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Looking for Guild: Mixed bag
As we recover from the holiday insanity, we can now concentrate on getting back into some serious gaming again. This week's LFG column is a mixed bag of players looking for guilds and guilds looking for players. Hey, maybe they could help each other out! While most of the submissions are from Final Fantasy XIV players, we also have one from an Elder Scrolls Online guild leader looking to get set up properly before launch. Follow along after the jump for the list and complete rules on how to submit your own LFG entry!
The Guild Counsel: Seven New Year's resolutions every guild leader should make
As 2013 comes to a close, it's a good opportunity to look back at your guild's year and remember the success and memorable high points you reached together. For every guild that made it through the year, there are hundreds if not thousands that didn't. There are many challenges to running a guild, and sadly, there are too many potential pitfalls that can cause even the most cohesive guilds to fracture and fall apart. The start of a new year is a good time for guild leaders to make a few resolutions to strengthen their guild and make the coming year more enjoyable for all. Let's look back at some helpful advice from the past year's Guild Counsel as we look forward to 2014.
Drama Mamas: The case of the evil guild leader
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. What do you do when you realize your GM is not a good person? Dear Drama Mamas, I promise to keep this as short as possible while still giving you all the needed details. I am, and for all intents and purposes HAVE been, a member of of a guild of which the GM and I have know each other for a long time. We've gamed together across numerous games as well as several MMOs in our day, developing a guild that has followed us in the same manner as I've followed him. I was young when we began our quest of gaming, but now as I grow older, I'm learning that he is an enormously terrible person.
Storyboard: Working without /random
Two weeks ago, you might recall, I ranted about using random rolls as a mechanic of resolution when roleplaying in MMOs. For those of you who can't be bothered to go back and read the whole thing now (which I totally understand; you probably have holiday games burning a hole in your pocket), the core point was that random rolls don't actually tie to anything for resolution and wind up coming off as an obvious and unfun kludge for the sake of random resolution. "Well, if you're so smart, why don't you come up with alternatives?" And I did. Readers also had some wonderful suggestions and feedback in the comments last week, which make the article even more worth reading, so really, go ahead and take a look at it. This week, I'm taking a look at how you're going to resolve conflicts in roleplaying without relying on what amounts to a coin flip. And as you may have expected, they're all taking tips from tabletop games.
The Guild Counsel: Making the most of holiday events with your guild
The holidays might seem like a good time to lay low and take a break, but they can actually be a great opportunity to get ahead, particularly for more casual guilds. The arrival of holiday events means that players can relax and enjoy the short-term change of pace, but with the right approach, those limited events can help your guild boost its finances and its morale at the same time. Let's look at how even the most casual guild can benefit from holiday events in this week's Guild Counsel.
Ask Massively: The one where we talk about our 2013 awards
Let's talk about our 2013 awards (not the 2012 awards, though this image demonstrates why we avoid easily manipulable community polls). Some of you agreed with our picks. Some of you didn't. That's OK. Not everyone on the Massively staff agreed with all of them either. A lot of sites just let the Important People reach a consensus on nominations or even the final vote, but we let every staffer vote on the entire pool of everything. Everything, as one columnist put it, was a write-in. Goodness, even TUG scored a vote in there. Of course, TUG is adorable. A bunch of people wrote something to the effect of, "How dare you say subs are the year's biggest mistake? Massively hates subs! You're so biased for F2P!" Specifically, we said that subs were a huge blunder for The Elder Scrolls Online and WildStar. "Massively" is not a hivemind entity, and "Massively" does not hate subs. Quite a lot of us like or even prefer subs. Most of us grew up when subs were the norm. I'm subbed to two games right this very second, even though what I personally prefer was classic Guild Wars' buy-to-play campaign set-up. We also voted for a sub game as our game of the year! But let's be perfectly clear when we're fighting this F2P-vs.-sub war: The sub model we remember so fondly is not the sub model games are deploying now.
Storyboard: You ruined your own event
You're running a roleplaying event, and it's going well. It's lively, people are having fun, characters are playing off one another well, it's ideal. So you decide to push things a little further, to take things up a little more, and the next thing you see is people mumbling excuses and leaving until you're left with one or two people who remain less as a function of fun and more as a testament to bitter determination. What in the world happened? I'll tell you what happened: You ruined your own event. This has kind of been a week for me of people ruining good stuff, which makes this week's column unintentionally apropos. A lot of roleplaying events start out great, with everyone invested and happy to be present, but they quickly dissolve when a few well-intentioned but poor choices are made by the people running the event. And while I can't chronicle every possible pitfall, I can at least talk about the most common ones that I see again and again.
Looking for Guild: FFXIV
Final Fantasy XIV's successful relaunch was certainly one of the big stories of 2013, taking many of us on the team by surprise. It gave us hope that game companies can recover from failed launches if they play their cards exactly right. We see that love for the reborn fantasy MMO here in the LFG column, especially, as more and more Massively readers are reaching out to find like-minded guilds to join. This week is no exception as we have an archer looking for a free company to call home in today's listing.
Drama Mamas: Staying guilded to please someone who's never around
Playing WoW to please someone else is always a losing proposition. So what do you do when you figure that out on your own and you're ready to throw yourself a life preserver? So basically I've got myself into a bit of a situation where I'm not happy and I'm not sure I can solve that without making someone else unhappy. Before Mists dropped, I was convinced by a real-world friend and classmate, to transfer to Alleria, because her (absolutely wonderful) horde guild that I am also a part of, had made an Alliance version of the guild and I play primarily Alliance. I paid to transfer my main over (and eventually one of my other favourite characters) and was promptly part of a guild with no one in it. My classmate rarely plays due to real life time constraints, and not a single one of the members of the horde guild actually play the characters they brought into the guild. I've been trucking along, entirely alone for the majority of Mists. When it became clear that I was the most active player, they handed me the title of GM and vanished. I tried recruiting but no one stuck around for long, and I had a few friends join, but they also rarely have the opportunity to play. I've now single-handedly raised the guild to level 19, filled up the guild bank with mats that will never be used, and gotten several guild achievements on my own. That's super satisfying, knowing how hard I worked to bring it where it is today, but if I'm still all alone, what's the point?
The Guild Counsel: All's fair in love, war, and MMOs
When we're playing MMOs, we're in a virtual world, but we're also playing a game, and as in all games, there are rules to follow. It's one thing for an individual player to break the rules, but when that player is part of a guild, it can have a ripple effect that affects every other member. Guild leaders are in a tough position when it comes to rule-breaking because knowingly allowing someone to exploit could make the guild complicit in the process. And when the banhammer strikes, it could come down hard on the entire guild. How much responsibility should a guild leader have over players who bend or break the game rules? Let's consider a few points in this week's Guild Counsel.
Drama Mamas: How to deal with an overzealous guildie
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. One way or another, this week's letter writer is going to give her biggest fan the slip. Dear Drama Mamas, I'm a GM of a casual RP/social guild. As such I do my best to be diplomatic, friendly, and keep things friendly and inviting for my guildies. We've kept it going for years with ups and downs and I'm incredibly proud of how little drama we've had all things considered. I'd hate to be the source of any drama so am considering this a preemptive strike. There is one particular guildie who isn't breaking any rules, is a wonderfully creative RPer, and annoys the everliving crap out of me. It's not his fault, it's a personality thing. He rubs me the wrong way. We're very different people with different senses of humor and priorities etc and so on. And that'd be fine, I'm an adult perfectly capable of getting along and keeping the peace with people I don't necessarily jive with. Except that he is DEAD SET on becoming my BEST FRIEND FOREVER. To the point where my dislike has steadily grown into a total reluctance to log on.
Storyboard: Don't fight with /random
Most of my Storyboard columns center on larger issues, providing advice in some way. This one does not. This one is purely about one of the elements of roleplaying in MMOs that I particularly dislike: using in-game random rolls to determine the outcome of actions during tense scenes (or out-of-game rolls in games that don't support /random or /roll or something similar). This is a time-honored practice in MMOs, but I've never had many nice things to say about it, to the point that I wrote an entire column about dueling without even discussing it. In practice, it makes sense, casting otherwise unresolvable situations back to the realm of tabletop gaming. What's not to like? Lots of things. Resolving conflicts with random dice rolls is unsatisfying and to be avoided at all costs. And if you want to compare it to tabletop gaming, you're making a lot of logical leaps that don't hold up under scrutiny.
The Guild Counsel: Survive the holidays with these fun guild events
The holiday season can often mean that things slow down in the guild. Members have their hands full with gift buying, holiday events, and travel to visit family. That slowdown is OK. Guilds should encourage players to take a little time off, while recognizing that it'll be harder to organize and run larger guild events like raiding or PvP. But just because things get quiet doesn't mean the guild can't have a little fun and merriment. In this week's Guild Counsel, let's look at some memorable events that are easy to run, bring the guild together, and leave everyone with a smile.
Ask Massively: New hires, HEX, and the problem with rogues
The Massively staff is not made up of Rogues. It turns out that a curiously high percentage of us play Shamans, but that's neither here nor there. The point is today we have questions about Rogue classes in MMOs and the shiny new hires soon to be added to our roster, and there's no good way to smush these topics into a coherent introduction. I maintain that this is entirely your fault. Soldack asked, Do you cover the HEX TCG that is going to also have a full fledged MMO? And do you have any interest in hiring a writer/streamer to cover it? Yep, we do cover it as a sort of pseudo-MMO. We got our grubby paws all over it at this past E3 and after the Kickstarter was announced, and we keep track of it in our crowdfunding column as it continues to develop. But we have no plans to hire a new journalist to focus on it or other MMOTCGs/MMOCCGs (like Hearthstone) exclusively right now, nope. If that changes, rest assured that we'll be putting up a hiring notice!
Drama Mamas: Giving up on the team that gives up the farm
Image: Wowhead Having kids in the house keeps it real -- even (especially?) when it comes to PvP. With my 12-year-old daughter and I both plowing through moderate Arathi Basin obsessions, I have to admit that she's got a better handle on the social aspect than I do. How so? I've had to put myself in time out and cool off my knee-jerk reaction to whiny losers. The background: Leveling my most recent lowbie through her 20s and 30s in AB was absolutely, utterly glorious. My teammates were relaxed, and my opponents didn't spend more time emoting /kek or /spit or making strange gestures at me than they did focusing fire on me (yeah, the healer ... ouch). The 40s flashed by, too, albeit with a little more arguing among my teammates over strategy. But once the 50s hit, the losers (in multiple senses of the word) came out in full force. As soon as a single player declared we might be too far behind to pull off a win, half the team would crumple into an orgy of chat despair. Players would stand dead in the graveyards in order to continue textually bemoaning their fate. When your team gives up, what should happen next? Is it time to launch a rallying cry? Decry a lack of sportsmanship? Call out culprits? Ignore the whole thing and let the downward spiral continue?
Storyboard: Why am I still here?
Sometimes, the biggest problem you face isn't whether or not you can find dramatic roleplaying but whether or not your character has a reason to keep subjecting herself to it. I ran into the problem recently in Final Fantasy XIV. As a player, I enjoyed what was going on with one of the many organizations my character belongs to. The problem is that she wasn't enjoying it, and she didn't have any reason to keep subjecting herself to it. She didn't like most of these people, she didn't need money or resources from them, and she wasn't really deriving any benefit from it any longer. Obviously, I wanted her to stick around. But every so often you find yourself in situations where your character isn't happy and wants to leave... and has both reason and opportunity to do so. Two weeks ago I talked about getting someone out of your life; now it's time to talk about keeping a character in the mix.
The Guild Counsel: How to lead and still have fun
Leading is hard. Whether it's a sports team, an office of workers, or a guild, there are many challenges that all leaders share and make even the toughest person want to walk away. And because running a gaming guild is less of a job and more of a hobby (or at least, it should be!), it's hard to get good people to step forward and run things. We're all here to have fun in game, after all, and if leading a guild detracts from that, it's not surprising that some shy away from it. But running a guild isn't always about taking power and making hard decisions. In fact, there are plenty of successful guilds that have rejected the top-down mentality. Can leading a guild really be that easy?
Drama Mamas: When friends don't behave like friends
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. It hurts when your good friend doesn't have your back. I have an issue that I hope you can help me with. I've been playing wow for 6 and half years now and after my first guild folded I went to play on the hordes side of the fence for a little bit. After deciding to return to alliance I offered my support to a friend from the previous guild in her quest of making one of her own. It's been about a year since I joined the guild and was appointed assistant gm and being put in charge of raiding I even took care of the guild whilst my gm and her partner was moving states I farmed for mats and put gold in the guild bank and also gained a handful of recruits.
Storyboard: Pacing and numbers in roleplaying
I attend a lot of roleplaying events. This is not a surprise to anyone, I'm sure. What also probably isn't a surprise is how many of them turn out to be slow, meandering, and generally not all that great. It's like wading through any bunch of player-generated content; you've got a lot of people who have a great idea in their heads to the point that they'll ignore signs about how badly that idea will shake out in reality. A lot of it comes down to two major issues: pacing and numbers. In some ways, this is an extension of the problem of people not playing to the medium, but it's also a problem of pacing and overall event flow. If you're not thinking about how you're pacing an event, you haven't fully thought things out, and if you aren't thinking about what that means for the people attending, you're going to wind up with a lot of bored people complaining via whispers.
The Guild Counsel: Revisiting the Guild Turkey
A couple of years ago, we looked at a few ways that guild members can turn a guild into a nightmare, creating all sorts of drama and becoming the official guild turkey. Being in a guild can be a challenging experience as it is because you have dozens if not hundreds of people under the same roof, with many different objectives and ways of seeing things. But there are some members who amp up the drama and excel at creating tension. Everyone has a bad day here and there, but some players have more than their fair share. Let's look at a few guild turkeys for guild leaders to be careful of inviting in this week's Guild Counsel.
