A Night in the Life of a GM

Inspire by Aunaka’s post on what a raid leader’s day looks like, I wanted to follow up with my own experiences on what a raid leader’s night looks like. You see, my responsibilities don’t immediately end after we kill the new boss. Once we get a progression kill down, a whole slew of other actions need to take place. This process could take anywhere from an hour to 2 hours depending on your guild.

  • Update  recruiting threads – We’re never finished recruiting. There’s about 5 or so threads on various forums and communities that have to be edited with a modified kill count.
  • Update rankings on WoW Progress and Guild Ox – Pressing the giant Update button which pulls your guild’s latest armory information to reflect the new kill and have standings updated.
  • Update the website to reflect kills – Involves uploading the kill screenshot and come up with some witty tagline on the front page. I’m not good at this.
  • Augments for players – This means handling a billion requests for gems, enchants, and other leg patches. A billion. Yes, literally. A billion.
  • Look up information for the next boss – Ensure the overall strategy is online on the forum with links to any additional resources and videos.
  • Write a recap post on the night – If there’s anything that needs to be tweaked and changed, this is where it goes.
  • Harvest and plant crops – I’ve got until midnight to plant as much stuff as I can across all my alts

I don’t mind though. The post raid process is a method to “decompress” from the raid. It’s important for players (especially GMs) to find a way to gradually destress themselves off a raid night. The duty is never over after a raid ends.

6 thoughts on “A Night in the Life of a GM”

  1. Could you expand on the “augments for players” section?  I’ve alway been interested in the spectrum of policies from raiders get their own stuff to raid leaders getting all consumables, etc. for the raid.  Where do you stand on this?  Does it depend on where the power position is where raid leaders feel they have to provide for raiders or else they will go elsewhere vs raid leaders that have raiders to choose from and don’t mind telling raiders to be responsible for getting their own consumables / enchants?

    Reply
    • Bank stuff is typically shared. I see to Enchants mostly. Someone else handles the actual in-game raid leading, but I’ve taken it upon myself to publish general strategy outlines and notes on the forums. After the outline, I let the rest of the team chime in with other observations or videos.

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