Recently, one of my readers (I do have them!) turned me onto this little gem of a book called “The Guild Leader’s Handbook” on Amazon, which is this little compendium if tips and tricks about being a leader in a group of people towards a mutual digital goal. I have to say, it’s about time that something like this came out in actual print, mostly because I think there are always some tried and true facts about being a guild leader in an MMO that frankly needed to be committed to the written word. I haven’t cracked the book at all, but I do hope that one vital and salient point about what is needed to be a guild leader isn’t missed.
To be a guild leader, you have to be a masochist. And people have to appreciate the positive value of that level of self-punishment.
I was never really a guild leader, but I did climb as high as to be suckered into being a sort of senior officer and a raid leader, which meant such fun tasks as posting raid strategies, using my barely coherent mathematics skills to determine points for our raid/loot system, and listening to people talk my ear off about how the purples needed to be on their toon instead of another’s. The thing is, someone has to do the job, and the job of a leader’s, especially in an MMO’s, is just sometimes as painful as sticking a pair of scissors in your hand and twisting.
Perhaps the worst day I ever had involved:
-Me somehow finding a bug in the raid point software that gave someone hundreds of points and minused a ton of random points from others
-Listening for two hours to 3 people involved in a crazy online love triangle that was affecting our ability to raid
-Having to sit in vent and hearing the unfortunate sound of someone on the raid that had the stomach flu, and
-Misassigning the best warrior weapon in the entire dungeon to a gnome mage.
…but on that day, we killed a raid boss we’d been working on for weeks. Somehow, it made the masochism all worth it. I’d say that the next time you see your guild leader or raid leader, or if you ever pop open the book I linked, make sure you give them a virtual hug and perhaps even some cookies. Trust me – they’ll need them.



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