Leadership Decisions

A conversation happening late last night in Obsidian got me to thinking about the general cycle of a linkshell's life. Given the exodus of players to other MMO's like Aion recently along with FFXIV being on the horizon and various other real life circumstances that usually prevent people from dedicating as much time as they had previously to XI, a lot of linkshells are faced with their own end game.

When someone takes up a position of leadership, they're taking on an obligation to ensure the people that choose to follow them have an event to do. Expecting scheduling perfection of leadership is out of the question from a member's standpoint, but at the same time...habitually rescheduling or canceling events isn't fair to these members.

This puts leaders in a precarious position. Before I get into that though, understand that people come and people go. It's a natural part of a community's life. A guild in EQ, a linkshell in FFXI, a clan in WoW etc are all subject to this. The idea behind creating a community is obvious. They're created mostly for the social aspect of the game, but also to achieve common goals. The vast majority of the time unfortunately though, these start to crumble as members get what they want.

It's a matter of perception. The drive to pick up an item or achieve a goal often times blinds a player to exactly how much time they're investing in the game. When they finally get or achieve it, they "wake up" and either find something else to achieve or move on to something else. Does this make a person selfish? Not necessarily, but it does open the person up to that sort of questioning.

Did they really care about the community to begin with?
Did they only care as an ends to their means?
Are they willing to continue to contribute after the fact?

To the subject of these questions, it's hurtful. There are other people who benefited from their contributions along the way to their achieving their goals. It's hard to fault a person when this is the case, especially if you're not dealing with a black and white situation. If someone shows up, gets a piece of not-so-coveted gear within 2-3 events and leaves, that's black and white. If someone has literally poured years of their life into a community, that's gray.

What does leadership do then when vets aren't contributing as much time? What role to the vets have to play if they aren't contributing as much time?

In the conversation last night, Brizzy described LB's current membership scenario and it resonated a bit with me in terms of how it compared to Obsidian's. The way I understood it, rules were being changed that didn't sit too well with the vets and the vets griped/bitched to no end or left the shell altogether citing they didn't want to go through a rebuilding process.

(I've been in that situation before...it's not fun.)

This gets us back to the post title. This whole scenario of rebuilding and leadership having to make the decision to rebuild is tough. Especially when you have vets, who are largely responsible for the rebuilding having to take place to begin with through their level of inactivity, griping about it. It's almost as if vets who contributed a ton of time feel entitled to keep the status quo and just let the linkshell die rather than try to let leadership fulfill their obligations to the people who still haven't achieved their goals yet.

I've spoken at length in a couple of previous posts about the lack of dynamis attendance. Reading Brizzy's comments about LB got me to thinking about how our crew would react if a couple of the scenarios that are running through my head to bolster attendance played out.

When a linkshell's memberbase starts to wane or show disinterest in various events, leadership is faced with one of two options:

1. Thank everyone for their time and contributions and break the shell.

or

2. Find new members.

Option 2, at least in terms of FFXI, can be achieved in a number of ways, but no matter what, a leader is in a lose-lose situation.

Leadership can start advertising via shouts and forums that the linkshell is openly recruiting again.

Pros: Probably will pick up at least half a dozen people.
Cons: Probably will pick up at least half a dozen people who suck.

Leadership could start talking to other shells in similar attendance situations about absorbtion or merging.

Pros: Will pick up a lot of people.
Cons: Will probably have to form an entirely new shell and have everyone start from scratch or figure out a conversion method for the points standing and have "new" members essentially start in the same place they were in their old shell.

With either one of those scenarios, there are likely rule changes that will come about. The make up of the linkshell changed. This doesn't mean leadership will go changing rules for the sake of changing rules. It's too common for a rule to be changed to favor leadership in scenarios like this as a lot of leaders feel the need to either wave the power sword or try to accelerate the time needed to get what they want specifically. A good leader will avoid this if at all possible, but again, members have to understand that with new people generally come new challenges and those challenges have to be met head on.

Unfortunately, new people + new rules = disgruntled vets.

If any of these scenarios ever played out in Obsidian, I would bet Gungnir on the fact that there would be an uproar and the most vocal members would be the ones who have been to an average of one run per month in the past year. I can't help but feel this is probably the case with LB based on Brizzy's descriptions (I do wish LB's leadership the best of luck in the rebuilding process). Their leadership has apparently made the decision to keep things going, but are finding cockblocks all over the place from the very people that forced them to make that decision to begin with.

Vets have to realize time and place. If you had perfect attendance in Obsidian from 2005-2006, congratulations. If you show up in 2009-2010 and criticize a decision leadership has made in the 2-3 years you've been missing, STFU. Get back in touch with the reality of the shell, then make your opinions known. Let leadership do their job and if you have an opinion, express it with the understanding of your recent level of contribution to the shell as a whole. Ask why that decision is being made. Understand leadership is going to feel somewhat betrayed and that you're open to the aforementioned 'selfish' line of questioning. They're building a community. Again, community members come and go, but you don't go eat from the soup kitchen for two years, then go eat from the hamburger joint up the road for two years, then come back to the soup kitchen and bitch because they aren't serving vegetable soup 3 days a week anymore.

This is where I get irritated the most. Being a leader is a thankless job. A normal member of a linkshell gets to spend time getting some supplies and show up to an event. A leader gets to organize it, make decisions (some easy, some hard), perform the admin tasks associated with it and then...maybe gets to enjoy the event itself outside of all that shit. Members normally do not realize this is the case. I do appreciate the ones who do and make a point of thanking leaders, but these people are few and far between as a whole. I've always realized I'm there to serve and direct the people who want to join the community I'm helping to build, but when faced with a scenario like this, I'm almost floored by the fact that there are veterans out there who believe leadership should just let a linkshell die.

God forbid that linkshell exist and be successful without them.

In Obsidian's case, I don't believe we're at the membership crisis point yet. We're approaching it, but I feel like we've still got some time to make some tweaks to bolster our dynamis attendance a bit again. Ideally, I'd like to see 30+ for each run rather than the 25ish we've been seeing. The reason I don't believe we're at that crisis point yet is based solely off our Einherjar attendance.

Yes I get that Einherjar is 30 minutes vs. 2-4 hours in dynamis.

However, the Einherjar numbers tell me that our memberbase is still very large and very active.

It might be time to truly start enforcing that "Do 1-2 Dynamis runs/month or no Einherjar for you" rule.