If your World of Warcraft guild is like my World of Warcraft guild and you too have spawned multiple “guilds that hate your guild” (as well as numerous players who wouldn’t piss on you if your heart was on fire), then you should be aware that the recently beta’d armory can be a valuable tool in tracking your enemies.

I spent my morning coffee time surfing down some of our former guildmates — because I hope life is treating them … well.

The Emo Tank — Last I heard, he had server transferred and was thinking of transferring back oh! if only we’d take him back. (Umm no.) What I hadn’t heard, he name changed, or deleted in a fit of emo-ery, because there’s no level 60+ warriors with his character name ANYWHERE. And this is why I hate name changing in MMO games, people can fly under your radar. You are completely unprotected.

It’s remarkably easy to do in WoW, no GM approval necessary, although it will cost you unless your server is on deck for free character transfers: Create same-named character on your target realm, apply for transfer, your character will be flagged to change the name — POOF! You’re under the radar.

So now, Emo Tank could be back for all I know and preparing for his assault.

There’s three other players I can think of that server transferred after brief drama fits: the guildbank-stealing rogue (not our guild bank, some other hapless guild — Read re: The guildbank thief) and The Two Sisters.

Guildbank thief, I already knew he name changed so I have no means of tracking him down. There’s no real danger from him since we haven’t guilded any new rogues for … months, nor will we for … months.

So anyways, The Two Sisters. That’s a long story.

Once upon a time, soon after we first downed Nefarian, one of the guildmates started championing this new druid as a potential guildmate. We were mildly interested — what guild couldn’t use 8 more druids? We sure could. Then and now.

She applied, she talked on our Ventrilo (so we KNEW she was an actual girl on teh intarwebs), she raided with us a few times, we tagged her. And she was a good guildmember for us. No complaints on play or attitude.

Few weeks after we tagged her, she told us that she has a (real life) sister who also plays Warcraft, a hunter (/groan), a night elf (of course), and she would like to apply to our guild and begin her raiding career. (Note: I have changed the classes and other identifying information to preserve their anonymity.)

We weren’t happy about the night elf hunter part, but if she was as good a guildmate as her sister, maybe we could boot one of our frequently-AFK, frequently-drunk hunters to make room.

We would have, had we gotten the chance.

The sister raided with us a few times and she was ok. She wasn’t awful, but she wasn’t very self-sufficient either — got lost in Blackwing Lair quite a few times as I recall. (WoW tutorial for the non-WoW: it’s impossible to get lost in BWL, OR SO I THOUGHT.)

Still hopeful we could boot another of our hunters while he’s afk or drunk, we tagged the hunter-sister also.

Within the first week, there’s some weirdness going on. First of all, every raid night before start time, the sisters would log on and immediately dominate our Ventrilo with 15 minutes of: how was your day? my day was good. what did you do today? I hope you had as good a day as me.

So you understand, these were two adult women who lived a few states away from each other, and I understood that they liked to catch up every night, but we do have private channels for private *ahem* chit chat … y’know … rather than using our more public raid channel with the 38 players trying to coordinate who is going to bring what to where. But whatever, we could live with it.

Then, I caught word that hunter-sister and Emo Tank had a thing going. And that’s when I knew that she was nuts.

I’m not very sentimental — I know this about myself. I don’t hear of an intra-guild romance and think “how sweet”. I think, “Shit. This will not be good for us.” I won’t go so far as to say that every in-game romance is doomed to fail — unless you consider a 95%+ chance of failure and fallout, doomed. I’m just saying, “Shit. There’s a 95%+ chance this will not be good for us.” It’s science.

Week Two — hunter-sister lost her mind and posted her Myspace addy on the guild boards. Of course, we all raced to Myspace to check it out. I think I stepped on one of the gnome warlocks in my haste. Are we not human? We are indeed.

This seems a good moment to pause for a lecture on internet, and online gaming, safety.

#1 – Women, posting any real life information (location, phone number, PIC) is bound to be trouble. I don’t agree with it, it shouldn’t be that way, but that’s biology. I think women discover this within the first 30 minutes of internet usage. I could be wrong, it could be 10 minutes.

We have a thread on our guild boards, probably like most guilds, for guildmates’ real life pics — almost 100% participation by the guys, 1% participation by the women. Why? I had assumed the women understood biology and they had been on the internet for longer than 10 minutes.

#2 – Children, get the hell off the internet. You think safety is another way of saying “don’t have any fun ever”, and, you think you’re immortal. It’s not and you’re not. Log off now, don’t return until you’re 21.

#3 – Men, any chick who puts something like “I’m looking for the perfect man” on her Myspace is whacked. I suppose if they’re only 18 or 19, they might write such a thing because they still believe in mythological beings (See Also: unicorns) — otherwise, whacked.

Unless you enjoy the “You’re my boyfriend now!! Call me back in 5 minutes!” types, in which case, I’ve got a Myspace link for you.

Until she set her Myspace as private/stay out!, it was a good source for finding other guildmates with Myspaces to make fun of. Not that hers was lacking for material — she had a 10-paragraph manifesto (heh, MAN-ifesto. I kill myself.) discussing this perfect man yet to come along. For a woman in her mid-30s, it was some fucked-up shit.

Tomorrow in the exciting conclusion: We are shocked to discover that our guild membership contains no perfect men. The imperfect variety, however, we have plenty.