X. Keeping It Moving
A pug is like a bicycle. It moves forward or it falls over. Also like a bicycle, the driver should always err on the side of gripping the handlebar more rather than less tightly.
Maintaining the momentum of a pug is crucial. Players play to play, not to sit around and wait. Vacillation is fatal. If it's not possible to engage a boss, fight another one, or pull some trash, or at least start some small talk or call for a break.
XI. Leadership And You
Myth: A raid lead style characterized by emotional outbursts, childish name-calling, playing the blame game, and making the raiders "afraid" is viable.
The reality is, such antics aren't good leadership; they are the product of the absence of good leadership. They are rife amongst raid leaders in WoW because WoW RLs are drawn from the playerbase; they are ordinary individuals who do not possess leadership skills but are nonetheless forced into positions of (marginal) authority.
A good raid leader must have all the same qualities of any good leader. These qualities include:
-Decisiveness
-Honesty
-Reliability
-Responsibility
-Open-Mindedness
-Mercuriality
-Assertiveness
-Initiative
-Charisma
-Humor
To lead is to unite diverse personalities and skill sets towards a common end. To lead well is to bring out the best in others, while overcoming their faults.
This is how good pug leaders lead good pugs and bad pug leaders lead bad pugs. They convince others to join up and work with people they do not know to down content for everyone; they turn love of the game into performance and redirect selfish impulses into productive energy.
A good pug leader must be a true student of Machiavelli. He must be a benevolent despot, and understand the fundamental unity of his ability to maintain his authority and his willingness to do what is best for the raid.
Example: A raid leader will most easily hold onto his raid, his authority, if he accepts contrary opinions and freely admits his own errors. The raid leader who cannot do this will no longer be a leader; he will be disregarded and become irrelevant.
Conversely, a good raid leader, like a good general, distinguishes between the open-ended discussion about how to deal with a dilemma and the implementation of the decision he arrives at. A good raid leader is open to dissenting points of view and encourages others to voice them. When a raid leader asks his raid for advice, or tells them frankly what he does or does not know, he makes the pugs stakeholders, active participants in the raid. A raid with no small talk, no one but the raid leader communicating, bodes ill for its success. And likewise, a raid leader must be iron-fisted in putting down disobedience and insubordination to his orders. A flawed strat, followed in a consistent way, is always better than 25 raiders doing three different things.
A raid leader must balance criticism with praise. The balance between carrot and stick is vital; each reinforces the value of the other. Most crucially, to fail at this balance destroys the credibility of the raid leader, and credibility is the most vital asset of any leader.
Micromanagement is a good thing. Especially when leading pugs, always err on the side of giving specific instructions. Tell specific people to do specific things.
Never speak in a pedantic manner that assumes that the person already has the information corollary to what is being said. Negative example: "ok this is sapphiron if u get cleaved its because u didn't know where 2 stand." Communication should be informative. When addressing the raid, the raid leader's goal should be to draw an image or impart a motive in the brainds of the pugs. To fail at this is called "talking from the inside out". When wording information, the raid leader should clear his mind and phrase it in such a way it is useful to those who do not know it. This is the single most common failure of raid lead communication: to give furtive or cryptic instructions that make sense only if the audience has sufficient understanding that they are unnecessary in the first place.
The best listener is a good speaker. Pugs who have mics will always be better listeners and more easily follow directions than those who do not, because they are engaged in the activity of the raid. For this reason, even pugs who should almost never be speaking must have mics, and pugs should be encouraged to use their mics, not only to share tactical information, but also to make the pug a communal endeavor.
Fundamental to charisma is self-obsession. All charismatic individuals are in love with themselves. This is so for a very good reason: humans are designed to sort themselves into leaders and followers, and assertive, self-starting behavior arouses a reciprocal response in others. This is why the celebrities that are so popular are so disgustingly self-indulgent.
Charisma is best earned by a raid leader through a mercurial, self-starting leadership style. Give orders. Get things going. Cut a fresh path through the brush and lead people through it single-file, don't lead a mob down the wide highway. Avoid stereotyped behavior such as calling for ready checks or using hackneyed expressions like the plague. This is the reason the greatest raid leaders in WoW use expressions like "it's not rocket surgery" and "everyone, jump up and down if you're ready, I don't do ready checks." They understand the vital role of idiosyncrasy in good leadership.
In everything a raid leader does, he must not only put the success of the raid first, but keep the final goal before his eyes at all times. Everything he does must be a means towards that end. Favoritism, meandering raids, minutiae, dumb arguments about strategy that are non-decisive between a kill and a wipe - all that is bad. Fast clears, clear instructions, keeping stragglers with the group, all that is vital.
A positive raid environment is vital to success. Good players who play well don't want to raid like a forced march, or play with a power-tripping tyrant. Maximize the fun factor. Encourage small talk. Be self-deprecating. Be fair. Address individuals in the raid. Put down players who insult other players or usurp authority.
Above all else, a skilled raid leader must be A Big Man. He must have a penis so large he doesn't talk about it because no one would believe how big it is. He must shrug off hateful remarks. He must be willing to let someone else MT, or top the meters; he must accept that there are many, many, many players better than he is, and it's quite likely some are in his pug. Nothing earns the respect of pugs more than putting the success of the pug above one's own winning or losing an argument or having one's way. If this means changing the strat or admitting failure or ignorance or apologizing and doing a mea culpa so be it. The mea culpa is perhaps the most difficult to practice and greatest deed of the truly skilled leader.
The greatest enemy of the raid and its leader are those who openly and actively seek to undo the raid, i.e., griefing. This takes the form of insubordination, deliberate underperformance or suicide. If tolerated by the raid leader this sort of thing always heralds the doom of a pug; it shows the pugs that those who seek to undo the raid are stronger than those who seek to make it succeed. It must not be tolerated.
Vision is fundamental to leadership. In the case of a pug, the vision is to kill a boss in a timely manner and get epix. The vision must be plausible and shared by the pugs. There must be a clear path between the starting point (the instance portal) and the final goal (rolling on loot). Therefore, setting unrealistic objectives, or offering prevaricating answers as to "how far the raid will go" is self-defeating. Do not promise pugs the moon. To do so is always self-defeating. Establish clear goals.
Likewise, embrace the limitations of yourself, the raid, and human factors such as time, energy and patience. Continue so long as there is a reasonable chance of success - then take the initiative to call the raid before it turns ugly.
Call breaks at reasonable intervals, for fixed lengths of time. Not allowing breaks will compel pugs to make their own, which is dangerous to the raid. Do not take too many breaks, and do not take them immediately before a difficult boss. Try to divide the raid across the break period as evenly as possible in terms of difficulty, patience, and reward.
Finally, a leader must make his pugs want to do well, and want to not do badly. He must make their desire to perform well be stronger than their desire to appear to perform well. Best of all is to make a pug where players seek to perform well to earn repute in the community. This is also why LFD/LFR is so pernicious and sucks.
XII. The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly
A good pug is a pug comprised of skilled players attempting an instance at near-progression level. Realistically, this is seldom the case. Examples would be doing Naxx in blues, Ulduar in mostly T7, ToC in T7/T8, or serious attempts on LK-10 or a clear of most of the wings of ICC-25.
A bad pug is a pug that outgears the content but fails at it or squeaks by.
An ugly pug is a pug that grossly outgears the content, and does it for reasons other than the drops (trinkets, achievements, prestige items, rare drops, boredom) and skilllessly zergs it down.
All three types of pugs are legitimate in their own right. A good pug, for example, will take good players with mediocre gear over bad pugs with great gear because the intent is to perform well. A bad pug will take whoever sends a tell and accomplish its extremely limited goals. And an ugly pug will take players who outgear the content, zerg it down, and refuse to take players who do not outgear it - for example, level 70s have no place joining an ugly pug for BT/SWP, nor players in 232 joining an ugly pug for Algalon or ToGC-25.
It is vital to identify the style, impetus and target audience of a pug raid. The pugs to recruit for an Onyxia-25, the level of play to be expected, the pace and "cleanness" of the raid, are very different than for a pug seriously attempting BQ-25 or Sindragosa-25, or that were attempting Yogg prior to ToC.
XIII. Putting Pugs To Work
It is to be expected that every pug leader have a stake in the success of his pugs, and that his initiative in organizing it be motivated by a specific want he has. By corollary, a pug with no apparent such drive, "LFM ICC25 FREE ROLLS ALL LOOT NOTHING LOCKED" is as ill-fated as "LFM TK MOUNT LOCKED"
The key, then, is to bring the pugs on board through fair and consistent policies. These policies should reflect the type of pugs sought.
GDKP, for example, attracts those who want gold, or have it. Free rolls attract those who have nothing to bring to the table but their undergeared characters. Free rolls are not at all unreasonable for loot pinata bosses, or bosses with a broad loot table of highly specific gear pieces, such as ToGC-25 or VoA or obsolete WotLK content. Locking something has the benefit of implying the other loot is not ninjaed and the leader does not need the other loot, and likely outgears and has fully experienced the content.
It is vital to remember that all pugs and pug leaders are fundamentally selfish. An honest and productive pug does not seek to disguise or misrepresent this selfishness, but moderate it into a productive drive that is satisfied in an equitable way. Conversely, expecting pugs to come for nothing is as unreasonable as expecting them to be led by a saint who wants to "help people out". The ideal pug is mature and understands the concept of give and take, as opposed to an immature individual who veils his own selfishness by condemning the wants and expectations of others.
Ensure that a loot policy is in place that gives a reason to come for each person to fill each of the 25 raid spots.
XIV. The Power Is Yours!
In closing, "You do not need a license to pug."
Pugging has some ironic appeal: the excitement of making normally trivial content a challenge, of playing the hero carrying less skilled players through content, being big and magnanimous, or, best of all, the excitement of playing with randoms, widening one's horizons and seeing the playerbase.
Those who think themselves shrewd or responsible - hopefully with good reason - would do well to realize that if they do not take up the mantle of leadership, less worthy souls will. Of course this is a sort of Catch-22: only stupid, bad, and/or delusional or megalomanical players would ever actually want to lead pugs. Certainly, this is true of most leadership in real life.
Yet the experience of pugging can be quite rewarding, as well as profitable, and moreover, it may come to grow on you.
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