The Zen of Running a Gaming Community

So look, I’ll just say it: part of the reason I started a WoW guild way back in the day is because I’m a control freak. I like things to be done efficiently, decisions to be made intelligently, and events to run smoothly. Instead of demanding that someone else meet my admittedly high expectations, I tend to do the work myself. It only seems fair.

This was fine while we were a WoW-centric guild. Well, truth be told it made me a little crazy over the years, but it was fine logistically. I generally ran a tight ship, but beyond just control I was involved in almost everything, if not participating directly. The idea of a raid boss dying without me present was almost painful to contemplate. While I wasn’t playing in every achievement 5-man group, I knew who was and when they usually ran and what they were working on.

It was almost a year ago that we officially switched from being a purely WoW guild to a gaming community, and without a doubt the biggest change for me was learning to let go. I can’t play every game. I can’t spend time really carefully getting to know every member. I can no longer make rules like “raids start at X time” and enforce them. We have guilds in four different MMOs at the moment, and I am the officially designated guild leader in exactly none of them.

Instead of handmaking and participating in everything, my job is more to create and maintain structures for the other members to fill. I don’t schedule and roster all events, but I do run the calendar system so others can post their events. I don’t play Minecraft (due to a lack of time), but I do update our server when there’s a new version out. I don’t personally make sure every new member is properly welcomed into our community culture, but I trust our long-term members to show them how we roll and provide feedback if there’s a problem.

I feel like this zen attitude is paying off. Our community has really come into its post-WoW fruition in the last month or two, in my opinion, and I really enjoy seeing the diverse interests of our members and how our we can meet those interests. We have folks who just play SWTOR, or who only play Bioware RPGs and Minecraft. We have a small group who are always chatting on RIFT Mobile. We have one person who doesn’t even play a game with the Cats anymore, technically, but she is on our IRC channel and in the Turntable.fm room every weekday, hanging out and being awesome. My lackidaisical attitude is helping to create a space where everyone can play or chat however they want.

There are certainly tasks that require my old hands-on approach — recruiting and creating cross-game events are the two big ones — but I’m kind of chagrined to see that just creating a nice space and then letting people do their thing has been my most successful tactic yet for growing a gaming community.

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I was watching a bit of the SWTOR Guild Summit feed while writing this, and one of the Bioware folks just said that 38% of all level 50s have played in an Operation at this point. That seems like a really high number to me, and a good sign of the health of group PvE content.