Dearest Applicants,

As an officer of a raiding guild, I want to dedicate this post to all of you individuals who have applied to any raiding guild, and I think I speak for all officers when I say your written masterpieces are the finest in this virtual world of dragon-slaying. I want to sincerely thank you for making recruiting immensely easier. I think everyone can learn a thing or two from the experts of application-writing.

You’re right, of course, about WWS/WMO parses being an unnecessary requirement. My apologies to you for contradicting your claims of being a good player by asking for one. If you say you’re good, I should just automatically assume you are. And if I question your rotation, the obvious answer is the the “right rotation,” because everyone knows this most basic information. You are the best at your class, which should totally be obvious by your super-special purples as displayed in your armory.

I also should know better than to ask for dps numbers. Telling me you’re always top five in your current guild’s raids gives me a clear, accurate number of what sort of player you are, since, of course, I raid with you, right? And answering my request for a rough estimate of how much dps you do with “good dps” is also an universally acceptable answer.

You’re clearly the superior individual, so please make us aware of this from the beginning of your application. Insult my guild members and myself when we ask you questions regarding questionable talent builds, rotations, and itemization. You’re totally right! Since when do you have to actually be a walking encyclopedia to join a raiding guild? It’s just a video game, and you, sir, really need to put us in our places and tell us how it is. So if anyone asks you questions you can’t or don’t feel like answering, you are in your right to just call the guild bad or accuse people of living in basements.

Guild applications also aren’t English papers, so please don’t bother spending any time making sure you’ve spelled words correctly. In fact, while you’re at it, completely ignore the concept of punctuation. Language is an ever-evolving thing, and I’m clearly the bigger idiot for not realizing this. You’re applying to a raiding guild, after all, not to participate in a spelling bee. Who cares if your application is a giant wall of text comprised of incoherent babble? I can armory you, so it doesn’t really matter if I can understand you, after all.

It is also perfectly acceptable to not answer every question on an application. It’s not your fault we don’t make our applications in an easily-understandable, multiple choice format. In fact, just skip around and answer any questions that don’t require thought. For extra bonus points, just go through and answer any open-ended questions with “yes.”

Please ignore all the stickied threads that explain my guild’s raiding schedule, philosophies, expectations, and rules. You’re a pretty smart guy/gal since you’ve realized I wrote them just out of mere boredom, instead of for your benefit. In fact, after skipping over all threads, please consult me or another officer in game to ask about our schedules, recruiting needs, and progression, and preferably consult me during a raid. If you want to skip this step, just go ahead and apply but answer the “can you make our raids?” question with a written shrug or a “wat time do u raid” question of your own.

I should understand when you apply to other guilds besides mine. You’re testing the water, as you say, and you’re doing the smart thing by applying to as many guilds as possible. Feel free to stretch out the application process as long as possible, that way you can sort through which you were accepted to and rank them in order of preference. And if all those top 100 ranked guilds deny you, please get back to us as soon as possible. We totally want to be your last resort.

And last of all, who honestly cares if you put a lot of effort into your application or not? This is a video game, and if we can’t realize that, we need to go outside and see some sun, clearly. You’re not applying for an impressive job in real life, you’re applying to an internet guild with internet people killing internet bosses. We take ourselves way too seriously if we expect you to display a good attitude and a willingness to do everything you can to contribute to the overall success of your team’s progress. So instead, go join a less structured guild and cry when it falls apart, and then complain you can’t get into a good raiding guild. In fact, re-apply to us; we’ll understand!

Sincerely,
A Very Disgruntled Recruitment Officer

/edit/-> This post was intended to be a stab at something humorous, but sarcasm is sometimes misconstrued. If you are actually interested in constructive application tips, please read my guide here. Thanks!

For my long-time readers, do you recall when I lightly touched the subject of dealing with bad players in Have A Little Faith? In that post, I had said:

If I don’t belittle, kick, or replace people who aren’t meeting our standards, then what do I do? Fixing a problem isn’t always solved by brute force. You can’t will it to magically become better or remove the problem in order to find a solution. I’ve always been of a mindset that most of the best players weren’t born overnight. And in my experience, if I just watch how I handle it (no one likes being called bad, regardless of how nice and constructive you are), I’ve been able to turn flaky people and bad players into outstanding role models. And that takes time.

I got a lot of comments and e-mails from people asking me to elaborate on how I personally dealt with bad raiders. In a more indirect way, this post will hopefully answer that question and perhaps help similar guilds in similar positions. Please note that not all guilds are run the same way, which makes most of my advice a moot point. This method is simply what works for my own guild. It’s not meant to be taken as a guide, but rather an insight to the trials and tribulations I’ve experienced when it comes to dealing with bad players.

We Struggled, Too

When I first started my guild, I cared more about getting people with the right attitudes than I did experience or skill. And when I first chose my officers, I made it clear from the beginning that we would never drop our standards, regardless of how desperate we were to flesh out our raid roster. We promise to foster a mature and intelligent player-base, with an upbeat, positive raid environment. When people are bad, we don’t directly tell them they are bad, especially in front of others. We try not to single people out unless it’s a large group of people, and we never, ever insult, belittle, or yell at people.

Most of the time, admittedly, it’s difficult keeping that promise. There are times where I have to go afk on vent during raids, so I can calm down my boyfriend (who is the main raid leader), and remind him to not lose his temper. There are times where even I have to walk away from the computer before I break the rules I created, and it takes a lot to get me angry in raids. Is that exclusive to just our guild? Of course not. These are the normal, everyday issues that plague almost nearly every raiding guild. It’s how you handle it that defines your type of leadership.

Before I explain how we currently handle these problems, let me first explain to you our problems in BC so you can understand why we do things this way. We started out as a reroll guild with a special emphasis, as I mentioned earlier, on guild personality. Many times we would read through an application, find the person well written, intelligent, funny, and with a good attitude, and would insta-invite, not really ever asking raid-related questions to determine his/her attitude towards end-game. This was, inevitably, our downfall.

We eventually gathered enough people to successfully begin 25-man raids, and although the majority of our members were Karazhan/badge-geared and experienced, we zipped through the content with all the nerfs. To the inexperienced raiders with us- which was, in all honesty, the mass majority of our guild- we seemed pretty good. We were one-shotting all the bosses, AoEing the trash, and doing most of it with relative ease. When we got to t6 content, we started seeing a more apparent gap between the good and bad players. We had about 10 people who understood raiding and their respective classes, showed up reliably, and essentially carried the rest of the raiders who didn’t enchant new gear, no-showed raids, and did half the dps the top ten raiders did.

We also did an open-guild loot council, which was initially established as a means of making the guild more involved and close-knit. In 10-mans, it was a fantastic loot method, and was very successful. In 25-mans, especially with a large group of new players, both new to the guild and seriously raiding end-game? Not so much. In the end, as we encouraged people to be more involved, the least deserving players were getting the best drops over the ones who rarely got loot and deserved it the most. The good people were penalized because their “dps is already high enough, give it to someone who could use it more.” Players who upgraded their gear outside of raids via crafted or bagde gear were also penalized, because it was less of an upgrade for those in Karazhan or blue gear.

We were spiraling out of control. Many of our good players confided they didn’t like the path we were taking, and we agreed. After trying to snag control of the reigns, we realized at that point the only way to fix things was to change. At the release of Wrath, the officers discussed our issues and how we planned to fix them. We targeted our problems and knew we were going to have to either get rid of the bad players, or teach them to be good.

Give Them Motives

For a few people, they were just new to raiding, and with a little patience and instruction, we are able to turn into good players. But for many others, they were just lazy. If they didn’t want to show up, why should they? They raid when they want and how they want, and they still keep getting raid invites and loot, so why bother with silly things like adhering to raid rules and etiquette? Sure, we could kick all those people out, but when the mass majority of your roster is comprised with that type of player, it makes that a difficult decision to make. Besides, just like the new players, with a little subtle motivation and patience, you can turn a few of those people into reliable players, too!

We realized the biggest culprit of our BC problems was a lack of structure and motives. We had laid out our expectations pretty clearly, but because we didn’t have any direct penalties or benefits, people didn’t even try to adhere to them. So we instead implemented a strict ranking system where raiders got rewarded with first priority on loot, raid invites, and specific guild bank items (enchanting mats and gems, for example, when they were expensive and difficult to obtain), and you had to meet and maintain our expectations to be considered for such a rank.

Such a ranking system was our saving grace and while it didn’t happen overnight, helped us maintain a reliable, predictable raid roster and succeed in raids. But more than that, it helps us handle bad players while still being nice guys. We don’t have to worry about undeserving people getting loot and having to be passive-aggressive with invites. People don’t make it to core status if they don’t deserve to be there.

We try to be very upfront about core and casual ranks from the beginning. When we are interviewing new members, we always make it a priority to explain our rank system, and to also make it clear if he/she doesn’t meet our expectations, they won’t make it to core. That way, there are never any hurt feelings or surprises if it does happen. It’s easiest to have a recruit immediately go to casual after their trial period, as opposed to demoting an existing raider because he/she has gotten complacent or lazy. With that route, there’s almost always hurt feelings and, in rare cases, a gquit in following.

I’d like to say the most defining difference between our rank system and many of the hardcore guilds I’ve been a part of is how we handle it. When we notice somebody not performing at the expected level, we don’t just give it a raid to see if the problem fixes itself, nor do we immediately demote the member. Just like we like to pull members aside and recognize them for playing well, we always try to talk to our members and give them feedback when they aren’t, either. If it’s a skill/numbers issue, we will sit down with them and try to analyze and compare numbers to see where they’re going wrong. If it’s a class we don’t have experience with, we try to pair them up with patient people who are skillful at their respective classes.

There are always positive ways to motivate your raiders to play better. If you don’t want to actually penalize people, try to give them other goals and rewards for doing well, so the only penalty there is, is not being rewarded. Praise where praise is due. In conclusion, there was a fantastic post Rhaina made on the Guild Relations forums that had me nodding, and really states this point better than I ever could:

Before you start approaching individuals, make sure that the facts are out there.

Here’s a BC example .. .. ..

Right around the time we figured out the King Mulgar pull, we knew our next challenge was going to be mobile DPS for Gruul. We counted up the tanks and the healers, and figured out how many DPS that left us with. We looked at his health and at roughly how many growths we could heal through. We then calculated the amount of time that this left for the DPS to down him before he hit that many growths. Divide his hit points by the number of seconds to get raid DPS required. Divide raid DPS by number of DPS to get individual DPS minimum. Post this calculation along with the information that Gruul is a movement fight with DPS stoppages.

We told people that to give us a little wiggle room, we wanted every DPS to be able to produce that much individual DPS plus 10%, and to be able to do it in a movement fight. We took the raid back to Kara and told people “If you can produce that much DPS for the Aran fight, then we will go try Gruul.”

A lot of people who thought they were doing fine because they were 3rd or 4th on a 25-man DPS meter found out that they couldn’t sustain that DPS while moving and stopping and doing the other stuff they had to do in Aran.

One week later, we went back and tested again. All our DPS had improved, and most were now over the threshold. We then worked with the two people who were not to help them troubleshoot their issues, and three days later, we dropped Gruul for the first time.

It’s one thing to say “You have to do 4000 DPS in a tank and spank or we won’t let you raid.” It’s another to say Patchwerk has X health and Y enrage timer and so the entire raid must produce X/Y DPS, so since there are 17 of you, divide that number by 17 and see what you need to be doing to ensure that you are doing your share”. The latter demonstrates that you are not being arbitrary, but are looking at the actual fights and making requests that are reasonable if the raid is to down the boss.

So start there. Provide factual information about what DPS needs to do and why. Then give people a chance to hit that target, and then when you approach the ones who aren’t, you will be doing it in context, not out of nowhere.

In some raiding guilds, gkicks are a lot more frequent and expected. Those kicks aren’t really difficult to do, as people know their performance is consistently being judged and analyzed, and if it doesn’t meet the officers’ expectations, they will be replaced. But what about the gkicks due to personality conflicts? What about the people who have been in the guild for a long time?

In my opinion, these are the hardest guild removals, especially since you don’t have hard facts and concrete evidence like you would with WMO parses and recount numbers if someone is being kicked solely based off raid performance. People might realize they’re playing horribly because it’s easier to compare themselves with others’ performance. However, few people ever realize they’re rubbing others the wrong way, have a bad attitude, and/or just don’t fit in with your guild, because there’s no real easy way to see these things without being an outsider. And since they don’t know, explaining said issues is always an unpleasant surprise for them.

Somebody’s Gotta Do It

I’m a pretty nice person. I make friends easily, and generally speaking, I’m the more approachable officer of our bunch. If a certain person is playing horribly or is acting sulky, I’m usually the officer that gets to have a nice, casual chat with him, because if anyone else did it, it would result in drama. I lead by friendship, and the unique relationships I have with my members are what make my leadership a success. But there are downsides to this as well.

I don’t like removing people from my guild. Blame my gender, blame my age, but I feel it’s the worst aspect of guild leadership. Unfortunately, someone has to do it, and that someone became me when I elected to help lead this guild. I have a tendency to always try to imagine how others might feel or perceive my actions, and I doubt being kicked from a guild is something anyone likes. Regardless of whether or not the individual’s actions have justified the guild removal -even if I dislike the person- I always have a heavy reluctance when it comes to asking someone to leave.

If I feel so strongly about kicking people I dislike, imagine my personal distaste for kicking friends. And, considering I lead by friendship, I’m good friends with most people in the guild. When I got into this position, I knew I would have to make many sacrifices in order to always put the guild first. But nothing weighs heavier on my heart than having to put on my “officer hat” and asking a friend to leave the guild. Nothing hurts more than knowing that friend feels betrayed, and regardless of how close we had been, I’ll never receive a friendly inquiry from him again.

I’ve been in this situation many times, and as much as I hate it, I will do the right thing every time it happens. Nobody likes removing people, especially friends, but it’s something you’re going to have to face if you want a stable guild. Leadership isn’t always what it seems from the outside. There’s a lot of dirty work you’ve got to have the stomach to handle. You won’t always be the glorious, fearless leader that represents your outstanding group. You will be seen as the bad guy more often than not, and if you can’t take that, this isn’t the job for you. In the end, it’s worth it for me. It’s the bigger picture you’ve got to look at, folks, and that bigger picture is what motivates me to keep on truckin’, even when I’m emotionally crushed from doing said dirty work.

The Bigger Picture

You have a guild to run. There are so many different roles you have to play, so many jobs you’re required perform. One of the biggest and most underperformed role is managing personalities. Everybody is different. Duh, that’s obvious. But what isn’t as obvious is that due to everyone’s differences, there will always, always, always be people that don’t mesh well with certain others. Sometimes it’s as easy as knowing the quickest way to happily quiet the loud, obnoxious guy in vent, which satisfies both him and the people he bothers. Sometimes, though, there’s no easy solution.

I had a recent situation in my guild where there wasn’t an easy solution. The individual was good friends with many people in the guild, including myself. But at the same time, he had twice as many people dislike him. I tried privately talking to him about the issues, but in the end, the only way to fix it would be for him to change himself. It got to the point where he was ruining people’s enjoyment of the game. They were reluctant to log on for raids, they avoided guild chat and vent when he was online, and they sat out of off-night activities when he was involved. I finally realized with an alarming clarity, that if I didn’t remove him, I would end up losing more than just him.

In this situation, you need to come to the realization that you want to have as few causalities as possible. It’s unpleasant removing a good player and friend to the guild, but keeping him/her at the cost of many more is not worth the price. You always need to look at the bigger picture and do what’s best for the guild, not the individual. Yes, his feelings might be hurt, and yes, you might lose his friendship. When you sign up to run a guild, though, you are officer first, friend second.

The Actual Kick

Once you’ve realized there’s a problem, it’s imperative you act swiftly. Don’t grow soft; your guild is depending on you. How you act is entirely dependent on you and the situation. Sometimes, the solution is as easy as a blunt talk to the person and some work on his/her end, and a kick isn’t required. But you need to fully assess the situation, considering different actions and the potential results of said actions. Take the route that is the least bumpy for your guild.

If you’ve decided to remove the person, consider how to approach him/her. Make sure all or most of your fellow officers are present and agree with your decision (hopefully, you all discuss such issues and decisions together!), to help present an official, united appearance and lend credibility to your reasoning. If you often use ventrilo as a guild, do it over vent in a private channel; it’s quicker, more personal, and more importantly, saves you the trouble of screenshots that reflect poorly on your guild posted at inopportune times.

Consider too the personality and attitude of the person, and be ready for any reaction. Everybody responds differently to the “gkick talk,” but nobody ever responds happily. Some people get sad and quiet, whispering a rushed, “Thank you, may I leave?” lest we find out they were crying the entire time. Some people get hurt and angry, and make demands and accusations regarding our capability of leading a guild. Nobody likes to be rejected, so try to be understanding and imagine how you’d feel in their position. If they get angry, yell, or insult, don’t fall prey to their bait. Keep it official, and if it gets nasty, wrap it up immediately.

The Day After Drama

It’s inevitable. Where there’s a kick, drama will soon follow. You need to make sure you smother this drama as quickly as possible, before it evolves into a nasty wildfire.

• If people ask why the person quit/was removed, put on your “officer hat.” Be as straightforward and unopinionated as possible, and give broad, open-ended answers.
• If the person posts on the forums about it, don’t respond. Instruct the guild to not respond. Don’t fall for troll bait.
• If the person starts whispering people to start trouble, advise people to ignore the pleas for attention.
• Under any circumstance, do not insult the person in front of others. Even if the person was disliked by everyone, it’s disrespectful and makes you look bad. Don’t be so petty.