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.

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.

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.