For roughly 3 years between my sophomore and senior years of high school, World of Warcraft (WoW for short) wasn’t simply a game – it was my life. To help hit this point home, when I quit, my level 70 Dwarf Hunter had about 50 days played on it. That’s 1200 hours of me physically being at the computer (at least I didn’t make myself seem like a total loser </sarcasm>). But, much like Twitter, WoW required some pretty simple, yet demanding things in order to truly succeed.
1. Relationship Building & Networking
Towards the latter end of your leveling days, 70 was the max level at the time, you almost HAD to find a decent group of individuals that you could tolerate, but more importantly could tolerate you. If no one on your server liked you (you were pompous, ridiculous, etc), the ability for you to find this group of individuals (a guild) was slim to none. You needed this group to foster in the ability to raid in the end-game, or basically continue playing after you’ve hit the maximum level. If you weren’t good at networking, you were effectively dust in the wind – even more so if you weren’t good at your role. World of Warcraft has several networking features, including but not limited to:
- Friends Lists – ability to add people you like to a list and see if they are online or offline.
- Groups – ability to get in a small group in order to tackle obstacles you can’t do solo.
- Raids – ability to get in a large group (of up to 40) in order to overcome more difficult obstacles.
- Guilds – ability to be included in a group of individuals that shares a specific chat channel (guild chat), where you can talk, network, plan raids, etc.
Just like in social media, networking is the lifeblood. If you can’t connect, you will fail (or, in the case of WoW, become bored and quit).
2. 7 P’s and Strategy
In the end-game, WoW is very strategy intensive on the occasional raid boss. Some of them require very specific strategy and timing, or else the rate of failure is high. For instance, one boss, Chromaggus in the Molten Core raid instance, required to be tranquilized (or tranq’d) by a hunter, or he would enrage and go into a frenzy, greatly increasing his damage output and putting your chance of survival very low.
This is similar to the social media/business spheres – without strategy, your likelihood of failure is great. This is very much like the 7 P’s – Prior Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance. You prepare piss poor, your results are piss poor. It’s as simple as that. If you do plan properly, your guild or business could see success against a raid boss, like these guys:
3. Recruiting & Maintaining Guild Members (or Employees)
In end-game raid situations, the guild/raid leader is effectively the employer, whereas all the guild/raid members are employees. If you do what the raid leader says (assuming they’re not a complete moron), you will achieve GREAT SUCCESS! If not, prepare to do pretty awful. Anyways, in order to constantly see raid progression without significant time sinks and road blocks, a constant flow of new blood is necessary. Employers must look for the next, best, and greatest talent in order to achieve success. If people couldn’t perform their duties well in raids and refused to fix it, they would be replaced by someone more willing to do the work. If you were willing to do the work, you would consistently raid and be rewarded in rare armor, weapons, etc. It’s really a difference between looking like a total bum or looking like you’re the shit (virtually, of course).
Do you want to be a badass, or do you want to be a bum? The choice is yours.
