Rejection

On my Brightcape blog I got a strange comment yesterday.  It was

"You people are all <expletive deleted> stupid and your guild sucks."  -Anonymous

Where does that come from?  It is particularly strange since it was at the end of the Safe Schools post, which is a little bit old at this point.  I deleted it right away though I suppose I could have left it for awhile in light of the fact that I am posting about it.  Clearly the troll who left it is some person who is mad at me for something I did within WOW but it isn't clear at the outset who they might be or why they chose to spew their trash on my blog.  After a little bit of consideration I figured out where it came from.  Note that I have exactly no proof of this but I got trolled by some fool who was mad at me about WOW, today, and who found a link to my blog which is in the post I made in that thread, so I can be pretty confident it was this person Tolur.

So here is the thing.  I have been a recruiter for a long damn time in WOW.  Back in BC my guild seemed to take tremendous, one might say inordinate, pleasure in watching me roast applicants who posted crappy, slipshod, half-baked applications.  People would come to the guild website and instead of reading the application form and making a reasonable attempt at answering the questions as asked they would ignore the question, talk in all leetspeak, lie, answer complex questions with 'yup' and all manner of other disasters.  I would then politely tear them apart, listing every way in which their character was suboptimally set up and every question which was answered foolishly or wrong.  I think the guild assumed that I was just crushing dreams because it is fun to crush dreams but that is not the real reason I did these things.  To be sure, there were some applications (This one is actually pretty hilariously bad) where the applicant so severely disrespected the application that I really just spent my time roasting them for no reason other than to chastise them in a fashion amusing to me.  Most of the time though my negative criticism had a very specific point to it:  To find a diamond in the rough.

There are plenty of people out there who really don't know that if you are filling out an application you need to actually do a good job or you won't be accepted.  There are also plenty of people who don't know that there are free resources on the internet that can tell you exactly how to set up your character and how to play the game.  Most of the people that don't know this aren't good raiders but there really are people who aren't aware of these things but could be good additions to a roster.  The key ingredient is tenacity.  When rejected some people just walk away and sulk, some go on the blog of the person rejecting them and post vulgar garbage, and some fix their crap up and try again.  That third type of person is exactly who I want on my raiding team.  Life will regularly kick you in the head; that is unavoidable. Your cannot prevent that situation but you can choose how you respond to it.  Someone who knows what they want and is willing to say "Okay, I was wrong, but I can and will do better."  is exactly the sort of person I want working with me.

To be sure, the vast majority of the time when someone applies and I list all the things wrong with their application they simply leave, delete their app, insult me, or what have you.  It is rare that I actually get someone playing back at me who shows real moxie and stubbornness.  When I do get those people I feel vindicated; I have found my diamond in the rough.