Fighting for Peaceful Fighting

The key to conflict management isn't stepping in after a fight has started and fumbling around to stop it.

The real key is creating and maintaining a process to help everyone through their disagreements.

1. Step 1: Have everyone agree on how to solve the problem. Voting, /rolls, mediation, an impartial judge, whatever. Just have everyone involved in the argument agree that they'll accept whatever the outcome is, even if they don't like it. It's just like loot rules, only for relationships -- we hand out loot based on pre-decided methods and we stick to them or everything falls apart. This is the same thing.
   
2. Step 2: Go through the steps you've agreed on to reach a conclusion.
3. Step 3: Everyone accepts the outcome. No recounting the votes, no redos. It's over.
   

If you can't agree on how to end the fight, it will never end. If there are no rules, then players keep changing the rules, keep making up their own rules, and everyone calls foul all over the place. You must gather participants and get them to agree to stick to one path in order to reach a peaceful conclusion.

Common WoW Disputes

• Loot
• Personalities
• Guild Direction
• Guild Structure
• Guild Methods

I've previously written how to attempt to overthrow a corrupt leadership, but most fights are about differences of opinion and vision, not corruption. In such cases, following my advice on overthrowing your leadership is, in itself, immoral. The key to conflict management is fighting clean. It's not about stopping a fight but about ushering it to an honest and fair conclusion, a conclusion all participants have agreed to live with ahead of time.

Over my next few posts, I'll delve deeper into that list of common disputes.

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Beth Blevins is a former officer in In Vino Veritas.

She's currently enduring a heat wave.

Beth's been married since her junior year of college.
Whenever that was.