Raid Leader: Attitudes and players that don’t fit the guild

One thing struck me today as I ran a google search for raid leading, all the sites that I have read apart from the ones by decent players and people who are being up front and honest about the game tell the RL to do the following.

Stay calm all the time, be nice to everyone, be grateful, show respect, kiss your raiders bum holes…. You know what, it’s all a load of pap.

You can be this warm and fluffy RL who is trying to keep everyone happy if you want, personally I’ll be quite up front now and say point blank if you do that you’ll get walked over and sooner or later you’ll lose respect from everyone apart from those who are blindly loyal to you for whatever reason (normally real life friendship or family).

OR

You can be firm, fair and set a high standard that you expect to be followed without fail. Now by that I don’t mean you have to rule with a tyrannical hand, I just mean that if someone breaks the rules then you have to take action. Breaking the rules once because of not knowing them does not necessarily mean that person is exempt from those rules, however, sometimes it does.

Let me give you an example.
A player joins the guild on a Monday, he plays a few days, Wednesday reset comes up and low and behold sometime in the afternoon he’s pugging ToC 10 although its meant to be guild only and he has no officer permission. He’s gone with his mate that is running in another guild, yada, yada, yada. What do you do? Well personally I would have a word on this occasion and make sure they know the rules and where they are and are not allowed to pug then wait and see what happens the week after. But what happens if the person in question ignores the whispers and repeatedly decides to link loot and achievements into the guild chat. Thoughtless, gloating and arrogant are three words that come to mind, and honestly there are plenty more.

Now, I wasn’t online at the time so another officer dealt with the situation, but after multiple whispers and being completely ignored I thoroughly back their decision for a guild kick. It’s not the first time this particular guild member showed a lack of humility or the ability to follow simple rules. In fact he was lucky to survive our last encounter in which he decided to berate some of our raid members for not break 4k DPS when he was in fact only reaching 3.4 himself.

Now this person can and has managed to do a lot higher on the damage front before and don’t get me wrong they are a good player in terms of skill, however, keeping them in the guild is causing more problems in terms of clashing attitudes and the flagrant breaking of rules that everyone else has to follow, I’ve made the mistake of giving warning after warning to these kinds of people before until it has become such a problem that decent members of the guild get annoyed and leave or decide they don’t need to follow the rules either. That doesn’t happen these days.

Needless to say that person is no longer with the guild and I will now be looking to recruit into his position.

So the point here is that you don’t have to compromise all the time, don’t jump off in the deep end and give people the chance to enter into some kind of conversation but if they don’t take that chance and fall into line then don’t let it continue to the point where it can cause further damage.

We are a small guild and we have rules for a reason, simply put, we need everyone to be available, if your not available to your guild, then your guild isn’t available to you. It’s a two way relationship, not one. That being said it isn’t a democracy, we have one GM and three officers, and any one of us are trusted to make the right decisions, sure we listen to the rest of the guild and take their opinions onboard but the final decision rests with us and ultimately our GM. Guilds don’t function well with too many people having input in too many areas, they stall, they start to lack firm direction and leadership and they take far too long to make decisions and take action. My advice, make sure your leadership is strong both inside and outside the raid otherwise you may as well let all your raiders pug and watch as they link things into the guild chat once in a while rather than watching a whole runs worth of loot going to guild members only.

Some people might not like this kind of stance, and that’s fine, I’d be interested to hear from people about their thoughts, but it simply wont change the fact that I learnt lessons from being too soft the hard way and I wont be making the same mistakes again.

Take it easy, have fun,

Cybac

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