Guild Drama: A Treatment Plan

Over the past few weeks, I've had the opportunity to contemplate the structure, dynamics and success of certain guilds...which, of course, leads to the question "What makes a guild successful?" It seems to be inevitable that guilds have drama - there is no way around it. However, a guild is marked by how it addresses and deals with the drama. Drama intervention, by necessity, occurs on multiple levels - GMs, officers and even guild members are crucial in dealing with the situation.

There are, also, different types of drama, and each must be dealt with accordingly.

"Bad Day" Drama: Sort of self-explanatory - someone has a bad day and simply is easily stirred up, etc. I find the best way to handle this is a combination of patience and talking with the person privately - allow the person to vent to you in private will often diffuse the situation. Also, trying to create a lighthearted situation in the raid can assist in calming folks.

"Sensitivity" Drama: Some folks are sensitive to just certain subjects/words or whatever. This is one of the more difficult types of drama to deal with, requiring careful treatment, understanding, and a lot of patience. At times the "sensitivity" relates to specific situations or words. When dealing with Sensitivity Drama, the key is to identify what has triggered the sensitivity. Until you are able to identify the cause, it's nearly impossible to know how to begin dealing with it. Again, the key is to spend some time (preferably in private) talking with the person, encouraging them, mediating, etc. Often, the key to diffusing a situation is showing the person that someone does care.

"Drama Queen/Troll" Drama: If a guild member is prone to repeated disruptions of this sort, the easiest (and perhaps the wisest) course of action is /gkick. The motivation behind this sort of behavior is generally singularly to gain attention through the disruption of normal guild operations. Troll drama is designed to change the topic of discussion from your normal focus/topics to whatever the troll has put forth. The Troll-style drama spreads rapidly through the ranks, as it is generally designed to do. The repercussions can be devastating - often it ends with multiple guildies upset, angry, frustrated, disatisfied, ultimately causing a mass exodus (whether en masse or a steady trickling of departures). While most of the other forms of drama are easily dealt with (and worth the effort to correct), troll drama should be ended the moment it begins before any damage can be done - which general means /gkick. Hand-in-hand with this, however, is the importance of training your guildmates how to react when this sort of thing does (hopefully rarely) occur. The best course of action is NO reaction...do not provide the troll what he most desires - attention.

Leo Down!

Well, Leo is officially dead! It was a rough night, but after wiping at 3% on our first attempt when Leo enraged, 2 stupid wipes, and then wiping twice in a row at 1%, we finally got him down! Hooray!

Today, after the reset, we went back in and killed Hydross, Lurker and Tidewalker in quick succession. (YAY!). Then we got our first look at Fathom-Lord Karathress. There was a bit of confusion at the beginning of the fight and some of the misdirects didn't go off. We tried two or three more times, but it was near the end of raid time, so we decided to knock off for the night and come back tomorrow, rarin' to go.

On a side note, if you remember my post The Guild from a while back, the guild that was formed when some folks split off was also heading into SSC tonight as we were going in. The second we were inside, suddenly /1 (the local channel) was flooded with spam and unnecessary comments, clearly trying to distract us and/or get a reaction. My reaction was to move that channel to a separate tab in Prat (I love Prat!) that I easily was able to ignore. It's sad that people can't just walk away and focus on building a guild instead of tearing down another.

A Bit of This and That and a One Night Clear (Mostly) of Kara

So it's been a while since I've posted - I've actually started several posts that I never finished. Why you may ask? Well, it started with a bit of a frustrating week in Kara. Despite getting some nice loot (Shard of the Virtuous", Ruby Slippers), we had some issues downing bosses we normally down with little or no problem. We got Oz at the Opera again (that wasn't really a problem, other than that it glitched on the start and we had to reset and start it over), but we just couldn't seem to down a couple of others.

Being a relative noob to our guild, I've been (thankfully) rather ignorant of the politics (read: drama) in our guild and prefer to remain so. On Friday night, there were a few things that happened and by the next morning, our main raid leader, shammy healer and mage had walked out. Because of their departure, we lost some others, including another mage/rogue and our main holy priest. Now, I think if they had just left we still would have lost a few, but there was also a big hubub when they left. And of course, that just made things worse.

I hate drama! Have I said that already? But really I do! Part of me wonders if our guild will survive. Part of me feels obligated to stick it out to the bitter end to try and MAKE it work - particularly since a few of my friends have joined there now too. Am I keeping my eyes open? Yes. Am I leaving now? No. Am I stupid enough to think this will be an easy road? No. But I'm not a quitter - once I join something, it is VERY hard for me to walk away. Too bad, really - the easy way out would be to quit.

On a positive note, we did a fairly complete clear of Kara last night - we missed a couple of bosses, but we cleared Attumen, Moroes, Maiden, Opera (Little Red Riding Hood - YAY, it wasn't Oz again!), Curator, Aran, Chess and Prince. We also did a couple of attempts on Nightbane and one on Illhoof, neither fight I'd seen before. I think we could take one or both on another night - we had virtually no AoE - and only one warlock. Our group makeup for the night was two warriors (the offtank was brand-newish in Kara), two shadow priests, two resto druids, two hunters, one warlock and one rogue. The great news is both Hunzul and Deressy (Gloves of the Fallen Defender which I used to get Handguards of Malorne, Aran's Soothing Sapphire and Girdle of Treachery, got some new gear! AND Cianna, one of our friends, got the Sunfury Bow of the Phoenix to drop off Prince that she's been trying for since July!

So Deressy went instead. It was, however, a rather frustrating week there. We downed Attumen, Moroes, Maiden, got Oz at the Opera (again!) and chess. Deressy walked out with some nice new gear - . Not bad, eh?

It wasn't terribly late but a few of our folks had to leave due to early work the next day, so we put the rest off until Friday.