Machiavellis Cat was formed in 2005. I was level 35 at the time. I had been looking for guilds to join but none of the available options really appealed to me. My goals were to find a group of people that would: a) not use slurs; b) encourage intelligent interaction; c) run Mauradon with me. My recruiting mantra was “only people that I would have a beer with in real life”. I remained the guild leader from May 2005 until.. yesterday.

I’d been thinking about it for a while, of course. Most of my guildies don’t know that I came right up to the brink, planning succession with the officers, shortly before Cataclysm. I backed off because it didn’t seem right to leave in the middle of pre-expansion doldrums when my recruitment experience was needed the most.

Almost ironically the instigator this time was this post by the lovely Larissa of the Pink Pig Tail Inn. I am the Anonymous who posted here, yesterday. Almost as soon as I left my comment, I started to ponder it. I’ve talked about stepping down quite a bit in the last six months. I had felt for a while that raiding was more of a chore than fun, and real life was starting to close in on our Eastie-friendly raid times. Maybe… maybe I should take my own advice.

So here I am. Liore, citizen.

Six years ago I was not in the best place in my life. I was in a very strange and negative job environment. I had recently lost my closest friend to a drug addiction, and since I had moved for said job I didn’t really know anyone in the city. I was in the middle of a pretty powerful fugue of depression and anxiety. I didn’t talk to anyone. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t like to leave the house. I hadn’t even had a haircut in a 18 months. I was a mess.

Guild leading was not the only thing that helped me get better, but it certainly was a large part of that. When I first started recruiting I would actually hide in a dark corner of a building in Ironforge before advertising MCats in trade chat (yes, I started as a trade chat spammer) because it was too scarily close to public speaking. But I did it because I wanted a nice guild, and if you wanted a nice guild you had to get out and advertise so I was just going to have to suck it up and get it done.

Over the years I learned how to have difficult conversations and how to deal with the burden of making difficult but correct decisions. I learned about group dynamics and communities. I developed a knack for advertising through recruitment posts that serves me well in my current job. A few years ago I had an ex-guildie go off the deep end and publish horrible, hateful things about me, and I learned that I can survive that. I have met over 35 guildies (with more to come this summer), arranged three real-life meets, designed swag, wrote loot policies, interviewed strangers on Vent who applied to us. And some of those people even became my honest, real life friends.

Everything isn’t perfect now of course, but for years having the title of guild leader somehow gave me the extra fortitude I needed to move things in the right direction. And now.. I don’t need it anymore. I could possibly contort my life to accomodate raiding and guild leading again, and in the past I would have, but that would have been a bad decision. I almost feel that guild leading was like a brace that did the essential job of keeping me upright for the longest time, and then the bone mended. It feels.. really good.

I was a pretty damn fine guild leader and community builder, if I do say so myself. Now it’s time to see what Liore, casual WoW player, proud Cat, and hopeful human being, is capable of.

I don’t! I don’t like them, and I resist giving them as much as possible. I hate micromanaging in general, but healing assignments are close to my heart as an issue. For the most part, I think that healing assignments assume that your healers are too stupid to know who needs their attention. They create tunnel vision, and discourage independent thinking.

Healing assignments cause healers to lose track of the rest of the raid. We’ve all seen it happen. Heck, if you play a healer you’ve had it happen to you: you’re watching your assigned green bar and suddenly a mage drops dead. Who was looking after them? Oh, no one was assigned and they stood in the corner and were slowly dotted to death? Hmm.

Or say you’re working on Omnitron and are assigned to heal melee. Toxitron drops slime bombs, and one of them targets you. You run away and out of range of the melee. One of them dies because you weren’t there to heal them and no one else bothered because they’re assigned to someone else. Ooops.

In my opinion, for the most part healing assignments are insulting. They imply that a healer is not smart enough to tell who needs healing, and not skilled enough to heal them in time. Instead, having healers on general healing duty encourages them to develop and use their own experience and intelligence. It assumes that healers can triage properly. Overall, I think that a healing team that runs mostly without assignments will have a better understanding of the fight and how it affects the raid as a whole.

Plus, in my opinion, free-for-all healing is more fun. :)

There are absolutely times when healing assignments are useful, such as Thorim when the raid has to break up into two entirely different groups, or fights like Blood Queen where the tanks will all immediately head off in different directions.

However, for the most part I hold the healers to the same standards I hold the rest of the raid: I assume that they know how to do their job and I give them the space to excel in it. Healers who can think for themselves and have a broad understanding of a boss encounter are more valuable in my opinion than healers who can take an assignment and keep it alive.

(This topic came up because I spent an hour this morning fighting with a rogue about the importance of healing assignments.  Yes, a ROGUE. About HEALING. What is this world coming to?)

I have seen a number of posts on the official forums lately by folks who are trying to start up a guild now and feel positively overwhelmed by their lack of perks. Post-Cataclysm guilds are already behind the bulk of guilds for rank and generally take some time to build up an active membership, meaning that they get even further behind. The argument goes that this lack of perks makes it impossble for new guilds to recruit.

Now I don’t want to be dismissive of someone’s concerns, but I am calling upon six years of guild leadership and recruitment when I say that guild perks will not kill your new guild. I know that starting a new guild is incredibly tough, but I have two reasons for saying this:

1) The type of player who bases their decision for a new guild on perks is not the type of player you want.

Someone who is so mercurial that a 10% mount speed buff or heirloom cape is their motivating factor is very unlikely to become loyal to your guild. They aren’t interested in being a part of your “guild family” or a core member of the “raid team”. This hypothetical person will jump to another guild when they get a better offer, and frankly you’re better off not wasting your leadership efforts on them. (To be totally honest I doubt this person even exists, but I see this argument often so it’s worth addressing.)

2) The type of guild who recruits just for perks is not the type of guild you want to be.

Guild perks are just that. They’re nice and fun to have, but not something upon which you’d want to build the foundation of a guild. Any guild that emphasizes their guild rank over other less tangible qualities gives its applicants no reason to feel that they are anything but XP machines. That doesn’t sound enjoyable!

In fact, much like we ask players to not give a GearScore on guild apps, we don’t mention our guild rank number when recruiting. Interested players can easily find it themselves and I’d rather focus on our more interesting qualities.

This all being said, I understand that recruiting for a new guild is incredibly difficult. Generally I recommend that new guild leaders try and answer a few questions in their recruitment message: What is the goal of your guild? What’s the history of your leadership team? What is your community like? Answer those questions with sincerity and a hint of panache and you will grab the attention of good potential members, perks or no.

The new guild leveling system was hands down the most exciting part of the Blizzcon 2009 Cataclysm announcements for me. It was nice to see Blizzard working to make guilds more viable, but the actual implementation of guild rep and guild XP is flawed, to say the least.

I’m actually surprised that it’s taken Blizzard this long to bring in some official coded support for guilds. This is just a guess of course, but I would surmise that a good, active guild is one of the greatest ways to ensure high player retention. Plus it’s relatively inexpensive for the company as a resource since most of the heavy lifting of recruitment, policy, guild forums, etc are handled for free by the players themselves.

Earlier this week, when Cataclysm launched, there was a hard cap put in for daily guild experience to keep guilds somewhat evenly paced. The exception to the rule was Guild Achievements, which would add XP even if the guild was already otherwise capped out for the day. There are a number of Guild Achievements but they take some coordination to obtain, such as Working as a Team or any of the Classy achievements.

Apparently, though, less than 24 hours after the expansion launched, Blizzard decided that guilds were earning too much experience from guild achievements and removed all rep from them both going forward and retroactively. Additionally, guild experience caps are currently so low that the Cats hit the cap by early afternoon every day. Keep in mind that we are not a mega-guild nor a hardcore one: we have 40 or so players of varying degrees of activity, with maybe half on during peak times like after expansions.

The result of the current XP caps plus the change to Guild Achievements is this: I have led the Cats for almost six years, and yet I will never be able to contribute a single point of guild XP. By the time I log on in my West Coast timezone, we’re capped. We’ve been capped for hours, and there’s not a dang thing I can do except cheer for the folks who were on before me.

It is important to note that I am not asking to receive a guild perk one moment before Blizzard’s ideal timeline. Heck, I’m in favor of reducing personal contribution to guild experience if it means we get guild achievements back! This is about a flawed mechanic that has removed a lot of the fun and participation from the guild leveling system. My guild is pretty stupid for achievements anyway, but knowing that killing every critter I saw or working on a certain reputation would also be my contribution to the guild level added a great element of teamwork.

As it stands now, a huge swath of guilds will hit level 25 at almost the exact same time on the exact same day. Really, what’s even the point? The cap is so low that Blizzard may as well just have said that all active guilds get X amount of guild experience every day.

The low guild experience daily cap and the change to guild achievements have taken away the opportunity for me and many, many other players to participate in the guild leveling experience. I have been a huge fan of the new guild system ever since it was announced, but seeing it implemented this way is pretty disappointing.

As of today the old WoW forums have been set to read-only access, and we’ve all migrated to the new community portal. I like a lot of the new forum functionality — like the avatars! — although I’m not totally sold on the design. One very disappointing aspect of the new site, though, is that the Guild Relations forum apparently did not make the cut.

The Guild Relations forum was created in 2006 to be a “place for the open discussion of any item important to guild structure” (Eyonix). It went along with the Guild Relations Program, which seemed to be Eyonix’s pet project. A handful of guilds were chosen as Program representatives, with more to be apparently added later. Nothing really came of the Program, but the forum thrived without it.

Over the years the GRF created one of the few civil, self-policing places on the old site. For the most part things stayed polite, if heated at times, and above all very helpful. Not sure which loot system you want to use? Need a second opinion about how your raid leader treats you? Do many guilds require authenticators for bank access? If there wasn’t a sticky already covering the topic, a slew of people with all kinds of guild-related backgrounds were happy to share their experiences.

Cataclysm is bringing in changes that emphasizes guilds, and I think the new 10/25 lockouts will foster the creation of a lot of 10-man groups. It’s almost ironic that Blizzard should decide now to cut the Guild Relations Forum loose. Worst of all, it’s been done without a word from the folks upstairs. There were threads asking about it on the old and new forums, and at no time did anyone respond. It’s kind of disappointing.

Whether you’re a guild leader or a member or someone who is looking for the right group, losing the GRF is losing a great resource. If you agree, I encourage you to post in this thread and ask Blizzard to reconsider. Thanks. :)

So, I’m addicted to Project Runway. I love that show to pieces, to the point where when I was sick this weekend I sat under a blanket on the couch and watched the entire eleven hours of Season Two of Project Runway Australia. (I also will watch Project Runway Canada, and Project Catwalk (UK). I am not limited by nationality!) I could go on at length about why I enjoy the show so much, but the short version is that I am utterly mystified by a contestant’s ability to take a seemingly impossible task and create fashion art in a few hours. I don’t understand how their creative processes work, and nothing entrances me quite like a process I don’t understand.

While watching hours of fashion-based TV has not made me any more chic, it has actually taught me a few things about life. It is with that in mind that I give to you:

Raid Leading, Project Runway Style

Make it work!
Okay, okay, you probably saw that one coming a mile away, but it’s true. Sometimes despite everyone’s best intentions you end up with 24 people online, one raid tank, and 9 healers. Or maybe you’re just having one of those nights where everyone has a case of The Dumb. What do you do? Pull up your bootstraps, and just make it work. Kill what you can and try to not get too bogged down in negative vibes. Do the weekly raid quest, or Sarth-3D for mounts, or break into 10s groups. Take a 5m break and give people an opportunity to shake out the sillies. Just.. make it work!

Use your mentors
The contestants on Project Runway are usually very focused designers who are confident in their vision. However, the best of them will still stand back and really consider the feedback from their Mentor. Accepting the wisdom and experience of someone else doesn’t lessen their strong approach or skills. When you feel your raid strategy is getting stuck in a rut, solicit feedback from your “mentors” in the guild. Ask your fellow officers, ask any class/role leads, ask your tanks.. sometimes when I am just not sure what is blocking us I’ll ask the whole raid on Vent for their feedback. A fresh perspective often helps, and asking for feedback doesn’t diminish your confidence as raid leader.

Don’t be afraid to be unique
If there is one single piece of advice that I think the Mentors give more than anything else, it’s that a design is too safe. Contestants are encouraged to be unique, be creative, and be true to themselves. The same can be said for your raid team! Don’t get hung up on what The Joneses are doing. Unless you are in a guild with a mandate of being Top 100 or whatever (in which case good on ya!), your world ranking doesn’t really matter. Let your raid be true to itself — how is it doing in comparison to how it did last week? Or last month? Or last expansion? It’s okay — actually, no, it’s GREAT — to expect improvement and progression, but it should be within the scope of your guild and its stregnths and weaknesses, not what Premonition is doing this week. I have a tough time with this one myself, for what it’s worth.

Look at your strategy with an editing eye
The second most frequent critique I hear on Project Runway is that an outfit is too overworked. It has sequins and flowers and lace and cutouts and shoulder pads and a giant bustle and and and and… resulting in a big ol’ mess. The same can be said for picking a raid strategy. I admit this one could be chalked up to personal preference, but I am huge on simplifying boss strategies as much as possible. Don’t assign everyone their own unique spot to run to after BQL fears — just emphasize spatial awareness and spreading out. A more simple strategy will be easier to translate to different raid groups and different raiders. Of course, adopting strategies like this one require more practice, which is the other half of this concept. Don’t be fussy and change things on every pull. Sometimes you just have to decide on a strategy and give it a good number of tries for people to master the bare bones.

Use the accessories wall thoughtfully and strategically
No, wait — scratch this one.

In short, Tim Gunn can lead my raid anyday. Call me!