Once upon a time, before the release of World of Warcraft’s Burning Crusade, we had this guildmate … paladin.

No wait. His original main was a paladin. After he quit Warcraft for the third time, he switched main characters to his mage. He also had a level 60 priest as an alt character that was reasonably equipped for raiding. He had a nice stable of raid characters to choose from, based on our needs, and other than the frequent “I’m quitting” announcements, he was a valuable member.

Well … after about the fifth or sixth “I’m quitting” routines, he began a rapid descent into insanity. I still don’t have any idea what his problem was, probably game burnout or some real life issue, who knows, but he was a bitch to get along with towards the end there. All this “I quit” “I’m back” “I hate you all” “Love! Love!” came to a head one weekend when there was an issue with a guild applicant and the app’s e-friend.

Let’s call my guildmate Iquit and the applicant Flakey … because he kinda was. Flakey was a level 60 priest (OMG, TAG HIM NOW!) with acceptable priestly skeelz, which in the raiding endgame of World of Warcraft means A. he had his Flash Heal spell hotkeyed and B. he occasionally paid attention during raids. Ya, a primo app EXCEPT he would withdraw his application every other day.

Flakey expected an immediate guild tag — ye ole priest entitlement attitude you sometimes see — and our guild doesn’t work that way. Priests might have to wait a few days for a tag. Hunters have to wait 18 months. (I kid. But they wait much longer because, well, they’re hunters. And probably night elves. Ya dig?)

Anyways, Iquit is PVPing in the battlegrounds on a Friday night and he makes a disparaging remark in /say to one of the server known-assholes, who just happens to be bestest friends ever with Flakey. Iquit and Flakey exchange words in /tells and eventually the argument moves to our guild message boards.

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Some interesting World of Warcraft forum discussions, and as with anything involving the WoW forums, there’s a lot of chaff to separate from the wheat.

A post-Burning Crusade take on a perennial topic: Alliance vs Horde, maturity level, EZ-mode, moronic public convos. “How to tell which BE’s are ally rerollers” I’ve never really bought into the theory that Alliance has more immature players than Horde, although I’ll freely admit I haven’t spent much time playing Horde. Certainly public chat is equally stupid on both sides.

On my own server, guild vs guild shit-talking mostly originates with Horde. However, the larger Alliance raiding guilds are rather prompt about booting ill-behaved players; we have the population numbers in our favor, after all. Seems to me that Horde probably doesn’t have that luxury.

As far as PVE EZ-mode, fear ward is a powerful thing. Although, when it comes to racial abilities, the racials you don’t have are always more attractive than the ones you do. Unless you’re human like my rogue, then the other racials actually ARE better.

Over on the Guild Relations forums, this convo pops up occasionally, “Website Critique” — guilds post their link for others to evaluate the usability and design. Several players offer detailed suggestions and Do’s/Dont’s for guild sites, which is rather useful — designing a guildsite to satisfy both recruiting and membership needs is a challenge.

I’m not a fan of splash pages, but I had run across this guildsite while researching my own guild’s redesign and rather liked it: Pirate Ninjas. They’ve integrated their pirate theme superbly throughout the site — corny, but well done.

Finally, an older thread that still has some life in it: “Worst reason/excuse you’ve seen for a /gquit”. Some people are actually thinking of original material for a /gquit, which is encouraging.

Also encouraging, that my guild has somehow missed guilding these quitters — narrowly missed, probably.