What you described reminds me a lot of my earlier days with Conquest. The first times I heard them cursing and yelling at each other, I froze up and wanted to crawl under my bed. But just like your guild, a lot of the team’s best performances were when the guys were pissed off at each other. It shocked me at first, but they were respectful of the fact that I don’t like to be yelled or sworn at personally (I didn’t care if they yelled or swore at each other- whatever works for them) and, as one of the guys pointed out, it’s nice that the team is tight enough to be able to rip each other apart during the raids and not take it personally. I was actually really sad when the guild mellowed out.

It is possible in a 25 man, but it does take people who are pretty comfortable with each other and have the right kind of personality.

I think setting makes a difference too- heated moments are a natural part of intense gaming, but losing it in, say, a post-raid discussion thread doesn’t usually go over as well.

We have the habit of calling everything that goes wrong in raid. It’s rarely nice not carefully said. Like you said, it’s more like “MOVE YOU PRIEST ! *expletive deleted* “.

We discuss what went wrong or how to do better during wipe recoveries, sometimes it’s quite heated discussions. It’s not always the best timing, but that’s how we work.

Many of our first downs were made after a big good shooting at each other on TS. Pretty strange. It’s always awkward to explain this to someone wanting to join our guild.

I also think we need a really strong bond between us to afford this kind of behaviour. The way our warrior tank gives criticism would have put me off for a long time, but from that particular raging canned meatshield, I don’t mind. Anyone else saying it the way he does would get a strong virtual slap in the face and a gquit/gkick. Anyone surviving his test period with him around is worth the guild…

I think the way we deal with it is that, on the moment, it’s not fun nor pleasant, but it’s useful because people take the critic, swallow their pride, and improve, and you see the result immediately. But afterwards, it’s all forgotten, we joke about it “Remember that day you did that stupid mistake ?” “Yeah I wiped the raid, *insert RL name here* was pissed, hahaha !”.

We also speak aloud when someone did great. Good dps (we always praise people who get ranked on WoL), nice saving from a healer, good tanking, genius move, is always called out too. We are actually working on Al’Akyr HM and some people did great moves during first phase and got “Oh you sold me dream there !” from the RL.

Maybe people from the outside may think we are arrogant, but it’s the way we are. We are not delicate between ourselves and don’t let room for mediocrity. Generally, people don’t always understand and some hate us for that. We experienced a gkick from our previous 25-man guild because of that before founding our own guild. It’s easier to do criticism in a small guild where you find like-minded people, than in big 25-man guilds were people are often from different backgrounds, and more or less friends. There, you need to be more careful.

I think criticism can be given without really formatting between people who see themselves as peers. If not, then you need to put form in it. You won’t give/take criticism to/from your best friend the same way you would give/take it to/from your boss or your students.

But in the end we need to learn the balance and part of the communication process is learning the ebb and flow of the people you are around (and them to us), things aren’t always black and white there are many shades of gray especially with emotions involved.

Every guild / group has their own dynamic, but in the end I’m proud of my team. There’s plenty of times I’ve not communicated the best out of frustration in the heat of the moment but being mature and looking at the circumstances helps to put things in perspective for all of us to not overreact.

Then again I work in communications so try to always look at all sides hehe

I was probably spoiled in my last guild. While they weren’t perfect, they were pretty good with post-raid debriefings and immediate feedback during run backs. So I took it for granted and I’m always shocked when I hear how many other raiding guilds are either too aggressive to be helpful or are totally chicken about confrontation.

I did notice the WoW Insider link when my spam box blew up ^_^. I rarely get spam so I was scratching my head there until I figured out what was going on!

Anyway, my take is that I think the main reason that CC (not to be confused with Crowd Control, which is also mis-understood by a portion of the WoW Community) is not understood is that it isn’t a part of our real lives. CC is a part of mentoring, which seems to be a lost concept to the majority of people. The reason? Mentoring takes time and it takes patience. And given society’s love affair with fast food, speed dating, Cliff’s Notes, txt msgs, and any other thing you can think of that is all about quickness, it doesn’t surprise me that mentoring has gone the way of the Dodo Bird.

With that said, how many WoW players actually want to take part of their time on-line to mentor someone, especially in a PUG? It’s so much easier and faster to call someone a noob in a PUG than to explain the fight, talk about how people should react, and then re-cap after the fight regardless of how it turned out. Every time I try to just explain a boss fight for someone new, it is inevitable that some “seasoned” DPS gets impatient and types ‘gogogogo’. I understand that raids with guildies is a different scenario, but still, a lot of the educational portion of learning how to play better is done outside of the raid. I don’t know the solution, but if I do, I’ll write a book based on the concept for the professional world and become a millionaire.