Officer Drama

An interesting phenomenon to watch develop is how a recently promoted guild officer deals with his new rank and responsibilities. We had two guildees interested in stepping up to the duty of raid leader, and they both agreed to switch off leading the group every other night. This works, in theory.

Both are good guys and great at leading raids. One, T, is very vocal and very supportive, but is also rather busy during the day, doesn't always know when to shut up, and has bad time management skills. This came up last night when he invited a shadow priest to the raid who posted that she would be selling her account. One of the other officers asked T if he had read her post on the forums, and T said he didn't have enough time. A few weeks ago he spent ten minutes explaining the Bloodboil fight to the handful of new raiders, leaving a couple of veteran raiders confused on what the hell he was even saying. Then last night, he plowed right ahead to get a new paladin his SR gear for Mother, despite the fact that the guy has only been in guild for a week, and we didn't need him for the fight away. Oh, communication...

T also has a bad habit of belittling me, though in more of an uncle-like way opposed to any malice. We've always had a Loot Council member take care of the gems, Hearts, and epics that drop during trash, and announcing the bids for the loot of the boss, and when the officer that typically took care of that left, the job went to me. T likes to tease about how "Neg likes to feel important" as I do the routine announcements of epics and take bids. When people took up spamming the trash drops in raid so I could "see them" (like the sparkles over the bodies aren't indicative enough...), a person's bid got lost in the confusion, and the item got sharded instead. While it wasn't a major loss, this did not sit well with me, and so I asked the raid (multiple times) to stop linking the items in raid chat. T "helped" by adding "Don't stomp on Neg's glory," or something like that. Last night when I asked the raid if anyone needed gems or whatnot from the guild bank, to whisper me, T gave another "Neg likes to feel important," to which I replied, I was doing my job. Sometimes the sexism in WoW is more serious then I think...

N, the other new raid leader, was a really light-hearted guy, full of advice, and always willing to help. Now he's feeling stressed and tense during raids. N gets frustrated when T takes over his raid nights unintentionally just by talking so much. A couple of nights ago, my first night back raiding, I had begun my usual setting up of the groups, a habit I had gotten into once the old leadership had started to fizzle out, but not yet turned over the power. N had asked me to let him set up the groups a week back, since he was raid leader and all, so I conceded the responsibility that night. I hadn't kicked the habit though, and N became bitter towards me for moving around people. When he took out the feral druid from my group, replacing him with another caster, which essentially required the in group shaman to drop Wrath of Air instead of Grace of Air, I told N that this leaves my group unbuffed, to which he replied 'Spec BM then.'

I was not pleased.

I'm not one to shout, so I just sat there fuming for the majority of the raid, contemplating speccing back to Marks so at least my damage wouldn't suck. I screwed up a couple of times, but at that point, I really didn't care. Eventually we apologized to each other over the matter of arranging groups, but it didn't end there. Because it's easier for a member of Loot Council to have loot control due to the fact that we can see the response of other LC members when we decide on who gets the items, opposed to the other officers that don't have access to the channel, I asked N to at least make a member of LC Loot Master for the raid. He tend exploded in ochat, asking if I would like to lead the raids. Flabbergasted, I asked what was his problem, and started to explain why we had a LC member be Loot Master, when he stated that there was no "loot council." This definitely caught me unawares. I was gone a grand total of five days, and they decide to overhaul all of our prior decisions going into this new leadership?

It turns out, our GM-in-standing, a great guy with a very attractive French accent and terrible about making decisions on his own, told the officers while I was gone that all officers were a member of Loot Council, including the Raid Leaders. Considering we had decided to exclude the Raid Leaders from this responsibility because they were already had enough to do while the LC decided who got what, this was a surprise to me. We argued over it for a while, me stating that the GM was wrong, that he says a lot of things without really thinking them through, and that it's not like he has the final say on anything anyway, considering he's just the GM in title, not in authority. Now it's up to a vote on the officer forums, with the decision to retain Loot Council and the Raid Leaders only having say in event of a tie leading by one vote. Ironically, it's the old officers verses the new officers on this, a fact that I don't foresee as being a good thing.

Just another week leading a guild...