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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsBreakfast Topic: Does your guild's social reputation matter?
by Deb Montague 
Sep 4th 2010 at 8:00AM
If you've been on the internet in any capacity for a few years, you are familiar with the Penny Arcade theory (NSFW language). I've just come through a couple weeks of this with my guild. It resulted in one person's being kicked and another leaving. Briefly, the kicked person tried to sell tracking the Time-Lost Proto Drake for 5k gold. A person on the server paid 2,500g up front and was led on a wild goose chase, after which the ex-guild member phased, hearthed and put the "pigeon" on ignore. When an officer and I confronted the perpetrator, the lies grew ever more convoluted. I kicked him and repaid, from guild funds, the money stolen. The person who quit behaved in a manner that wasn't appropriate. I called him out on it.
These incidents have me thinking: Does it matter how you behave in a fake world? Realistically, I'm probably never going to meet 95 percent of the people on my server. In our guild Code of Conduct, I state right at the beginning, "We do not tolerate malicious, hurtful behavior or speech in guild chat, party chat, WoW chat or on Vent. This is grounds for dismissal. Honor and respect each other and other guilds. When you join this guild, you represent us wherever you go. Respect others as you expect to be respected. Your integrity and actions directly reflect onto this guild. Inappropriate conduct with other guild members and the Llane community at large is not permitted and is grounds for dismissal."
I am adamant about this. I feel that if you want to be treated with respect, taken seriously, invited to raids and not called out on the server forum, you must respect others. I've worked very hard to create a guild that is respected. When people think about us, they know we're here for the fun of the game. We don't take ourselves seriously, and we treat you fairly and with respect. Am I way off base here? Again, does it matter? How do you think your server views you and your guild? Do you care?
Filed under: Breakfast Topics, Guest Posts
Reader Comments (Page 2 of 7)
Eisengel Sep 5th 2010 5:53AM
I this gets a little closer to it. Besides the question of whether it matters or not, if it's your guild, it's your guild. If you make a rule that everyone has to speak in rhyme or be /gkicked, then that's the rule. If the rule is "don't be an asshat", then that's the rule. If your rule is, "We do not tolerate malicious, hurtful behavior or speech...", then yes, screwing another player out of 2,500 gold is grounds for a /gkick.
Sel Sep 4th 2010 8:39AM
I absolutely care how my guild and my characters are viewed by the server. My guild often has to pug a few people to fill out our 10 man group, and if we should start to alienate people by behaving badly, I worry that eventually no one will ever want to join. I'm pretty quiet myself, but if I see someone from the guild having it out in trade chat or something, I tend to act as the mother hen of the group and say something in guild chat or a whisper to get them to stop fighting with people in a game.
I know these people are strangers and it shouldn't matter what they think, but on a small server, everyone tends to know everyone else's business, so I would at least like our guild to be respected enough to avoid any kind of trouble.
MusedMoose Sep 4th 2010 8:40AM
I don't know that the guild I'm in has a reputation on our server - I've never seen it mentioned, for good or for evil. But I know it's made up of good people, and that's what matters most.
And your guild's code of conduct sounds similar to the rules of our guild. One (out of four) of the rules is to remember that you represent the guild, so behave accordingly. It's something I remember when doing random PUGs and stuff like that - I've got that guild name over my head, and I don't want anyone to think that people in my guild are jerks because of something I did or said.
Shoikler Sep 4th 2010 8:43AM
My guild is a casual social guild, but it still has an expectation of maturity. The officers don't /gkick lightly, but people have been removed for being inappropriate in Trade Chat. Part of it is that is how it could reflect on the guild, and part is that we simply don't want to subject ourselves to that kind of behavior.
PandaMarius Sep 4th 2010 8:47AM
No. It doesn't matter.
I am not saying I agree with the behaviour, and personally I have never engaged in malicious acts toward other players, but in the end, it doesn't matter. People don't play the game to be nice to others, and I believe 90% of people who divulge in malicious acts/racism/homophobia etc etc will NEVER behave in public how they behave in game.
Its the same reason the RealID thing was canned;
They want their anonymity so they can shake the responsibility.
Gendou Sep 4th 2010 8:53AM
Just because they act like bigots and engage in griefing doesn't make it right or acceptable.
Anonymity has a lot of benefits beyond an excuse for acting the fool.
uncaringbear Sep 4th 2010 8:58AM
To modify an old saying, it's how you behave when there's little to no threat of consequence that is a true indicator of your personality.
PandaMarius Sep 4th 2010 8:59AM
Again, I am not in any way condoning or agreeing with the aforementioned behaviour.
Anonymity seems to lend itself to bigotry and ass-hattery more than say... a good Samaritan.
arcaneterror Sep 4th 2010 9:50AM
I'm wary of people with "Panda" in their name, because on Durotan Alliance, the guild "Panda Inc" - many of whose members have "Panda" in their names - is well known for being full of ninjas and douchebags. Hmm...
On a less insulting and more relevant note, my guild is one where being that much of a jerk is an unwritten rule. We joke around, pretend to ignore high rollers, sling friendly insults at one another, but at the end of the day, we're all friends and everyone gets what they want.
Maribel Sep 4th 2010 2:46PM
"I believe 90% of people who divulge in malicious acts/racism/homophobia etc etc will NEVER behave in public how they behave in game."
That doesn't matter. There are real people in the game who are hurt and offended by the malicious behavior and bigotry. Just because they wouldn't use slurs to someone's face in real life doesn't mean that the slurs they use in game are harmless. Do you really think everyone playing this game is a straight white guy? That's one of my biggest gripes about the G.I.F.T. strip - I don't prefer to believe that "normal people" will act that way given a chance. It's not "normal" to start spewing hatred the minute you face no consequences.
nh4416 Sep 4th 2010 6:19PM
Great point...shouldnt be voted down
PandaMarius Sep 5th 2010 12:06AM
I'm not even going to start on asking why I was voted down, or why my nickname is Panda IRL, because the people who have voted me down don't agree with me or are ignorant.
You say that people still get hurt by other people acting like ass-hats in game, and you try and refute my points, yet Blizzard has given you many ways to play the game your way, and if someone is being an ass-hat in trade, the game has a built in functionality to let you ignore that person and never see their comments again, hence it doesn't matter.
If you are one of those people who cry incessantly about how other people are playing the game, then you are there for the wrong reasons. The means to exclude those people from your playtime is there, if you don't utilize them, then you can't be on here saying that it matters and that you get offended, because in all seriousness, if you get THAT worked up about what some douche is saying on WoW, and you don't put him on ignore immediately, there is something wrong, and its not the "Social expectations, respect for others and caring about your reputation" part of this column.
Sequoia Sep 4th 2010 8:50AM
The guild I run is a small (around 40 members), social levelling guild but I don't see it as being much different from a large guild focussed on progression. We don't tolerate jerks and our members feel a responsibility to represent our group positively. We might be a tiny percentage of our server but players always remember the guilds of asshats and that's not what we'd like to be known for.
dagimp Sep 4th 2010 8:53AM
Personaly i do not think Guild repuataion matters. On the kirin Tor server the guild i am in is hated both both Horde and those alliance baddies. We are hated becasue we go against the norm and raid in the morning. We are also hated because we have on of the dervers most well known trolls. (Love fro). But we noticed with all the hate we get we still get a lot of applicants and people wanting to join our guild. We are a little disconnected from our server sicne we are very self sufficent. If you want to see how much hate we get stop by the kirin tor forums and look around. Guranteed you will find a disbanded hate thread. The funny thing about this hate we get is we are friendly people, and joke around in guild and vent. we go along with tade chat. And yes when we start to get flamed we will add fuel to the fire to get kicks. But we have never went out of our way to piss some one of or hurt them. Like i said we still get a lot of apps of people wanting to come over from our server and other servers, so really guild repuation means nothing.
Gendou Sep 4th 2010 9:02AM
I have never understood this mindset. I have seen it frequently in larger raiding guilds who feel that their size allow them to get away with activities (trolling, griefing, even ninjaing) that smaller guilds might think twice about. They feel that because they don't need others from the guild to support their chosen playstyle that they don't need to act with respect toward anyone who isn't in their clique.
The interesting thing, though, is that these guilds invariably collapse due to their own policies. By allowing people to treat others outside the guild with disrespect, they create an atmosphere of hostility that will bleed into the guild's internal dealings. Once that happens, the guild will often split apart. Sometimes the GM or another officer will ninja the guild bank and transfer servers to join another, more progressed raiding guild. Or a group of the best players in the guild will decide they want to call the shots and break off into their own guild.
And once the guild fractures, all of the fragments find themselves scrambling for new players and often unable to find enough applicants quickly enough to sustain their playstyle. When that happens, the one thing that kept people applying to the guild is gone (whether PVE progression or PVP ranking) and new applications to the various fragments of the old guild go from a slow stream to small trickle to nonexistent altogether. Without their reputation for PVE or PVP achievements, the guild(s) can't survive.
I've seen it happen time and time again.
The guilds that survive in the long term, whether big or small, hardcore or casual, are the ones that have a consistent reputation for fair and respectful treatment of all players.
Or at least so goes my own anecdotal evidence on PVE and RP servers.
Your mileage, of course, may vary.
Kurash Sep 4th 2010 11:54AM
Very well said, Gendou. For what it's worth, that has been my own experience too, so you now have two people's worth of anecdotal evidence. :)
FlyingMonkeyEmu Sep 4th 2010 8:56AM
Hahaha, care about what other people on my server think about my guild? A "Code of Conduct?" Maybe it's just because Demon Soul-US is just so awful, but I couldn't possibly care less than I do about my guild's rep. It could just be the server, but I pretty much hate 90% of the people I encounter in WoW outside of my guild, and end up despising about 60% of the people that get recruited into the guild.
The majority of people on any given WoW server exist purely to A) ninja loot from you, B) fill up slots in pugs, and C) spam nonsense in trade chat. You don't have to worry about what these people think about you, because most of them are horrible, horrible excuses for human beings.
And the fact that you seem to worry about how your guild looks before you consider whether or not a player's behavior is ethically justifiable suggests to me that you fall into the 90% of players that I only trust when I have power over.
uncaringbear Sep 4th 2010 9:00AM
Wow, you need a hug. And you should probably consider playing a game where other players don't aggravate you so much.
Sequoia Sep 4th 2010 9:02AM
@FlyingMonkeyEmu
If my server was that bad, I think I'd transfer. D:
crschmidt Sep 4th 2010 9:07AM
I expect that the attitude you have taken towards the game has more to do with you than it does with anyone else in the game.