Everyone else then goes “LOL – yerp, you are an idiot!” but they catch on if they were doing the same mistake (even if I wasn’t, or did it intentionally… or like… really did it by mistake). 😛

It can be as simple as someone reducing their video quality to get better performance. Some WoW fights were infamous for not drawing ground effects that could kill you if you reduced video quality too much. Another example: one thing that I had problems with on some fights was not to move out of the fire, but to move in patterns that allowed you to stay out of fire for the whole fight. In some cases, fire follows you and you need to kite it, and if you kite the wrong way, you end up cornering yourself. Or you focus so much on running out of an area with an incoming effect that you, by mistake, don’t move out in a straight line, but tangentially, and therefore don’t make it. If you are told to “be faster” moving out, you’ll never solve that problem, because you move as early and fast as you can – but in the wrong direction!

So yeah, if you criticize the leadership, you probably want to keep those points in mind, too. In my opinion, audience is even more important here, because you don’t want to criticize them in front of other members, because it can question their authority. Unless, of course, as in your case, the abuse of authority is the main problem, in which case you might as well try to get some audience. Especially in your case, it just seemed like the fight was lost from the beginning, because leadership abused their authority and were unwilling to listen to voices that pointed that out.

Your second point, about whether or not to voice criticism at all, is also a good one. This, more so than how to point out criticism, seems to me like a fundamental difference in guild attitude and goals. A guild that doesn’t want any criticism on the performance of other members, even if it is voice carefully, light-heartedly, and constructively, cannot expect to progress through content effectively. That is completely fine if content progression is of no interest to the members: it’s obviously a very viable way to play the game, just by leveling some alts, running lower level or tier dungeons, and socialize. The right people in the right group can have a lot of fun that way. However, such a group cannot expect to ever progress into harder raids or pvp content. (If they do, they’re probably all just naturals, and that would be a very rare exception.) This would be very different even from an “inclusive” raiding guild, where I would expect everybody to be able to accept criticism that is appropriate to their current level of play. Of course, you can’t expect a player who has so far only done LFR-difficulty raids to perform well in heroic modes immediately. If you call him out for seven things he did wrong all at once, you’ll probably end up overloading him. It’s like trying to dump university-level linear algebra onto a fifth-grader who so far just learned how to solve a simple linear equation with one unknown. You can learn all of that, but you need time.

Lets turn it around a moment and talk instead about the criticism of the guild leadership – if anything this can be even touchier, regardless of the audience. It certainly was in my case and seems to be in Stubborn’s as well.

The other factor here is – what grounds for criticism is there in a game? The grounds are only viable if the stakes are significant, and often they are not. Sometimes the judgment error can occur not in taking the wrong tone or misreading the audience – sometimes it was in the decision to give critical feedback in the firstplace.

You have a very good point there. It’s generally very hard to gauge the correct response in every single situation. A lot of what I’m drawing is an ideal picture, which you don’t have in the real world. I myself have noticed that when I worked with students, too. It means that sometimes, I start too low on the threshold and crank it up too slowly, don’t get any response, and get frustrated, then overshoot the target. It’s a thing you definitely need to learn, and that you can only work towards perfecting without ever reaching that perfection.

Your other point, that we often tend to do things the way we’d like them done is, in a way, the dark side of the golden rule. Being able to figure out what different views on a topic there are is another incredibly difficult problem. The fact that most of us have a more or less homogeneous peer group that shares a large fraction of our opinions on political and social topics and what productive ways are towards these targets only exacerbates the problem. I try to always see the other position, but sometimes it can be so alien to you that it’s hard to fully understand it.

Go ahead and write about it, it sounds like an interesting topic!

The apparent tone-deafness of the community as a whole can no doubt be largely attributed to the fact that most people believe others should think like they do, and as a result, will most often craft criticisms in a way that’s most useful to themselves. Instead, taking time to really evaluate who your target is can certainly make the difference in how the criticism is perceived.

I’ll point out, though, that at times that’s nearly impossible. As a composition teacher, I’ve spent many, many years trying to carefully perfect the art of criticism, especially now that I’m teaching developmental students who have very fragile writing-self-esteems. Even now, with more than a decade in, I occasionally misjudge people’s thresholds. In those situations, I often stick to being polite and honest, since my role in a class is different than a raid leader’s role in a guild.

In fact, that may be an interesting topic to write on.

Thanks for the pingback, and great post!

Stubborn