Guide to Healing, Leading, and Progressing in WoW Raids
Have you ever been dragged into a discussion between two players? You’re being asked for your opinion or to side with someone, but you just can’t really bring it in you to actually care about it.
Other than flipping a coin, how would you decide and resolve a disagreement when you just don’t give a damn?
“Seriously? You’re asking me to decide which one’s better and could take on the other? Star Trek or Star Wars?”
See that image up there? That is one annoyed looking cat. Looks as if someone took away his toy or threatened him with a bath. That’s the same look I exhibit when someone comes complaining to me.
But hey, it comes with the guild leader territory.
Listening to complaints. It probably takes up around 15% of communications.
(Actually, file that post idea away. “Percentage of matters that occupy guild leader time”).
Most of the time, it’s just hot hair or someone wants to get something off their chest. Generally, complainers aren’t really taken seriously. But y’know? Every so often, there’s a legitimately dissatisfied player.
If you really want to lodge a solid complaint, you need to identify if what you want is an actual change or you just want to vent.
Too often in guilds, players are exposed to people complaining about something.
Maybe it’s someone’s performance.
It could be their lack of attendance.
Perhaps the raid just takes too long to get going.
You know, if you’re looking to secure some kind of change in policy or the way things are done, then effective complaining is called for. If it’s for the second reason (emotional comfort), then really, all you’re looking for is someone to listen to you.
My advice? If you’re going to complain because you want something done differently, figure out exactly what your end game is. The most ineffective complaint is the one where there’s no objective.
Here’s some examples:
Once you figure out the outcome, identify the person capable of delivering it. You don’t harass the Warrior if you don’t have any food or water, right?
If I’m on the receiving end of a complaint, I instinctively put up walls because I know what’s coming. Being conscious of this, when I’m lodging a complaint to others (a legitimate one, mind you), I make an effort to be calm and polite.*
Ask yourself this.
Are you looking for results or the satisfaction of being right?
* My friends have picked up on this. When they notice I‘m super extra nice, they immediately get suspicious.
When following through with your complaint, start off with a cushion. This is a statement that prevents your target from feeling that they’re being attacked. Follow it up the meat and potatoes which contains the concern that you want resolved. Then finalize it with a statement proving that you’re not crazy or insane. You want that statement to prove that you are a reasonable person who would greatly benefit from the assistance.
Here’s a fictitious example:
Problem: Concerned about excess, off-topic chatter during a raid.
Solution: Additional focus on the encounters that matter
“Hey Jarvis,
I appreciate the hard work and energy you expend running the raid. Our raid group is an energetic and talkative bunch of players. Can we get them to tone it down during progression boss encounters? The raid would proceed much smoother and efficiently allowing us to get out earlier and awarding everyone precious relaxation time.
Bonus: They get to socialize in a less pressured environment.”
Signed,
Buster
Let’s break it down.
I appreciate the hard work and energy you expend running the raid.
Jarvis is the raid leader. This guy puts up with just about everything and is the linchpin. He might not get too many pats on the back but this is your way of recognizing the little things he’s doing.
Our raid group is an energetic and talkative bunch of players.
You’re reframing and putting a positive spin on the problem. The raid tends to discuss stuff that’s not relevant to what’s going on. This could be due to excess energy or a lack of focus. But, hey, you don’t really know the root cause. Maybe they’re just hyper from all the gummy bears.
Can we get them to tone it down during progression encounters?
Now we’re getting to what you really want. For the sake of your sanity and to prevent yourself from verbally destroying someone, you’re asking the boss if he can do something to calm players down. Maybe all they need is a firm reminder. Who knows? You don’t care how it’s done as long as it’s done. I will add that it’s a nice touch to offer a solution or two that you feel might work.
The raid would proceed much smoother and efficiently allowing us to get out earlier and awarding everyone precious relaxation time.
This is where you appeal to the rewards section. As my uncle Lawrence Reciprocicus always asks when someone calls on him for a favor, “What’s in it for me?”
You want to offer something mutually beneficial that your target would appreciate. In this case, a smoother raid and an earlier clear time.
Now the next time you feel the urge to throttle someone or want to stab a pen through your raid’s eyes, consider voicing your concerns to your leaders first. You gotta do it with discipline and serenity! Violence is never the answer!
I remember vanilla World of Warcraft. Every so often, you’ll see many players wistfully thinking back about the fondness for the old days. Thinking about how the game play and the difficulty was truly better then.
That’s Kodo-crap.
Let me tell you, those days weren’t all that great. People that remember it so positively are doing so through rose coloured glasses!
We’ll talk about the PvE side of things.
Raids consisted of 40 people. Of those 40 people, 10 were phenomenal. 20 were mediocre and average. The last 10 players were carried because they were either sleeping, AFK, or just plain stupid. Coordinating the efforts of 40 people was like trying to pull greased up weeds from the ground.
It took an abysmally long time to gear out people. Remember, this was when drops were 2 items per boss. We’re really lucky to have 5 items a boss on 25 man these days.
Don’t get me started on attunement quests? Having to grind through Blackrock Depths just to get keyed for Molten Core? I did so many of those runs to help my guildies get keyed.
Life before the dungeon finder was agonizing depending on your server. Sitting in chat for 3 hours looking for a healer for Undead Strat? Good luck. Oddly enough, that’s why I rolled a priest. Current SWTOR players can sympathize a little bit with that.
What about PvP?
Cross realm didn’t exist.
Alterac Valley battles took up the whole day (if not more).
Servers usually had one or two pre-form teams per faction and queues took longer than most in order to ensure both teams were lined up against other pre-forms. It made for some fun rivalries though. One of my first ever guilds in WoW was a PvP guild. All I did was Warsong Gulch, Arathi Basin, and Alterac Valley while playing on a Paladin.
Granted, there were some memorable moments.
Finishing my Benediction.
Killing Rag for the first time (on the last attempt, no less).
40 players acting in a cohesive unit for the first time after screwing up for hours on end instilled this amazing feeling. It was infectious. It’s like this feeling of accomplishment and the thought that “You know, maybe we really can do stuff”. All that coordination, all the wipes, they actually mean something when factored in with the 40 man raid.
I still hate it.
I’m so glad I never have to farm Whipper Root Tubers again.
You’ve figured out why you should blog.
You worked hard on naming conventions for your blog.
You learned the nuances when writing for the internet.
You’ve mastered Writer’s block.
And you learned to… just get off your ass and write.
But despite applying all the technical and promotional techniques that you learned, you’re still not quite getting the comments you’re looking for. The traffic isn’t reflecting the effort and work you’re putting in. No facebook likes, Google +1’s, and no retweets. In fact, you’re gradually contemplating throwing in the towel.
What gives?
It’s because you’re missing a crucial element. A few weeks ago, I signed up for a Webinar from John Morrow, associated editor from Copyblogger.com. It was a free, 2 hour session discussing elements of traffic and community building. I figured I’d share the notes I took.
Content: Write awesome content. The logic is if you keep writing amazing and helpful stuff, you’ll get noticed and your viewership will start skyrocketing.
Promotion: At the same time, you need to promote your posts. Ask for links, retweets, shares, etc. If people don’t know you exist, they’re not going to read your or share your stuff. So you have to do what you can to get known.
You get jillions of readers if you can combine them effectively.
The equation
Content + Promotion = Readers
But, this equation is missing something.
It’s off slightly. Content and promotion are both important, but there’s a missing component of the formula. You can still write smashing hits and you can still get those mentions, but it might only work for the short term and it doesn’t help your overall strategy of your blog.
This is what the actual equation is.
Content + Promotion + Connections = Readers in the bajillions
Jon used best selling authors as an example.
The easiest way to write a best seller is to already be a best selling author. Guys like Seth Godin and Stephen King don’t need to ask for agents, or be booked to TV shows. People just already know who they are. The reasons why new authors struggle is no one knows who you are. You have to fight to get an agent, a publisher, an interview and so forth. This works the same way for bloggers.
“If you deleted my blog and all my subscribers (I’d be sad for one), but it’s not the end of the world. Because over the past few years, I’ve built relationships with all the popular bloggers in the world. I could still do in a flash.”
-John
The real key to blogging isn’t who you know. The key to blogging is who knows you. No matter how good your content, or how awesome it is or how hard you work, it’s not going to matter.
If you don’t have any influential connections, it’s not going to matter.
Popular bloggers ignore you because they don’t know you. If you email a blogger asking for a link to your site, you’ll most likely be ignored.
If you think about it, we do the same thing.
You scan through your emails and look for the senders you recognize. Anyone you don’t know, you end up ignoring or skipping over. Popular bloggers get on average 100+ emails (some go to 500+) per day. The reality is, most bloggers don’t often respond via email (at least, not right away). We respond to people we know. You have to get lucky with them opening your email to help you out. That’s not a situation you really want to be in which is why why link building won’t work.
If they don’t know who you are, it’s impossible. They have to know you first in order to get you links.
What’s supposed to happen is you share your link with your friends. They share it with their friends and then it goes viral and snowballs it.
Wrong. That’s not actually how it works.
The posts don’t start with people with few friends. It’s not actually consistent. It’s like winning the lottery online. The way viral posts usually happen is they go top down. They get other people with big followings on twitter to share it with their followers and to their friends on twitter. And then their followers. It starts with the top people and works down.
Your goal must be done in these 3 steps in this order.
Step 1 — Connections with list owners
Connections means that those bloggers know your name. They’ve read your work. They’ve had a conversation with you. They think you’re smart and they like you.
No, this doesn’t mean a connection on LinkedIn.
Now list owners means people who have a huge twitter following, high RSS counts, a large emailing list, etc. They’re all different types of lists. You need to get THOSE people to like you because they can help spread your content to their followers and readers.
Step 2 — Content creation
Create awesome content targeted specifically at their audience, point out how it’s relevant to their audience, and ask them to promote it. You can’t just write great content and “hope” someone stumbles upon it. You need to have a connection in mind.
Step 3 — Convert visitors
Ideally, you’d be able to offer your readers something of value. Blogs in other niches hook up readers with like an EBook, a report, or something but unless you’re really intense about it, I wouldn’t stress about that.
When it comes to subscriptions, Jon advises that email is way better than RSS. The engagement level and retention of email over RSS is about 20 times more valuable.
But, you should offer both types anyway. Make sure they’re full feeds.
This is the wrong order
Instead, the actual order should be:
The problem is you start as nobody. How do you become a somebody?
The answer to this is guest blogging!
Jon discovered that this is the only strategy that consistently works for every topic, every blogger, every niche. Some strategies work for certain topics and bloggers, but guest blogging is good for everything. If you guest on a big blog, and you write a mindblowingly amazing post, readers are going to say that post is awesome and they want to read more.
Here’s another analogy he used.
Think of it like an opening act for a major concert.
You’re performing on stage for someone like The Rolling Stones and you’re the first act.
The act of writing a guest post for a popular blog, those bloggers will love you. These posts get you introduced to other popular bloggers and influencers as well. This does NOT mean commenting. This means an actual article to give away to big popular blogs. We’re talking like 1500+ words. You write a popular post for one of these blogs and they edit it for you and give you feedback.
As an aside, if you ever get a chance, take your original version and put it side by side by the edited version. Ask yourself what changed and why.
The smartest thing you can do is link directly to your page (If possible, link directly to a page that offers something cool, like a webinar, or a report, etc).
I want to re-emphasize one more thing.
Network the hell out of everything.
Make friends.
Get contacts.
Know people.
Connect.
It is the universal skill of all universal skills. So many opportunities will be available to you. This is one of the lessons my dad instilled in me when I was younger (actually, this was second after knowing my 12 x 12 multiplication tables). While you’re never going to be best friends with everyone you meet, it doesn’t hurt to be on relatively good terms with everyone.
This isn’t even about blogging. Things like academic openings or even job postings? Amazes me how much of that stuff is behind closed doors. Who you know can make a way bigger impact on your life than what you know. You never know when a blogger’s brother’s wife is looking to hire someone for a specific position that happens to coincide with your goals.
You never know what doors will open from that one blogger who takes you under their wing, or from that one guy who retweets your post.
On the other hand, if there’s nothing wrong with burning bridges as long as it’s done for the right reasons. Alas, that’s beyond the scope of this post.
“More business decisions occur over lunch and dinner than at any other time, yet no MBA courses are given on the subject.”
I have a question for you to ponder.
Would you rather be in a guild that ran 2 ten man raiding teams or 1 twenty-five man raiding team?
Why?