The science of /gquitting
by Mike Schramm 
Sep 8th 2006 at 8:58PM
So I just joined a great guild two weeks ago (as my warrior is getting ready to start raiding), and today I saw a sight many of you have probably seen before: the guild's first officer has apparently been having problems with a few people whose "names he won't mention," and posted a fairly polite /gquit message on the guild's message boards. So I did what most people in that situation would do: I grabbed the popcorn. I doubt this guild will break up (it's got a fairly solid background and lots of members), but if it does, it'll be a sight to see.And then I notice that Relmstein has today posted a nice article about this very subject. He says there's two reasons guilds break up: Either the guild leader decides to quit and take everybody down with him (or her), or guild drama creates a big enough rift in the membership that eventually everyone wants out.
In the first scenario ("death by self destruct"), there's one leader who's convinced there's nothing that should happen in the guild without their say. Weird decisions are made, and ideas or help are refused by the leader. Eventually they decide it's all over, and a few /gkicks later, it's all over but the crying.
In the second ("death by divide"), one or two members of the guild gets angry about something that happens, and starts fracturing the guild apart (usually by gaining power and then abusing it in the eyes of the leader). This one is much more fun-- there's usually a few spirited in-game conversations, a few long rants on the message boards, and eventually everyone /gquits away, as Relm says, "quietly in the early morning."
Is there any way to stop it? Relmstein doesn't give any answers to that one, and in my experience it's completely true that most disbands fall along one or both of these lines. But maybe that isn't so bad-- a guild isn't really a family or a job, even though it has qualities of both. It's just a voluntary grouping of people with the same interests in game. One guild breaks up, another comes along. And either way, it's always fun to watch.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Virtual selves, Guilds, Blizzard
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Dyyne Sep 9th 2006 10:01AM
Guild Drama LOL
I honestly dont understand why big guilds like that do that. I personally manage a nice medium sized guild (20+ level 60's and 40 or so lower levels) and really, rarely have problems. Ya, we've been around for, oh...almost 1.5 yrs now. The real strategy to keeping a guild together I guess is treating everyone in the guild like an equal. If anyone tries to start drama, "LOL /gkick". And, in the situation when people DO leave for endgame guilds, they always leave on friendly terms and almost always come back after a month or so. "End-game guilds come and go, but Channel 2 News Team is forever".
Guild Drama is just a fancy way of getting attention
Cappy Sep 9th 2006 9:57PM
One another WOW realm I was a top officer of a guild where one of my best RL friends was the GL. We are in our mid thirties, and have been playing online together since the days of Earth and Beyond Beta. It was quite a nice guild and I was the first to 60 by two or three months. I patiently waited for the others to get to 60 running BRD and such with them over and over and over as new groups of players began to near 60 running pugs of UBRS and Such when no one needed me. But every time someone did turn 60 they's leave a few weeks later because we didn't have enough 60's yet to do UBRS or any of the other raids.
Then one night I got kicked from a group because someone from my guild had run with them the night before. He was a new sixty that I had run everythign from ST to BRD a hundred times to get to sixty. He drove me nuts anyhow. He had ninja'd a Blue then ran around the room agroing eveything, then fiegned death wiping the party while he logged off.
I layed into him in guild chat, and LOL just as you said wrote a long diatribe on the web site expalining to everyone what it meant to be a member of our guild. It totally wreaked the guild, and the core members switched to other servers because of the resulting fracas.
Now I am the guild leader and we find ourself struggling along with only a handful of sixties, many of whom are leaving for end game guilds. But those of us who form the core of this group remain stead fast about the principles of friendship and comradere over blues and purples. Its just so hard to find others that want to take part in that type of guild and are willing to wait until you find 20 or 40 really good people to fill your roster.