MMO Gaming

I missed the story of the week the past two weeks I believe (maybe it was more than that, I seem to have a problem keeping up with things given how busy I am at the moment. But, at any rate, the “weekly” article is back. Today I would like to illustrate an example of a bad guild, with bad guild leadership.

This story comes from my early days in playing World of Warcraft, way back when I started and was playing on the Hyjal server. At this point in the game I joined the same guild my brother was in (who had gotten in because of a friend he had that was in the guild). The guild was, at the time, the largest on the server housing somewhere close to 400 players (it may have even been more). This guild happened to be a sort of do whatever guild, there was no real, proper structure or focus for the guild (i.e. it wasn’t a “raiding” guild and it wasn’t a “family” guild, it just was).

At this point it is important to mention that generally I wasn’t well known within the guild, I didn’t do a lot of talking or grouping with other players, or asking for help for that matter mainly because a lot of the people in the guild were a higher level than I was at the time (this didn’t particularly bother me though). I did, though, agree to host the guild forums for them because I had a bit of experience using phpBB and messing around with web development in general. So, I set up a guild forum off my personal website and hosting plan and didn’t think anything of it. I didn’t ask for anything in return I just put it up to help the guild out.

Now, the leader of this guild, who will remain nameless, had a bit of a problem. There were several (somewhere between 5-10) officers in the guild aside from him as the guild leader. A lot of people were now starting to hit max level or getting to the higher levels with their characters and were starting to leave the guild for those that had more of a focus on what they wanted to do (for many this meant going to guilds that were doing raid content). The guild leader would constantly complain about how much work it was being a guild leader and how he really didn’t have time to do it with his full-time job and family, etc. I mean literally all the time. I wasn’t really to fond of this because, even at the lower level that I was at, it really didn’t do much to help my morale or belief in the guild and I was not the only one.

So, thinking that I would be helpful, I sent a private message to the guild leader saying that if he didn’t have the time to dedicate to the guild perhaps he could promote an officer to be the guild leader and he could step down for a bit to just being an officer. I felt this was a fairly reasonable suggestion, and it was sent to him innocently enough, I even offered to help out in any ways that may be needed to make the guild run better. Well, as it turns out, I was wrong. I got a reply that seemed completely off the wall to me, filled with cursing and his telling me how he was a supervisor at his workplace and he knew how to motivate people, etc. I responded back basically saying he could do as he wished and I was only making a suggestion, and that, to not cause trouble, I would just leave, as at this point other people had found out about my private message (via officers who then spread it everywhere) and let things return to normal (at this point I had no desire to be in a guild with someone who was an idiot anyway). So I went ahead and quit, as did my brother, and we thought everything was fine. I even left the website/forums up for them to use as long as they wanted as I really didn’t care that they were able to use it, I left without really feeling any particular hatred toward the guild master or the guild.

They mentioned, a short time later that they would be moving to a new website/forums (one of the other officers had set things up from my understanding). They didn’t want to lose posts so I e-mailed a database backup to the guild leader and didn’t really think anything of it. After they had things set up I disabled the board on my web host (I didn’t delete anything at this point, just disabled because messing around with things wasn’t a high priority for me).

A few weeks went by and nothing really happened. Then, I signed up for an account at a forum and was going to put up an introduction post (in the forum they had specified for it). I remembered I had written a decent introduction post at the guild’s forum and, given I hate introduction posts in general, I opened the forum back up and copied/pasted my into to this new forum. I forgot though to disable the old guild message board again because it really wasn’t a priority. Of course, a few days later the guild that I had left had their message board hacked (because they had not updated to a new version of the software that had come out) and, noticing that the old board that I had put up was now no longer disabled accused me of hacking their site to get back at them.

Up to this point nothing had really phased me, I had gotten a bit annoyed before when I had received the rude response but overall I didn’t really care. This accusation changed that though. It really struck me the wrong way because it went against what I did at places like phpBBHacks.com where I was on the Support Team helping people fix their forums. This idiot had gone and accused me of caring so much about the fact that I had willingly left his guild that I would then go and hack it to get back at him. My first reaction was to tell this guy exactly where he could go shove his delusions of grandeur, but I didn’t. Instead I did what I would do with any other person who had a problem with phpBB, I offered to help him fix things, and try to get a backup, etc. He refused, and decided to put his conversation with me on their site so that everyone could see how much of a jerk I was.

Happily it had the opposite effect. Within the month about 75% of the long-time members had left and the guild basically fell apart because they saw what an imbecile their leader was. I’d love to say that I was a better person and this didn’t mean anything to me, or that I was even sad about it, but I’ll be perfectly honest I was ecstatic that the guild leader got exactly what he deserved.

So that’s my crappy guild leadership story, anyone have one of their own?

guild leaders, World of Warcraft, Blizzard entertainment, message boards, hacking, Story of the Week