The Situation:
An MMO guild partaking in endgame raiding has a bad week. Formerly defeated bosses wipe the raid despite almost all the same participants receiving the same instruction. Leadership percieves a lack of discipline and general paying attention-ness. Experienced raiders in particular are guilty of this and appear to be coasting, while inexperienced raiders are generally just lacking in knowledge. Raid Leaders report several instances of players who should know better making lazy mistakes and ignoring instruction.
Analysis:
It's frustrating for sure. The previous tier of content was downright easy and the guild blew through it. The 10-person version of this same content is much easier as well. So on the occassions when the guild confronts this top-tier 25-person content, they are slacking because everything before was easy. Particularly frustating is not the failings of newer or inexperienced players, but the disregard by the most experienced players of the mechanics of the fight and the instructions of the raid leader.
Solution:
I like to implement systems to create solutions. So the first thing I thought of when I heard this was that some additional structure was needed to shape things up. Like in any endeavor, skilled and experienced people 'coasting' indicates that they aren't being challenged. Even though the team as a whole is failing, the highly skilled individuals are not percieving that as personal failure. This is in part because they are over-exposing themselves to successful 10-person raiding, and while there is some control that Raid Leaders have over that, trying to starve them of raiding success in the 10-person version probably won't solve their engagement issues in the moment.
Instead, targeting the unchallenged players with additional responsibilities in the moment should drive them to focus instead of coasting. My suggestion is that Raid Leaders do the following:
On fights with specific mechanics that all players have to understand, charge a problem experienced player with explaining the mechanic to the raid.
In general, make problem experienced players responsible for mentoring less-experienced players. A great situation is when you have one or two new players filling a similar role to a more experienced problem player, tell the experienced player that you won't be slowing down to explain things and that they are responsible for making sure the less experienced player knows everything they need to know to succeed.
These practices are generally useful in situations where a single player is not living up to their potential. Apathy is one of the worst enemies of any group endeavor and yelling and chastising will not necessarily create the desired motivation, as especially in the digital world it is very easy for someone to just close a chat window or click over to another program to avoid a virtual berating. Especially in a gaming situation where negative consequences are very difficult to enforce (no one's job is on the line for instance) being the boss means having to use even more carefully considered methods of enforcing discipline and motivating.
There is a lot of distance between the feudal notion of "Do what I say or die" and the gaming notion of "Do what I say because...it's fun". Although the recent downturn has probably instilled a little fear into the young worker about job security, there is still a very strong sense of "If I don't like it, I'll just go somewhere else" in us. Increasingly rare is the idea that as workers we should have to pay our dues and put up with whatever our bosses throw at us because our survival and success depends on it. In one sense that can be seen as apathy or entitlement. But it's also social evolution - the greater social and economic freedom that we've won as a society is changing the basic rights we demand in any social or economic contract.
Older folks might look at that situation and forsee the end of society as everyone becomes to apathetic to work, or the failure of the machine because nobody wants to be a cog. But for the first time we have a very interesting playground (in the form of online social gaming) to experiment with these sorts of social situations and learn what works and what doesn't. I think a generation of managers raised on these sorts of gaming situations may come at real-world management problems from a different angle that is better suited to the changes that previous generations can only lament.
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