GuildMasterpiece Theater

Well, I finally decided to get an alt to 70.  I have tried many times, got bored with it, and then went back to the hunter.  I didn’t want another dps class, and the only think as easy to level as a hunter is of course a lock.  So I decided that I would roll a priest, and by golly, I think she just might make it!  She is sitting pretty at half way to 66 right now, and has plenty o’ questing to do.

But then what happens when I get her there… more faction rep, more kara, more of ALL that stuff… sightara.  When you are leveling, you sometimes forget that the game BEGINS at 70.  But, it does.  I think for now I will just worry about getting her kara keyed.  You can get into OHB at 66, right?

Maybe I will start a fun kara alt night.  KarAlt ‘08?  It could be fun… or it could be hours of wiping on moroes! >.<

Well, we had an officer that due to RL stuff just couldn’t be an active member of the guild anymore.  This made us all very sad, but we definitely saw it coming since his play time was dramatically reduced.  We were disappointed, but excited at the chance to get to elect a new officer!  We actually got to talking, and we are taking on two officers in his place, a healing officer and a dps officer (one of our original officers is a tank so we have that covered.)  We are actually super excited about doing this!  Instad of class officers, we have kind of grouped them into three groups… that way if someone needs help the officer can either help them, or know who to send them to for help.  I hope it works!

How is it that a guild with over half of ssc and tk on farm could feasibly have issues in khara???

I’ll tell you how. People think its like going to mc and not worth the attention they need to pay. Yes even a guild with everything on the go, slacks off in khara. And wipes because of it. Now im all for laying back and having fun but damn!!! wiping in khara Children Please!!! I just want to kill em when we do it. So please if you are a player in a raiding guild, don’t assume just cause its on farm you can be a retard. I’ve started handing out soap on a rope in raids to the idiots… usually followed by a threat to boot them and bring in someone with attention paying capabilities.

Don’t slack off, your gm/raid leader will hate you for it.
And contrary to popular theory WE DO REMEMBER, especially when were doing invites for the big raids you actually care about getting into.

 Ok that was my posting spurt for today, might have something more for you guys on the weekend.

-Belle

PS: that thing above where it says were friendly, i didn’t read that on my volunteer email. I am not friendly, but i do like to rant

Well, first i tell everyone who joins my guild that i will kick your ass out if you start it. And i’ve been known to enforce it on multiple occasions. But sometimes you’ve been grinding away so hard people just loose it over some stupid stuff. Well i had one of these incidents over khara loot of all things. So i decided it was time to blow off some frustration guild style.
The announcement goes up Guild event Sunday 5pm.
Everyone ponders what it will be but, being me i’m as tight lipped about it as a virgin on her wedding night.
Well the time rolls around and i tell everyone to go make level 1 alts, i’ve lined up the locks in the stv arena, and bam its level 1 come as you are tourney style.
This was highly entertaining, we pitted a raid of level ones up against a 70, put them up against each other handed out prizes and fun was had by all.
We followed this up on monday by downing solarian and getting some good time in on alar, he will soon join the ranks of the slain.
As we all know occasionally a break is required. Don’t forget we play wow for fun. Don’t make it a job to your guild.
I’m also looking for ideas on what some of you do for fun stuff to break the stress of your guild.
With vash in our near future i expect well need the ideas.

I’d also like to point out that solarian went down like swiss cheese where as the week before in an hour all we succeed in doing was getting our raid blown up alot ~!

-Belle

I know we have more GM’s than are posting… don’t be scared!  We want to hear about your guilds people!

I must say, I am recently trying to train an officer to run the raids when needed. Just small stuff like khara and za, or bosses that in theory we have so far on farm we can do them in our sleep. We all credit the stability and success of a raid on the Mt, and the main healers, you can have slightly less on the ball people for anything else but those positions have got to be the best. It just never works if you don’t.

But what about the raid leader, does a slightly less on the ball raid leader really make or break your raid? Does the raid rely on those calls for the things they should be watching that much. Is everyone really that immune to the bars, the warnings, the mobs running around? I mean when your halfway through ssc, do you really need your raid leader to tell you so and so is sacrificed on illhoof in kharazan? In theory, we’ve all been doing this for months and it should be autopilot, i mean khara clears in under 4 hours every week both raids for badges mostly, put a new raid leader in to take charge and all of a sudden its a two night event. Is this due to the raid leader or people not paying attention.

I wondered this, so i decided to get sneaky and slip into the vent channel with the announcements off and see what was going on. I slipped in and i listened to the raid, the new leader was doing much better this week, but it all seemed so stiff, there wasn’t allot of communication, and everyone was quiet because the prior week they had spent the entire raid overriding the raid leader and ignoring the instructions, or outright contradicting them even though they were the correct instructions. So of course they got balled out for that. But all of this brings me down to one question.

No matter how wonderful your raid is, does your raid leader make or break it?

And if as i suspect this is the case, what do you do when you find you need to train a new one, and no one has the  certain something it takes. I’ll tell you now theres not alot of good raid leaders out there that can hold there temper, and solve the problems the raid runs into. I find as time goes on that the people who could be good raid leaders are scared to step up, due to former issues where there stepping up was considered an attempt to take over and caused conflict with the officers.  And so this one way monologue, waunders into a conversation on drama and maturity.

Where do you as guild leaders and members draw the line? We all know the line, the someone that is trying to show there worth, but ends up arguing with the gm instead of listening as they should be. Or the raid leader who can’t handle people stepping up to help them out because they are so much in control. BTW this is me to a slight extent, if im in the raid im in charge Period, Exclaimation point, were doing things my way and no one elses. However i fortunatly listen to my officers and my way has been developed through research and trial and error.  So at least i temper the control freak in me with a little moderation.

 Another question to the guild leaders, Why are you a Gm? Why do you day in and day  out deal with the difficulties, the trials the stress and the sheer time from your real life to be a guild master and raid leader. People rarely thankyou for it. 

I think these are all good questions you should ask yourself. If your confortable with the honest answers more power to you. Anyhoodle back to work now, thats my meandering for the day. Ill put up an antecdote next time i think.

 -Bellemorte

I have trouble yelling at people, and I am not so great with the tough love tactics.  I am more of a kind guild master, I listen to your woes, and I always give people the benefit of the doubt.  I never yell, and I keep my raid leaders from losing their tempers as much as I can.  So, last night, when I was having to grab tainted cores from the people on the bottom of the stairs, and people were rambling on in vent and I yelled “Shut up!” it got REAL quiet.  I don’t even like that phrase.  I am a kindergarten teacher by trade, and to five years old that is the equivalent of telling someone to “F off.”  But I needed to know who to grab my core from, and I needed to be able to get there and I needed to be able to hear when the mage at the pillar was ready to get it!  SO… I yelled it… haha I still can’t believe it, but it worked.  The entire raid got quiet, got their business together, and we killed her.  It was awesome.  I almost got my helm too…. damn mage. 

Ok i’m sure you have all run into this, and yes its not directly related to gaming but its something i use inorder to raid I’ve talked to support for a couple of games and most recently creative and there email/chat support always seems to have issues with the concept of reading your issue.  I mean i understand that you do this all day and its boring and you’ve got scripted replies, but Please people if you are going to do a job where you are trying to fix something make sure you understand the issue before whipping off a reply that has nothing to do with it and looking like an idiot!!!!

Now for the examples, heh. So i recently bought a second creative sound card. The xfi to be specific. Its snazzy sweet has awesome sound, enter the problem. I run Dual sound card’s i’ve been doing this for about 6 years now with a sound blaster and some on board sound. I recently built myself a new computer. The New pc’s onboard was realtek, and i really really hate realtek even high end realtek. So i went out and got a second sound blaster card. There not the same model, so hey there should be no problem right? Differn’t drivers and all that. WRONG!! Creative in there infinate wisdom has apparently decided that if you are installing the driver package for a product Any creative software you previously had installed must be something not in the system any longer and it auto uninstalls it. I mean comeon people you couldn’t put a damned prompt in? We detect blah is installed on your system do you wish to uninstall????? So i send creative an email about it because of course like so many companies now adays they don’t have any actual phone support. And i get a reply that reads the following.

“From the detailed description provided; I understand you have an issue
with your Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer wherein you run dual sound
cards. When installing the driver and software for one of the sound
cards, it uninstalls the other sound card’s driver and softwares.

I would like to apologize for any inconvenience that this webcam may
have caused you and I understand where you’re coming from.

However, let me just advise you that it would not be possible to use two
sound blaster cards at the same time since these may create conflict.
Therefore, I suggest using just one sound card one at a time.”

Now to add further insult to injury i’ve already got it working but the shiny xfi software isn’t, And i’m not using a webcam children… No where in the damned email i sent did it mention a webcam. And this is one of the better replies i’ve gotten lol. So what i want to ask the world is, Why is it so hard to actually read what your replying to, when this is your job? I guess it boils down to being lazy or something. Or potentially english is not there first language who knows.  Oh and to tie this into the gaming thing, I use this for streaming music to vent and speakers as well as running a headset for vent. Nothing funier than dj’ing some classic songs in vent preraid lol. You can get some really good sound quality doing it as well, but it does require some fiddling with the settings.

Oh and Woot morogrim tidewalker added to our kill list last night. He died and everyone was Hes dead really? As usual the wonky strats worked for us. but ill post another blog about that later once we’ve refined it a bit. That puts us 4/6 in ssc with lethoras, and vash to go.

What can I say, it seems to TOTALLY be working!  We took a good step back, and we cleared even more BOSSES!  How fun is that?!?  Next week it will back to our regularly scheduled more Vashj!

So, this morning I sign on and check out Digg like I always do, man you can get lost in that site for hours and there on the front page I see this article: Husband and Wife get Divorced over WoW and it makes me think about the game. As a GM I spend a LOT of my free time on this game, and I don’t ALWAYS have my priorities straight, but I would like to think that most of the time I do. I feel like this is one of the top five toughest parts of being a GM. Sometimes when you sign on your screen turns totally pink in whisper, or sometimes when you log onto vent people are begging to yank you into a super secret channel… these things happen all the time, and before you know it, a quick log in to check your auctions can turn into an hour and a half of dealing with why so and so really wants his mom’s best friend to join the guild to raid even though she is a rogue who turned 70 six hours ago. (I would totally let a mom in BTW, cause MoM WoWers are the coolest.) But still, you get the picture.

Over the course of being a GM, I have discovered a few ways to handle this. On occasion I will put up my <DND>sign, and people for the most part get that means I don’t want to be disturbed. But then, there are always the select few that don’t get it. One of my favorite things to do is to just go <AFK> and stay that way. Then I don’t feel obligated to answer any whispers, because I am obviously AFK.

Now, I am not saying that as a GM you should always do that… that would make you suck a lot. But, I am saying that as a GM I sometimes find that I need to finish my darn dailies… or else someone is going to have to cover my repair bill!

So… how do YOU guys deal with the taxing time it takes to be a GM?