I was interviewed by Marcus Bloodblade, but the video and sound crapped out on us a lot. 
Itâs pretty long, I wouldnât hold it against you if it was too much to bear, but here it is regardless, and hopefully Marcus and I will do a follow-up with some alternate tech.
Shawn,
I listened to the entire 2 hours of this interview. Minus the audio and visual problems, I was very interested in what you had to say. I will try my best to avoid any spoilers and keep this focused on a higher level discussion. Apologies if something leaks out that shouldnât, feel free to edit if so.
You are 100% correct in that running a guild is like running a company. As someone who is responsible for many many people, I learned a great many things from my time in WoW. From DoD and afterwards. Good and bad, great moves and errors. All of those contribute to the evolution of my person.
So I listened to this interview, interested in what your conclusions were. To be honest, I donât care for the 10/25 debate, and that took up entirely too much time that could have been used for more productive talk. I wish those soft-but-not-quite-soft ball questions were skipped.
Anyway, it was a great interview, and I respect your points of view on most things and as a person,. But one thing really bothered me. And it really did. The issue of âtrustâ and how you try to combat âduplicitousâ individuals by having âspiesâ and even having officers report on other officers. How do you build an organization based on openness and trust, if you resort to such tactics?
Part of my responsibilities include fostering a great work environment, full of talented and extremely smart individuals. There are definitely smarter people than me in my organization. Itâs why I hire them. I know that if I resort to such tactics, not only will I alienate most of my superstars, Iâll create a horrible work environment where people will actively look to leave. Most people are far too smart to be taken for fools.
Edit : This type of thinking didnât magically come to me. I learned some hard lessons along the way to start thinking this way. Just wanted to make that clear to others. The point of this paragraph is to convey what my ideology is now and how I relate to this topic.
So with that tangent out of the way⌠If you had a do-over, specifically in the aspect of organizational culture, would you do the same thing again? If not, what would you change? Any insight on what you learned?
âSpiesâ was a poor word choice. I solicited feedback from officers on their observations of the guild.
In hindsight, upon reflection, there are always different choices to be made.
I really enjoyed the interview, it was a pleasure to finally connect with a member of the community that has has a profound impact. However, I do think the 10/25 debate has some merit to it. It was essentially what killed the heroic guild I was running in a fashion very similar to DoD. My members didnât want the challenge of 25 members, nor could I fill the raid. Members wanted the âeasyâ route to heroics and didnât care to share loot with 25 people. Itâs really a dynamic that people do not want to address or admit.
However, I think the meat and potatoes of the discussion centered around dealing with people. That is the greatest challenge of any GM in any MMO. Dealing with people that arenât bound by a paycheck, per se. Dealing with people that 9 out of 10 are anti-social, selfish, and lack the means to support a community that requires teamwork to succeed. That is the greatest obstacle of any MMO Guild. The reason why heroic guilds continue to thrive is because they log in, they raid, and they log off. Any guild attempting to fill those gaps will find themselves with similar problems. I really donât have much hope for guilds that do not follow the âhardcoreâ heroic raiding model. Because with downtime, comes manipulation, cliques, politicking. etc.