Ya know how every once in a while you’ll get this hinkey feeling about someone — like there’s something not quite right or maybe the words out of his/her mouth resemble the truth, but not exactly? Maybe you’ll talk yourself out of the hinkey feeling — what do you know, you’re just being paranoid, maybe should up that dosage for a few days.
That hinkey is thousands of years of human evolution springing up to defend your vulnerable ass and you ought to pay attention. This is another example of a valuable life lesson I’ve learned in multiplayer online gaming. (What an enlightening hobby this has been.)
We had this level 60 rogue apply to our guild a few months back — he’d been on our server forever, he was friends with quite a few guildmembers, and he had reasonable equipment and resist gear. Since he could string together enough English to complete our rigorous guild application, he was considered solid. And yet … there was something not quite right about the guy.
He’d been around the block a few times … the block being The Endgame Guilds … and my opinion on that is this: if you can’t get along with anyone, you can’t get along with us, either. My favorite guild applicant is a guy who’s been in one, maybe two, endgame guilds, not five or six. Five or six says you don’t know how to deal with the arguments, the frustration or the WORK required of a raider.
A few of the officers had a similar hinkey about the guy and we passed on his app.
He eventually started his own guild and I noticed immediately that he was guilding some of the server’s Unguildables. The Unguildables, for those not in the know, are those players kinda like him: they’ve been in several many raiding guilds and there’s been “problems” … loot disputes, high-scale dramatics, hacking rumors, maybe it’s as simple as they PVP’d too much when they should have been raiding. I couldn’t even list all the ways that one becomes an Unguildable. Just know that once you’re labeled as such, it’s time to roll a new character and a new personality if you want to join a raiding guild again.
Now, remember a few weeks ago I told you the story of our own guild rogue that left after posting that he had sold his rogue account and thanks for the memories and the next day the new driver would be taking over? (Here’s the link.) I also told you that he landed in a Guild for the Unguildables after I torched his application to a rival endgame guild. This is the very same Unguildables guild he joined.
Anyways, the Unguildables go about their business, recruiting fresh-to-raiding, don’t-know-any-better level 60s and other Unguildables and began their ascent through Le Molten Core, the first of the 40-man raiding zones with the primo raiding gear. They had some trouble fielding a full raid so the one weekend they asked a few of our people to help out with MC. They didn’t ask me, and I’ll assume because they knew what the answer would be. In any case, they tricked three of our people into helping them out.
Shit, meet fan. Fan, here’s shit. Our guildleader catches wind of this the next day and confronts each of the three in turn, because y’see, at the time we were still doing MC clears to get to Ragnaros. If they burn up their weekly MC raid ID helping some other guild, they can’t do their weekly Ragnaros duty for us. Two of the three were longtimers and they got a warning; the other guy was new and had, unfortunately for him, aligned himself with the two jagbags that had tried and failed to pull off a guild coup a few weeks prior. (Here’s the link for that guild drama.) He was guildremoved.
I know it’s hard to keep track of all the actors involved without a playbill, but one thing you should have noticed: isn’t this all too many coincidences to swallow? One coincidence I can take, but when there’s two or more, then those thousands of years of evolution spring up to defend my vulnerable ass.
Word got around that the new guy got guildkicked and suddenly, the guildmembers are chatty. “Did I know that NewGuy had an alt in the Unguildables guild that was an officer?” No, I didn’t fucking know that or we would have kicked him out sooner. Duh. “Why can’t someone be in two raiding guilds?”
Why? I’ll tell you why. Because you cannot serve two masters. Your dog can’t do it and you can’t either, that’s why.
Imagine blank stares.
Ok, put it this way: we raid four days a week, they raid four days a week. There are only 7 days in a week. Get it now?
Good news, he was removed before he could do any real damage. (Thanks Evolution!) Bad news, this wasn’t the end of it.
Tomorrow: The End of It. Maybe. I’m pretty sure it’s the end of it.
The ole unguildable guild. The worst is when the unguildable guild somewhat half succeeds. Then the newcomers to the game do not know that their guild is full of loot ninjas and other fallen end game raiders.
I’ve had a few “Hey can you help me?” “Your in guild
<Unguildable>, no thanks” followed by a drawn out conversation of me trying to explain that their guild is led by undesirables while fending off dragons or slimes or something.The “first to 60” group of people on my server eventually founded such a guild, kinda sad really, they were e-famous for a week. But never made it to molten core.
Hey, at least the Guild of the Unguildables makes it easy to weed out troublemakers in the future. If you get an applicant from there, his comments on his old guild can function as the proverbial canary in the goldmine.
Also, it’s a good idea to keep at least civil relations with the other high-end guilds, so that potential Unguildables can’t pick off undeserved loot from all of them.
Yeah, we had a group like this as well. They called themselves Might referencing strength, I always took it as they “Might” make it.
They didn’t.
Wow, sympathies, but gotta say, glad for once it’s not my guild. It’s a lot easier to take this all with an amused smile when it’s someone else’s headache, ya know? I let someone talk me into being a guild officer once, and NEVER again. Just hate the dramatics too much.
But I do remember getting that feeling a few times back when I was one, and while I wasn’t always right when I thought someone was okay, I was always right when I thought they weren’t. I think there was one exception, but even that was only sort-of an exception (a guy who had a good heart but could make an enemy of a saint… none of the officers had the heart to kick him because he really was a good guy, but he wasn’t good for guild morale and tended to make a bad impression on new people). People are complicated. Which is annoying. 🙂
Wow, the more I read about the endgame of WoW the less fun it seems. Its never a good sign when part of the game gets described as “work” and what’s up with booting people from a guild (let alone having them be unguildable) because they wanted to PvP?
Damn.
You dedicate to your guilds raid times and pvp on your own time, this isn’t “have your cake and eat it too” where you can show up, get fat loots, and go pvp while the guild is in AQ learning new bosses, it just doesn’t work like that.
Daz and Zxy – you are both right.
End game PVE is good fun because you get to assemble 40 people in a raid to achieve the proposed content. It is also a nightmare for the exact same reason (40 people? with the exact same idea of what “successful guild” means? no way).
By the way, Foton, thank you for the blog. Most of your posts about guild drama and raiding end up linked in my guilds’ officers forum (after some occasional translation into French)… I can tell you that when it comes to WoW cultural differences are but minimal. We even have our frog-eating Emo Tank.
You really want me to blow your mind? Our guild alliance is made up of 4 guild: Us (probably 80% of the raid), the guild we will probably eventually absorb if we can get them away from their cult-like multi-game clan, a guild made up of one chick (don’t ask, we don’t), and a …ready for it?….farmer guild. Ok so they are not all farmers (they are mostly all jacktards though), but the GL has admittedly accepted farmers (something about trying to teach them the error of their ways or some shit) and it’s a large enough percentage that when you see someone with their tag you assume they are a farmer until evidence to the contrary.
The funny part is that the farmer guild GL would get all butthurt when we were reluctant to allow any of his members to fill open raid spots. The hilarious part is not really because we were afraid of ninja’ing (would give us an excuse to severe ties actually), but we have already had to demote most of his guild into oblivion because they fucking suck.
Daztur – Actually the politics of the endgame is quite a bit of fun (if you enjoy that kind of thing). It’s like a constantly ongoing game of Survivor only instead of the winner getting a million dollars they get Tier 4 chestpiece. 😉
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Daztur almost all of what he wrote applies to levelling guilds and casual guilds as well. Even people in real life. You only are looking at one little example, you have to look at the whole package.
People who whine constantly about how poor they are, are obsessed with what loot they can get, act squirrely in an undefinable way, spread rumours, complain all the time. These are not people you want in your life, they are negative and draining.
Ironically it’s the people that raid in order to farm for phat loot that end up unguildable. Most raiders mainly want to overcome new challenges, and there are varying levels of committment between hardcore and casual. For instance I am casual, but all those same ideas apply.
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