Behavior in raids – leadership
Becoming a raid leader is not role one can just ‘take’, its a role that first requires you to conform. Just like the players will conform to their roles and their personality type the leader must first find his place in the group to be able to lead.
In a LFR the time needed to ‘hold’ a leading role is short, but for a guild raid group a leader will need time to be able to have the group work together as a team. The difference primarily based on the level of ‘facerolling’ (lack of complexity) that is possible in a LFR where mistakes are much easily ‘forgiven’ and the boss mechanics can be ‘ignored’ by some and have the raid still come out victorious. From the next level and onward such mistakes have much ‘deadlier’ consequences, and when you reach the Heroic level you also face additional mechanics that do not exist in the other levels and where there is no room for ‘mistakes’.
Even if the basic mechanics of an encounter is more or less the same for all, it becomes unique for each combination of players that take it on. And its up to the raid leader to ‘mold’ his team into a team that is ready and able to succeed. Overcoming these challenges is not just a combination of individual efforts, it is just as much how they are able to work as a team and counter any flaws or assist in enhancing positive abilities that each individual player might display during different challenges. Where each player must understand both the game mechanics for the encounter as well as those for their characters role, its the leaders role to puzzle all of this together on both a game and social level and bring the victory home.
So make sure you groom your aspiring leaders – they are a rare breed, and the good ones even more so. At the same time it seems that good leaders always bring with them a set of flaws. So the question becomes this; does the raids successes outweigh the flaws of the leader?
Positive goal oriented communication enhances performance?
This weekend I had two experiences with LFR (Looking for Raid) in WoW (World of Warcraft). LFR is an in-game tool that lets you sign up for a raid event with 24 other players facing some of the tougher challenges in the game. Both experiences relate to what happens once a raid is unable to handle the game challenges they encounter.
The first episode happened in a raid where there was were little communication going on between the players, and the little communication that was there was either casual or negative. The moment the raid started to have performance problems or wiping as it is often called, the negative comments in the raid chat channel increased and players were looking for someone to blame rather than looking for solutions. As the raid had no established leadership and no one trying to hold the team motivated, annoyed players left the raid rather than trying to collaborate and look for a solution. This is where episode two becomes interesting. Later during the same weekend in another raid the same level of chatter was going on, but this time there were also a few people trying to lead the group. The raid encountered the same performance problems as in the first episode, but due to the presence of leadership very few players decided to leave. The presence of leadership analyzing the problem and working on finding solutions kept most players focused and motivated, and having these solutions solving the problems kept the raid from loosing any more players as the raid progressed.
It seems that even the smallest presence of leadership or guidance is enough to motivate a team to continue working on overcoming problematic challenges that the game throws at them. For collaboration to work this part of the collaborative effort must be kept present and positive. For LFR in WoW this is a role that one or more players need to perform, but it should be possible to introduce mechanics in the game that would help motivate players into taking on these types of responsibilities. Motivational game mechanics that create a solid communication platform for positive social interactions is an interesting design challenge for MMORPGs today, but so far I have yet to see any attempts on solving this aspect of game play.
Gunnar Øyvin Fredrikson 