If I were to do live-blogging on a guild raid night in World of Warcraft — let’s say yesterday night — this is how it would have gone:

One hour before raid invites, 20 guildmates online: Log on, check my character for repaired equipment, combat supplies, and after all the ducks are in a row, zip down to the Stormwind Stockades to farm for some noob alt gear.

Guildmate Convo #1: This rival guild’s alts are sending our guys tells begging for gold, can I deal with this? I think wtf and suggest they /ignore the idiots and, errr, maybe don’t give them any gold?

Convo #2: Offtank_03, aka The Emo Tank, has a serious family issue at the moment but he’ll still be at the raid. I express sympathy and hope that won’t lead to a longer conversation where I’ll need to quote a little Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. I suggest he take the night off, Emo Tank will have none of that. For the Guild!

Convo #3: One of our raiders with dwindling attendance was reclassified to our casual raider rank and wants clarification on that.

I’ll explain: we have two ranks for regular members, one is for those with over 50 percent raid attendance, the other for those with less than 50%. The only difference between the two ranks, other than the name, is that higher-attendance people get invited first to the 40-man raids, and the lower-attendance people are invited next, if there are spots available and based on what classes we need. Everyone on the waiting list earns DKP same as those in the raid, so the lower-attendance people aren’t penalized in that way because they can’t get into a raid. Both ranks bid on loot equally, earn DKP equally, receive guild assistance equally — the only difference is the order of the invites.

We instituted this change many months ago when we noticed the curious relationship between attendance and farm mobs. Once the learning was behind us and a boss mob moved to farm status, suddenly, ALMOST INEXPLICABLY, attendance for that mob and/or zone would skyrocket. (Apparently, real life obligations can go to hell when there’s loot to be had.) Since we used to fill raids first come, first served, you can imagine the ruckus when some yokel who never showed for the learning attempts (read: wipes) got into the farm raids ahead of those who had.

Enter our two-rank system, which has worked wonders to encourage stable attendance. Every evaluation period (about once a month), there’s fresh drama from those guildies that didn’t make the cut and get moved to the lower-attendance rank. I just don’t get that drama. It’s math. Attendance is under 50 percent, you’re not invited first. Big f’ing deal, you go on the wait list, get DKP anyways and you can do whatever the hell you want in game. You don’t like it, get on that wait list more than 50 percent of the time and in a few weeks, BOOM, you’re back to the higher-attendance rank.

So that’s what Tell #3 was about — guy was pissed he got bumped to the lower-attendance rank. We had just done an evaluation the week prior, so I’ve gotten a lot of these tells this week, and they all start off like this: The guild should make an exception because *fill in the blank*. (Y’know, blow me.)

Kinda went on a rant there, where was I? Oh ya, The Stockades. Finished that, flew to Eastern Plaguelands to do some Naxx turnin.

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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.