WOW FACTOR
AN INSIDER’S LOOK AT THE REAL SKILLS DEVELOPED IN THE VIRTUAL WORLD OF WARCRAFT
By
Kirk Wankel
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PUBLISHED BY:
Six-sided Publishing Inc. at Smashwords
WoW Factor: an insider’s look at the real skills developed in the virtual World of Warcraft
Copyright© 2010 by Kirk Wankel.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Events referenced within this publication relate to one-time historical events and, as such, may not be indicative of future performance. No event is intended, in any way, without limitation, to provide the reader with the ability to draw a conclusion on the subject of each event’s current or future performance, or ability to perform. No event referenced within this publication is intended, in any way, without limitation, to be considered a conclusion by the author on the subject of the event’s current or future performance, or ability to perform. Opinions provided within this publication are those of the author alone, and may not be representative of the persons or companies discussed.
World of Warcraft is a trademark of Blizzard Entertainment in the United States and/or other countries. World of Warcraft and all related materials, logos, and images are copyright Blizzard Entertainment. This book is not associated with Blizzard Entertainment. All other trademarks and trade names are the property of their respective owners.
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For information contact: sixsidedpublishing@shaw.ca
Smashwords edition format: ISBN 978-0-9866647-4-8
Parent electronic resource format: ISBN 978-0-9866647-1-7
Parent print format: ISBN 978-0-9866647-0-0
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Wankel, Kirk, 1974-
WoW factor [electronic resource] : an insider’s look at the real skills developed in the virtual World of Warcraft / Kirk Wankel.
Includes bibliographical references.
Issued also in print format.
ISBN 978-0-9866647-1-7
1. World of Warcraft. 2. Internet games--Social aspects.
3. Virtual reality--Social aspects. I. Title.
GV1469.25.W64W36 2010a 794.8’1 C2010-904915-2
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WOW FACTOR
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Contents
Chapter 2 – That’s no moon, it’s a space station. How a guild’s structure mirrors that of a corporation
Chapter 3 – Necessity is the mother of leadership
Chapter 4 – Leadership character traits
Chapter 5 – Leadership skills Side A
Chapter 6 – Leadership skills Side B
Chapter 7 – What’s in a name?
Chapter 8 – Forget stock options, I want DKP: Compensation plans
Chapter 9 – General skills: Every building needs a foundation
Chapter 10 – Economics 101: The virtual marketplace
Chapter 11 – Economics 202: Supply, demand and goblins. Time is money friend!
Chapter 12 – Economics 303: The good, the bad and the ugly of market inefficiency
Chapter 13 – Economics 404: Risk management: Inflation and product evolution
Chapter 14 – Marketing: Know your customer: Rise of the middle-aged gamer
Chapter 15 – Marketing: Know your customer: Collectors, sex and lazy customers
Chapter 16 – The end summarizes the means
Glossary
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INTRODUCTION
Have you ever wondered what happens when your significant other, friend or family member heads into their computer room for a night playing World of Warcraft? Have you wondered if they were gaining any real world value from the hours “lost” in a virtual world? As a player, have you wondered how the skills you have used to create guilds, run raids and defeat the game might translate into skills in your day-to-day life? As a business manager, have you wondered what skills you should expect from the gamer generation when you interview them for positions and when you try to integrate them into your company? Have you felt you could more effectively leverage their skills if you understood them better? These questions and more are answered as we analyze World of Warcraft and its relation to the business world.
In the next sixteen chapters we will delve into World of Warcraft, not as game, but as a development tool. We will look at how the game develops practical skills and experience that translate into the real and business world. We will show that players are exposed to many of the same situations and experiences that a typical business must address and, as such, that the game generates a wealth of experience for the player to draw on in their business life. By the end of the book, the hours spent online by your significant other, friend, family member or potential employee will not seem so “lost” anymore.
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Welcome to WoW Factor: An insider’s look at the real skills developed in the virtual World of Warcraft. My name is Kirk Wankel. I am a Chartered Accountant which is the Canadian equivalent of a Certified Public Accountant (“CPA”) in the United States. My career includes nearly fifteen years of experience in the business community. I am also a child of the computer revolution who has been gaming since the era of Commodore 64’s and my family owned one of the original IBM PC computers before the existence of Microsoft. Yes, it is hard to believe, but there was a world and computers before our friends from Redmond, Washington, came on the scene.
Back during that time period, circa 1980, the company my father worked for was relatively forward-thinking and recognized the impending personal computer revolution. As a result, it offered to subsidize fifty percent of the purchase of new computers by certain employees. While that may not seem like much in today’s world, an original IBM PC had a price tag of $6,000. Imagine what that would be today in inflation adjusted dollars: even scarier when you consider most cell phones are more powerful than those computers.
I highlight the price tag, not just for the interesting anecdote it provides, but to show just how much the world has changed in the last thirty years. We have gone from an era where computers were just coming on the scene and were very costly and inaccessible, to a world where almost everyone owns a computer, has internet access, and where a child over the age of ten who cannot use a computer is effectively as stifled as a child who is functionally illiterate.
My background comes from the accounting world, where the computer revolution has been profound. I can still recall my first days as an auditor, performing the majority of my audit work on ten or fourteen column paper, using a pencil, and making auditing references in red. Back in the day, an auditor’s footnotes and references were almost an art form. You could identify someone else’s work by their style. The accounting profession almost single-handedly kept red pencils in production.
Today, accounting is almost entirely completed by computer and seven and fourteen column paper has been replaced by spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel. In turn, accounting efficiency has gone up substantially and most accountants would cringe at the prospect of having to perform an audit, prepare a budget, or prepare a set of financial statements by hand, though I am sure some pine for the days of the old red pencil.
As an early adopter of the computer, I was exposed to the online community as it developed. I still recall the days before the internet when friends had 300, 1200 and 2400 baud modems for online communication. These were the equivalent of the big brick cellular phone, for those of a younger vintage, with some modems being larger than today’s typical laptops. At the time, online communication was done via BBS’ or bulletin board systems.
Looking back, those early days of bulletin boards presented the first major intersection of online and real life. One of my closest friends and business advisors, a successful international route planner for a major United States airline, is someone that I met on a local bulletin board back in the late 1980’s. At the time, he went by the screen name “Skibum” and his interests were skiing, (/sarcasm I know, hard to believe), computer games, and debating the issues of the day. Little did we know then where our careers would lead, but it was evident from the start that the potential was there.
With the explosion of the internet in the early-to-mid nineties, I was first introduced to the multiplayer online community via a classic Activision Blizzard Inc. (“Blizzard”) title, StarCraft. Unlike World of Warcraft, which is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (“MMORPG”), StarCraft was a real-time strategy game that pitted individuals or teams of up to four against other players. StarCraft was at the forefront of the creation of e-sports and became a cultural phenomenon in South Korea.
Starcraft utilized Blizzard’s Battle.net online network which allowed players to congregate and interact with other players between games in a sort of virtual lounge. As a result, the game was able to create a huge online following as players began to learn about and interact with other players. While the StarCraft game itself was not a massively multiplayer online game, the Battle.net service that enabled you to play it online was, in essence, a massively multiplayer online chat room. As such, it laid the foundation for me and other players to venture into the massively multiplayer online world.
Prior to StarCraft and World of Warcraft, massively multiplayer games were contrary to my view of computer games and the maintenance of a reasonable computer/life balance. The original massively multiplayer games included significant time sinks (activities that are primarily time consuming, rather than challenging) that rewarded compulsive behaviour and fuelled the negative perception of computer gamers that still permeates society today. Without StarCraft lending credibility to Blizzard and their ability to redefine the market, I would likely have never ventured into World of Warcraft and discovered the evolution of online gaming it created.
That I chose to write a book based on World of Warcraft is a testament to Blizzard’s ability to redefine the massively multiplayer online world and create an environment that can add value to an individual on a personal and professional level. That it was able to create something that not only enabled a reasonable computer/life balance but took the positive aspects of computing and brought them to the forefront has been a boon to Blizzard, and the gaming community as a whole. It is also what ultimately created my alter egos that fuel the virtual-life side of this book.
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Within the World of Warcraft, my name is ZippyTDR and I am a gnome Mage! I am also ZippyTSP, a draenei Priest and ZippyTM, a night-elf Druid. These three characters combined have spanned five years and three versions of World of Warcraft: the original version which is referred to as “vanilla” World of Warcraft and the two expansions known as The Burning Crusade and the Wrath of the Lich King respectively. During that time, I put in two hundred and seventy four “days played” on those characters. A day played refers to twenty-four hours of online time. Thus, if you played two hours per night for twelve nights, you would have one day played. To put those numbers in context for the non-gamer, if World of Warcraft was a standard forty hour per week profession, the two hundred and seventy-four days played would convert into a full-time job lasting over three years (technically 3.161538 years for the obsessive-compulsive gamers out there) without a vacation.
The existence of three alter egos is not a sign I should be visiting my local doctor to test for attention-deficit disorder. Rather, it is due to the fact that World of Warcraft has not actually been one game over the past five years, but three. Each expansion brought with it substantial changes to the game mechanics which drove the multiple-character disorder described previously. The motivation behind the various characters and the naming convention used is discussed later in the book.
As World of Warcraft was my first MMORPG, I was a bit of a latecomer into the social networking that ultimately drives the longevity of the game. I joined my first, and only, “endgame” guild (an endgame guild is a guild that has primarily finished levelling and is focused on the content available to those at the maximum level. This content commonly referred to as “endgame” content) called the Fluffy Bunnies of Doom in the late summer of 2005. In January, 2006 I took over as their raid leader (raids are the largest and most complicated content in the game requiring from ten to forty players to complete. A raid group is the team of players attempting that content) and became part of the guild leadership.
From that point to this day, I have maintained those positions and the responsibilities they entail. At first blush, the idea of a successful group of people called Fluffy Bunnies being lead by a four foot Gnome named Zippy might seem a bit crazy, especially to the non-gamer in the crowd. However, it did and does work and the reasons behind that success form a major foundation of this book.
At this point, half of the World of Warcraft players reading this are probably threatening to burn the book. You see, World of Warcraft is split into two factions called Horde and Alliance and I play Alliance. This is the sporting equivalent of Chicago Cubs fans reading a book written by a Chicago White Sox fan (other than maybe President Barack Obama) or the business equivalent of a Microsoft employee reading a “how-to” book by Steve Jobs. Nonetheless, I would like to alleviate those concerns. To my Horde brethren, please do not confuse my pedigree with being anti-Horde. In fact, some of my best friends are Horde. My old StarCraft clan members all rolled Horde. I even dabbled in playing Horde a little myself when I was younger and am still part of an original server (a server that was in existence the first day Vanilla World of Warcraft was launched) guild.
I ended up as an Alliance player in fairly typical fashion. That is, my real-life friends rolled Alliance and since my original purpose for playing World of Warcraft was to play with them, I rolled Alliance as well. I can hear all of the parents in the crowd lamenting... While I am pretty sure I would not jump off a bridge if my friends did it first, apparently I would roll Alliance. Besides, bungee cords break!
Before we move on, I have to address the second group out there that may be threatening to burn this book. That group being the natural enemy of the accountant, the engineer. To the engineers in the crowd I make the same plea. Some of my best friends are engineers. In fact, the main tank of my raid group is an engineer. Engineers are very nice people. I admit I cannot understand a word they say when two or more of them talk to each other, but that does not keep us from getting along. Well, at least as long as they are not causing a “wipe.”
A “wipe” is one of the numerous game terms that will pop up from time-to-time in the book. In order to provide some clarity for the non-gamers in the audience, there is a glossary at the end of the book providing a bit more depth on the various terms used by gamers and other information. While “leet speak” and gamer terms are second nature to the gamer population, they may as well be a foreign language to the uninitiated, as they are as close to the English language as the local slang of any region.
Back to this specific gamer term, a “wipe” is the term for a failed attempt by the raid group to defeat the current obstacle. Typically, a wipe is a chain reaction of events from the benign to the spectacular that results in everyone in the raid being dead. The starter of this chain reaction is often credited with “causing the wipe”. This is a distinction one does not want to hold very often, as it tends to make their raid mates rather unhappy, especially if the events that caused the wipe were the result of a spectacular level of ineptitude. These cases are often followed by the standard cry of “I didn’t do it” through to the more creative cry’s such as “it’s not my fault, my cat jumped on the keyboard”. Sadly, I am not making that up and it is not an isolated incident. Apparently, World of Warcraft is a very popular game for felines.
Over the four plus years that I have played World of Warcraft I have simultaneously lived a “normal” life as a Chartered Accountant working as a Vice-president of Finance or Chief Financial Officer of three companies with three very different histories. Prior to the last company, my world was that of most typical gamers. That is, there was a clear barrier between the work world and the gaming world. At the time, you could tell your co-workers you played golf, were on a softball team, or some other amiable “approved” after-hour activity, but if you told them you were a gamer, it simply elicited reactions of confusion or in the extreme, shame. Even when you stumbled upon a fellow gamer in the company, you avoided it as a topic of discussion for fear of other co-workers overhearing. Co-workers did not understand gaming beyond the perceived negative connotations and trying to change that bias seemed futile.
The last of the three companies changed all of that. The company was new, technology focused and founded by a couple of young entrepreneurs. As a result, they had built a young, tech-savvy team behind them who were all products of the computer revolution like I was. A side effect of this was that I was in a business world that understood gaming and the gaming culture. The majority of my co-workers were gamers and knew gamers. While my co-workers primarily played first-person shooter games (for example: Halo, Half-life or Call of Duty) and did not play World of Warcraft, they were well aware of the game and understood the basics of the MMORPG culture. For the first time in my business career, discussing gaming and World of Warcraft was not taboo. Quite the contrary, it was comfortable and part of the office climate. As a result, when a business issue would arise that would correlate to a similar situation in World of Warcraft; the first reaction was no longer to shelter that response, but to bring it to light. The company had fostered an environment that made the synergy of business and World of Warcraft rise to the fore and situations from both began to be used for the benefit of the other.
Over my eighteen month tenure with the young tech company, events would consistently arise in the evolution of the company that were direct parallels to leading a guild and a raid in World of Warcraft. Issues related to teamwork, leadership, strategic planning and more would come up. More and more often, I found myself relaying stories to the employees and management team about World of Warcraft and lessons we could learn as a company from the events of the game. This, in turn, created the recognition that there was a great opportunity to showcase World of Warcraft, and gaming, in a positive light, and dispel some of the misconceptions that non-gamers have.
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My background provides insight into the “why are we here?” of this book. Some of you will read the book and determine it is simply a need for validation for the gamer community. Some of you will see it as a humbling of the business community through the recurring theme that business events and strategies are not limited to the business world, but prevalent in the gaming world as well. Some of you will read the book and determine it is a book about nothing and simply the ramblings of a narcissistic Jerry Seinfeld clone. I am sure a few of my relatives will fall into this camp (hi mom, hi dad!). Some of you will see the book as satire of the human experience in business and life. Others still will find a genuine insight into the mechanics of being a gamer and being a businessperson, and that they are not the diametrically opposed worlds they are often presented to be.
Hopefully, you will come away with a little something of each and appreciate the ironies and correlations that exist. However, if the general consensus is ultimately that this book is primarily a shout out for the gamer, an opportunity to stand up and be counted and say “I am a gamer” and be proud of that fact then it would still be a success. Just as the business world can use a satirical humbling, the gaming community needs a shot in the arm.
Every now and again we need a reminder that life is about having fun and being proud of yourself in whatever you do. We need a reminder that you are ultimately defined by how you live and feel rather than what you do. Whether you are a Chief Financial Officer or a mail clerk, whether you are a gamer or a football player, if you enjoy what you are doing and proud of yourself in doing it, that should be all that matters.
Unfortunately, that is rarely the case and now and again people need to stand up and be counted. Today, gamers need a soapbox. Gamers need to break out of the socially neglected shell created by Dr. Phil episodes of negativity and the stereotype of twenty-five year old single males living in their mother’s basements, unemployed and subsisting on hot pockets. The world is evolving at an ever increasing rate and so is the gaming community.
Gamers are now a core foundation of our society. Major politicians, athletes and business people play World of Warcraft. New video game launches are as big as, or bigger, than new movie launches to the point that Hollywood actors happily take jobs doing acting or voiceover work for new games. Blizzard alone has generated in excess of $100 million per month in revenue from its video games.
World of Warcraft has brought gaming into the main stream. When any activity has eleven plus million followers, the world starts to stand up and pay attention. The individuals playing World of Warcraft could create a large Scandinavian country (I am partial to Sweden). In fact, there are enough World of Warcraft players to determine the results of the next United States election. If World of Warcraft players banded together and voted as a block, similar to how unions used to vote, they would represent a large enough block to swing the outcome of the election. Forget the minority vote, forget the female vote, and forget the union vote. Imagine a video of President Obama playing World of Warcraft trying to sway the gamer vote and telling the Republican’s he is about to PWN them again. Actually forget that, some things are better left undisturbed...
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World of Warcraft has put gaming on the radar screen of society. Gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry. The time has come for it to be recognized with a level of respect and as a valid form of entertainment, extracurricular activity, and with functional development tools, instead of being treated with uninformed derision.
Generation X and generation Y gamers are a substantial and growing part of the business community. It is time for the business world, and society as a whole, to recognize the impact being a gamer has on an individual’s skills and ability to perform their job. It is time everyone had some appreciation of the skills and dynamics that being a gamer creates. It is time for someone fresh out of College or University to be able to record on their résumé under extracurricular activities that they are a gamer and have it be a positive. It is time for a potential recruiter or employer to understand that the gamer has developed many of the skills, and possibly more, than the applicant who proudly states they played varsity football, loves to travel, or was part of the photography club.
Life is a collection of experiences. Success in real life and the business world comes from drawing on past experience to improve future performance. Any vehicle for an individual to increase their experience and reservoir of knowledge is an asset. The ultimate value from playing World of Warcraft comes from the experience it generates and how that experience can be transitioned to real life. World of Warcraft may be a virtual world but the interactions and experiences are real. The player who leverages those experiences in their business life will have a solid foundation for future success.
When you look back at this book for the underlying theme, the not so subtle subtext to the general satire, it comes down to the fact that gaming and World of Warcraft provide gamers with a very effective skill set for success that gamers should be proud of and non-gamers should respect. I am not expecting the reader who is the parent of a twenty year old to fully understand the nuance of what being a gamer is just as I do not expect a Manchester United devotee from England to appreciate North American football. What I am hoping to convey is that each player is developing a set of skills they can carry forward into the business and real world that will help make them a success. I am hoping that, while you may not appreciate the game, you can appreciate the skills it is developing: that the person who plays World of Warcraft ten to twenty hours per week is just as functional and well adjusted as the person who plays golf ten to twenty hours per week. I am striving to create a bridge so that people can stand up and proudly say they are a gamer and not immediately be judged negatively. Last but not least, hopefully I can entertain and make you laugh along the way. Now where did I put that picture of the bunny with a pancake on its head?
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THAT’S NO MOON, IT’S A SPACE STATION. HOW A GUILD’S STRUCTURE MIRRORS THAT OF A CORPORATION
One of the critical dynamics of massively multiplayer role-playing games, such as World of Warcraft, is that the endgame content is designed to be played by a consistent group of players with success being determined over a period of months, rather than hours. This long-term philosophy creates a dynamic where organization and structure are necessary to succeed. A player cannot simply log into the game whenever the mood strikes them, look for a raid and expect to succeed: just as a business professional could not simply drive downtown, announce that they want to work for the next eight hours and expect to be employed, or a football player could show up at a stadium and expect to play in a game. As a result, World of Warcraft has a long-term organizational structure through the use of guilds and those guilds are organized in a fashion very similar to corporations.
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More than any other feature; the organizational structure of MMORPGs is what differentiates them from other online games, old school arcade games, or traditional console (Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony Playstation 3, and Nintendo Wii) games. Historically, the console game market addressed the spur-of-the-moment gamer. The typical console gamer is the player who shows up for the Sunday pick-up basketball game at the YMCA. The World of Warcraft raider is the player who plays every week in the Thursday night league. This is not to suggest the console gamer is in any way inferior, just different. The spur-of-the-moment gamers’ available play time is more dynamic and they cannot commit to a regimented schedule.
While a new raider may not initially appreciate what they are signing up for, they soon learn to understand and appreciate that agreeing to be a raider is equivalent to taking a job with a company. As such, one of the first things that stands out is how structured a raiding guild is and how closely it mirrors a corporate organization.
A raider quickly learns that they are no longer playing the game by themselves, or simply for themselves. They learn that they are now part of a larger organization and with that come new roles and responsibilities. Just as I have worked an innumerable amount of days with questionable health as a Chief Financial Officer because of some deadline, I have run raids on nights where I was so sick I lost my voice or had chills at the computer. Not because I wanted to, but because I had twenty-four other people relying on me to be there and lead them.
Ultimately, the structure of the game is both a blessing and a curse. When you are able to assemble the components necessary to succeed, the rewards are high and everyone is entertained. However, the logistics involved in setting up and maintaining a raid group are substantial. Doing so for “a game” includes the additional burden of overcoming peoples’ desires not to be put on a schedule for their free time or entertainment time. It is this inflexibility of raiding that often causes people to choose not to raid, or to depart from the game once the solo-play aspects of the game have been exhausted.
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The organizational chart for a raiding guild is broken down by the key roles of the raid, just as the organizational chart for a corporation is broken down by its key roles and departments. In order to explain the roles, I first need to briefly outline the mechanics of a raid and describe what it is that your son, daughter, husband, wife or co-worker is doing for three hours when they go on a raid.
World of Warcraft is a fantasy game where players assume the role of heroic characters with various abilities and take on fantasy creatures such as dragons and other monsters. In a raid, the primary purpose is to move through a dungeon and defeat the various monsters that are placed in the way. Each major monster is called a “boss” and defeating the final boss of the final dungeon currently available is the long-term objective of the raid group.
At the basic level, most massively multiplayer games have their raid mechanics based around three core groups, all of which provide unique and critical dynamics to the raid.
The first group of players are responsible for occupying the attention of the boss and absorbing its primary attacks. This enables the other players to complete their roles relatively unimpeded. In this role, the players focus on having the highest health and armour available in order to survive as long as possible. As a result, they have earned the nickname “tanks.”
A real world example of tanking would be a pick-pocketing team. It is common for pick-pockets to work as a pair in order to increase the odds of success. The process is fairly straightforward. The first person will do something to distract the mark, such as pretending to sell them a cheap tourist item or flirting with them, while the other person does the actual pick-pocketing. In this case, the first person is the tank because they have kept the marks attention allowing the other person to do their job.
Now, if you are wondering what a mild-mannered accountant such as I would know about pick-pocketing, I had the previous example happen several years back while visiting Barcelona. The main boulevard of Barcelona is La Ramblas, which is primarily a pedestrian street full of shops and, as it turns out, pick-pockets. I am sure that, to a pick-pocket, four wide-eyed Canadian tourists must have looked like an easy score. We were walking down La Ramblas, checking out the shops, blissfully unaware of what was about to occur, when a lovely young lady came up to one of my compatriots and started to harass him to buy a little cloth item. She was quite insistent. However, as she was doing this her partner, another lovely young lady, was pilfering his wallet. It was a well-orchestrated ruse, except somehow my compatriot noticed and grabbed the arm of the prospective pick-pocket. I can still see his furrowed face, vein popping in the forehead, yelling at this young waif of a girl to give back his wallet. Needless to say, the “tank” had not done her job successfully and the boss was angry!
The second group of players in a raid is referred to as the “healers”. This group of players is responsible for keeping everyone in the raid alive. While the tanks are responsible for keeping all of the bosses primary abilities focused on them, there are often secondary abilities in an encounter that damage the other players. The healers need to keep the tanks alive, along with the players being damaged by these secondary abilities, long enough for the raid to kill the boss. Healers are often referred to as a support class because their job is to support the players that are defeating the boss, rather than performing the actions to defeat it. You cannot heal a boss to death.
The closest real-world example of a healer would be the cut man in the corner of a boxer, or the pit crew of an auto-racing team. While a cut man certainly cannot heal the boxer and make them stronger during a boxing match, they can lengthen the fight and increase the chances of their boxer winning by minimizing the impact of the damage they have taken to that point in the fight. A pit crew does, in essence, heal the car of a racing team. By changing the tires, adding fuel and other minor repairs, the pit crew makes the car better so that it can continue the race.
In a business environment, a healer would best be compared to an executive assistant. An executive assistant performs a support role for their executive. An executive assistant puts out fires, manages mundane or low priority tasks, and addresses logistical needs so that their executive can focus on their primary tasks.
The last group of players in a raid is called the “DPS”. DPS stands for damage per second and is a gaming metric to measure how much output a damage dealer is producing. All other things being equal, the higher the DPS, the better the player. The last comment is very critical as all players are not created equal, resulting in player analysis being far more complex than simply looking at DPS output. The DPS group of players is responsible for killing the boss. In a sense, the first two groups purely exist to stall the boss long enough for the DPS to kill it before it kills the raid.
In the pick-pocketing example, the second girl is the DPS. She is the one trying to accomplish something while the other girl is stalling the target.
In a more traditional example, if you looked at a North American football team, you could consider the offensive line as the tanks and the quarterback/receivers/running backs as the DPS. The offensive line is responsible for stalling the defence long enough for the quarterback/receivers/running backs to move the ball down the field. As for a healer example, you can find one with the position of fullback. This player’s primary responsibility changes from play to play but fundamentally their job is to support the rest of the group to help each play succeed. The character traits exhibited by the players in the game in these roles is even similar. Players who are drawn to being the “star player” are drawn to the DPS classes as it is the most obvious method to stand out and be noticed.
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With that background as a foundation, I will show you the evolution of building a raiding guild from the ground up and highlight just how similar it is to creating a new company. When I am done, hopefully you will have an appreciation for just how much time and organization goes into being a raider and the foundation it develops for someone being part of an organization.
Within World of Warcraft, the creation of a guild only requires a guild leader and nine other players. At its inception, a guild is nothing more than a gathering of a number of friends. A raiding guild takes this basic structure and develops it to a much deeper level, ultimately resulting in a structure taking the form of a typical organizational chart.
You can think of a raiding guild as a new company with a predefined product or service. Unlike a young entrepreneur who first has to come up with an idea, the basis for the existence of a raiding guild is defined by the game. The purpose of a raiding guild is to defeat the endgame content in World of Warcraft.
So what is endgame content?
Unlike traditional games, there is no predefined “end” to a MMORPG. The game world exists, and players can interact within it, in perpetuity so long as the game provider continues to operate the servers. In fact, two of the major founding MMORPG games, Everquest and Lineage, both of which were launched in 1999, continue to operate and have active subscribers despite the fact they have launched sequels designed for the migration of their subscribers.
In order to keep players interested in the game, the developers create content that they expect the players to work through once they reach the maximum level available for the game. Gamers refer to this content as “endgame” or “endgame content”. The premise behind the label being that, while the world is perpetual with no specific definition of completion, if a player or raid group has defeated all of the current tasks laid out by the developers they will have, in fact, “beat the game” for that window of time until more objectives are launched.
As a real world example, consider a tennis club. If a player joins a tennis club with the objective of defeating each of the members, once they have achieved that goal and have no one else to play, they could be considered to have beaten the club. Yet while that may have occurred, the club will continue to operate, providing the player the opportunity to continue to attend and play those players they have already defeated.
Unlike the tennis club that may or may not make any effort to bring the player new competitors, World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs try to continually add more content so that the players have new accomplishments to achieve and continue to want to come back week-to-week and month-to-month. The games try to pace the launch of content, such that players are able to beat the game on a consistent basis, but that the amount of time they spend at that stage is minimized.
Alright, we know that the purpose of a raiding guild is to create a “company” capable of defeating the endgame content that the developers produce on an ongoing basis for the raiders. The next question is how do they do it?
Like any good company, you start at the top. The centerpiece of any guild is the guild leaders. Guild leaders are the game equivalent of the Board of Directors. As such, their roles and responsibilities are very similar.
First off, we will take a look at the Board of Directors in the typical business environment and then we will compare that to World of Warcraft. A Board of Directors is defined, both by their responsibilities as board members, and by their specific external skill set. We will start with the latter.
On a good Board of Directors, there are three types of board members. The first type of board member, and the largest contingent of the board, is the operational board member. These board members usually include the internal board members, along with one or two external board members who are specialists in the industry in which the company operates. The core value these board members bring is in ensuring the day-to-day operations of the company are run successfully.
The second type of board member is the “rolodex” board member. This board member brings key business relationships and contacts to the table in order to promote the company agenda and move it forward. This board member exists to open doors the company could not possibly open by itself. A common example is a retired politician who has contacts in the government to help obtain contracts or legislation beneficial to the company. Alternatively, this type of board member can be an individual whose presence on a company board opens doors due to their high profile. This is similar to using an athlete in marketing campaigns.
The last type of board member is the “bankroll” board member. This person has access to capital or capital markets at a level necessary to ensure the continued funding of the company until it is self-sufficient.
All three types of board members bring critical elements to maximize the success of a company. The absence of any of the three often results in small companies failing to reach their potential. Most small companies that struggle make the mistake of only having operational board members. This results in companies that may have strong products but fail due to inadequate access to capital or markets.
Within the game of World of Warcraft, the guild leaders fulfill the role of the Board of Directors. In a typical guild, the breakdown of board members is heavily skewed towards operational guild leaders. This is because guilds tend to evolve very much like small businesses. The guilds start with a general idea of their objectives and over time discover the need for other skill sets in their leadership.
A good guild will have all three types of board members in its guild leadership. Operational board members are somewhat self-explanatory. They are responsible for the day-to-day running of the guild, the raids, and ensuring that the raiders that exist are used effectively.
The relationship board member is much harder to develop. This is because the game itself has only been in existence for five years. You cannot bring in a “grey hair” board member with 20 years of experience and the relationships and contacts that go with it. Rather, the guild leaders who serve the relationship role are the ones who are very active on the server (the system the game environment operates on), create a name for themselves outside their guild, and promote the guild at every opportunity, so that when a prospective raider is looking at guilds they know who your guild is and the image you are trying to project.
The bankroll board member may seem like it is the least important of the three in an online game, but the reality is they are critical to adding credibility to a guild. A good guild requires its own website and its own communications server. These are necessary so that the guild can operate effectively, and just as importantly, so the guild can present a credible image to the gaming community and attract new players. While the overall cost of running a guild in dollars may not be that significant to some, it is substantial when you consider it is an incremental cost to your entertainment expense and there is no monetary return on that investment. Furthermore, players of the game run the gamut from unemployed college students through to highly paid professionals. What may be a trivial cost in real world dollars to one raider may be a significant burden to another. In the end, new recruits are, more often than not, gained or lost by a guild’s infrastructure outside the game, rather than in it. As a result, having the bankroll board member is critical.
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With the types of board members defined, we can take a look at the responsibilities of the board as a whole.
Develop the company mission and ensure the company stays on target: This is perhaps the most critical responsibility in a company. It is the answer to the question “why are we here?” Many companies fail because they are so fixated on the day-to-day running of the company that they lose sight of the big picture. Moreover, employees often consciously choose short-term solutions at the cost of long-term success. Ensuring that the big picture is clear and understandable to the employees and that the employees stay on task is a major responsibility of the board.
The economic crisis of 2008 and subsequent recession highlighted, more than any time in the last fifty years, the cost of short-term thinking. One of the unfortunate consequences of public markets is the quarter-to-quarter reporting emphasis and the “what have you done for me lately” public perception. This economic environment led to companies that emphasised short-term gains at the cost of long-term growth and success. Companies lost sight of their long-term mission and purpose because of their focus on keeping the markets happy today.
There has been a huge amount of debate and rage over executive and board compensation as a result of the financial meltdown. However, the real rage should not be over how much the executive and board members were being paid, but how poorly they performed for that pay. The financial meltdown was a function of the executives and board members failing to do what they were entrusted to do, which is ensure the long-term viability of their companies. Executives and board members sacrificed the future for the present and, as a result, took on riskier and riskier financial positions until the inevitable bubble burst, despite the fact they knew they had an unsustainable business model.
At the same time, they did so under the approving eye of the regulators. One can only brandish their sword at the executives and board members so long when one realizes that the regulators themselves promoted the increased risk profiles of these companies. The regulators monitoring the markets and the economy created the environment in which the companies were working. They believed that the benefit to the growth of the economy, by increasing risk and extending credit to a greater amount of people and at greater levels, was worth whatever potential price would be paid.
Ultimately, the fallout from the financial meltdown has been, and will continue to be, widespread and there is a lot of blame to go around. However, once everyone is done dissecting the corpses and return to focusing on the future, the telling answer to whether we have learned anything from the meltdown will be based on board governance. Have we learned to put back the emphasis on the boards to ensure their companies have a long-term mission and purpose, and that they follow that mission?
In developing a long-term mission, a board needs to focus on a number of aspects. There is no silver bullet for company strategy. External factors that a board reviews include market size, competition, existing technology and rate of technological innovation. Internal factors include access to funding, critical employees, time to market, and core competency. The latter is a huge issue despite sounding like something you would find mocked in a Dilbert comic. A struggling company often exists because it has either lost sight of, or has failed to recognize, its core competency. Every company can make a product, but can it make it better, faster, or cheaper than the competition, or does it have better access to market, more effective marketing, etc.
Serve as the face of the company: One cannot underestimate the power of image, brand and marketing, and this exists at the company level, not just the company’s products. At small or new companies, a company relies on the image and credibility of its board members to create the brand image and credibility of the company. In the absence of the company’s own brand, potential investors, vendors, and customers will infer a brand, image or reputation from the board members that support the company.
Obtain sufficient resources/financing: While most companies have one or two specific board members who are on the board because of their financial resources and ability to generate investment when needed, it is the responsibility of the entire board to assess what resources are needed and when. Cash-flow management is critical to the success or failure of smaller companies. The cardinal sin of the development company is to have a great idea or technology only to run out of money before becoming a commercial operation. Even knowing this, companies often fall into the trap because anytime a company raises funds they must dilute their existing shareholders. Inexperienced businessmen will often undercapitalize their companies with the naive belief they are protecting their existing shareholders when, in reality, they are exposing them to an unnecessary risk of failure. It is far safer and prudent in the long run to overcapitalize a company, within reason, to ensure it has a reasonable chance of success because companies rarely develop at the pace expected by management.
Select the executive management team: The board of directors is responsible for setting the vision of the company, but it is the executive management team that executes the vision. The success or failure of that team will ultimately define the success or failure of the company as a whole. Ensuring the management team has the proper skills, proper chemistry and are working towards a common set of goals is critical for company success. History is riddled with examples of companies who were great “on paper” but ultimately failed because the executive management team could not work together or were working to differing agendas.
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Now we can compare the responsibilities from a typical board of directors within the context of a raiding guild in World of Warcraft:
Develop the guild mission and purpose: You might say that this is the pre-defined “defeat the endgame content”. However, that is only part of the mission of a raiding guild. A similarly narrow view would be that the mission of all public companies is to make as much money as possible for their shareholders. While true (though some of my investments lead me to question that assumption!), it does not begin to adequately tell the whole story. Just as companies are different in the products they produce, the size of the company, the markets they sell into and most importantly, how they treat their employees, raiding guilds also differ in mission and purpose.
Imagine comparing a company or a raiding guild to a car. You would not compare a Mercedes Benz to a Yugo and say they are the same because they both get you from one location to another. Or perhaps you would, in which case I have a nice luxury Yugo to sell you for the low, low price of $50,000.
One of the major business catch phrases of the twenty-first century is work-life balance. Work-life balance refers to how much a person is able to maintain a healthy level of work and non-work activities so that they do not get burned out. Gamers face the same issue. Since being a raider is effectively a second job, the balance between playing the game, working, and real life is often the number one factor behind what type of raiding guild a player joins. This is further complicated by the fact there is no right answer as to what a proper work-life balance is. It is different from individual to individual so the correct answer for one person does not mean it will be the correct answer for the next.
Guild officers need to determine what raid-life balance they want for their guild and promote that balance to current and future guild members. This process can include developing an understanding of the ethics and mechanics behind existing guilds to determine which structure will work best for their desired guild members. The values exhibited by each type of guild mirror those of the business world. In both cases, finding individuals that have similar values to your organization is a major step towards a long-term enjoyable partnership. On the flip side, finding individuals with goals and objectives that differ dramatically from the guild or company’s mission and purpose will almost always lead to frustration and unnecessary stress.
At the highest level, you have raiding guilds that are not just a second job, they are a first job. There are 5-10 of these types of guilds in the world and they expect the game to come first, even if that means taking a vacation from your work to defeat new endgame content when it is launched. These players take the game very seriously and their guilds go after the “world first” achievements. A “world first” refers to being the first guild in the world to defeat a new boss encounter. Defeating the final boss of a new zone is the game equivalent of winning the Stanley Cup or Super Bowl. Given the extreme requirements of these guilds, it is understandable that you are talking about a player pool of a couple of thousand players out of an eleven and a half million player subscriber base.
It is hard to provide a real world comparison to the world first guilds because they are at the extreme and few legitimate companies (in other words, companies not providing “waste management” services to the Soprano’s) reach that extreme anymore. The best comparable would probably be the Wall Street brokerage firms that have come under so much fire in the last year because of mortgage meltdown in the United States. Those companies were willing to go to extreme lengths to maximize their corporate bottom lines, blurring the line between reasonable and unreasonable business practices. They were willing to provide, and the system even encouraged, risky mortgages. As well, they were willing to take on excessive levels of risk for the bottom line and their employees were willing to walk across the street at any time if someone else offered them a bigger compensation package.
The defining differences between this style of organization and more conservative organizations relate to loyalty and instant self-gratification. World first guilds are the crowd that believes that “nice guys finish last” is a mantra, not a cliché. At the extreme level, each individual is in the game for their own success and they are willing to do whatever is necessary to obtain that self-gratification. This results in senior managers or raid leaders who are in positions to support their ego and self-worth and who are willing to hire or fire anyone if they believe it will create a short-term spike in success. At the lower levels, it creates individuals who will freely move companies or guilds if an opportunity for advancement or greater compensation or success presents itself. While there is nothing wrong with this specialized set of ideals, it is restricted to a small percentage of society. Any individual who participates in this type of organization without the same ideology is very likely to have a negative experience, or, less politely, they would get eaten for lunch.
At the next tier, you have the “server first” guilds. Although World of Warcraft has eleven and a half million subscribers, all of those players do not play together. World of Warcraft is broken up in hundreds of different “servers” that each hold roughly ten thousand to twenty-five thousand characters of which roughly one thousand to six thousand are active at any given time of the day. A server first guild will typically raid 20-30 hours a week on new content and recruit the top talent on each server who are willing to play the game at an almost full-time level.
At these first two tiers, the players are mostly defined by their ability to devote time to the game. They are often college students or older players who are unemployed or self-employed and therefore have the flexibility to devote more time to the game than a typical person. The number of exceptional players who cannot devote the time to be in a server first guild far exceeds the number of regular players who are playing the game forty hours per week.
This relationship where time is the primary determining factor is similar to accounting and law firms. In both of these cases, the primary deliverable is as much, or more, billable hours as it is quality of work. As a result, the accounting or law student willing to work the most hours will often be the one first in line for promotion.
At the next tier you have the bulk of raiding guilds. These guilds are made of players who have a more typical set of real-life commitments and it is those real-life commitments that dictate their play time. Some guilds raid only on the weekend. Some never raid on the weekend. Some raid two nights a week, others three, and others four. Some raid earlier in the night, some later. Some have a family-friendly attitude, while some do not allow players under a certain age. Lastly, most of these guilds have a pre-defined level of commitment and expectation from their raiders from very casual to very serious, resulting in some very creative descriptions such as the popularly described “serious casual” guilds.
The guild leadership is responsible for setting the structure of the guild and the raid along with what type of image it wants for its guild. Perhaps more importantly than setting that structure, the guild leadership needs to be able to communicate it to the game community so that it can recruit like-minded individuals. For that reason, most guilds operate their own websites outside of the game. It is important to have a message forum to foster relationships within the guild and give potential recruits an opportunity to learn about the guild. While you can post recruitment threads on the official forums (forums hosted by the game developer) for World of Warcraft or send messages in-game, it is much more effective and provides the guild an air of professionalism to have its own website and forum.