Blizzard announced their new WoW expansion.
Too little, too late.
Is it so hard?
Is it so hard to find twenty five people who are not suffering some kind of mental impairment? I think ten people is pretty reasonable number of sane, intelligent people. But twice that starts to push the limits of expectations.
World of Warcraft is a fun game, but if you want to pursue the end-game raiding content, you will have to find twenty four other people you can work with. And they can’t just be people you can get along with under ideal circumstances. These people need to be comrades when the chips are down and things are not going well. They need to agree on what they expect from everyone else and be able to apply that same expectation to themselves. I don’t think I know that many people in real life, and if I did, I certainly were not friends with them all at the same time.
When you try to build this dream team, you end up with some people waiting around for the rest of the team to stumble into your guild. Sometimes after being through several other guilds, searching for their true home in the game. And that journey can leave this otherwise normal person with any number of strange quirks and psychological problems. Sometimes it’s something as simple as “we don’t pull the mobs like this” or “I cleared this in another guild so you should be coming to me for advice!” And it can be worse. After spending twenty hours a week with a group of people who hate each other to get some content down, they have often abandoned any protocols for working with people in any rational way. They learn to treat people like dirt to show their own superiority. They learn to insult people who are not as well geared or skilled as they are. They develop these insecure mechanisms where they tout their spec as being the same as the main tank in Nihilum instead of taking any pride in having a spec they know is good and WHY it is a good spec. I’ve had people, after being removed from our guild for not fitting in well, actually try to argue their way back into the guild. Often they expect to stay in the guild based on their skill or gear, even if everyone in the guild hates their guts. Who does that? I know who. Insane people!
It makes being a guild leader a nightmare sometimes. On one hand you need to recruit and grow your guild. On the other hand, you need to scrutinize these new people and keep the jerks out. When someone is really bad, it’s not such a bad job. It’s the people who seem normal, but are a swirling storm of drama underneath that make being a guild leader a serious pain.
Grrr.