Human Resources, possibly?

In my raiding guild I used to be an officer. One of my responsibilities (which I actually volunteered for because I knew I would be the most diplomatic person for it) was to tell people if they'd failed their trial periods in our guild. Basically like telling people they'd lost their job or they'd not passed their probation period.

I always tried to do it as nicely and as fairly as possible. I knew that they'd want to hear why they'd failed. I would explain why they'd failed and what they could do to get better. We were a patient guild and always guided our trialists and gave them a chance to improve before we decided to fail them, so when it got to that point I knew they were just not cut out for our guild.

I let them down gently, but firmly and told them what was up. They appreciated my honesty and empathy and went on to other guilds.

It sounds stupid, but in WoW sometimes people take raiding guilds quite seriously and it is sort of like having a "job", but not really. You show up for raids (big group events) at specified times, you've got a job you need to perform, whether it's dealing damage to monsters or healing your allies or protecting your allies from the hardest hits those monsters do. If you're unable to perform your role properly you will not last in the team.

I guess doing it for a job in real life would be much, much worse though. In a video game it's like whatever. In real life that's their livelihood. I'd probably end up bursting into tears from feeling so sorry for them if I had to tell them they were fired, haha.

Either way, playing WoW has actually taught me a lot about how teams work and how best to build them and bring them closer together. It's the human connection. It's being real. What makes people passionate about their jobs? A lot of the time, it's the people they work with. That fucking matters, because in a job you're spending a lot of time around those people.

I enjoy spending time with my guildies from WoW, so I enjoy raiding with them on that game. Otherwise I'd probably hate it. It's the same with work. You have to actually want to be around your co-workers, even if it's just in a work-related capacity. Otherwise you'll hate your job and if you hate your job, it's time to find a new job. Same with a WoW guild. Hate your guildies? Find a new guild.

So I guess that's what WoW has taught me. It's also taught me to accept people from all walks of life. It's taught me that we're all very weird, very odd people and that's absolutely okay.