Altitis

And here we are, on the brink of 2009, and as usual, it’s time to look back at what changes the year brought.

One year ago, the hot topic in the WoW blogosphere was still the PvE / PvP opposition centered around the notion of Welfare epics. When I wrote my closing post on the matter, I didn’t yet measure how different 2008 was going to be – not only has the topic practically vanished, but as Megan astutely points out, the notion of Welfare epics nowadays could, if used at all, be applied very readily to raiding, whereas PvP gear is currently a lot harder and longer to aquire.

The one thing which hasn’t changed though is that the term is still being used by certain people to demean the achievements of those who are following a different path from theirs, one they deem inferior. 

2008 was largely dominated by the long Wait for the Lich King, and like the end of 2006, the controversies have centered around the hardcore / casual divide and the raiding scene. One thing which has changed drastically though is the reputation of the few dominating figures. In 2006, even me (then still raiding) was following the race to the Naxx world first with interest. Death and Taxes and Nihilum were in a neck-to-neck race and most people were cheering them on. Even if we weren’t directly affected, we could sympathise with all uberguild’s dismay at the reduction from 40-men to the 25-men raiding format.

Two years later, Death and Taxes has suffered from problems but has at least exited the immediate consciousness of the average player rather gracefully. Their opponent, though, through countless name changes, ugly drama, questionable sponsorships but foremost through a series of graceless and classless public tantrums about the difficulty of the game, haven’t just tarnished their name but in the end effect massively diminished the interest of the community in the life and adventures of the überguilds. In my mind they have become like the spoiled, rotten elites living lavishly and criticizing the taste of this year’s caviar and champagne when the unwashed masses are having sausage and beer. In the most ironic development, while they were wallowing in their pride and spitting at the rest of the gamers (with their dwindling cohorts of me-tooers), the world first for the currently most difficult raid achievement in the game, killing Sartharion on 10-men with 3 drakes up, was snatched up by Method.

In the meantime, titles and mounts for PvE feats have become a lot more commonplace, and the introduction of the achievement system has brought an entirely new dimension to certain aspects of the game. Whether by a bit of an accident or clear design, achievements don’t just give raiders more elements to compare and measure up against each other but also allow for different grades of challenges for farmed content. A bit like all those RPGs with several party members where players have developped additional challenges (single character, low level, gametime etc…) but formalized in a quite addictive structure.

I can’t help but wonder how my old 2007 antagonist Stop the Warrior views today’s game. Might give way to an interesting argument.

So here we are, on the brink of the new year. Last night, Steptoe remarked that this was the most hardcore evening he’d ever seen me play: we ran 5 instances in a row together. Which is indeed more than I have ever done in this game. That being said, it was 2 times Violet Hold, Drak’Tharon followed by another pair of Violet Hold runs (Steptoe wanted the plate pantaloons off the voidwalker boss), and Violet Hold isn’t exactly a long isntance – according to my Blessings timers, it takes slightly less than 24 minutes from buffing to exit. It was quite a profitable evening for my paladin, too, with a couple of nice drops.

Steptoe has taken to taking with his Death Knight and is doing well. Let’s also immediatly put one notion to rest: on leveling instances, you do not need to be crit immune as a Death Knight, far from it. Steptoe was level 75 and his gear was around 435ish defense after he got the legplates, with a combined avoidance of about 40%. The healer was a level 74 priest, who didn’t really have too much of a hard time apparently (and since we ran UK the night before when Steptoe was only around 410 defense and the guy came back, that speaks for itself), and throughout the evening the amount of free FoLs I was tossing the tank’s way have decreased quite a bit.

We had two wipes throughout the 5 runs, one early in Drak’Tharon because sometimes a lifetime of experience in not standing in stuff isn’t enough to recognize the stuff you shouldn’t stand in, the second one in VH on the netherstalker boss because of an unfortunate conjunction of me getting hit by an energy sphere about a half second before critting with judgement of blood. Wipe by Bloodicide. Had to happen once.

Regarding Ret performance, I’m a bit peeved about where I was sitting on damage meters. Oh, I came out on top in Drak’Tharon Keep, that one being an undead-heavy instance, no contest. The first two Violet Hold runs, though, I was only third (not by a large measure but still), behind a mage and Steptoe, and in the last two runs, I really had to work my arse off to keep on top against a level 75 boomkin, including eating AP food.

In the end, some gear upgrades, and I dinged Coldweather Flying in the middle of the last run. 3 more levels to 80. Still with about 20 quests in Dragonblight to go, that’s just three zones I’ve seen and used so far. Glad to have my epic fyling back though.

And this concludes my last 2008 post. Whether you level, raid, PvP, and do it casually, softcore or hardcore, I wish you all a very merry evening and a happy new year. To 2009, and may your chosen activities in game and in Real Life bring you joy and merryment.

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Bad things tend to happen when Steptoe and me try to get creative. To wit:

… And as a quick survey of the armory showed afterwards, we’re so original there’s three other guilds in EU by that name.

Oh well.

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As most of you will have seen already, Kil’Jaeden is down, and the PvE content of the Burning Crusade is now complete.

Two things strike me, first, it was SK Gaming who got the world first, putting an end to 25 months of Nihilum dominance. Congratulations.

The second thing is that KJ fell (again) in less than one week. Thanks to the gate system, Blizzard basically ensured that Sunwell Plateau would artificially remain unvanquished for 10 weeks, but in practice, the instance would probably have been cleared within 4 weeks without gates.

Now a couple of years ago, I would probably have jumped to the conclusion that spending all that development time on the top content to see it eaten up in a month was overkill, catering to 0.1% of the playerbase for very little additional content. But in reality, this kind of discourse is almost always tied to the notion that the casual content comes up short (something I may have been guilty of myself in the past), a notion which is only true in the eye of the beholder. In practice, lots of content has been added for casual players as well, and while old Azeroth isn’t really being given much love these days, little touches here and there still happen.

In SK Gaming’s own assessment, despite falling in 5 days, Kil’Jaeden is the hardest boss in the game, and perfectly tuned to demand the best a player can give. Contrast this with Naxxramas, which took a couple of months to clear, how do you reconcile that difference?

Well, I do believe the relatively short time between a boss’ gate opening and its first kill is actually speaking less about blizzard’s devs and more about top raiding. Let me venture an educated guess here, but to me the 10-20 guilds forming the world first contenders have mostly reached the game engine’s limits itself, a point where no matter what combination of methods are being coded, they can recognize the pattern, relate to a previous boss fight, and devise the appropriate counter almost naturally (if I liken this to the Treck borg, I’m gonna sound like the ultimate geek). There’s probably a point where stuff like not standing in burning vortexes, clicking on spawned thingies, dealing with nasty adds, handling aggro resets, positioning the raid properly, not staying around your guildies when you’re about to explode, managing fear, composing with an  enrage timer, decursing, healing and dpsing according to whatever situation becomes natural.

In a similar vein, one thing about having Altitis is that the newbie zones is probably what you will have visited more often than anything else – I sure did. The draenei and blood elf starter zones are something I’d qualify as both very well done and faster to finish even on the first run-through than the original ones. And that isn’t just because the zones were done with a lot more polish than their predecessors, but also because there’s only so much you can do in terms of newbie quests before the player recognizes and reacts to patterns. Let’s face it, there’s only one single questline in the draenei and belf zones which provides original components, the Stillpine Furblog chain in Azuremist Isle, and even that one, in the end, amounts to little more than fedex and kill.

I think (but feel free to tell me just how much I’m talking out of my arse) it’s pretty much the same with boss fights. The limits nowadays are the game engine proper, but also the imagination of the devs – there might still be some mechanisms to be devised to innovate on boss fights, but in the end, it probably becomes harder and harder to find new stuff which can be countered with more than one specific raid composition, allows for more than just one set of cookie-cutter approaches, and is more than “chug enough of the right type of consumables to beat”.

The bottom line is that this relatively short time to clear the hardest bosses in the game demonstrates, in practice even more than in marketing speak, that we have indeed reached the end of TBC, in the sense that only the new skills and talents WotLK will ship with could provide room for new mechansism and types of boss fights.

Even then, I’m not sure there will be enough novelty and variety available to dispel a feeling of “more of the same”, a complaint I’ll go on record predicting will become much more pervasive in the top raiding circles once Wrath is live. Something which, unfortunately, will probably not be fixable within WoW, independently of the quality and challenge Wrath could provide. Should any of the competitors in the MMO market provide a decent endgame, I expect a good portion of the top raiders to leave for pastures providing a different shade of green.

Makes me pretty glad to have Altitis, actually. I’m nowhere near the point where I could reach the limit of what the game has to offer.

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From last Wednesday to Sunday, the Swiss canton Wallis was host to the biannual Alpine competition Patrouille des Glaciers. This is pretty much one of the biggest races in Ski-Touring, an otherwise not very widely-known sport combining running, mountain climbing and skiing.

I have a certain fondness for this race, not least because two years ago my annual tour of duty in the Swiss military had my unit participate in building and managing the communication network used both for the race organization and participant safety. To set the backdrop of the race, a couple of numbers:

The competition, originally a military event which was meant to verify the fitness of our mountain troops during and after WW2, has been relaunched in 1983 and is open to civilian and military teams. There are actually two routes available, the “grande Patrouille” or long route, which goes from Zermatt to Verbier, and the “petite Patrouille” or short route, going from Arolla to Verbier (Arolla being one of the checkpoints for the long route).

A couple of figures to give the scale of the race:

• The short route is 26km long but spans altitude changes of +1881m / – 2361m for a flat distance equivalent of 53km
• The long route is 53km long and spans altitude changes of +3994m / -4120m for a flat distance equivalent of 110km
• The winners for the short route close the distance in about 3h of time, whereas in order to participate the teams should be able to run the distance in 8h30
• The male record for the long route stands at 6h 18 minutes since 2006 whereas the female record was broken this year and stands now at 7h53mins.
• There were 1412 teams of 3 registered this year, for 4236 participants. 1818 ran the long route, 2418 ran the short route
• Each team must cross the finish line with a distance below 100 meters between the first and the third member of the team.

What’s interesting with this event is that you have about 100 pro teams competing, the rest is comprised entirely of amateurs. The oldest participant I’ve heard of this year is 66 years old. The race is split across two nights, with teams starting in smaller groups at different times of the night. The long route starts in Zermatt at 10 pm, with additional starts given every hour until 3am. The short route starts in Arolla at 4am and has additional starts every 30 minutes until 6.30am.

In 2006, my own military unit, 200 people strong, was scattered all over the canton, with 6 manned and 7 unmanned stations to oversee during the whole event. We had 40 metric tonnes of equipment, which spanned a surface of half a football / soccer (depending on where you come from) field. Although military-grade equipment is particularly robust, we nonetheless had to arrange the exchange of key equipment pieces about every 1.5 days due to extreme temperature conditions (our highest relay was having some nice warm -30° C at some point). That wasn’t too bad though, as we were collaborating with one of the local civilian telcos who plugged into our network to provide GSM coverage for the participants. Contrary to us, their electricity generators were more sensitive to cold, and they had to worry about having a special and customized fuel mix available so that their own kit would continue to run in both extreme temperature and altitude conditions (ask any standard manufacturer of electronic devices, including computers, and you’ll find that their normal operating conditions are limited to 3000m in altitude, not to speak about temperatures of course. Good luck having LCD displays working in sub-zero temperatures).

All in all, our activity was taxing but very rewarding – contrary to what often happens during our annual tour of duty, we all worked in the certainty that our contribution wasn’t a waste of time (something which isn’t always as certain, which is a bit the curse of militia army systems). But enough of my military recollections, if you want interesting, funny and well-written accounts, BRK among others has much more interesting stories to tell than me.

What does this all have to do with raiding? Well, there are actually a couple of parallels between the Patrouille des Glaciers and raiding. First of, there’s only a small amount of teams which have a shot at winning the race – for the long route, the average amateur team takes about 10-11 hours from start to finish (up to 18ish for the last to cross the finish line) compared to the 6h and 18 minutes for the male record, a gap not unlike the difference between the guilds competing for world and server firsts, and all the other. The rest of the people race first and foremost for themselves, to overcome a challenge they have set to themselves.

From speaking to teams racing both in the short and the long route, the most common trait is that no matter their final standings, every single participant I’ve ever talked to (and I have both work colleagues and business partners racing) will always acknowledge the efforts made by everyone else. You would be extremely hard-pressed, for instance, to find someone racing on the long route to sneer at the teams running the short route. Or at those who, for whatever reasons, had to drop out. You’ll never find a team talking down the accomplishments of teams who started later in the night than them (it’s obviously a completely different matter to run through the night or through mostly daylight), or earlier when the snow conditions are better.

All the participants respect each others, because what counts for them is overcoming the challenge the mountain and the weather conditions present them with. Similarly you wont find any of the amateurs accusing the pro teams of cheating, doping or similar things, nor would you find a pro team talking down the amateurs because they run the route in twice or even thrice as long as they do.

Contrast that with raiding, in particular the competitive aspect of it. The tone, the mentality is, unfortunately, entirely different. Look at what happened recently on the Eredar Twins: When Nihilum announced their world first, the reaction of other guilds, including some of the future US-first holders, was a complete disgrace. From accusations of cheating to ugly US / EU stereotypes, non-stop play and other nasty things, to Nihilum’s own reply in kind, you’d be hard-pressed to find solidarity or respect as the dominant trait (though SK Gaming, who got the world second, was in fact extremely gracious about it, setting an example of a different attitude), many congratulation posts were also complemented with a couple of cheap shots.

This isn’t reserved to the World First race either – the vocal fringe of hardcore raiders often and routinely talk down and dismiss anyone else’s accomplishments in the game if they are even 15 minutes behind them, and God help them if they actually PvP or take advantage of badge loot or removed attunements to clear instances.

I’m mentioning raiding here but the same can be said, to a point, to arena play (and the delusion of turning it into an e-sport). There’s just something completely different in terms of spirit between the people who go out in the cold and harsh weather and accomplish a big physical effort, and us computer warriors pretending that our button-pressing skills are something particularly remarkable in the grand scheme of things.

That’s where much of the cultural disconnect happens between me and the more vocal fringe of the hardcore raiders. I value progress for itself, regardless of when it happens in the broader context of wowjutsu ranking. The important part, for me, is beating content or overcoming a ranking objective with online friends, and seeing content many won’t have access to (including myself for that matter). You do it for yourself first and foremost.

I believe the hardcore playing scene in WoW would greatly benefit from having a bit more sense of sportsmanship and fair play. That obviously ties into valuing other people’s honest efforts more rather than separating the world into elite and scrubs (where the cut is always made so that one is elite and those below scrubs, no matter where one stands).

One can always dream, of course.

All pictures courtesy of Patrouille des Glaciers www.pdg.ch copyright

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Since the test in its latest form is all the rage, I thought it would be interesting to see how I score these days on Dr. Bartle’s revised test.

I believe I first took the test in one of its early versions at Erwin Andreasen’s site, when my online gaming was in the text-rich world of MUDs. Back in the days (I do sound pedantically old, don’t I?) the test only scored the three dominant traits, and I came out as a SEA category – Socializer / Achiever as the major combination, Explorer as the minor figure (yes, unless my memory plays funny with me, the minor trait was in the middle in the initial versions of the test).

A good decade later, things have definitely changed, not just that my interests in life have evolved, but also because I added PvP to the thing I do and found out that I actually enjoy it a lot.

So today I get this:

ESKA

Achiever 60.00%, Explorer 86.67%, Killer 66.67%, Socializer 80.00%

Achiever went from the second most important trait to the least important. I think the results are spot on. While the quest for wearing leet purplez is something I don’t adhere to beyond simply seeing better gear as an enabler for other activities, I pride myself in being able to answer more questions about mechanisms or little-known things than my guildmates. The Killer trait acknowledges my interest in PvP as well, and I’ve talked about the importance of the social aspect of the game in the past.

Speaking of which, I recently reconnected with my old pre-TBC guild leader, an online acquaintance whom I consider as close to a friend as you can with people you’ve never met in person. Long story short, after chatting a while, I rolled a new mage and hooked up with his current guild on Dragonmaw EU – a PvP server (grumble. Wish I could have PCTed my belfadin over). Altitis is a relentless condition.

I also took the Online Gamer Playstyle Survey, and look what it found:

Organizer-Creator

This combination is also referred to as the Architect playstyle.
You are looking for a part of the virtual world to call your own. More than simply creating a guild or leading groups, you like to give people a sense of community. In games that allow you to create cities or environments for your guild, you’re likely to spend a lot of time customizing and tailoring it to the type of environment you want to have. You may also spend a lot of time outside of the game providing an Internet-based communication medium for your group.

That’s particularly interesting considering I ran (and still run) the guild fora for several of my previous guilds.

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The guild website I’m hosting hasn’t had a proper template refresh for over a year now, and revamping that one is next on my todo list. I am running it under the quite complete phpBB Plus package (made by the German phpBB community),  based on phpBB2.

In the meantime, though, phpBB3 has been released, and it has a couple of very interesting features making it worth sandboxing for a while.

First and foremost, it’s a lot simpler and easier to read the code, gone are all the good tables for layout old-style, and here comes modern fluid code based on <div> and CSS2. The Admin control panel is a lot better in my opinion, and the board is easier to manage.

For Portal functionality, mods (or hacks) are still under heavy development, but it looks like there should be two or three solid choices available within a few months.

That being said, there’s one feature included in the stock distribution which alone makes it definitely a very interesting proposition for a wow guild forum: the possibility to add new BB code tags on the fly, in a very nice, clean and simple editor.

The screenshot above show it all. And why is this handy for a WoW site? Item Popups.

So far, to have full item popus including proper rarity colouring, you had to spend quite some time to install ItemStats and get it to work. You could of course add a simple syndication script like those offered by wowdb or wowhead, and ask your forum users to manually colour the link, but that’s putting additional burden on the users. ItemStats, last time I played around with it, required even more tweaking when you wanted to make sure your item popups weren’t coming from Affinity Media sites (which I am boycotting).

Here it gets much simpler. Provided you have the item syndication script in the header of your active template, all you need to do to create a new tag for your item links is enter the following into the editor:

[item={TEXT1}]{TEXT2}[/item]

in the top field, and in the lower one:

<a class=”wowdb-item-full-small” href=”{TEXT1}”>{TEXT2}</a>

And there you go, you now have a functional [item] tag for your phpBB3 board. Of course, the above example is based on wowdb and if you opt for another source, specifics may vary, but I found the simplicity of it all pretty nifty.

For your guildies, all they have to do is look up the item in wowdb, then do [item="your link here"]itemname [/item] and it will get the proper popup, the proper colouring and in the above example the proper item icon as well.

Cool stuff.

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My playing blues isn’t really over, and I found myself counting options last night. At that point I remembered that the one part of the casual game I hadn’t explored yet was the Draenei content – while I took a warrior to level 10 previously, I haven’t done much else in the two new (well not so new anymore, come to think of it) zones.

The Doomhammer guild I had joined with Steptoe last fall after PCTing out of Ghostlands looks like a bloody alt reservoir, and I haven’t really been all that active on that server, meaning I don’t know anyone. Leveling on Ghostlands before getting the hell out of dodge did have an advantage, there were plenty of people I had run with throughout the long process so beyond my guild, there was a loose social network I could call upon.

I don’t have that on Doomhammer, and without a guild, having that network would have been useful. I’m also pretty bored with my paladin right now, so working as a tank-for-hire like Galo did with a lot of success isn’t something I’m willing to do at the moment.

So I finally just changed my server selection, popped onto my old pre-TBC warlock, waved hello to the guildmates of old, then got my level 6 draenei shaman out of cold storage and ginvited. And you know, there’s definitely something special about that place. That guild was the result of a successful merger which took place in December 2005 to avoid, for both merging guilds, that friends who had leveled together would scatter all over the server. Returning last night immediately put me back in touch with people I knew more or less since I started playing – All the way back to questing out of Auberdine on my first alliance toon. There’s also many familiar names I had raided with in ZG, AQ20 and MC who said hello, and somehow, it felt like a homecoming.

How long will I stay? I don’t know. I’m not really playing much these days anyway, but for the time being, I’ll be playing on Draenor EU for a while. Social interaction is, in the end, part of the reasons to play an MMO in the first place, and I hadn’t been getting much of that recently. We’ll see where it leads me.

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I’m currently still in low-playing-time mode, and whenever I actually squeeze some time to log on, I play on the shaman. Which I never got around to joining my current horde guild, initially because no officer was on when I PCTed her onto Doomhammer, and later because I didn’t really bother looking for anyone with /ginvite.

I do keep an eye on the guild forums from time to time, though, and to my surprise, I learn that the GM has left the guild and handed the key to one of the officers.

To everyone expecting a Foton-grade Drama retelling, you can stop reading right now, because I have no frigging clue what happened.

Thing is, when I got recruited there, it was on my then-main level 70 pallie, and the now-departed GM invited me with the full knowledge that I was a casual player and only available to join Kara as a replacement for an “early” leaver – early being 11pm server time in that case.

I obviously have no similar understanding with the new management, but from the tone of their introductory post (and what had been going on during the last times I was on), the guild appears to be trying to focus on raiding in order to forge an identity and cohesion.

Needless to say, a proper raiding guild has little room for a player like me. It is even possible that I have been let go from the roster since I last logged onto the paladin, which was already 2 or 3 weeks ago.

Since my good old 2007 buddy Steptoe appears to have vanished from the surface of the planet too, undoubtedly eaten up by a grue or at least by Realifitis, it’s probably time to start shopping around for a casual-friendly guild one of these days. There’s bound to be a fitting match out there. Somewhere.

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A couple of weeks back, the Guild Master appointed me to an officer role, on what seemed a bit like a whim. “Because you’re helpful” was her reason, and while I couldn’t help being flattered, in practice I only served as a sort of social officer or something. While this guild advertises itself as social / raiding, the guild revolves around the latter, so having a late-night player who only joins a raid for last-attempts-before-calling-it because a healer had to leave early made me the odd one out (the rest of the officer staff being part of the raiding core).

That got resolved two nights ago when the Guild Master rearranged officer ranks and simplified the hierarchy around people she knows and trusts personally (we’ve had some funky events with some other officers in the recent past), concentrating the duties she laid out on four people instead of 10ish. One of the four remaining officers last night thought I’d want an explanation about my demotion, and to take it up with the GM. I didn’t.  I’ll blog about it instead

For some reason, I’ve always gravitated towards officer positions in my entire online gaming career no matter the setting – wizard on MUDs in the 90ies, then in two linkshells in FFXI (BTW, while extremely simplistic I still think the very flat hierarchy of Linkshells is actually one of the positive things FFXI did), and every single guild I’ve been part of in WoW. Through all these years I’ve seen most of the different people who end up in such positions, from the serious “public servant” minded person to the slightly less mature teenager who has the power get to his head and starts playing the little dictator.

During the first months of TBC, when I was running my failed experiment at creating a raiding school, identifying and promoting the kind of people I wanted to be part of the management was probably my biggest difficulty (beyond actually not realizing the initial guild’s purpose, but I’ve written about that already). It starts with recruiting powers. You want recruiters to get new members which will mesh with the guild culture, and they will by virtue of not being you have a different take on that  than yourself. In Post Tenebrae, the first people I gave the /ginvite command to initially asked me about every single potential candidate they had talked to, and surprisingly, conveying to some of them that I gave them the role because I trusted in their judgment took some convincing. At the same time, it gave me confidence that I actually made the right choice picking them, because their questions showed that they were able to think about the bigger picture and see the guild as more than just an umbrella with a common chat channel.

It didn’t just help me to quiet down my little interior control freak but also convinced me that I had found, among them, the proper officer material for the then young guild. A couple of weeks later, when one of them approached me to “confess” he actually had been slack with recruiting and felt he didn’t deserve to be a recruiter, I didn’t just keep him in his role, I promoted him to full officer a couple of days later. Why? Because he put the guild’s best interests ahead of his own, and with time, I’ve found that picking those kind of personalities was the best choice for running the guild. Steptoe was cut of the same cloth, and when Post Tenebrae, our raiding school, fizzled out, we moved servers together.

In an officer cadre for a raiding guild, I think making a distinction between technical and social management is important. Raid Leaders, Class Officers, Preform Commanders are technical roles,  but what cements a guild and holds it together are the social roles, and they aren’t necessarily the same people. Based on my relatively short tenure as a GM, I believe these social roles should form the core of a guild’s management and hold the highest ranks.

The ability to visualize the guild as more than the sum of its individual players, and to put its interests and reputation ahead of your own ego are core skills for such people, along with a knack of smoothing things over and taking the pulse of the members. No matter how you do it, there are things the rank and file won’t tell the GM, for a lot of reasons. You need ears to hear their voices for you, and a voice speaking to them on behalf of the whole guild, and ideally, they should be able to be autonomous enough that a GM shouldn’t have to micromanage every single guild concern.

In short, to get back to the change described in my current guild, if I were in the GM’s shoes, any person you have to demote if you reorganize the guild’s management structure who needs long explanation or even makes a fuss about it probably wasn’t what I’d pick as officer material in the first place. A normal member can and does have his own needs and wants, and only the more mature among them will place the guild above themselves (they may be more prone to put the raid above their own needs because it serves their direct interest too). Managing a bigger guild, especially a raiding guild, is often a thankless job, something which gets very tangible the moment the first loot conflict erupts. People who lack the ability to share a guild vision will burn out eventually or worse, generate their own share of drama.

To name a managing officer is to trust them with the responsibility to drive the guild where you want it to be, on your behalf, even in your absence. This obviously also assumes that the GM has a vision about the guild and an understanding of its purpose and objectives beyond being a private chat channel for a couple of buddies. The officers you pick for the guild management duties instead of the technical management duties should be those who do not just share but embrace your vision. And one who raises a fuss when he gets demoted because the management needs the GM has set have changed will demonstrate that the best decision as far as he is concerned was to demote him.

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Sometimes I just get a good laugh out of these. Comedy gold:

What is your raiding experience?

my raiding experience is that i know my place in the raid i know what my jobb is and do what i commanded to do =)

What Raiding instances are you attuned to?

yes

What are your Previous Guilds?

dont remember all the guilds i have been in have been removed i have been in 3 raid guilds …

What do you expect from this guild?

going raids have sme fun time get some better gear and can go other raids

Why do you want to join our guild?

get some new m8 to talk with get better gear help other players in guild in heroics whatever they want to do i still on it hehe:D

Any last words?

i hope i get a invite to this guild becaus i really want get some new m8s in guild raiding and have traching and bosses hehe and btw i am druid dps and off-tank i just need some gear from kara then i am ready to tank.. if you need my help i really want to =)

To his defense, he claimed to be 15. Also, this is an EU server, English as second or third language isn’t exactly uncommon here. Heck, I’m part of that particular crowd myself. Still, Firefox now has a spell checker…

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