep communication channels open – Always keep your ear to the ground. Listen to what your guild members have to say, no matter how mundane it might seem to be. The web of player interconnections in MMOs like WoW  is so vast that most players are only ever 2 degrees of separation apart. This means that there is a strong chance that even if you are not friends with a possible recruit, someone in your guild probably is. Utilise and leverage those relationships to get the right players into your guild.
• Politics, and the knife in the back – I’m starting to get into territory that will no doubt cause a little uneasiness, which is no surprise as I am now talking about the wholesale slaughter of other guilds! Turning one guild’s misfortune into your own fortuitous windfall! I am of course talking about poaching important players from other guilds.Poaching itself is nothing special — almost everyone you recruit will be from another guild! — but I’m talking here about poaching a key player in another guild: their main tank, or perhaps an important social figure.  This requires a combination of having good friends, keeping an eye on ‘current affairs’, and being charismatic enough to lure someone into your guild; someone that is likely very loyal to their current guild.I’m not going to go into the details of poaching as it’s a topic best-suited to an article on the sociological and psychological stresses on the denizens of virtual worlds, and how to manipulate them.

At the end of the day, you must remember that as a guild leader, you are in a unique position. You are at the top of a pyramid: the end-point of all activity and communication below you. It is your job as guild leader to sift through the thousands of pieces of data available to you and find the important bits; it’s your job to differentiate between the pimples of harmless whining, and those little blackheads that will eventually develop into nasty, pussy spots that’ll make your life hell.

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.

For as long as we’ve been human one resource has always been valued above all others: knowledge. The success and progression of civilisation is measured in just one way: the extent of our knowledge.

We pride ourselves on how developed we are. How much more more civil we are compared to our barbaric ancestors. We sure have come a long way from the grunting, cave-dwelling proto-human. Guns. Medicine. Democracy, equality, liberty; these concepts, these inventions are fine examples of our ever-expanding body of knowledge, our scientific research and the evolution of thought.

Civilisation is like a machine, with each and every one of us playing the role of cog or spring in the great, universal machine. It spans the complete evolution of humanity through time and space and, if we avoid extinction, it will be everlasting.

And that’s how we power this machine: knowledge. Knowledge goes in one end: ‘metal conducts electricity’ — and out the other end comes invention: ‘computers’. Grossly simplified but you get the idea. This machine needs to be fed constantly. It doesn’t differentiate between new data or rehashed, time-worn knowledge: that’s what makes it so devastating! It creates and destroys with ambivalence. Cultures, ideologies, religions; all have fallen or been cut down into their constituent parts only to be reabsorbed — reconstituted.

It seems to do OK with regurgitated, reabsorbed data as long as there’s something new being added from time to time. Imagine a big cauldron of soup — wouldn’t it get a little boring if you never added a new ingredient? The soup would probably dry out even. Our greatest gains definitely come from pouring new knowledge in.

And where to find the new knowledge? Exclusively within the domain of exploration. Pushing the boundaries is the greatest thing we can do to perpetuate the machine of civilisation, of humanity.

That’s the crazy thing: all of the knowledge we need to survive is already out there waiting to be discovered. It’s like turning over rocks and finding wriggly worms and millipedes. It’s like turning over a rock and finding data that solves an unknown — ah, so that’s the solution… Eureka! But these rocks might be at the top of the highest peaks or the trough of the lowest marine trenches. These figurative rocks might be in the petri dishes of science labs or on the whiteboards of a particle physicists.

Wherever they are, these rocks need to be turned. It doesn’t matter by who, ultimately, as it all becomes part of our great machine. The magic becomes mundane and the entirety of civilisation surges forward, simply by flipping a stone and reporting your findings.

Problems arise when people stop exploring, when we cease pushing against the boundary. The machine continues to churn — it can’t stop — but with a lack of new data errors begin to appear. Our world-view begins to stagnate. Data is re-analysed and new, erroneous, contrived conclusions are drawn. False progress, bureaucracy, fads and pseudo-science can grip society in a stranglehold.

Before our very eyes exploration has become the black sheep of governmental spending: Research, science, space travel and the like all shunted onto the back burner and the back of our mind. There is knowledge out there just waiting to be discovered and assimilated into our culture, knowledge that will propel our civilisation into the next era. But it’ll have to wait. We have more pressing issues at hand apparently.

I’ve been tackling the subject of authority (who or what you trust when seeking the answer to a question) and knowledge (a working, true data set) for a while now. I haven’t really gone into ethics because it’s a sticky one. I’m going to try it now, in a couple of articles.

* * *

I think it’s painfully apparent to everyone by now that technology itself is not a good thing.

Technology is merely a tool. Really, that’s all. Technology is a tool that can be used for good or bad. In the future, technology might gain sentience and become much more than a tool, but that’s outside the scope of this entry because… well… arguing something that may or may not come true is hard work. And I’m not a sci-fi author.

There’s an old, trite argument, but it illustrates my point: guns don’t kill people. People kill people. Technology is the same thing, but because inventions are new and shiny, people are mostly blind to its nefarious uses; it lacks the evil connotations of the gun that we’ve developed over hundreds of years. When the gun was first invented it wasn’t ‘bad’ either — just new, and very cool.

Technology — the idea of new inventions, modifications, enhancements – really is the same thing as the humble gun. I mean, if you want proof, a gun is technology. Weaponry is one of the longest chains of technological development in history! And it’s not abating either… it has a long way to go. I’m sure you’re aware of the tax money that goes into ‘defence’. Weapon technology has been the deciding factor of major wars and the continuation of empires and dynasties — having advanced weapons is (sadly?) probably the pinnacle of any given modern civilisation.

But because guns (and canons and muskets and rifles and…) have killed huge swathes of the population, does that make technology bad?

There are literally millions (billions?) of people that would say guns and weapons are Bad Things. They kill people, ergo… bad. Before guns, we had swords, spears, slings — were they also bad?

How about fire? Was Prometheus, the lad that stole fire from the Gods, the greatest war criminal of all time? Without fire, almost everything you see today wouldn’t exist. Chemical energy is the end of that technology chain, and we frickin’ worship chemical energy.

That’s the thing — without fire, that desk in front of you wouldn’t exist. That’s how technology works — it’s omnipotent and omnipresent. You can’t staunch the flow of one technology and expect to carry on living the life you live.

Without fire, we would have burnt out [hah -- frozen to death more likely] and gone extinct a long time ago. Without spears, we would’ve starved. Without guns we would’ve perished in wars.

You see how I keep using the word ‘we’? It’s a selfish thing, eh? Man makes fire because he doesn’t want to freeze. Selfish, selfish, selfish. Man fashions a spear because without it, he uses more energy hunting than he gains from the animal’s flesh. Man crafts a gun because it lets him kill — or threaten — at range, without putting himself at risk. SELFISH!

But what’s the other option? No technology? No fire? No human race? Just step to the side and make way for another master species? How on earth are we ever going to agree to that? No, we can’t stop progressing — that’s one thing we can’t do. We might nuke ourself in the process, like so many civilisations before us, but it’s better than standing still, stagnating, dying.

We can agree then that technology isn’t a good thing itself, but something so intrinsic to human survival that we can’t imagine life without it, without tools. But as always, when anything involves humans, it’s more complicated than that.

With technology we create both solutions and problems. One caveman uses fire to cook his food while another uses it to brand dissident villagers. You keep a gun in the house to dissuade burglars, I keep a gun to shoot Negroes. While one scientist is planning clean, sustained energy from nuclear fission, another is working under the duress of an evil mastermind that wants to nuke us to smithereens.

Thus there are some that think technology has lowered our quality of life — that technology is a bad thing — though that’s impossible if you take ‘technology’ to mean any and every tool we’ve ever fashioned. So they probably mean ‘recent technology’ — the atomic bomb, the Internet, sports cars, Facebook, etc.

And maybe they have a point. You’d never think of a telephone as a bad thing, right? But the Internet? Maybe. Fire’s a good thing — but weapons of mass destruction? Probably not. They’re both advancements on the same technological line

It’s too unknown. The rules are unknown, the lines are blurred. There have been failed technologies in the past