Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Inches from a clean getaway

Not sure I really want to get into the guild drama ranting, but I guess I see other blogs that I have a good respect for venting about their drama, so I'll play monkey see, monkey do. Why not, I mean, all the cool kids are doing it? Why not me too? Plus, at this point, who knows if any of my guildies even know about this blog, so its kind of rolling the dice on whether this posting will cause even more grief :-)

My current guild is a pretty noob guild. We're all on our first character, and at lvl 54, I just caught up to someone else and am tied for highest lvl. Well, if you count the new recruit 56, then I'm technically tied for second, but I don't recognize his membership yet, as its only a few days old and I haven't run with him yet.

We have basically no organization or schedule, or future vision or plans for where we want to go.

We do have some friendly members and a general good group of people who are mostly helpful to eachother in terms of assistance with quests, quick answers to questions, some material and profession sharing, and those sorts of things.

A relatively small clique of the higher lvl players run instances sometimes, mostly organized on the spot by the leader guy sending out a "/g wanna run ZF?" or some such. Not too much other instance running, but a little bit of another clique about 10 lvls below the leaders is forming, and they do similar instances and coordination.

Within the few cliques that're forming, the members are all lvl'ing at roughly the same pace, with some exceptions accelerating a bit faster and catching the next clique up, and some going a drop slower and falling out of cliques.

I imagine this is what most lvl'ing guilds look like, with perhaps a rare exception that has some nice organization, or at least some scheduled "help the lowbie night" or "instance night". (If you know of a good one like this on the Terokkar server, drop me a line, because in case you haven't been following along, I've got 16 more lvls during which I'd like to get in on some of that action).

Then the drama.

A few weeks ago you get the new recruit who proceedes to go out of the way to annoy anybody and everybody when the guild leader isnt around, but when the leader is around, a perfect angle. So the GM then responds by saying this player shall not group with anybody but him. So bam-o, you've got a problem child who has now got a monopoly on the GM. Isnt that convenient.

Then you have the same problem child actually run in an instance when the GM wasn't logged in and totally get on the nerves of one of the other guildies. Now, this second guildie is a bit of a piece of work to begin with, but now you've got a little bit of drama brewing. Lots of gchat, a couple of forum posts (not as if more than 3 of us even check the forum), and a general sense of disruption in the guild.

Next thing you know, allegedly (I've only heard it second hand from 1 member), the offended guildie is now accusing the GM of trying to parley a RL affair with the other player, and blah blah blah, Jr. High School all over again, and I'm not talking about the Wonder Years!
So I get the whisper from GM, and through a variety of conversations, the possibility of disolving the guild comes up.

Am I a bad person for actually getting excited at the notion?

Am I so passive aggressive that I would rather the guild dissolve than just gquit myself?

Then he decides to keep the guild together but /gkick the guy who, while not fully innocent himself, is sort of outside the clique of the GM and the painful member who has a monopoly on his groupings.

Inches from a clean get away!

Then my favorite part...the guy who got kicked forms his own guild and starts recruiting some of the existing members. And everybody's all offended that he would do that. Are you kidding me? Of course he's gonna do that. I don't blame him for a second.

What do you think? Do I hang out until I hit 70, and can then apply to a more serious guild? I do have a great time when we actually do run instances, so do I just ride it out? Or /gquit and start looking for some leadership pre-70? Does that even exist?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That would be a big Gquit from my prospective. On my server there are a couple of guilds that are actually broken up into two. A pre-BC guild and BC guild. (I thought it was funny when a I saw Brethern of Blood II for the first time) They have a good group of leaders and I believe they do a lowbie night. They've been around for awhile so it seems some pretty good leadership has to be involved to keep two guilds going! Theres good guilds out there.

Suzanne said...

Based on a similar experience that I had, I'd recommend a gquit as well, but if you're not quite ready to make the leap, then you could roll an alt and use them for guild exploration. I was part of a small guild that I liked (though they did leave me wanting a bit more), and when they merged with another small guild (filled with people of questionable behaviors and spelling skillz), I decided I'd better shop around. I had one of my alts join a friend's guild, and within a couple weeks, I realized it was a better match for me. The old guildies are still on my friend list, and maybe some day (when I, too, am level 70), I'll join them for some endgame fun. They just weren't the right group for me in the long haul to 70. (I was a lone 35 in a sea of 70's when I gquit.)