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A couple week’s ago we asked what your challenges were as a Guild/Raid Leader, now its time for the flip side. What issues do you have as a member of the general raid/guild population?Keeping up with raid attendance, dealing with the guild bank, unorganized raids? What frustrations would you like to vent to the leadership of your guild?
Before I lead my own raids, I was a raider in another guild. I had some issues.
1. I farmed mats for the cooks and the alchemists to make flasks and buff foods for just about anyone in the raid as a courtesy. Yet, when I had a RL issue pop up every now and then, not only would I have to buy my own stuff, but people BITCHED because I didn’t provide theirs.
2. People apparently are able to sit for four hours at a stretch and not take a bio break or stretch. This is not healthy. And certainly not possible for everyone. Due to some physical difficulties, I can’t sit for this long. I was ridiculed for my frequent stretch breaks.
3. DKP hoarding. This meant that when KT finally dropped that damn caster whatsit, I never had a chance. Because the mage held on to his DKP never taking any upgrades, just so he could take the dagger. The rest of us clothies were taking upgrades as they came.
For those reasons, and being told *I* SUCK, because the group as a whole could not get the execution down for Kel Thuzad, I left the guild. I understand the desire to be in the top 10 on the server. But that guild hit number 3, and fell apart because the raid leader burned the raiders out.
Mindful of my own issues, and those of my raiders, we do things differently. And of course, I tank and lead the raid, not running behind as a caster dps.
Dear Officers: If any raider of yours talks about how they didn’t feel they could come to you about something, it’s not that you’re not on enough. It’s almost never about how much time you spend in game, actually. It’s almost always where you are, communication-wise; it’s almost always that they felt you weren’t /open/ to talking. Just be open & around, even if only for a spare few minutes before/after raid, that’s all. 🙂 <3 A Veteran Peon.
(By "peons" I mean those of us non-officer types who can't directly change where the guild is heading. We can lead by example, sure, but we don't have much more in the way of traditional leadership powers.)
Beyond not being prepared or having to deal with less-active players, the issue I hate the most is when the officers seem separate from the non-officers. There's transparency of rules & decisions, sure, but if your raiding group doesn't feel like they can talk to the officers about even small things, they won't come to the officers until a problem is quite nasty (& possibly unsolvable at that point).
From a peon's perspective, hanging out too much in the officer-related channels comes off as a clique, honestly. I know very well that, most of the time at least, you may actually be doing important stuff down in those channels — for example, our RLs pop down after every raid to discuss the raid & plan the composition & strats for the next one. It's legit important stuff, I understand that & don't want them to stop doing that, actually.
But it does create a silent (& sometimes deadly) separation effect when the only places we can find you are either in raid (a time when I shouldn't & really don't want to bring up possible drama) or in a channel we can't just pop down & talk to you about things. Either we literally can't pop into the officer channel because of rank restrictions or possibly we feel like we're interrupting "more important" things, so we don't tell you about small nagging problems until they're around the dramatic magnitude of "more important" things.
Oh yeah, sure, we can whisper you, but eventually either you get tired of being flooded with /w (c'mon, GM blogs say it all the time) or we get tired of having to whisper you all the time. And then the communication just dies altogether.
So please, just be around and hang out as people. You don't want officership to be a job, and frankly, your raiders don't want you to be that miserable, either. Honestly, we don't. I think the more we see of you as actual beings not connected to dark green text, the more likely we'll listen to you & cooperate when you need to be Officerly about things.
Something I’ve been guilty of, occasionally, in the past with my own raids: Organization ahead of the pull.
Which instance are we heading to first? Which bosses are on our list tonight? Questions like these are not necessarily problems if answered late, but it is hard to tolerate standing around for 20 minutes while waiting on details which could have been covered prior to invites.
Other players failures keeping us behind. It’s frustrates the hell out of me.