Top EU guild Nihilum is recruiting a few serious Horde raiders on Magtheridon (EU). And not that I play on the EU side of things, but if I did, I wouldn't be welcome to apply. Why? According to GM Kungen, there are a lot of reasons they don't recruit females, but the one he highlights is the need for recruits to have a "high 'abuse tolerance.'" And a bit later in the thread, poster Awake adds that female applicants are avoided because of drama. And while I know there are immature girl gamers who can bring plenty of drama to a guild, I know equally immature guys who can be just as bad. So to me, personally, it makes better sense to simply not recruit idiots of either sex.

However, in discussion over at wow_ladies, zeolla points out that a girl in the middle of a group of boys can sometimes cause problems without doing anything:

Insert a girl and Guy A and Guy B have a crush on her. They end up bickering, which annoys the other guys who may like her and so forth. A girl gamer can just be in the middle of a conflict like this without doing ANYTHING. Usually in this situation if she says she's not interested, she becomes a 'slut' and lots of fighting occurs.

So perhaps for a group so completely focused on a single goal (end-game raid success) having uniform member base just makes it easier for everyone to get along with as little fuss as possible -- and focus completely on the guild's purpose of bleeding-edge PvE domination.

Update: There's been a lot of interesting commentary on this post, some of which I'd like to highlight here.

Zuuler: "Throw them [girls] into a social environment with a bunch of geeky boys who would normally be afraid to talk to a girl directly and you have problems erupting. I think the same could be said if a predominantly female guild had a few males in it, the exact same problem would occur." I'd like to hear about any all-female guilds out there...!

Deathlike: "It's not a misogynistic ideal for Nihilum to be a guys-only guild; in fact, it's exactly like most sports: there's women's hockey and men's hockey." In line with Zuuler's comments, this may be accurate. Just that the all-female guilds in the game aren't as obvious -- because they aren't competing in content on the level of Nihilum.

Duromiir: "...if the GM has trouble with immature players on this level, I'm not sure why he hasn't /gkicked the worst of them to set an example and kept on only the good players who are also good people. I *can't* imagine that they have any shortage of applicants." This is an excellent point, though with a guild specifically trying to achieve world firsts, I wonder if there's time to deal with any level of potential "drama" and remain competitive with the other major guilds. Time is crucial when trying to score "firsts" and an evening of raiding lost because a key player /gquit could be the difference between making headlines and getting an unnoticed "world second."

Tags: eu, guild, guilds, nihlium, warcraft, world of warcraft, WorldOfWarcraft, wow, wow europe, WowEurope

Filed under: Virtual selves, Guilds, Raiding