In no particular order:
1. Retard. (also, tard) Although, I do enjoy the variants of the “tard” theme (tardtastic, tardriffic, tardiness, et al), the plain vanilla insults (e.g. that guild is retarded) are so void of imagination that they are, at their very core, retarded.
2. Lawlz. (either spoken on Vent or typed out thusly) Lawlz had a brief moment as a sarcastic, pity laugh. That moment is over.
3. T.T ;; QQ (weeping smileys) These have infected our guild chat like a pandemic. “I only have 4 Tier 2 T.T” “I lost the random! ;.;” Guess what. I want to /gkick you, T.T.
4. More doooots! Also, 50 DKP Minus! (y’know, spoken in a Pakistani-esque accent during a long boss fight ala the Onyxia guy UPDATE: dead link, refer to the YTMND page instead.) I realize it’s too much to ask that people not shout “More Doooots!” during Onyxia, but every. single. raid. boss. is. too. much.
5. Piccolo of the Flaming Fire. (AE on friendly players: dance) I don’t necessarily HATE this thing at every raid — it’s more like a “FFS, here’s that damn flute again” kind of thing.
6. ZOMG (spoken: “zoh my gawd” usually as if one were a foolish schoolgirl) Just stop. Please. Just stop.
7. Posting on the World of Warcraft realm forums. We’ve had a few “PR issues” as of late — customary for any MMOG guild of some size. The high profilers have “PR disasters”; we have “PR issues”. Enough of us have played other games and know the best approach is public silence and /tells with the injured party because nothing was ever solved via public message boards — no minds have ever been changed by a carefully worded official guild response.
Nonetheless … no matter how often we warn our more vocal members to SHUT UP, no matter how stiff the penalties for responding to trolls, no matter how tight we cinch the muzzles, they cannot stay out of the fray.
Like moths to a flame.
zomg you have harsh requirments \(^3^)/
Imagine if somebody made a joke about Chuck Norris–I’m sure humor would ensue if we exaggerated his abilities. Those jokes would continue being funny over and over again.
Number 7 is most definitely advisable.
I remember during the stupid war effort grind we attempting to get a couple of guilds on side for handing in stacks or various things.
May as well have painted a big fat bullseye on our guild tabard for all the flaming we got for that little stunt.
Interaction is now kept to a minimum realm forums.
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Hello fellow participant in the Carnival of Gamers!
I quit WoW a couple of months ago, but I understand what you mean about the Realm Forums. We used them, though, as kind of a player test. Players could flame, argue, post what they want, as long as they:
a) never attacked a person, only his (or her) behaviour and ideas,
b) never alleged that another player had broken the terms of use (that was a matter for guild leaders and/or Blizzard), and
c) never generalised a complaint beyond the specific circumstances they were making it in.
If they couldn’t do that, they got warned. If they did it twice, they got kicked. That served as a really good way of publicising our guild and getting positive rep: we got a name for being polite, reasonable, and yet willing to engage in the community, and people could see that we’d take fair action to remain that way.
Not particularly WoW specific, but:
1) Don’t be ditch’n yer beaux and taking off wid the guild leader.
2) Leaders don’t be buying gold – is a poor example.
Unsurprisingly, most guilds don’t feel the need to impose these upon their members. Tragically, those that do need, don’t do it on account of the power corrupting thing. Dang.
Wish I had had the balls to bail when the snoopy client was discovered, or I when discovered how important grinding is to this game (can’t grind – fall asleep)… perhaps one of the periods of poor server stability. No, I bailed when the game *really* stopped being fun.
Being in a guild run by folks one knows IRL has its upsides – easy to arrange runs, easy to trust on loot… language gets moderated exactly to the level that folks can deal with very quickly. Shucks, my guild had a bunch of folks who could *think* very clearly – half the guild was techies IRL. Some of us worked together – we had been being paid (actual money) to work as a team for years.
Sometimes the rpg feature can fail, real-life can intrude and one of the more important features of games – the ability to take one’s mind off of of other stuff for a while – can become impossible to reestablish.
Hacking, scripting, farming, gouging, Ninja-ing, camping, spamming, harrassing, and of course bugs, imbalances, sploitz, and general instablity – these *are* annoyances – they really are.
They just can’t compete with life for the ability to piss one off.
Grrr.