Hot BBQ Sauce
This is one of those mornings where I have consumed breakfast and am really struggling to get started on the whole writing thing. At least when I was doing NaNoWriMo there was a clear point to begin with again. However in the case of thinking thoughts about things… I don’t have the clear starting place. It is still cold as hell here in Oklahoma. I really wish that my Canadian friends would take this weather back. Cyfer one of the many Canadians in my life said it was an early Christmas present… and no re-gifting. I keep wondering what the postage is on a tornado.
Today is a bit messed up and I think that might be part of the problem. We have my group at work’s Christmas party tonight. It is a minor miracle that we actually like each other enough to have annual get-togethers like this. I am pretty certain we are the only group in our department that has one. Since that is looming over my head it makes everything else I do today feel like I can’t really get involved in much of anything. I had to wake up relatively early this morning and handle raw pork so that they could have pulled pork this evening. Nothing says cold like handing meat fresh from the refrigerator.
Actually doing something potentially cool this year. We got a 3 mini crock pot thingy with individual temperature settings. Since I prefer my pulled pork with hot bbq sauce, it bums me out a bit when I have to shoot down the middle and go for a mild and sweet sauce when I am making it for guests. So this time I am using our biggest crockpot to cook the pork and then am going to divide it up into the smaller pots. Will have one flavored with hot, one with regular and one with hickory bbq sauce for a variety. This way each of us can have a flavor of our choice, and it will let the timid easily experiment without committing to too much heat.
Mentorship Matters
Yesterday in the comments of the blog one of my good friends Scarybooster made an excellent suggestion, and then later Athelia added some tweaks. In raid guilds it is common to have class officers that see to the tutelage of new members of that class to make sure they are doing things as they should. This works great in the case of a raid guild, because winning is generally the ultimate goal. However in the case of House Stalwart, a social guild this paradigm doesn’t exactly work. Most of our members don’t want someone telling them how to play their class, and for good reason. However I still see a specific need for someone to turn to that is able to answer core questions about their spec.
So I took the ideas they provided and spun it around a bit. Last night I introduced the Mentor Program on the forums. For those without Stalwart Online forum accounts, I will preface it here.
How to Qualify
- Be a Member of House Stalwart of at least Stalwart rank or higher.
- Be maximum level in a given spec (this is currently level 90 in World of Warcraft)
- Be willing to answer questions from players and explain the inner workings of your class and spec in simple terms
- Be willing to provide outside resources that the players can study
- Be extremely patient
What Benefits do You Get?
- A Sense of Accomplishment From Watching Players Improve In Your Chosen Spec
- Admiration and Respect of Your Guild Members for Giving of Your Time
- A Special Mentor Rank (pending you are not already of higher rank)
I have taken what is normally a hierarchy system in raid guilds and turned it into an opt in service. As a result the mentors get recognized easily by the special guild rank, and in the guild note it would say what specific spec they are a mentor for. Ultimately my whole goal with a lot of my changes is to encourage engagement between the members of the guild. The more engaged a player is the more involved they are in the guild as a whole.
Looking for Scribes
Additionally yesterday I announced that we were looking for guild scribes. I can’t be everywhere all of the time. As a result I have requested help in keeping the guild front page updated with nifty things that people are doing. Doesn’t matter if it is a raid victory, random farming of world bosses, soloing a raid, or hosting an in game event. If House Stalwart members are involved I want to know about it. My hope is that folks will write a paragraph or two blurb and send along with it some screenshots that I can then use to adorn the frontpage.
One of our newer members Gueraloca has been helping me out with trying to gather up a census of our guild. When you have almost 900 characters in the guild, everything becomes daunting. As a result Guera is helping me connect the dots between alts and mains. If you are a member of Stalwart please check out her thread on the forums and fill in the alt/main information. The final goal of this process is to have neatly organized guild notes. That in itself will be a pretty massive undertaking, but the goal is to build them in a way so the addons that link alts and mains can work off of them.