Guild drama and you

If I am posting this in the wrong area, would a mod please move it?

That being said...

Hey all, I'm a long time lurker, and rare poster, and lately things have happened to me within the realm of Guild Wars that has noted my concern. This is not a rant, as the title may suggest, more of a confusion as to a few things that have been happening in my guild as of late, and a want to know if others have experienced anything similar.

Recently, I had a new member complain about a certain solo farming build, and by attempting to help them, I was apparently agitating them. As I have long been known to teach others to farm, rather than give them something I farmed, I found this behavior strange.

After the person left the guild, I began to look over my methods to see if there may have been something I had said to cause the person to leave, or perhaps there was some error I had made in inviting the person at the time. Most of my fellow guildmates told me that I had no fault, that I had always been a good person to call upon whenever help was needed, and my use such sites as Guru and Wiki have allowed me to give others a proper reference so I do not need to be called upon in certain things, such as collectors, elites, and what have you.

As my guild is going through a restructuring of PVE and PVP, mainly because of drama like the above that has cause people to leave, I sit in wonder as I watch a once active guild that was going to a great start at PVP suddenly drop to such low activity that I fear for it's survival, I ask you all, do you deal with the same things that I speak of?

If you have any interesting anecdotes, and stories of similar drama, feel free to post them, but please, let's keep this thread civil, as I would hate to see a lock anytime soon.

- Arnold Schwrtznggr
"The Governator" of SYPR

Take 15-50 people, and stick them in a room together for 1-10 hours a day, each. You're going to get drama.

I ran a guild, FoFi, for 14 months. It originated on a Magic Cards website, and I made an effort to draw in casual, comfortable players who would fit well. My main goal was in getting creative people, and running fun & creative setups.

My officer, a long time member in high standing at the website I mentioned before, wanted to be more competitive. I wanted to be more creative. Things got icky when he, an officer, started recruiting members based solely on their ability to run top PvP builds. The result? Muddied waters, and a few very annoying people in the guild.

Eventually the difference in playstyle got to be too much. He refused to leave because he felt he would be 'abandoning' us, but on top of his interest in competitive play, he wasn't well, and wasn't the funnest person to be around. It was scaring members away. I eventually told him to go make a splinter guild and further his own agenda.

Of course, things don't end there, and there were hurt feelings between him & a guild leader in my alliance, which left me in the middle. Things still haven't righted themselves, and after the break in my guild, it eventually crumbled, leaving me to go join another guild.

I do plan on making a new guild in the future. Just gonna use my current one to get stuff done in Nightfall, then work on it.

Guild drama is normal unfortunately, happens to any guild, the one you described isn't so bad, the real guild drama is when 2 good friends or long standing members of a great guild have personality clashes and the guild break up.

At least Guild Drama in this game isnt at levels like that of Ragnarok or Lineage.

Jesus.Some days those games are nothing but reruns of "Days of our Lives".

Novalon,

I know neither you nor your guild personaly, but there is a general trend all guilds have to face at one point in their life and it seems precisely to be what you are facing now.

When you first create a guild you generaly do so with a core of people that like to play together and have about the same view of what their playtime should consist of, after a while and real life helping the guild usually finds it a good idea to grow a bit mostly to help the members find people to play with in a more easy way.

That growth will usually take place by first recruiting from the friendlist then by recruiting people who advertise they are looking for what your guild is offering, sometimes even you simply decide to advertise what your guild is offering to attract people.

This growth process will take a bit of time during which friends of friends will be invited and the guild will be quite active, at one point in time however people will be invited that don't really fit in your guild and people will take a break from the game this will lead to a decrease process during which people will leave the guild again because they do find it less active.

From there you have two possibilities :

a) your guild doesn't really have a sturdy back because you failed to integrate your members well enough and the leaving/inactivity process will most likely follow a snowball behaviour to leave a dead guild behind.

b) you actually took the time to integrate most people into a tightknit community and your leaving/inactivity process will leave you with a core of people bigger than what you started with and most likely with a base in a few other games, congratulations your guild is now more than likely to exist on the long term

From there on you will have growth and leaving processes because activity in a guild is a bit like breathing but overtime your guild will become bigger and bigger because you will encounter more people that actualy will integrate in your core and will remain in the guild not for the game but for the social aspect outside of it, this is where guilds turn into clans spawning dozens of games simply because the community is that huge (of course when groups get that big they also risk losing their identity but that is another story)

From what you are telling in your post you seem to have the core group needed to prevent your guild from sinking so I wouldn't fear too much.

Kind regards,

Darakus

I was once in a guild where the guild drama became real life drama between people who were married... It was a very ugly situation. And so much deception and backstabbing were going on that I felt like I was still in highschool, despite the fact that most of the members of the guild were adults.

Luckily I'm in a much better guild now, just composed of a small group of friends. It seems that recruitment is where the trouble begins.

Honestly, some guilds just aren't very nice, and go out of their way to give other guilds a bad time. Then your guild gets kicked from an alliance, and because you no longer own a town, your members start leaving. All the while, you have actually done nothing wrong, but are left feeling like you are Hitler from some of things that are said in alliance chat.

It makes you wonder what you could have done differently to prevent these kinds of things from happening, but when you didn't do anything in the first place, and it's just some nasty people doing it to you, there's nothing you can do.

I wouldn't dream of being in a guild with even one person I haven't spend quality time getting drunk with.

a "guild" without drama is not a guild. it's called a contact list.

The first guild I joined was awesome. The guildleader was the wife to one of the officers. We got along well together, and the guildleader and I got along very well. The hubby was always a bit in the background, and rarely joined us for missions/quests etc. Then one he started ranting at me while his wife was offline about how I never help out the other guildies (even though I spent 100% of my time doing that, we were always a group of guildies running around).

At that point I decided that this is getting weird and I decided to move on. Even today I miss those awesome days. I am in another guild right now, but its still not the same as that guild... Too bad the hubby was a pshyco dude.

I was rofl when I noticed your guild tag is PMS. How could you not have drama??

Back on topic, I have seen my share of drama and really hate how much grief people can cause each other over a game. Power trips, jealousy, con-artists, real life issues that remove key people from game play; but I suppose it should be no surprise. These are people after all and when people interact drama is sure to follow.

Drama is going to happen. New members can make waves, but the way to avoid that is to spend some time getting to know them and do things with them - along with others in your guild - instead of just "padding the numbers."

One problem we ran across in GW early on was that we tried getting people in to start things up on the GvG side of things, but we'd either get people who weren't patient enough to wait until we had a core group large enough to consistently GvG (hencies? no thank you!) Or we'd get one that, upon being admitted into the guild, would try to dictate how things were going to be done. Those types didn't stick around long after they found that the guild leaders wouldn't cater to their demands.

We've only had 2 cases of someone being kicked from the guild - one a long time ago for being a total jackass - I wasn't around for that one, tho. And another one who decided to download a cheat program for playing America's Army - Gone within hours.

Every once in a while, there's a bit of drama that goes on between our longstanding members, but those are few and far between and are resolved quickly to everyone's satisfaction.

Heh, not guild related but a guy I play hoh with went nuts the other day over something equally stupid. We were running a dual smite and one of the members of our group just remarked on how he used two starbursters instead of thumpers or shock warriors. Which caused another guy to remark on how he ran it another way. Anyways long story short, this guy just flipped out about how he was leader and having won the halls a few times he would decide what to run for our build. They weren't even trying to tell how to run it just talking about different builds :S

My guild contains 1 person, me. The commotion is unbearable

I felt that another story was in order, this was a little less funny than the last I mentioned.

One day, our guild leader called a vote, because it looked like we would never amass enough faction to be able to own a town. Most people agreed that they felt it was worthless, and Alliance Battles should be more fun than anything else, not something that they have to farm continuously in order to keep the guild well known.

Well, a few people weren't so happy about this, mainly the largest contributors to the faction of the guild. Many of them up and left for one reason or another (whether it was because the guys were jealous of our leader because of his ability to be very friendly with the ladies, or not, remains to certain) and we found that a lot of our core players had left.

Just recently, our Guild leader has been stepping up our recruitment, something I believe I've never actually had to do. As I was not an original member of the guild, but have been a long standing core member, I feel that I had to keep the guild surviving, and if that meant recruiting more people, than so be it.

But to get back on track, it is apparent that a drastic change in Alliance Battling and Faction Farming can really change the outlook of a guild, wouldn't you say?

Off Topic: Is there an area where we can recruit on this forum? I searched and could not find the desired topic/forum.

The other thing is that you'll never make everyone happy. From the OP's post: what works to teach one person might really annoy another. I could cite endless examples from game life and real life. Personalities clash. Communication styles differ. And sometimes people just suck and there's nothing you can do about that.

Best way to deal with it is not to let it discourage you. If someone leaves, it's not a big deal. If 10 people leave, then worry that you're really doing something wrong. Eventually, you'll get the right kind of people (mostly) with some persistance. Another thing that might help is to define yourself from the start. Are you PvP, GvG, PvE, Luxon or Kurzick, ect. Set good expectations up front.

I once saw a card that said, "Why is life so complicated?" When you open it, it says, "Oh yeah, there's people involved".

Before I start on my story, let's clear a few things. I don't remotely care for GvG, rank, fame, faction, whatever - I'm a PvE dude; I'm a gay male; I'm too nice for my own good.

I had people rage quitting, leaving guilds and whatever because of the simple fact I'm gay. To those who wonder why the heck I tell that stuff, people talk about their relationships/mention that they have girlfriends and such, like "Oh brb g/f got home"... So I can't because I'm with another guy? GG. And yes, it happened in my guilds. I think I had a death threat once O_o;;... well see the kind of drama this generates. Thankfully, my guild's okay with that .

Second part, and the longest and probably the most important in my case is the interests conflict (okay, not sure I put it in the right words). As I said before, I don't care for rank, GvG and whatever else. As long as people are happy, good enough. The problem is when people are NEVER happy.

I was in this guild, where I had an officer recruit more members. The guy invited GvG players because he wanted a high rank. He started GvG and sometimes I'd tag along when they missed one player. When I'd join, they were about sure to lose because I don't play GvG because I don't even CARE for it; result is that our rank would go down. They were unhappy because the rank was down because I suck at GvG, and tension between the members would rise. Then I did what every sane person would: leave. I couldn't stand the drama about rank anymore. (I don't know why, but keeping being told I'd suck all the time kinda made me want to drop the game, which I did, only to take it back after 3 months).

In my current guild, we don't have too much drama. And what we have, we usually solve it quickly enough. Given the guild's been running for over a year and the players have known each other for a long time, we don't have too much problems with the "core", most active guildies. No rank req, no faction farm; those remain personal - and people understand this. Maturity and understanding FTW.

It's too bad that you were discriminated against based on sexual orientation. It will be a very long time before that goes away. Hell, even racism still runs rampant and people have been campaigning against that for a long time. It is getting better for gays though. They can get married in alot of places now, and the Gay Pride Parade is one of Toronto's largest outdoor events each year.

Back on topic, I don't really have any soap-opera drama stories. The first guild I ever joined about 13 months ago is the same guild I am in now. In the beginning it was 5 guys including me. We just messed around in PvE and had a great time of it. Later, we merged with another guild which doubled our member count. We tried to get into PvP sometimes but we found out that we all sucked pretty bad. Many people started to go inactive. Just a couple months ago the leader and co-founder started playing WoW, and I was designated as the new leader. I am largely sticking to the same principles that the guild was founded on. Some would say that we are near death as a guild because we are so small, but I think we do ok.

Luckily we have next to none guild drama. I am in the first guild I ever joined (helps that it was started by RL friends). Yes, people do leave because their interests in the game change, but we are blessedly free of drama.

Guild drama (or the lack of it) comes down to personality and whether members have a common idea of what the guild is about. On personality: If you find jerks, give them a warning or kick them.

On common idea of what the guild is about - same advice as Elinora, explain truthfully what you are about and what to expect. @Novalon: The danger is when guilds change what they usually do, a lot of people will leave. It's natural because people joined because they found a fit with the guild. If it doesn't fit anymore, they will leave. My guild decided soon after we started expanding, that we will not be everything to everyone, but stay focused with what we're good at, which is PvE. When we play PvP the goal is fun or variety versus rank or what not.

I know of guild splits because of drama. And stories of many alliances. But they have a good core so they were able to put the trouble behind them and came out better. With some persistence you will rebuild your guild too.

As my offering to this thread I give you this, which I consider to be recommended reading for all guild leaders and officers:

http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/arch...516.php?page=1

If you're not familiar with "The Daedalus Project" it's very interesting to read all of the articles and studies, although there are a lot of them. (NOTE: I wouldn't read everything unless you have a rather sizeable interest in Sociology, Psychology, and Demographics. Personally I have found Mr. Yee's articles and studies to be very interesting, as well as beneficial to my own studies and writings.)

FYI: Nick Yee is a grad student at Stanford studying online games and immersive virtual reality.