by Nick Yee
Hadean Drive Yards is one of many corporations in EVE Online. It sells manufactured starships as well as offering consulting services. On its corporate homepage located online (that is, not in EVE Online but outside the virtual world, actually on the Internet), part of their marketing material states that:
Our R&D teams have done extensive research and testing over the course of time and have developed certain configurations which can be applied to your Corporate or Individual needs. Our ships are considered by many to be the most agile, mobile and hostile pieces of equipment in the Four Empires. While we do offer all the physical requirements to make, arm and deploy ships, we also offer our larger clients consultation services.3
Hadean Drive Yards has a typical corporate structure with executive roles and managers leading three departments: research and development, manufacture and production, and mining and transport. The corporate hierarchy and chain of command are shown in an organizational chart available on its website. One of the roles in the executive branch is the human resources officer, who “handles most, if not all, of the hiring and firing and keeps up to date personnel files on all current and past employees.” In an online recruitment post, the chief financial officer, Vladimir Tinakin, described the ideal applicant: “We’re looking for bright and motivated capsuleers who are looking to belong to something bigger than themselves, and who want to find friendship as well as a knowledge of the game. . . . We have space for just about every play style.” Apart from gaining access to new technologies, a benefit of joining Hadean is “mentorship which can provide insight and guidance towards your specific training curve.” And you, too, can be a part of Hadean. Interested parties can find the application form at Hadean’s main website. The application has twenty-two short questions and an essay question on the applicant’s reason for joining Hadean. After submitting the application, the prospective employee is contacted and interviewed by a Human Resources representative. The recruitment post ends with this question: “Do you have what it takes to be Hadean?”4
In the same way that corporations evolved to take advantage of the free market, it makes sense that similar organizational structures have evolved in virtual worlds in which free markets are part of the system. Still, it bears pointing out that many gamers are becoming corporate cogs as entertainment. Some of these players review incoming applications and others set up interviews with the applicants. Online games are portrayed as fantasy worlds to escape work, but corporate work is now a form of digital play.
Dragon-Slaying
Slaying dragons is equally challenging work. After all, dealing with large teams of people, with varying personalities and motivations, is always difficult. The fact that you are interacting with orcs and elves doesn’t make the people behind the avatars any easier to manage. The immature, self-centered player doesn’t magically become wise and selfless when he or she types in a username and password. And yet, the rhetoric of dragons and swords doesn’t only hide the work from outsiders, it actually makes it harder for the gamers themselves to see this work. The following experience by a Guild Wars player is actually quite common:
Leading a guild is very rewarding, watching it grow and thrive, being respected by your members as a good leader. Politics and folks leaving the game eventually ruins the experience. Overall it was very fun, time consuming and an emotionally exhausting experience. Not sure if I would do it again. [Guild Wars, male, 41]
In the same way that dealing with other players was what made running a business difficult in Star Wars Galaxies and what makes cargo transport risky in EVE Online, other players make dragon-slaying difficult in games like World of Warcraft. Dragons do not have inner divas or bedtimes. People do. Slaying the dragon is actually quite straightforward once you’ve figured out how to manage a team of two dozen people to help you. And this is the crucial management problem that every successful guild leader must solve.
One of the main reasons to form a guild is to sustain a group of players to take on the team-based dungeons in the high-end game. For example, high-end dungeons in World of Warcraft require ten or twenty-five players. Although a solo player could certainly try to form an ad hoc team by shouting in the public city areas, many recruits will lose their patience while waiting for the team to form and leave. Dungeons also require specific combinations of combat roles, making it difficult to fill certain spots on the fly. And because these strangers have no loyalty to the group, the team often breaks up soon after its first failure in the dungeon. Guilds are a solution to both the availability and loyalty problems, at least in theory.
Sustaining a guild is no small feat. Sustaining a guild means making sure everyone in your guild is happy. Guild members who are unhappy quit the guild, or even worse, persuade other guild members to leave with them to form a new one. What makes managing a guild so difficult in online games is the wide variance in demographic background, life experiences, and motivations. In your guild is the hyper thirteen-year-old who is falling in love for the first time (and will soon be heartbroken for the first time), the college student panicking over what to major in, the stay-at-home-parent who is sleep deprived but so glad that the kids are finally in bed, and the war veteran who wants people to listen only to him. How do you make them all happy at the same time?
God damn, people don’t listen. I hated it. They are so whiny and expect you to do exactly what they say and give them what they want. Balancing the needs of 50 people suck. . . . I won’t do it again. I don’t even want to be an officer. Takes all the fun out of the game. [World of Warcraft, female, 26]
Think about the last time you had to work in a team of people (excluding family members) who were as young as ten and as old as seventy. Most people never have this experience in the physical world. In our daily lives at school or at work, we’re often working with people of similar backgrounds. In college, we work on projects with other students, who are almost always within a three-year age difference. And companies generally hire people who fit the company culture and have specific kinds of educational training and skillsets. In online games, this social homogeneity is removed.
The toughest part of being a guild leader is that my guild is comprised of people who have great personalities and get along really well, but are a real mixed bag of playing styles. You’ve got the guy who has 10 level 30 characters, you’ve got the guy who levels at a glacier pace, you’ve got the guy who hits 60 in a month but only wants to solo, you’ve got your hardcore raiders, the guy who has 8 level 60 toons, your casual players, your night crew and your stone cold PVPers. Trying to come up with goals and content for people like that, people who are all my friends, but have a million different goals, has been a really stressful balancing act. On top of which, I am a casual player who has a busy job and a RL of her own, and can’t be on every night of the week to make sure everyone is happy. Being a guild leader has taught me about personality types and how to manage people more than any job I’ve ever worked on. [World of Warcraft, female, 27]
It goes without saying that being the perceived gatekeeper to happiness can be incredibly stressful. And it’s a constant battle that always leads to disappointments.
The most valuable thing I have learned from playing the role of a guild leader is one akin to life: No matter what you do there will always be some folks that do not like you. [Legends of Cosrin, male, 30]
Of course, your guild members are not only interacting with you. They’re also busy gossiping, backstabbing, and getting fed up with each other. A common trigger for guild drama is rare loot—treasure dropped by monsters. Since five hours in a twenty-five-person dungeon yields only a few usable pieces of loot, tensions run very high when it comes time to determine who gets that loot. The following narrative comes from a female player who plays EverQuest with many offline friends.
Over time the more senior guild members and skilled players seemed to slowly begin leaving for one reason or another and the newer members kind of “took over.” Eventually it all came to a head on one
raid however, when a good friend of ours (also a senior member/officer) was put in a position of having to random roll on a piece of loot against a much newer member.
It ended up in a large debate, with people taking sides . . . one side believing that no one deserved loot more than anyone else regardless of time put into the guild, status, seniority, etc., and the other side angry that after all we had put into the guild we were being called “loot whores” for feeling that we deserved more than having to/random against some new member. The girl involved, her boyfriend (also a very good friend), myself, and my boyfriend left over this incident. I was very upset by the way the entire thing was blown out of proportion in the end and the fact that people I considered “friends” later stabbed me in the back with their accusations. [EverQuest, female, 40]
Guilds, with their mixed-bag personalities and competition for loot, are drama factories. Whether it’s trivial bickering or a serious accusation, every time there is a conflict within the guild, as guild leader you are the go-to person who must decide what to do. To run twenty-five-person raids reliably, your guild needs to have between double to triple that number to ensure availability and plan for contingencies. In a guild of fifty or more people, interpersonal conflicts are constantly being escalated to guild officers and to you. And these conflicts are accumulating whether you are on- or offline.
The toughest thing about being a leader is people want you to solve their problems. You become their surrogate parent. It’s analogous to running a business or any other organization in that respect. Actually helping them solve a problem or three is rewarding, but for me that pleasure is rapidly overwhelmed by the silliness of most of their problems. [EVE Online, male, 49]
Keep in mind also that high-end raids are pressure-cooker environments, with simmering tensions over past loot distribution and constant personality conflicts. Where there are limited resources, there is competition. To maintain control, guild leaders often devise rules and policies. And like office politics, resolving conflict in online games with a fair and firm hand while maintaining peace is challenging. It is difficult to be judge and friend at the same time.
A guild leader has to be den mother and bitch goddess in one. You have to be prepared to lay down the rules and abide by them, while at the same time, taking care of everyone in your guild. It’s a lot of work and it’s a really fine line to walk along at times. [World of Warcraft, female, 27]
It is hard enough to sustain a guild, but carrying out an actual raid brings its own unique set of challenges. First and foremost, you need to get ten or twenty-five people to show up at the same time. Since raids often run between two and six hours, you have to plan and schedule them in advance. The easiest way to do this is to establish a weekly raiding schedule that guild members can sign up for. Of course, getting twenty-five people to show up on time is another issue.
Getting everyone where they need to be, at the right time, is quite possibly the hardest part of a large-scale raid. There will always be latecomers, and not many on time. Making judgment calls—even when people are saying that they are incoming—on when to leave can be tricky. Leaving too soon will leave some people behind—and not likely give them a good impression of your raids (meaning they’ll not likely go on another one of yours, and possibly speak out against raids you do). However, leaving too late will cause frustration to those that were actually on time, and want to get the event going. [Ultima Online, male, 18]
From the moment guild members start showing up, the raid leader is bombarded with unexpected events and must rapidly cycle through contingency plans. Billy signed up for the raid and told you he would come but still hasn’t shown up after twenty minutes. Lisa, the primary warrior’s girlfriend, is now asking if she can take Billy’s place even though she didn’t sign up. Steve wants to know if he has time to run to the corner store to buy smokes. The primary warrior is now also hassling you to let Lisa take Billy’s place. Jamie is complaining that if the raid doesn’t start soon, he’ll have to quit early because he has the midnight shift tonight. You relent and let Lisa in the raid, and then Billy logs in the next minute. This level of crisis management is the norm, and the team hasn’t even stepped foot in the dungeon yet. Once in the dungeon, your window of response time is much smaller. And you have to make those decisions under greater stress. After all, dragons will not wait while your team bickers.
Then there are the contingency plans: What happens when things go south? Who is expendable (I played a wizard . . . trust me, it’s wizards first—burn all you can before you go down to try to save the raid)? What happens when the primary tank goes linkdead? When do you suspend the raid and when do you charge on? And you have to deal with rewards: Who gets the loot and why? What if half your damage dealers go “brb . . . dinner” and, 20 minutes later, is still not back? [EverQuest, male, 29]
Defeating a raid boss is like stacking a human pyramid. Everyone has a role, and everyone must understand the bigger picture. If someone stumbles, they often take out multiple people with them. In World of Warcraft, Rotface is a patchwork monster (imagine a giant, bloated, misconfigured Frankenstein’s monster) and is a moderately difficult boss. While the primary tank engages Rotface, smaller “ooze” creatures appear and begin attacking random raid members. These oozes are strong enough to kill most raid members with a few hits, so the person being attacked needs to bring the small ooze to the secondary tank, who is running circles at the edge of the room. This secondary tank keeps the small oozes away from the rest of the raid. In the ten-person version of the fight, one healer is often assigned to each tank, while a third is assigned to heal the group. During this encounter, Rotface has a periodic slime spray attack in which he turns in a random direction and deals heavy damage to everyone in a cone area in front of him. Between the small oozes and the slime spray, all raid members need to be alert. If two team members accidentally stand in the spray area, the healers have to use mana that they could have saved. And when the healers can’t keep up with the damage, raid members start dying and the pyramid starts to collapse. There are successful strategies to defeat every boss. But to succeed in a raid, team members have to accept and obey the commands of the raid leader.
The hardest part is definitely to get people to listen to instructions from the raid leader. I’ll take the most recent dragon raid I was at as an example. While running there after assembling the needed amount of players, the raid leader explained the rules of engagement on the way. And other participants commented on in other channels that he knew what he was talking about. One of the rules was to stay very, very close to the dragon, as it would otherwise be able to “single you out” if you ran a certain distance away from it, and would breathe fire on you, killing you and the people within a small radius of you. We get to the dragon and people seemed to forget quickly about that rule, especially “support classes” who apparently preferred to heal from a distance, thus getting killed first. [Dark Age of Camelot, male, 31]
In much the same way as football or basketball, explaining the strategy to a team is easy, but executing that strategy in the face of unexpected interferences is often challenging.
Of the things you expect to experience in a fantasy world, taking orders is probably not one of them. But in the same way that corporate structures emerged to take advantage of a free market in EVE Online, militaristic structures emerged in games like World of Warcraft to manage real-time, team-based combat.
The most successful large raids tend to consist of experienced raiders who are completely focused on the task at hand, know exactly where to find the key information, and follow instructions without question during the active raid times. [EverQuest, female, 40]
In 2005, I interviewed Talon, who had been the leader of a high-end guild for three or four years. The guild began in EverQuest and was consistently the first guild on the server to kill many of the bosses. When the guild migrated to World of Warcraft, it was the first to kill Ragnaros (the last boss in the original game). In our interview, Tal
on isolated obedience and discipline as the most important factors in the success of a high-end guild.
If I said something, people needed to do it instantly and they did. You never argued, especially on raids. Like I said, the organization was military style. To be successful you have to be organized. . . . If shit hits the fan, yes, they WILL follow the commands of the captain, but mostly because they know that if they don’t act in a cohesive fashion, they will lose. In other words, the power is given democratically, but wielded in a dictatorial way.5
As you can imagine, these militarized guilds are not everyone’s cup of tea, but succeeding in the high-end dungeons requires increasing amounts of centralized command, discipline, and obedience. The growing tensions from different guild factions wrangling over the goals and nature of the guild often cause guilds to split up.
A Second Job
These challenges of running a guild make it clear that being a guild leader is a lot of work. And more often than not, it is emotionally draining and cognitively demanding work. It is not something you would do to relax.
The toughest thing for me, about leading a guild was just showing up. I never wanted the job, but I felt obligated to maintain the guild I loved. I spent an average of 4 hours a day replying to ICQs and e-mails while attending alliance meetings in IRC [Internet Relay Chat] and writing up announcements for the website. This before I even logged in . . . which when I did, being a RP [role-playing] guild I was forced to attend every event and function I was invited to, to keep up community relations. Not to mention weekly guild and alliance meetings or any impromptu meetings that came up. Whatever time I had left was used up dealing with the inevitable daily guild issues. . . . So I got maybe one to two hours a week for myself. [Ultima Online, male, 35]