Retiring the cat herder
By sylvie | November 11, 2009
After about two years of organizing raids for my horde guild in WoW, I have decided that it’s time to let someone else do the job.
There are several reasons for this. For one, I expect to be very busy with co-chairing Graphics Interface all winter and I should concentrate on that. But there are other, more personal reasons.
I was starting to feel burned out as raid organizer. I don’t want my leisure activities to feel like a job and it was starting to be more and more like one. In addition, we’ve been going through several months where few people were showing up at raids and I was forced to participate in each one to make sure we had enough people to do something. Going to a raid because you want to is one thing; going to a raid because you have to is just annoying. I don’t know if people were not showing up because I was burned out or if I was getting burned out because people weren’t showing up, but whichever the case, I felt as though I was no longer being successful as raid organizer. It was time to let someone else take on the job.
Note, by the way, that I call myself a raid organizer and not a raid leader. A good raid leader needs to know each boss battle inside out in order to explain the strategy to newcomers. He or she knows who are the best tanks in the group, who should be healing the tanks and who should be healing the whole raid, and what the damage dealers should be doing. However, I can never remember all these details because I tend to space out whenever the boss battles are being explained. As an elemental shaman, all I really need to know is whether the boss fears, poisons or gives illnesses, whether I should be purging anything off the boss, and where I need to stand in order not to accidentally aggro a mob.
I suppose I could have learned how to be a good raid leader, but our guild has some really, really good raid leaders and it was always a lot simpler to just let those guys do the heavy lifting while I took care of the little details: finding out when people could raid (because our guild is made up of a lot of university professors and students, their schedules tend to change with each new university session); deciding what raid we would visit; inviting everyone who signed up and grabbing anyone else to fill out whatever holes there might be; encouraging people to actually show up; and sharing the raid’s success/failures with the whole guild.
It’s been a fun two years - mostly because our guild is great - but it’s time to let someone else start herding those cats.
Topics: Uncategorized, Games |
November 11th, 2009 at 9:54
Well done. It’s lot of work to organize the schedule. When I was playing, I really appreciated your welcoming and inclusive manner. You are great.
-Moofy/Teiktu