The Burden of Morale.

I’m going to do a little reminiscing here, and hope that folks bear with me through it because I do have a point – this isn’t self important dribble, I promise. When I started this game oh-so-many-bloody-years ago, my real life situation was in turmoil. I was a textbook case of “hiding in the MMO to escape issues you really ought to be dealing with.” I was still me, of course, but my stresses and difficulties made me a very unpleasant person to be around a majority of the time. I was sarcastic, aggressive, and I didn’t handle myself well under pressure. Combine those tendencies with actual leadership capability and you have a recipe for disaster. Unbalanced Yva + Raid Leader position = BAMF. If people made mistakes, I was sour, if things didn’t go my way, I was snide, and if you said I was wrong, I really hope you brought earmuffs because I would absolutely flip my top. I don’t want to say I was a BAD PERSON, but I was not in a good place and it showed. In retrospect, I never EVER should have attempted to lead raids even if I had the ability to do it on paper. On paper means crap if implementation of said leadership capability is lousy.

As WoW years went on, I always somehow ended up in some position of mouth-piece, whether it was healing lead, an officer, a raid administrator, or something. My lowest point was about 3 years ago, and I was a nightmare to deal with. I feel a bit badly for Chaos because they recruited me into the fold right around then. Somehow I still have friends there, but that might be because they’re all unhinged (said with love, mind you). They didn’t mind a hostile person because they catered to a hostile environment in a lot of ways. I think that’s true of a lot of high pressure raiding guilds – the morale of the group is overshadowed by the accomplishments. Purples meant people were willing to deal with a lot that, really? They shouldn’t have to deal with at all, but if someone pressed 2 really well and topped charts, who cares if they treated others like shit. We were still killing bosses. Seems a little unhealthy, yeah? It was. And this is how I lived for far too long. I was unemployed because (LOL) I’d gotten a decent job through a friend and screwed it up because I was up so late online, I couldn’t make it into work on time the next day. My relationship was suffering because my significant other and I had things going on that weren’t pretty – we’d broken up in fact, and all because of a lack of ability to communicate. That wasn’t all me, mind you, but my inaccessibility to him WAS. We couldn’t talk things out or make things better because I was too intent on the game and my raid. Game-side, my relationships were stressed/unhealthy because I was unhappy outside of game, AND I’d surrounded myself with people who swallowed my fits of angry psychosis because I was a decent healer and we were winning the game, so clearly EVERYTHING WAS FINE.

Then my grandmother died.

My grandmother was a great person, I adored her and miss her every day – even now. I was as close to her as my own mother, and her death was very sudden and very unexpected. So, take a person who’s toiling at a very low level of life already (and acting out in WoW to people who didn’t deserve it), and take away her best friend. Very, VERY bad. My health took a nosedive, I was vomiting every day thanks to the strain, I got ulcers and a nice little thing called panic attacks. All the while I still played WoW. I was in a raiding guild making everyone else’s life miserable.

Healthwise, it got to the point that I actually HAD to start seeing a therapist, because regular doctors could help with the stomach problems, but they couldn’t do squat about the panic attacks. And so, like a good little monkey, every week I started going to see someone. Over months and months and months, my eyes opened up to exactly how I’d been living, how bad I’d been to myself, and how that really affected everyone around me: real life friends, my boyfriend, my family . . . and my online relationships. I am not, at my core, a mean nasty person. I’m actually a pretty good person I like to think, and I’d do a lot for someone I cared about, yet here were people I called my “friends” and I was nigh-abusive to them if they screwed up while pushing a button in a video game. It wasn’t okay. I was a morale killer in what should be a fun, leisure time activity for the rest of my raid/guild/circle of friends.

Enter the point of this post: the burden of morale. When you go into a raid, whether it be as dps number six, an officer, a raid leader, the loot master, you are accepting a portion of responsibilty for that raid’s success. More than that, more IMPORTANTLY than that, you are contributing to the enjoyment of twenty four other people. Everything you say in raid, whispers, channels, or over ventrilo, affects other people. As someone who lost sight of that not just for months, but for years, I like to think I truly grok how big of a responsiblity that is. I’m not perfect now, not even close, but I’m a lot more cognizant of how my actions affect others these days, especially when I’m running a raid. When I’m wrong, I apologize and I mean it, there are no “but you DID screw up” addendums to make the apology meaningless. I don’t get as nearly as angry about the game because I remember that it IS supposed to be fun, and even at its most stressful, I’m still around a bunch of my friends who shouldn’t have to deal with my crap. I understand that sometimes, yes, a raid needs a kick in the pants, but they don’t need to be bludgeoned with their failures.

If anyone takes anything away from this post today, it’s to please try and remember that the people you raid with, surround yourself with, are not there to convenience you, to suffer through your bad day, or to shoulder your personal struggles. If you are at the point you don’t think you can treat someone with the due respect they deserve (online OR in that scary real life place), it may be time to mute yourself, not type in party, or to walk away from your machine. If you can do that, if you can remember those things? People will forgive and forget, they will excuse the occassional incident of snarkiness because it’s evident you’re working on being the type of person they want to be around. I am living proof that if you make the changes you need to make, if you are willing to relearn how to communicate effectively with your friends and raidmates – WoW folks are an amazingly forgiving lot.

Mostly? Because nerds rule.

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