Guild Drama

The guild I was in from March 2008 to about May of 2011 just folded, and the leader retired his account. We were the number one 25-raid horde guild on the server for a while there.

I recently gave Blizzard more money than they probably deserve to transfer my toons off my server of origin. My main, the troll priest, is in a social guild I found via a blog I like, where I leveled my shaman. By the time I got the shaman to level 85, I was so blown away by the fact that guildchat was in complete, intelligible sentences – and didn’t consist primarily of whining, posturing and hate speech – that I transferred even more toons to that server, just to hang out and watch guildchat crawl while pursuing whatever Azerothian obsession had me hooked at the moment.

I didn’t say goodbye before I left. I could easily come up with a big whiny rant about how they were mean and froze me out of the only viable group of 10 they had going, but to be honest, there was quite a lot of “I’m not going to heal that guy because he’s a hate-spewing d-bag and I’d rather /mock his corpse” going on from my end.

10-raids are intimate. There was nobody in that guild I really wanted to be intimate with. And we couldn’t pull 25-raids off any more because we always ran with about 15 core people and 10 who claim they watched a youtube video once, and previous raids were amenable to that.

When I joined it, there was one control freak of a guild leader, Decade. He worked in academia (/eyeroll) in the psych department (/eyeroll), specializing in addictionology. He was one of the biggest WoW addicts on the server.

Now. I might have mentioned his personal style of keeping everyone in check was to pretend every guy in the guild was gay and was having a massive gay orgy and affairs with everyone, and to claim various guys left their pants at his house, or were servicing him under his desk, or chained up in his back room like the geek. This definitely kept the hate speech down, but in kind of a twisted way. And the more I raided with other guilds, the more I realized that this “Polk Street bathhouse in the ‘70s” style of management was unusual. There have been gay people just casually talking about their relationships in every guild I’ve been in, but this was this weird layer of roleplay inserted between WoW-talk and RL-talk.

As it so happens, one of my good buddies was actually inside Polk Street bathhouses in the ‘70s, then during the ‘80s he was an overworked grief counselor and activist, and now he’s this middle aged guy who looks like somebody’s dad hanging around Home Depot deciding what kind of brackets to get. I asked him once if he knew why straight guys roleplayed being over-the-top and he had no idea. I think at some level it can be like a dominance thing, an attempt at public humiliation to test whether your rival will freak out or play along. However, I note that guys have an immensely wide vocabulary in that particular department and can center it around football, business, politics, fandom, musical tastes, pretty much any damn thing you can think of, dudes will find a way to compare size over it. I further note that when people vocalize regarding gay sex every thirty seconds or less, it tends to mean they are both interested in the subject and not engaging in it. I even furtherer note that, from personal experience, you can spend an entire dinner at Chow on Castro Street up to and including the gingerbread with pumpkin ice cream dessert (which I recommend) and not hear a .001th as many references to gay sex as one would hear in one of my guild's average raids. Yeah, yeah, I’m unique and cloistered and I live in a city renowned for gayness, but this whole situation was a total headscratcher for me, a hippie anthropologist wandering into deepest darkest flyover territory. The horror, the horror. And truthfully, I haven’t seen it in any guild since.

So part of my raid addiction, actually, was trying to figure Decade out. Was he a closeted straight? A gay dude living in some island of heterosexuality who could only express his true nature in sideways fashion? A conservative trying to be funny? Was he actually cruising guildchat, looking for naïve young men to chat with in private? All I could really gather was he was a neurotic control freak with an ironclad addiction to the game, or actually, to winning the game. I never saw any indication he was into lore, or goofing off with vanity items, or PVPing. He just wanted to win, and anyone could hang out with him as long as they didn't present obstacles to his winning.

After I initially started raiding with these guys, I went through a “that was nice, now let’s find another distraction” stage, back when I leveled my druid. I took a month off, reappeared in Decade’s guild, and every night, without fail, a raid invitation would pop up on my screen. I never asked, but I nearly always accepted.

They were always invitations to 25s. I severely miss 25s sometimes. There was enough peer pressure so that anyone trying to clog up the proceedings with attention-getting antics got smacked down fast, and there was always at least one really good wisecrack per night.

The main addictive part, for me, was watching how people worked together to accomplish things, or fail. Some nights, everything flowed like music, fights were effortless, conversation was funny and everybody scored new shiny things. Other nights, fail after fail would occur, followed by blamestorming and raging. Things were complicated by the fact we rarely had the same crew twice. The really, really addictive part was Finally Winning That Fight after working hard at beating it. That's just an incomparable rush.

In addition to the camp roleplaying, Decade was a memorable and colorful rager. He could rant in that special way of fussy control-freak guys. I think having an excuse to rage out was part of the game’s appeal for him too. Unfortunately, especially towards the end or when he got drunk, a lot of his rage would be based on bad data. He would be upbraiding people for failing at something they did last week, when someone would remind him that half the people from last week weren’t there, and this crew had never done it before.

One of my favorite examples was this particular fight in Ulduar where he used to rearrange the raid groups. The healers hated this, because we all use addons that move our bars around, so something like “group 2 will go left” is useless if you’ve got people arranged in a different order. And Decade, being massively impatient, would rant about what bad healers we were for making him wait around while we reconfigured.

Toward the end of Wrath, he rolled a druid, and decided to try to heal. This amused me; I was raiding as a resto druid on my ally toon at the time. We got to the aforementioned fight, and the raid leader – Decade couldn’t raid lead while healing, he quickly discovered – rearranged the groups. This sent him into a total panic attack, and I didn't see him play his resto druid much afterwards.

I wrote about this tendency toward misdirected rage on the guild forums once, and got back some hysterical in-game email accusing me of being the worst WoW player ever. All I can do about that is shrug; I rarely asked for an invite, I nevertheless got one every night, and I appear in about 90% of the progression kill screenshots over the time we were raiding, from BC through Wrath. And from running instances, I’m well aware of the fact that my status as most awesome healer in the universe can quickly change to feeblest player to ever get past the login screen, depending on who I’m randomly assigned to. I logged a ridiculous amount of raid hours during those three years. All from trying to figure out that mysterious “successful group” versus “imploding nebula of fail” magic.

Decade abruptly quit the game last year (then he came back and changed his name and made a new guild, then he abandoned that guild). One of the guys who had assumed some authority under Decade’s rein took over, Chaos. He was this scientist dude who liked to PVP, and was the sort of guy who would take up leadership due to a sense of responsibility but probably wouldn’t seek it out. He merged with another surviving 25-raid guild on the server towards the end of Wrath, to try to keep the magic going. He also brought in a bunch of PVPers, and soon guildchat was full of typos and guys accusing each other of buggery.

The whole locker room roleplay pretty much ground to a dead halt after Decade left. Unfortunately, it turned into more of a “ur so ghey!” “cut it out f*!” kind of world, and I was already on the record for being a snobbish liberal beyotch from the land of Harvey Milk. Fortunately, by this time I had been raiding in various groups on my various other toons and realized that yeah, actually the norm is to have a situation where people are in fact talking about how to successfully win the game rather than sex.

Around the time my bunny passed away, I took a break. When I came back, I started transferring all my toons. I’ve got my mage and warrior off on different servers, and my main’s in a social guild in a place where I can pug raids. I thought of finding another guild to raid with, but I’m not even sure I like this game enough to want to devote that kind of attention to it any more.

SWTOR’s coming soon. I’ve already paid for my limited edition digital download.