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Officers' Quarters: Last man standing
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook. Guild leadership is a tenuous social construct. It's all volunteer. It's based purely on someone's commitment to a community of people, most of whom they have never actually "met." It's based on their continued enjoyment of a single game, over months and years. When you look at it that way, it's amazing how stable and long-lasting some guilds can be, thanks to dedicated and enthusiastic leaders. This week's email, unfortunately, is about a guild in a different situation. It's from an officer who, after a series of mishaps and disappearances, is the last leader left. Hi Scott, First off, let me say that I'm a huge fan of your column, it's helped me out a lot in the past. I'm currently one of 3 officers in a midsize guild. My guild has recently been hit by a perfect storm of bad events over the summer. The guild's raid team has seen moderate success since the end of Cataclysm, enough to keep 8 people interested in raiding. However, we haven't been able to fill a raid team since Mists of Pandaria launched. I'm the PvP officer for the guild, but our Guild Master put a horrible new rule in place (disallowing any kind of guild events on Raid Nights) in January that send our entire PvP team off to another guild. Ever since then I haven't been able to recruit and gear enough people to make a full team. All of the issues started at the beginning of June, when our Guild Master started logging on less and less. He'd only log on for raids, but after a few weeks, he stopped logging on at all. In addition to that, one of our 3 officers stopped logging into WoW completely in mid-June. My colleague and I just kept trying to drive up guild activity with events, gearing nights, and raids, just trying to keep the raid team afloat.
Drama Mamas: The prodigal GM returns
Drama Mamas Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are experienced gamers and real-life mamas -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of the checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your realm. Actions. Consequences. Drama. Hello Drama Mamas, When I joined over two years ago, our 25-man raiding guild used a 2-headed GM system. Of course, only one had the guild controls, but they would pass things back and forth at times and had equal say in policy. Over a year ago, one of them, the creator of the guild left the game due to some heavy real life issues. Guild control was passed to the other, and another co-GM was assigned. We were told often that the old GM would be returning soon, but none of us ever heard from him.
