Attrition

One of my officers stepped down this week. It wasn't entirely unexpected; he's mentioned the possibility off and on for a while now. His wife had been doing the scheduling for our 25s, as well as leading them, and all in all, they were getting overloaded.

The other shoe was that the couple that had been scheduling our 10s has decided to server-transfer. I found out about that one after the fact - when it actually, as they say, dropped.

So on the one hand, our raiding is doing great - we're into ICC and making steady progress, our raid population has been pretty stable, and stuff is happening.

On the other, something about the administrative side is broken, because we're burning people out. Maybe the workload isn't spread out enough; maybe our raiders are starting to feel entitled and are pushing too much. Maybe our communication needs to be improved. (Ok, I know our communication needs to be improved.)

Regardless, I hate losing people. On some level it means I'm not doing my job right, which is trying to build and balance a structure to make playing together with people you like playing with feasible at the level of play you want. Within limits, anyway - we can only support so many flavors of raiding in one guild, but we also have PVPers and non-raiders happily under our umbrella.

So at our next officer meeting we have a lot of structural stuff to discuss - possible promotions, reallocation of administrative work, and so forth.

I just wish stuff would settle down until I had my tenure binder assembled, heh.

Still Groping Around in the Dark

So I've been the leader of my guild for four months now. I have no idea how to tell if I'm doing well at it or not. Complicating that is that anywhere I might try to go for advice - anonymously, you know, since my guildies are all good people, and sometimes I just need to figure out if there's a way I can de-escalate a problem or hurt feelings that have, more than likely, been caused by the communications breakdown that the nature of text and time-delayed systems - it's complicated by that I have guildies active in all the same online WoW communities I'm in.

So while I could really use some outside, objective, anonymous input sometimes, I don't want to throw out scenarios - with names redacted, of course - and have it come back and hit me.

The long and short of it, though, is that I'm debating if I should keep raiding. We're really pretty over-crowded on the DPS side of things, and I don't know if stepping out of raiding to not be part of the headache would help, or if disconnecting myself from active raiding would make me less useful on policy issues. When I start working Wednesday nights again, I may have to drop 10s, anyway, so maybe it'll be moot.