This week I will be celebrating my third year anniversary as a member of Fusion. We will be throwing a champagn ball in the courtyard of the villa. No, I’m just kidding. I won’t actually be celebrating it, simply reflecting on the last three years. I joined a guild full of people, enough to raid 40 man content. Now there’s only two people in the guild who have been in it longer, one being the GM. I’ve been an officer for about two and a half years and even by that point I was a veteran compared to 75% of the guild. Most people burn out in less than a year of raiding, and very few people who move into leadership positions last very long at all. The job has a tendency to take a toll on people and honestly most people just aren’t cut out for it. I’m not trying to talk myself up, it’s just a set of qualities I have that have me adept at this role.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows though, and I’ve had to make a conscious effort along the way to pace myself to keep myself from burning out. There are also many times I’ve had to make a conscious effort to not deal with a problem from a leadership standpoint that I knew the solution to but the effort level involved was too great at that point in time. As much as I want to be an extremely engaged member of the guild and go to every 10 man, every off night activity, every raid, but I have to make a conscious choice not to do these things because I know if I push too hard it’ll take all the wind out of my sails. As much I want to fix every problem in the guild and continue to push us towards being the perfect guild, I have to choose my battles from an effort standpoint because I need to keep up the energy and motivation for regular leadership duties.

I am reminded of the last person we promoted to officer. He had all sorts of ideas about things we should change and things we could do better. I didn’t disagree with him, and in fact I thought most of his ideas were great…theoretically. The missing ingredient that was taken for granted though was the officer effort and participation level to enact such things. You can’t just come up with a bunch of ideas and they magically implement themselves. This key ingredient is often overlooked by the leadership of guilds. They don’t focus their energies and they end up wasting their time and energy on less important tasks, and then run out of steam when it comes to working on the most significant problems. For us, a crucial thing we’ve done is simply prioritizing what we want to do so that we put our effort into the most important and highest return things.

Another key goal for us in terms of reducing burnout has been reducing the leadership overhead required by the guild. Sadly, a lot of the things we’ve done can’t really be adapted to most guilds because they rely on the recruitment of very high quality members and the maintanence of a high quality roster. We don’t explicitly track attendance or loot at all. For attendance, we expect about 95% attendance from our members. It’s very obvious when someone can’t meet that standard, and it’s just commonly accepted that if you don’t meet that standard then you will be a “second class” citizen in the guild with lower loot and invite priorities. For loot, we do our best to spread around the loot in a fair and mostly even manner. Because we’re able to keep such high standards for attendance and performance, everyone in the raid falls in a pretty narrow swathe and we don’t need to put a ton of extra consideration in based on these factors. When someone isn’t meeting the attendance or skill standards it is very apparent to us as leadership and very easy to factor into our decisions. A guild with a much broader variance in these factors has to put a lot of extra consideration into loot decisions, or has to use a point system and all the extra overhead involved with maintaining that.

Beyond loot and attendance, there are a number of other overhead-reducing factors that are built into our roster. We only recruit people who make it apparent in their application and interview that they already push themselves to be a great player without any oversight. There’s two rough groups of people: people who just want to do the best they can and pursue that without outside prodding, and people who need to be pushed every step of the way to improve. The former group is obviously much rarer and in much higher demand, but our status as a top guild allows us to be picky and make sure that our roster is composed entirely of that group. From a leadership perspective it greatly reduces our workload. In most guilds, the leadership has to expend a great deal of effort pushing its membership to perform. Now that’s not to say we don’t keep a fire lit under everyone’s asses, but we do it at more of an overarching guild level than on an individual level. We push to do things like learn new content on the PTR, do achievements that don’t have any tangible goals, and do things like speed runs which didn’t even award achievements in the past. We can focus our effort on overall guild vision and spend less time looking for where people are slacking.

Beyond reducing overhead, we’ve been able to rely more and more on the skill and motivation of our members to propel the guild as a whole. We have a lot of members with very high enthusiasm levels and this helps to keep everyone motivated. Because of this contribution from members in the guild, we as leaders have to put less effort into keeping the enthusiasm level up. Enthusiasm is a key to keeping a guild’s forward momentum high and for most guilds this enthusiasm needs to be continually provided by the leadership or it simply won’t exist. I can say from experience that this is a huge energy drain.

Not only have we been able to rely on our members’ enthusiam, but we’ve been able to rely on their leadership skills. Our roster is composed of a majority of people who have been former officers, raid leaders, and GMs. As needed, we can form up three ten man raids with zero officers in them that have enough leadership-competant people in them to run relatively smoothly and accomplish whatever their goal is. We ran a 20 man Naxxramas last week for the achievement with zero officers actually in the raid. Guidance was being given from outside the zone, but the raid ran smoothly without the GM (also the main tank) or me actually inside the zone.

Aside from crafting the guild to reduce leadership overhead, I also have to pace myself personally. We keep a much heavier raiding schedule than most highly progressed guilds in general and if I were to participate in all the raids I wouldn’t be able to last very long. During the progression sprints I will of course be in every raid but when we’re on farm mode I make sure to take off as much time as I can so that I’m refreshed for the next sprint. This has been a key for me since TBC came out as we’ve been competitive in US and worldwide progression. As soon as we realized that we were actually competitive there suddenly was a lot of performance pressure every time we came to learning new content. The pressure has only increased as our ranking has and the pressure on us as leaders to push the guild to high rankings takes it’s toll. The higher ranked we’ve become, the more raids I’ve opted out of during farm periods.

For most people, lasting for three years raiding or two+ years leading probably isn’t a goal. But my advice for those who want to last the duration is to learn to utilize the energy of others and learn to pace yourself. You can’t be the sole driving force because very few people have enough energy to sustain that over the long term. Don’t push yourself expecting to be able to last because you’ll find out at some point that you just can’t handle it anymore and you’ll have already gone past the point of no return.