A Business is Not a Public Service

From a Guardian article written over 8 years ago:

a public service and a business are inherently different beasts and asking one to behave as the other is like asking a fish to ride a bicycle.

The base reason is quite simple. Business survive on cash; money is their bloodline. Public service’s survive based on the people’s will; the governments or communities sponsor public services.

By nature, businesses have to attract more profits; failing to do so means the business dies. By nature, services have to please most members; losing majority popularity means the service loses funding, the only thing supporting it.

While it’s easy to blur the line between the two and believe that servicing the community is part of the business or that doing business is just a part of doing public service, they should not be mixed so easily.

Businesses are hierarchical, not democratic, and wages, terms and conditions are set by the executive and subject to the market.

Although there is some form of hierarchy in all forms of organization, businesses intentionally partition decision making away from portions of the business in order to meet market demands and unequal distribution of responsibilities and reward. This translates to the leader making the most decisions and being rewarded the most while the actors who hold the least responsibility get rewarded the least. Contrast this to public service where the entire organization is beholden to the wants of a community, leading a majority of the decision making, creativity, and responsibilities away from an executive branch to more of a community bulletin board.

When everyone is more similar than dissimilar and the incentive is pleasure not profit, why you’ve created a small communist society. But don’t take that word so negatively in its connotation. In many small groups, communism is a very preferred method of governing. For instance, within a small family or a house full of roommates, treating everyone as equal despite their output can be a very rewarding experience, full of love and understanding. This is not dissimilar from a service, whose goals are never to profit outside of its vision but rather to sustain and maintain what it was set out to do.

Contrast this with businesses, which also benefit from focus, sustenance, and maintenance, but also are willing to make decisions outside of its original vision in order to sustain profits, growth, and the company’s life. While the will of the people make a public service live, a business cannot survive on appreciation alone. Businesses, for the most part, live in a capitalist world in which the market decides what survives and what dies. So not only should businesses strive for more, in terms of profits and growth, they must always strive just to survive, because there is no base of taxpayer money or community goodwill (for the most part).

If public services are communal or communist and businesses are hierarchical or capitalist, how do we so easily blur the lines between the two?

This is because when operating or experiencing a public service or business, there will always be pros and cons unique to each side. Without realizing everything comes at a cost, people imagine the best of both worlds, particularly just for their personal experience. What many fail to realize is that the best of all things comes at a major cost, most of the time in the form of impossibility.

I want to make a business that doesn’t turn away anyone! I have a product or sale for EVERYONE.

This attitude alone drives away a lot of clients. Some clients like exclusion, some like to conform. Not every restaurant can be the Cheesecake Factory and support a menu of 500 items; most restaurants end up going out of business from a lack of focus or finances. The expensive places cannot cater to the lower income population and the affordable places cannot cater to the high income populations. From income, to background, to culture, to belief, there’s always a reason for people to prefer one thing over another.

I want to run our public service like a business! Let’s not settle for zero-sum and let’s grow this operation!

This attitude often upsets governments or communities that began as sponsors of something they wanted to becoming customers of something being held hostage from them. Despite understanding that everything costs something, public services are meant to be inclusive to such a degree in which a normal business may not be able to function, public taxes or community donations are required to keep services alive. Examples include art and music programs, which may not produce an immediate profit but are desired by communities. Other examples include college sponsorships, which are very different from college loans, and waste management services which are very different from junk collectors. Services are meant to be for all, with very little cost or commitment from the benefiters.

There are times in which a business will perform a public service and there are times in which a public service will contract out a business. A difference in philosophy should not stop these two parties from working together, it should actually encourage them to work together and focus on their strengths and weaknesses.

In a future post, I’ll cover how World of Warcraft guilds are actually a business, not a public service.

Holding Onto Poison

Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.
Falsely Quoted as the Buddha

I had not known this quote was falsely contributed to Buddha until I had Google’d it.

Fake or not, I find the saying to be true. It does very little to the other person to hold resentment. Some take their resentment further, finding ways to manifest it and to attack their villain. Whatever the outcome, whatever the result, whatever route anyone takes, resentment requires a source.

The second law of thermodynamics:

“…heat always moves from hotter objects to colder objects (or “downhill”)…”

This law of thermodynamics introduces entropy, a constant force at play causing a reduction in energy over time, over steps. It also implies that energy cannot go backwards without something supplying energy to reverse the flow. Meaning once something starts off as something, it cannot reverse naturally.

What does this mean for anger?

Sending out anger out into the world bears very little fruit, as every moment and every step away from its source reduces the power of the anger. The recipient will never receive the same amount of energy as the sender originally had. Additionally, the little fruit anger bears will be fruits of anger, as the only way there could be any other yield would require an equal and opposite force.

Anger, and negative emotion in general, is difficult to wield. We must be careful not to cultivate it actively or passively, as it will grow and become more difficult to manage.

A famous analogy in psychology popularized by Jonathan Haidt describes us in two halves, a rational rider and an emotional elephant.

The rider represents the rational thinker, the analytical planner, the evidence-based decision-maker. The elephant, on the other hand, is an emotional player, full of energy, sympathy and loyalty, who stays put, backs away, or rears up based on feelings and instincts. The elephant is often on automatic pilot.

How we navigate the world atop of our emotional elephant tells us what we think of our own emotions and their role in our decision making as well as the temperance and attitude of the rider mastering their emotions. There are lots of different views on the topic of emotion, varying from always listening to them to stoically holding back all feelings. Like many things in life, there is no one right answer. A common answer a friend can share with you, on the relationship between a rider and its elephant, is that the rider should decide where the two go in life, no matter how the elephant feels. Feelings can change and feelings are not the best predictors of new lands, which is why knowledge and experience are used to navigate the unknown.

We need not be cruel or uncaring to our emotions in totality, but the reverse is death of the rider. Without any emotional control, the rider is no longer in control of their destiny; the rider is at mercy to their emotions. This makes very little difference in times of peace. When times of war strike, chaos shall ensue and the rider must do his best to weather the storm. I pray that we all see sunny days, and on the few rainy ones we are prepared and optimistic. Hold on steady to your emotions and decide between the two of you who is in charge.

Think in Prosperity

It’s easy to catch yourself in a rut or to experience a rainy day or two. There’s steps to take beforehand to make these times easier on ourselves. There’s also steps to take in those moments to let optimism and prosperity in.

Think big. Bigger and better.

This relates to our environment. For many people, it’s not easy to change their environment or their headspace. It’s much easier to become complacent or comfortable in a familiar surrounding.

But did you know it’s easier to change your environment than it is to change your habits?

Some people are shocked when they hear this, while others connect with it very quickly. Ever gone on a diet and removed all of those foods from your home? You have to leave the house to cheat on your diet! Ever put yourself in a library to get some peace and quiet and to focus? Have you ever turned off your phone or deleted an app?

Environments and headspaces inform us of the likely outcomes ahead of us. We can have the best attitudes and intentions, but our limited choices may lead us to the same result over and over.

So why do I keep equating environments and headspaces? It’s certainly possible to purely change one’s environment, placing themselves in better locations with better friends. But it’s also much more easily possible to change the landscape within your own mind. People do this by reading books or listening to self help tapes. People do this with the free time they have, watching television or playing video games. A powerful saying is:

A man is what he thinks about all day long.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

No matter what the activity or the setting is, the space our mind is in plays a part in how we navigate the world. Similar to attitude, similar to environment, shaping our mind allows us to reach beyond what is simply around us or before us. With creativity and entrepreneurship, something must appear from essentially nothing. So with every endeavor, we have the choice to simply make what is around us or the choice to make what we can imagine. So, think in prosperity. Imagine bigger. Because I cannot see a bright future in which we do not choose to do this. How can there be a best version of the world if we don’t imagine and believe in one? It’s not to say we shouldn’t prepare for the worst, as this post began. But it is to say that what we make is a combination of what is around us and what we believe in. So believe in the best. Believe in yourself.

Maneuvering with Inexperience

Yesterday I hosted Naxxramas 25 for entry level raiders. The content is about four or five months old, in terms of the rerelease. In terms of first release, the content was released in 2008, 15 years ago. I give this game context because players have a large expectation of experience or knowledge when it comes to a rereleased game. I have yet to watch the following video, but it will be a great watch given its view count and production.

While I’ll have to watch the details of this film more closely, the title and the comments suggest that information is readily available to make the experience more playable or more fun, but players choose to ignore this information.

That’s something that’s tough to swallow, especially for the type of gamer who enjoys excelling at their craft. Not every player falls into this category and not all players will follow the same M.O.. The way to solve Rubik’s cubes is posted online, with tutorials and walkthroughs. Does everyone know how to solve one? No, because most people just don’t care for this puzzle.

How is a Rubik’s cube similar to World of Warcraft? With such a large, immersive world, WoW has the ability to engage players with multiple systems and games, not just one front. While a Rubik’s cube’s only enjoyment or fulfillment comes from solving a random or more challenging puzzle, World of Warcraft offers thousands of different puzzles and games, many of which are optional. For some players, the world alone is beautiful enough to engage with.

If anyone can be new or inexperienced at a game, no matter how much information is available, how should we go about our expectations? This is a difficult one especially without communication. I brought up my Naxxramas run from yesterday because it was an arduous and long run. One of the pain points I had was an assumption of knowledge or understanding of communication. There were many times when I relayed boss fights or instructions with open ended assignments or as passing notes. Until I was very specific, with player names and exact positions, did we achieve our best results. This comes at some costs. There are times where I rehearse fights before they happen and there are times when I explain things beforehand and players fail to manage what I had mentioned. As an instructor, the only true measurement of success is the passing of knowledge and a fulfillment of a test. Unfortunately with a real time game, there’s also the expectation of fun and the expectation of scheduling.

There is balance between over-explaining and taking too long and underexplaining and having poor execution. Two conclusions I reached after failing to reach my goals within the three hour raid window I had set aside were: with inexperienced tanks, the players in front of the raid taking damage, it is in my best interest to preview the run with them in some way so they can visually see everything before hearing an explanation and it is in my best interest to ask specific players if they understand their assignment or role in a fight regardless of my explanation. There is a statistic I heard from one of my teachers, sharing with us how difficult it is being a teacher and engaging with students. She said the average teacher waits 3 seconds after asking a question, before feeling defeated without a response. In the teacher’s mind, 3 seconds is a long time. For a student, it is a brief moment. Difference in knowledge and experience creates different shared experiences. Patience and understanding are key to any student-teacher relationship and the only true measurement of success is improvement and delivered results.

Impossible Sudoku

In 5th grade, my elementary school teacher stumbled upon a Sudoku puzzle and brought it into our class. She copied an example from her newspaper clip and posted it on the board. We worked on it together as a class and we got through the puzzle. At the end of class, our teacher drew up a custom grid herself and we transcribed it into our notebooks. Our homework was to solve this Sudoku puzzle.

As the title suggests, the puzzle was not possible. But 5th grade me didn’t believe that was a possibility. Why would an authority on knowledge, the one who introduced me to this topic, give me an impossible puzzle? It didn’t seem hard in class, in fact I copied the example in class and did my best to recreate the steps in the puzzle. I mean, it’s just process of elimination, how hard could it be?

Dinner time rolled around and my parents returned from work. They asked about my homework and I told them I needed help. My parents were only willing to help with my math homework, as English was their second language and they didn’t quite understand how to teach me any other subjects. Funny enough, I was tutored in math on the side; is tutor the right word? More like I was endlessly forced to do math assignments since I could write. So when my parents found out I needed help with numbers, they were more than eager to give me their piece of mind. I told them it wasn’t anything like what I had seen before and that I had tried for an hour or so on the problem.

My mother sat down. She asked me what the puzzle was. I showed her the example from the classroom we solved. She understood. She tried it out for a few minutes. She called in my father. I pointed to the in-classroom example, but my mother took over explaining.

They pulled my notebook from me and started jotting down numbers in small, fine print. I tried to follow their conversation in Chinese. It was the same conversation I had with myself an hour ago in English. Except, my mom was introducing a variable? She wrote down X and X-1 or X+1. I gave her a confused look. “I don’t think that’s the right way, mom. We didn’t do that in class.” She told me to hush and watch.

My father and her talked and argued for five, ten minutes. My father walked away and my mother said there was no answer. It was time for dinner.

What? That’s it?

I felt stupid despite coming to the same conclusion as my mother. Were my parents apathetic or did they just not understand the puzzle? How could there be no answer to a homework assignment?

The next day came and I felt a turn in my stomach. I had missed a homework assignment before, but when it came to numbers and math, I was expect to do well in class. I had a sort of reputation for having the best math knowledge, reciting multiplication tables with some sort of weird, militant enthusiasm and yearning for approval. I was a weird kid and I knew it, I just didn’t know what to do about it.

The afternoon rolls around and it’s time for math. My teacher puts up the grid and looks at the class. No one has an answer. She starts to get a little impatient. “Cary? Mr. Smartypants?”

I felt ashamed. I said I asked my parents and I couldn’t figure out an answer. My teacher looked at Donna, the other Asian in the class. Donna said she didn’t think she had the right answer, but tried writing one on the board anyways since no one else would volunteer. As she finished filling in her answers, she concluded, “but it’s wrong, that’s as close as my parents and I got.”

My teacher looked stunned. She double checked Donna’s work and realized Donna was indeed correct, her answer was insufficient. My teacher turned her back to the class and went up to the board. She grew silent. She picked up her marker and tried again. “No…” she trailed off.

“Huh, I guess it’s trickier making them than it is doing them.” She threw her arms up and laughed, turned around and wiped the board.

Is everyone an idiot?

A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats

There are two polar opposite views on success within a community. One is that one person’s success may bring up everyone’s success. This is summarized in the phrase: a rising tide lifts all boats. Another view is that one person’s success is the only success to be had. This is actually summarized as crabs in a bucket, where a crab pulls down any crab making its way out of a bucket, as if to spite each other’s progress.

As my guild reaches maximum capacity, we are in a pivotal position to either gain momentum and form many groups or to stagnate and slowly bleed out members. I say the latter with such pessimism because I have witnessed other guilds and have experienced pick up groups that have failed to launch or took large efforts in forming, taking away from precious raiding time. Lots of guilds and raids are competing with each other at similar time slots, allowing the free market to fully work, which will inevitably result in some collateral damage, i.e. the entrepreneur or business that fails.

What’s difficult about small communities is that while the free market is an impersonal law of economics, player bases are not rational, organized, or adherent to normal laws of economics. Some players will fantasize about being the best and will bootlick their way into any competent organization. Some players overinflate their egos and demand whatever they can out of whoever they can, regardless of equal value exchange. In many ways, opportunities, products, and services are incredibly limited in small communities which could easily cause insecurity and crab mentality. When success is scarce, any personal success feels that much more delicate.

Unlike the real world, digital communities and small communities that have yet to sunset have almost unlimited potential to grow. Prosperity and abundance are so easily practiced in the real world where things are finite, yet within small communities we become blind to this mentality. I was guilty as such when I first started hosting Super Smash Bros. tournaments. I thought I had competitors or adversaries that I had to manage or coordinate against. In reality, they had the same goals as myself and it was much better to collaborate and coordinate together with them. I experimented with many different solutions, from working together, to hiring them, to working for them, and to contracting them. All of those solutions were much more favorable than closed communication. It was difficult for me to see this at first, because I thought of compromise as a loss of integrity. But any communication and collaboration can go a long way and that potential is worth more than a lonely path with missing bridges behind you.

My top goal for my guild at this point is to create several raid leaders and organizers that can sustain the guild without my personal presence. As I reach out to other guilds and teach my own members how to raid lead, I hope to create a network of strong leaders than can organize and maintain the large social group we’ve created.

No Homers Club

Homer the Great is S6E12 of the Simpsons. It has an iconic scene in which Homer recalls a childhood memory where he is turned down entry into a treehouse. A gatekeeper eagerly accepts everyone except for Homer. When asked why, he points to a “No Homers Club” sign. In perfect comedic timing, Homer rebuts that they allowed another Homer into the treehouse. Without missing a beat, the gatekeeper says, “It says ‘No Homerssssssss. We’re allowed to have one.'”

This scene is incredibly funny because Homer sets up this story as everyone hates him and the world is against him. I think we’ve all felt that same anxiety and fear before. The extreme specificity of the example is so humorous, especially with the inclusion of an exception. I think we’ve all felt unfairly treated at one point or another in our lives and have looked at others in similar positions to only find different outcomes. It’s not easy explaining to people that life is not fair, especially if they perceive it to be unjustly or overtly unfair to themselves.

There are certainly times when life truly is unfair. But what can really be done about it? People like to believe the grass is greener on the other side, but most often the case is that everything has its pros and cons. We can seek different environments or different friends, but problems tend to follow us if we don’t resolve them. We can make changes to the things around us and we can make changes to ourselves.

It’s funny because we say the only thing we can count on is change, but there’s some things that never change. The episode Homer the Great is not only iconic with its infamous meme, but also because it ends the same way Homer recounts his childhood, with another No Homers Club created in his dishonor. The storytelling and humor are so fantastic because they relate to the human experience and because we find ourselves in the same problems we had as a child, with almost cartoonish exaggeration.

While it’s certainly possible the world is out to get you and an existential crisis can be so overwhelming, what we can do is control ourselves and our decisions, which plays out into controlling and creating our future. Don’t let patterns of the past define your future and don’t let the perceived antagonists stop you from changing yourself and your future.

Compromising Before Conflict

Something that I think is very straightforward but somehow lost upon some is that everything comes at a price, everything is a trade off. There’s nothing that is purely good and there is nothing that is purely evil. This message gets lost upon some most likely because it is difficult to see multiple perspectives and most personal experiences can be summed up wholly as good or bad.

Part of being a consumer of any product or service is that the consumer is the last person to experience the exchange and reaps only the benefits of a transactional exchange. This seems fair and logical for the buyer, as why would the buyer accept any other offer aside from one that makes sense? Unfortunately, that is not always the case with sellers, business, or services.

How is this possible? How can a business or service provide something that doesn’t make any sense? It would have to make business sense, ethical sense, moral sense, and beyond if it were to stand the test of time, would it? That is just not the case. From fast fashion brands like Zara becoming one of the wealthiest companies in our lifetime from hiding its practices in favor of profits, to tech companies emerging as arbiters of communication and advertising, all the way to small local shops that once existed and were bulldozes by superstores and Amazon, business don’t have to make sense as a whole, they just have to make sense to a customer base. The most desired thing out of a consumer, as previously mentioned, is the delivered product. That is the only thing they care about.

The same can be said of services and events. For many participants, what happens behind closed doors and after hours is none of their concern. The only concern they have is value per dollar or value per hour, measured in satisfaction or happiness. Was this a good experience? Was this a good product?

Conversely, businesses and services have to create something from essentially nothing, creating value out of something that others do not care to do. Why doesn’t everyone open a restaurant? It’s because many that do fail. Why doesn’t everyone own a business? Because business take a lot of time and energy and they always have a chance of failing.

The compromise products and services make is that the companies that provide them believe their investment will be returned and then some. There is no guarantee and each business seeks a different amount of “and then some.”

For the companies that place more emphasis on their product than their profits, it is more likely than not that the company will decline in health over time without a cash lifeline. Tech companies such as Facebook or Uber have placed incredibly large bets on their products over their profits, becoming stark exceptions to this rule. However, these exceptions are rare and businesses are constantly losing the battle between servicing consumers and staying alive. Without capital, a noble business is just volunteer work.

This is where premeditated compromise is necessary. If a business finds itself faltering or struggling, the only thing it can do to save itself is to provide a better service or product. Some companies try the opposite approach, of reorganizing finances and charging higher prices or finding lower costs. This tends to be a short term solution that only works if it buys the company enough time to create a better product or service.

How can a company compromise to create a better product or service? Some of this has to do with listening to customer feedback and honing in on what makes their company unique or special. Some times it relies on critical investigation and discovering latent reasons why clients enjoy the service or product. And most obviously it can do with changing the product or service to be more in line with customer expectations or satisfaction. Often times, negative or critical feedback will never be provided and only a new, proper solution can highlight deficits.

The largest compromise I am making with my casual guild in World of Warcraft is working with another guild to start a conjoint raid. The results are very promising, but the cost comes at fewer of our members are able to attend due to a shift in time and a stricter roster limit. The bet I am placing is that the experience and rewards from a successful conjoint raid outweighs the short term consequences at this time. There will be a deadline to shift gears or promise more from my product or service and this deadline must be beat with the strong community of players that should come to grow from this experience. The risks involved include losing guild members that are benched too often and irritating both the most casual and most hardcore players with a diluted vision. As time progresses, I’ll have more options to deal with these grievances and hopefully have more players to build a foundation with.

Keeping on Schedule

I started attending Super Smash Bros. tournaments in 2007, the beginning of my senior year of high school. There were so few tournaments that for my first or second tournament I drove 3 hours, across state borders, to play at college campus. I played for less than four hours before driving home alone. It was exhilarating. I instantly fell in love with tournaments. I somehow made it home before midnight and went to school the next day.

I remember even when I was a very casual player, less than one hundred tournaments into my career, I was always complaining about tournament schedules. I started noticing other veterans mentioning the same thing. One thing an experienced player always commented on before a tournament began was how well the organizer ran the event. The reputation of an organizer and their follow through were generally one and the same. Some of it came from the respect of the players and some of it came from the leadership of the organizer.

I’ve written previously about getting ahead of problems and how experience helps us navigate situations both in real time and with precognition. One element of live event organizing is understanding how time plays out long before the end of the event. Most events happen linearly and sequentially, relying on a previous segment to finish. There are rare occasions where there are simultaneous or concurrent processes, but these require additional bandwidth and organization. We can think of an event requiring X amount of work. There are multiple routes to solving X, but the main variables we are interested in are how much man power does the plan require and how much time will it take to execute.

When it came to tournaments and live events, I was able to enforce, predict, and establish times throughout the day, updating players and staff of how the schedule was shaping out. Tournaments, and most events in general, have subsections where we can time split ourselves and forecast our future times. This is incredibly similar to speedrunning, where players optimize their gameplay speed and check their times against themselves or others.

A good speedrunner knows long before the end of their run what their best possible time could be. They know from experience and what the limit of speeds are, so they can make judgements on not only what is possible, but also what is most likely. For this reason, many speedrunners will reset a run long before it is done, if say one particular segment was very poor.

Unfortunately with live events, the reset button is not an option. When it comes to organizers, they are a conductor both like train and like music.

The Railroad Conductor will coordinate the daily activity of the train and train crew, ensuring the timely operation of the train and the safety of all passengers.

The conductor beats time and prepares the musicians in rehearsal, but most importantly the conductor considers every aspect of the music and how to make it as inspiring and incredible as possible. Then they work with the orchestra to make that vision come alive.

With timeliness and with liveliness, event organizers have to adapt and operate in real time, ensuring a smooth and professional experience. For some people, ending on time is the most important aspect, especially if the event lasts a long time or ends late in the evening. For some people, seeing a particular event or outcome is the most important, whether it’s in the hands of the organizer or not, like seeing a fan favorite win or a rare piece of loot. For some, just having the experience go smoothly and finishing as expected is enough.

Because there are so many different kinds of players and fans, there’s no one right answer in how to specifically run an event. However, running an event on schedule will always have its professional edge and at the very least updating players and fans of a changing schedule is a great courtesy. It takes experience to forecast times, but with a little experience an organizer can quickly see the similarities between all events. And even if an event doesn’t end on time, an accurate forecast and a positive attitude can easily save an event. In another post, I’ll share a story where I dropped out of a tournament so I could run said tournament and ensure it would end on time. Oh what I would do just to go home on time!

Networking Ahead of Problems

The most difficult boss of every MMORPG guild is the roster boss, the boss that never goes away. Raids in most games have strict group numbers in mind, meaning you need exactly X number of players in the raid for the best time. You can run with less than that number, but it will be less optimal except in rare cases.

The tight specification is what is very difficult for many raiding guilds to handle. In professional sports. there are bench members who replace starting players that swap out for various reasons. In real life, there are several reasons why players are swapped out, from injury, fatigue, penalties, and more. However in the video game world, there are a lot fewer reasons to need to sit out. There are certainly times where work, personal life, health, or other reasons would cause a player to miss out on raids. In practice, most raiders are consistent in their attendance and rarely are raiders swapped out mid-raid.

While swapping out raiders mid-raid is possible, especially if encounters call for different compositions or if a particular piece of loot is more sought after, what happens in practice is that players play for the whole raid and those who are on the bench find a different raid to attend. This places players in a strange spot of not truly desiring to be on the bench, as there is no salary and no guarantee of any progress without physically being inside of the raid instance.

A lot of guilds build their guild size to be specifically the raid size plus 10-20%, allowing their players some variance in attendance and pulling from the more flexible players when needed. The common problem with this solution is that the window for this opportunity is quite small, as losing a few members opens up the doors to key positions being unfulfilled. Guilds in this position attempt to keep equilibrium by constantly recruiting and maintaining the current playerbase.

Another approach is to spill the group size over into a second or third raid, filling the raids with alternate characters and more flexible players. Alternate characters are great for filling raids because the players that pilot these characters already have experience and some are willing to take lower priority on items or attendance in favor of allowing more unique raiders in their guild the chance to raid. The difficulties in this approach are requiring multiple raid leaders and raid times, as well as a community that is robust enough to support multiple raids or identities. Common problems with this solution is lack of organization or leadership and lack of opportunities for players to engage how they would like to. If it becomes clear to players that there is a distinct difference in quality or availability, players will naturally dissolve and dissipate to other guilds.

The solution to my particular guilds problems will be to adopt and adapt a second approach, while finding guilds in the former approach. My current raid roster is a bit weak, despite my guild reaching the guild limit of 1000 members. There is a lot to processes to move forward, such as leveling members hitting 80 and level 80 members getting raid ready. To accommodate so many different players, attitudes, and schedules, my approach is to find outlets and multiple avenues, networking with other leaders so that instead of our groups competing with each other and losing to the roster boss, we work together and preemptively tackle content as a collaboration. Many guilds lack an identity outside of raiding, outside of their core attendance. It is possible we can provide a meaning to these guilds, to the few players who desire more than just raiding. Networking opportunities with other guilds and raid leaders grants us the powers to handle the roster boss.