f13.net

After an ever-so-fun weekend of bullshit, the wife and I quit the guild we were in.  If anyone cares, I'll rehash the story and details but that's not the point here.

 We're an Alliance Hunter/ Druid duo on Alleria (PvE) with BWL & early AQ40-experience and we're looking for a guild that raids weekends  in the evenings. (Fri & Sat mainly, if Sunday it needs to end around 11pm EST.)   Both of us were former officers and channel leads so we know oure classes, but really aren't looking for leadership positions again right now.    Anyone here a member of such a guild that could use us, or able to point us in the direction of one that could?  We're willing to transfer, seeing as our old EQ friends have abandoned us to play with their RL friends & co-workers.

Hell, we'd even reroll Horde, probably.  Tho the slog from 1-70 is daunting at this point to say the least, and she's not interested in playing on a PvP server.

Whisperwind Alliance here.  I'm in a guild that is probably too casual for your tastes.  We've always been too small for anything above 20-man.  The desire has been there, just not the numbers.  However, if you wouldn't mind slowing down a bit and since the expansion really did that to everyone anyway, let me know if you're interested.  The people are great and there hasn't been any drama.....yet.  There are still plenty of core players that are willing to cat-ass with the best of them.  We have a couple lvl 70's already.  :wink:

We have several family teams in the guild too.  One family consists of a mother, father, and two daughters.  Many times, they all play together at the same time.

The next problem would be transferring to an older server.  I'm not sure they would allow it right now.  Our queues have gone away since they offered free transfers, but we are still considered near capacity.

My guild on Proudmoore would be no good for you, but I'd like to hear the story.

Drama is good. Plz provide a ventrilo mp3 a la Getcha.

Shield of Azeroth is a pretty good guild on that server. They are a bunch of Mac guys that came over from EQ for the Mac and play all hours of the day. I woulda joined their guild when they started, but they chose Alliance and I chose Horde.

My girlfriend has a character in their guild and they have something like over 200 people in the guild. Good luck!

Well, my guild is Horde, on a PVP server (The PVP Server?) and the only weekend night we raid is Sunday. So I guess we are not a good fit.

Oh yeah, GIVE US DRAMA DETAILS!!!

Was Alleria one of the servers that was (is?)  offering free transfers to Farstriders.  I moved there recently from Kirin Tor for free, and I love it.  There's a couple guilds you could get into that would likely meet your raiding needs.

I don't have a guild, either, but then my BE has been level 6 since the day the expansion came out.  I just wanted to put in my vote for the dirt on your old guild.   :-)

Well thanks all for the direction.   Dren's guild sounds kinda fun, as we're not Uber or anything, we just enjoy raiding. It's something to think on.  We'd been members of SoA back at release, but found it a bit cliquish. (One of our EQ friends was connected to one of the founding members.) 

Since y'all asked, here's the 'dirt.'

My old guild was an amalgam of 2 guilds that got together to do MC, and found they worked well.  I'd been in the initial guild for about 7 months prior to us deciding to merge, and had wound-up an officer in that time frame.  Good guys all-around and really decent players who - for the most part - weren't prone to the usual lootwhoring a bullshit.  We were focused on moving into the endgame and when I joined they were just beginning to run everyone through UBRS/ Scholo/ Strath.   

The other guild was a "family" guild run by a guy and his wife, with a core interested in moving on to other stuff.  This created some friction there, and at the merge most of his officers quit, because while the majority of us were ok with having folks around who just wanted to hangout, his officers wanted to be 'uber' and didn't see a point in keeping around those folks who "weren't any use." 

So we merged, and my Gl and the other Gl took on co-leadership and most of us who were officers maintained positions and we began to take-out MC.   We moved through MC and had it on 'farm' pretty quickly, and during that time my wife became the Druid officer, and ran the healer channel.  That meant assigning buffs, determining who heals what tank, etc.

   Well, this pissed off one of the other healers, who seemed to think she was better suited, and there was some small drama there in the usual petty bitchy way women can be to each other.  The officers at the time agreed there was no way we wanted this priest being in charge, as she was pretty abysmal, and I recall it being mentioned that the only reason she was around/ drafted was that she was a dwarf.

Well, something changed about the guild after about 4-5 months.  My old Gl really started to become focused on loot as well as pushing through to BWL 'and beyond' and wanted to do it ASAP.

Officer meetings began to become "well what does person "x" do for us."   People began to get booted without notice because the Gls thought they were useless.  We started recruiting any random person, just so we could always have 40 people in a raid.  If, for example, we only had 3 rogues sign-up because the other 5 had real-life stuff to take care of, they'd go to Ironforge, pickup some idiot and guild him to fill out the raid that one week.

At some point along the way between March and September we got several players who didn't work well  with my old guildies.  They didn't like the guild rules, they didn't like the officers, but they did like the loot and they knew who and how to buddy up to people.   They got-in good with the other GL's wife, and proceeded to skirt the line, and often crossed it.  At first it was only 2 or 3 folks, but they began bringing-in friends and family until they were a decent chunk of the guild.

Inevitably with such haphazard recruiting cliques began to form.  The GLs happily ignored this, as they didn't read guildchat, and only hung-out in the officer's passworded-room in vent.  Nobody could talk to them without sending tells, and no leadership was being given to blend the group together.

Several times I, and other officers had expressed to the GLs that we weren't happy with certain behaviors.  Lootwhoring, excessive cussing in /guildchat, general disrespect, taunting, breaking guild rules, causing problems in the venttrillo server.  The response was usually, "Oh I don't pay attention to guildchat" or "well I wasn't in the guild channel, so I don't know, I'll talk to him and hear his side of things." 

  Later the response began to become, "well just turn off the channel or ignore them, that's what I do!"   :-o  Asking  why the hell they thought ignoring the guild was the best way to run the guild got nowhere.   I began to get pretty damn frustrated.  The truth of it was, they were so focused on doing the endgame stuff they didn't give a damn about anything else.  So long as the raid was filled, nothing else mattered, not behavior, not respect, nothing.   They knew if they clamped-down or booted-out the problem members, there'd be no way to field a full raid because the entirety of the clique would quit and they were scared of that fact.

Well, this past weekend was the end of it.  On Friday several of these guys had been going at each other and other folks with, "That's Gay."  and "You're gay" and dropping curses every 3rd sentence.  That kind of stuff has always bothered my wife, so she asked them to stop it.  They persisted, so she asked again, this time indicating that if she had to she'd squelch their ability to talk in the channel, as it was against the guild rules.

Well two of these asshats were having none of that.  How dare she tell them what do do, so they come up with the brilliant, "So what, I guess you're gay since it bothers you so much."  Her response was, "None of your business if I am or not, I asked you to stop so please stop."  The reply was, "Ha, yep looks like you're gay."  *plink* she squelched them, and of course guild drama explodes.

 "Hey he was just expressing his opinion" "You don't have the right to do that!"  "That's lame, I guess we can't say 'gay' in guild chat anymore."   Two of the other officers on at the time backed her up, saying they agreed and they'd have done it themselves.  This drove the two squelched idiots to /gquit.  This started even more complaining from the rest of their clique, and at some point I told the most vocal complainant that if he didn't like the rules of the guild, he didn't have to say.  "If you don't like it, you're free to quit" I think were my exact words. Well this caused two other people, one of whom was the husband of the aforementioned priest who had a chip on her shoulder. 

Well this got the Gls to actually pull their heads out of the holes in the ground they were living in.  The raids were in danger!  4 members (two tanks and 2 mages) had just quit, and I can only assume other folks were sending them tells complaining about the audacity of the 4 of us who were daring to enforce some kind of order.

Upon seeing that she'd squelched the first who who'd quit, my old GL begins yelling. "You cant just go squelching people.  You have to run all that stuff by Thorhamer and I first."  I was already angry about the asshats getting on my wife like that, but to then have the Gl essentially back them up made me see red. 

My response was along the lines of, "That's crap and you know it.  If it was your wife or thor's wife you'd have booted them yourself. Don't' sit there and tell me that my wife has to put up with this bullshit when you're not going to fucking lead the guild and your entire solution to all problems is 'just put them on ignore.'  Ignoring people doesn't fix problems it lets them fester and if you're not going to let the officers fucking lead then just do away with us.  I'm tired of this crap from you so you can find another fucking hunter and druid to go to BWL with tonight."

  The wife and I then /quit out of the game and went to take an evening to cool off and spend some time together.  I knew it wasn't over, and I'd probably pissed them off but y'know, i didn't really give a shit at that moment.

Well I was right about it not being over, the next day while she and I were leveling, I got a whisper from the other Gl asking us to come onto the vent server to talk.   Now right before this, someone had sent a screenfull of tells to my wife from a L1 character calling her a "Whoremonger".  She was upset and crying about it, and now I'm pissed as well.

Talking to the Gls, they asked how my day was, and I said lousy and when asked why said, "If some asshole called your wife a whore you'd probably be pretty pissed too."  No response, awkward silence, and then they moved in to,  "well we wanted to talk about yesterday."  At first it started out pretty softball, with "well in a guild this size you're going to have a lot of personalities" and other such mollifying stuff.

 As I listened, something about their tone bothered me but I couldn't figure out what it was.  I realized exactly what it was, when they told my wife that some people didn't like her approach to things, neither in the healer channel nor in the way she handled officership and that she should back off a bit. 

"You're just really blunt and we don't think people can handle your approach to things."   In essence they were saying, "Stop being a bitch"  That pissed me off even more, and I pretty much stopped listening to them at that point.  These guys had done the math and decided that my wife and I were the problem because we were two and they were 4(who had quit) and about 8 others who might quit if we weren't "reigned in."  These other folks weren't the problem, nor their own lack of concern about running a guild or addressing these issues prior to them being a problem.  Nope, just the two of us.

So then they turned to me, and said, "and I don't ever want to hear that 'if you don't like the rules then leave' line ever again.  That position stops here, we're not going to take that attitude any further.. "  At that point I cut him off.  I don't recall my exact line, but it was something along, "Well you can go fuck yourself then, because I'm done with this bullshit."  Then I dropped out of Vent and /gquit.

So then they turned back on my wife and began to try to talk her out of quitting too.  Healers being the rare commodity that they are, and competent ones even rarer I think they were having an "oh shit" moment.  I don't know exactly what they said, but I kept telling her to stop listening to their crap and just quit already.

  What finally did it for her was when they said they didn't want her to quit, but I was useless anyway and never did anything for the guild so I wasn't a big loss (Nevermind I'm the one that ran the DKP site because I'm one of two people who understood it, the other only being on rarely as he's a grad student working on his thesis.)  She pointed out that I was always there to give advice on bettering specs, raid strats, do instance runs and give equipment advice, and that they should know better.

   She logged out, and tried to calm me down until I pointed out they were manipulating her, trying not to lose a healer, and really didn't give a crap about her, personally, only the use she could be to them.  After all, if they did give a damn, why were they saying one one side she wasn't right to get upset, but on the other that they understood her position and wanted her to stick around because "nobody else can do the job you do."   She saw my point, logged back in and quit as well.

Now, I probably overreacted a bit and could have handled that vent conversation better.  I may, in fact, be completely  in the wrong on the early position and in my belief that those asshats needed to be squelched. However, I certainly don't feel that way after the I'll definitely be damned if I'll let anyone treat my wife like such shit, and then have them try to discredit me to her behind my back.  So, as I said before, fuck them.

Sorry it's so long, and probably overly melodramatic. No, I don't record things in vent or /chatlog so there's no juicy tidbits for y'all to pour over.   But that's the story, and whee isn't it fun.

That sounds like my old guild. Almost exactly. Except I went back for about a week as a normal member and sniped the leaders I disagreed with in /g until the whole guild saw what I knew and the guild collapsed. Good times.

Wow. Sometimes it really is shocking to see how people with such a lack of leadership ability are able to get a guild together to do anything. I can't believe they were able to find their own asses let alone run a guild.

Christ, it's a fucking game.  You both should have quit that guild ages ago.  And the game as well.

 :roll: yeah sounds harsh...but I guess it's justified. Just let it go, I'd do the same shit if I were you. I never got along with the new guild merge I'm in last year, even though they were pals for life, I always seemed uneeded or just a clueless farmer cause I'm asian and I don't play in the same time zone. Which is why I don't have any regret quitting last year after falling asleep in a raid monday morning my time at 3 am and getting warned about 'not going to raid again if it happens 2nd time' I just said 'ummm l think I have better things to do' /gquit and cancelled my sub. The only reason why I'm replaying again it's because my friend in the guild re-subbed my account for free cause he needed the company to level his draenei  shammy and got 'frozen out of raids' cause of too much RL work to do.

And to be honest, class officer and high ranking managing stuff like that is one of those stuff I hate in my MMORPG. I like to have fun, not to be drilled around like in an army while mowing down a boss HP bar with 39 other people and being told 'Sorry pal, we don't need <your class here> now...' . :( No offense..I don't spam gchat with gays and stuff, but I just find 40 man raids structure a bit too restrictive and boring. It breaks down the casual friendship, I remember me and my buddies migrated from Lineage 2 (we pvp a lot ...but we hated the grind lol) and rolled nothing but hunters and rogues in a server on launch. The first 60 levels was great, I soloed till my eyes go red on my hunter and hit lvl 60 in less than a month. Then we hit a gear upgrade wall. And people start quitting left and right cause they didn't have the right class and the guild can't raid without a warrior or a healer. We had 1 Druid.Lawl and everything just sort fall apart. :( Pretty disappointing way to end a game really, but that's just how end game is for me.  :heartbreak:

I find the "Your husband is useless anyway" spiel pure gold. They know how to lead people, those guys.

Nah, you didn't overreact. You could have quit way sooner without it being an overreaction.

Great story. Funny thing is that shit happens to so many "casual" guildleaders and also regular people. Your wife seems to have gotten in a little deep, emotionally though. I see the same thing in my guild where people get upset and cry and all that bullshit when their friends leave the game or guild or server.

My solution, though it might seem a little sociopathic is simply this: Fuck everyone who you don't know in real life. Play the game to have fun with one another, be friendly to others and so forth, group with them, joke around, have fun, but don't care too much.

There's a big line between your friend Bob who you go golfing with now and then and your Warcraft-friendship with Leggolaz the Hunter who you've never met but is apparently some guy called Steve (or was it Stewart?) who works in Engineering or something in Pawtucket. They can be really ncie people, they may be really cool people, but when it comes down to it, except in rare cases, onlne MMOG friends are disposable, transient and ultimately not worth tears.

And yes, these guys sound like asses. Delete that DKP server on your way out.  :-P

The core of my guild are the four Scottish people I group with :

My Brother, my wife, a girl called Connie (who also has a new baby and therefore is similarly 'casual' ) and her husband, who both live in Glasgow.

Sure, there's a wealth of other people in the guild but they're 'less real'.  That's how it works.  It's really funny when the other guildies come onto the TS Server and can't understand a word we say.

You people and your silly chewed-up English.

I pretty much refuse to take anything in WoW seriously. I can certainly be annoyed at people but I'll be damned if I get really pissed off over a stupid game because of other players (now, going into a frothing rage over dying 300 times in Ninja Gaiden or something is different). Every time I start getting angry over anything in game I just think, "You know, you could just log out and cancel your account, transfer your toon, or roll on another server and it would all be over and done and you could have fun again." Thankfully my guildies know I don't do this internet drama bullshit, so much so that my description in the guild roster is "Takes the Internet Seriously."

Merusk, I think you two would do well in our guild.  None of that happens.  Of course, we don't run Blackwing either, but certainly would if the opportunity came up.  We do get into 20+ instances with the help of alliances with other guilds sometimes.  ZF and AQ20 are our biggest conquests.

Of course, now, we are busy dominating the 5-mans in Outland.  We can finish ramparts and the furnace within an hour each with no problem now.

I don't think your reaction was wrong.  I think your decision to quit was late, but that's why I don't belong to guilds like that.   :-D

If you decide to move to Whisperwind, let me know and I'll get you two in no problem.  I'll PM you the website for the guild too.

No, she didn't get too involved.   I've been in a guild where the leader was in some sort of on-going feud with the leaders of another guild, and I've seen some screenshots of chats and the spam that he was subjected to, constantly; constant, pages upon pages, of outright swearing and veiled and direct insults will take a heavy toll on anyone, and you can't really guess at how much until you experience it yourself.  It's really nasty. 

My last WoW guild's drama also happened when the guild changed from "casual" to "raid-capable", and was also slowly over time.  People started being focused on raiding and loot, the recruitment happened too fast, cliques formed, and one of them tried to take over leadership.  Well, they actually succeeded, but when they reformed without the old leader, they lost the website, the DKP site, a sizeable chunk of the  guild, and a few experienced raid leaders.  They didn't last long.

/echo


Sadly, it seems to me that as a casual guild moves into raiding, there is a honeymoon period where the old guard, who all know each other, respect each other, and work together well start to succeed and have fun in the endgame as it was meant to be.  Then, at some point, a combination of the leaders' natural greed and the native population of purple-chasing guild hoppers starting to invade creates a bad situation. At that point it takes a really uniquely gifted leader or set of leaders to resist the guild's eventual downfall.

Hopefully 25-man raids mitigate this somewhat by needing fewer warm bodies to fill out a raid.  Who knows how it will all turn out though.

It also takes knowledge about progress, and a feel for how fast the guild is moving ahead; go too slowly and your raid-focused people will rebel, go too fast and your casual players will burn out trying to attend as many raids as everyone else.  But, I guess, that's what separates good guild leaders from bad ones.

Problems happened with us at the transition from 20-man ZG to 40-man MC (guild ignored our previously-solid recruitment policies in order to get enough people in for 40-man), and also happened because once people got a taste of MC loot, the "need to raid" process inevitably moved forward and we had to progress to BWL etc. faster than some of us wanted to, else we'd lose some of the good raiders.

Wow.  That is some tasty guild drama.  At times I think it would have been interesting to blog the inside goings on when I was part of an "uber" guild.  You saw this type of stuff (although really for me, none this bad) sporadically from an officer or a certain clique, but our leadership was probably the most solid part of the guild.  I think I've posted some of the crap that went on with my guild here the past, but it all pales to that.

It's interesting to get a somewhat inside look the whole husband/wife dynamic as relates to of all things.. a game. 

Recently, I've found the perfect guild for me.  No raid aspirations. No requirements other than you don't be a douchebag. No, "you must have this spec" horsecrap.  Some scheduled events, but they don't care if you attend.  Helpful folks but also people that understand some people just like to do their own thing.  Heck, there's level 69 that has spent the last 2 days helping lowbies run instances; most people I know would be sprinting toward the end.  And there's people on when I play.  Casual and mature, I didn't think that type of guild existed expecially when every guild listed on the WoW boards in my server had "raid or end game" somewhere in the description (well, there was one or two other casual guilds listed, but one was REALLY small and the other had some serious douchebag issues).

I hope you find something you can enjoy with less of the drama.  There's a lot of raid guilds on my server (Shu'halo horde side) and MOST seem to be pretty decent folks. There's an Oceanic guild that seems to have a lot of vocal jerkoffs on the boards, but that's about it.

Biggest drama in our guild happened about 6 months back -- the guild had gotten pretty big, and the original group of 10 or so that formed it were missing the more tight-knit feel from the beginning. They also felt that people were complaining they were "cliqueish" (who the hell was complaining that, I don't know) because the five of them were generally off doing 5-mans together. I always found them to be ready to help when I needed a hand, but there's always an asshole somewhere.

So they turned over leadership and the guild bank, and formed a small guild of their own. We had some back-and-forth over leadership (someone was more or less handchosen by the outgoing leaders, and a few asshats felt that wasn't the proper way of doing it. Of course, everyone in the guild had the utmost respect for this guy and that's why he was chosen didn't seem to register. Nor did the "We had to hand it to someone, you can have a fucking election if you want for a permanent position, we just handed it to the guy that's going to win that anyways" seem to sink in.

Most of the guild ignored it. We still see them on raids, and basically very little's different except for guild tags. But we're a really laid back guild anyways -- except for about three people who are all about "appearance" and shit.

God I love WoW drama. Some people are such idiots. Good on you Merusk for leaving. It can be hard to leave a guild some times but I think you will be better off in the end. I wish you guys played Horde and liked PVP, would love to have members like you, although our guild chat might be a bit to "intense" for you guys. It can definitely get a little balmy in /g some times. Anyway, I wish you and the wife the best of luck in finding a guild that fits you guys.

Well Merusk sorry to hear about all that.  In my experience playing with you you always seemed like a level headed guy.  Of course your wife wasn't running around with us at that time  :-D but still I don't blame you for leaving (or defending your better half regardless of the circumstances).

I agree with IW.  There doesn't need to be that much emotional energy sunk into A GAME unless it's something like professional sports where it's your career, etc.  Sounds like you had a lot of unfun for something that is supposed to be an escape route to "fun".

I find it all sorta pitiful really.  I enjoy WoW, but I play almost exclusively alone.  The reason being that I just cannot stand having to wade through the shallow end of the gene pool just so I can get better items for my characters.  I admit I'm probably on the extreme end of the spectrum as far as my patience level for douchebaggery goes, but I deal with enough of that in RL.  Paying 15$ a month to voluntarily expose myself to it is absurd.

My guild is just the WoW reformation of the UO guild I first joined in 2004.  It's very casual, with peak concurrency in the low twenties and everyone just goofing off and bullshitting in Ventrilo as they level up.  The leader is like level 47.  We can stay a smallish guild doing random five-man instances forever, if it means avoiding bullshit.

We had this one level 60 priest join.  Oh my god, a high-level priest.  She came in all weird and defensive, telling us she was female IRL despite no one asking and asking if we could believe it.  When we told her we had several women in the guild already and that it wasn't odd at all, she started going on about how she deserved to be promoted in the first five minutes because she was level 60 and supposedly uber at PVP.

I'm an officer.  I threw her the fuck out of the guild on the spot.  She can go find some catass raider guild hard-up for healers and female contact and run her bullshit there.

I'm convinced raiding, or more specifically the type of people it attracts and the demands it places upon its participants, is destructive to a guild, or even a social community in general. I'm not going to raid in Burning Crusade. If the arenas get old, I'm going to quit; the stress and time waste of raiding is simply not worth the few moments of enjoyment you get from killing a boss or getting some purps.

I probably did get a little too emotional with the crying, but when it comes down to it I was hurt and had put up with too much bullshit over the course of 2 months with this guild and probably should have quit long ago. I didn't warn them before I squelched them. I just said " That's it" and did it. They were being assholes about it and I'm not going to put up with them taking shots at me on a personal level in the guild chat  when I simply asked them to stop after I had been trying to ignore it and got tired of it. Everything else that Mer said was right though. I wasn't even being a bitch about it. But oh well, as Mer said fuck them. It pissed me off the way they talked about Mer and how they didn't even give a shit about him /gquitting no one even said shit in gchat after he did it.. as for the PVP thing.. it's not that I don't like it.. It's just I like to have fun and not worry bout being ganked by an upper lvl every 5 mins while trying to quest or do something.

Whoa!  It must have been bad if it got you to start posting here.

J/K  :-D

Welcome.  Busting out on the scene with a rant about a MMO?  Perfect introduction.

Come on over to SWC Horde.

Mate, if there are tears, then it's too deep. The moment a bunch of people act like cockmonkeys, you say "Fuck you cunts, I'm out of here. Have fun with your drama and bullshit."

...

Welcome Naraa!  :-D Simply put, don't ever care about online people too much. WoW has more guild drama than any other game I've seen, so whenever dealing with anyone you don't know in real life, always keep it in the back of your head that you don't know these people, and when people act fucked-up, just walk. You'll never know them in real life, anyway, so fuck their bullshit.

As for the rest, I think I'm going to start a character on WUA's server..

Thank ya for the welcome and yes it did piss me off enough to post on here  :-D. Mer told me to read what he and every one else posted cause I told him why I was reluctant to join guilds on Alleria again.  I do try to keep in mind that I will never meet those assholes. Mer pointed out the same thing and I did try to move on after the original asshole that started all this called me a bitch in whispers. I said he was out of line then threw his ass on ignore and let it go. It was the GL going off on me and then that same asshole using an alt to get me, and the bullshit in vent  was what finally broke me. I know I have to be a little more thick skinned for a game like this and it's my mistake for thinking I left this kind of bullshit back in jr high, but as I've said before I had been putting up with a lot over time and this was just the last straw and I realize it wasn't worth it now. I ended up reporting the asshole.. doubt anything will happen though knowing blizzard.

I think there's a tendency, because hope springs eternal, to think that a guild that's gone bad can have its course corrected back into what it used to be.  I know that I held out hope for our guild way past the reasonable point.

At some point, reality slaps you in the face and you realize that you are never going to be able to go home.  In my case, all the officers had quit, and I was the guild leader. I announced my intention to disband the guild and have a little afterparty in Stormwind, and there were actually still people saying "no, please, we can recruit, we'll come back stronger and better than evar!!".  Sure we can, after having lost 75% of the guild, including ALL of both the originals and guild hoppers.

YOU SHOULD HAVE SAID,

"STOP SAYING GAY FOR THE NEXT 30 MINUTES NOW OR YOU WILL BE SILENCED FOR 60 MINUTES."
"STOP SAYING GAY FOR THE NEXT 30 MINUTES NOW OR YOU WILL BE SILENCED FOR 60 MINUTES."
"STOP SAYING GAY FOR THE NEXT 30 MINUTES NOW OR YOU WILL BE SILENCED FOR 60 MINUTES."
"STOP SAYING GAY FOR THE NEXT 30 MINUTES NOW OR YOU WILL BE SILENCED FOR 60 MINUTES."

Then people would have listened.

Its always worth remembering that a lot of WoW's players are still in jr high - I freaked out a PUG I was in the other day when I said I had to afk coz my baby was having a hissy fit.  Turned out I was the only one in the group old enough to legally have sex.  That was freaky for everyone involved (except for my daughter, who went to sleep after having her nappy changed).

dude, dont be such a fag.



Aside from that, way too many adults never really outgrow the high school mentality. Gossip, backbiting, infighting, drama for it's own sake/cheap entertainment. Meh.

The guildies I tend to run 5-mans with? Almost all play as a husband/wife pair. So you usually get "Only X is on TS. So-and-so can hear it over his speakers" and "Oh shit, the dog just barfed and the baby's crying. Can we take a break?" a lot.

MC raids were fun. Our raid leader would joke after wipes, and no one gave a shit. Everyone chipped in to pay for the tank and whichever hunter was pulling's repair costs, if it had been a rough night. I couldn't handle a catass guild -- if you can't laugh at shit, how is it a game?

Someone else was on Kirin Tor and I didn't know it? :-(

I played on Kirin Tor for a while, too.  Earthen Ring before that.  Alliance side both times.  Both were 5-6 month stints with several months of break from the game in between.  A while ago.

I am still there if anyone comes by.  Lantyssa (of course), Tsukihana, and Kalindriel are my most played characters.

Being in a leadership position for a guild you care about will make you emotional.  There is nothing wrong with it.  Those of us that try to make it a somewhat family-like environment will always clash with those around who simply wish to advance themselves.  I've been there, I've cried my heart out, and it made me wary of ever being an officer, much less the guild leader, again.

I would say you were well within your rights, especially with the way the guild leaders were ignoring the social problems as Merusk says.  As one of the resident queer board members, I really appreciate the stance you took.  Thank you!

I'm rather pro-active when it comes to preserving the peace in my guild.  We had one of those "Look I'm a real girl!" wannabe guild-princess MMO drama slut types hanging around when I came back to WoW.  I flirted with her enough to take screenshots of her shit-talking her other e-boyfriends and telling me how she wanted "power" and then I ran her out of the guild.

Don't get me wrong.  I get along great with the other women in the guild.  They all have social lives and aren't trying to use our guild as some sort of attention-buffet.  But that type?  Our guild leader thinks the same way I do, and we have no use for that shit.

Maybe you're not a very emotional person, but just because some people cry about things that annoy them does not mean it is "too deep". I get annoyed by bigots I see everywhere in my life - I don't like that kind of thing and won't tollerate it. If I'd been a long standing member in a guild and saw it get overrun by idiots, tried to fix it, and got abused for it I'd be upset. Maybe I wouldn't cry but then I'm a guy and guys aren't allowed to cry at anything, right??

Nor is there anything wrong with caring about people you get to know online. I feel sorry for you if you play games with other people online and dont actualy get anything from that interation. I play with a couple of people regulary in WoW that I don't know IRL and I keep in touch with them even though we've moved around and are in different guilds. One of them stopped playing recently and the others in our little group feel his absence.

No, it's not about guys not being able to cry. It's more about perspective, which I got hit in the face with about 16 months ago, and quite frankly random people in a guild aren't worth that much emotion. I was quite close to the people in my EQ1 guild and others besides in that game. Much, much moreso than the random clusterfuck that most every WoW guild I've encountered has been. But you know what? People leave the game suddenly and then they're gone, so you're left with "a yeap, Lemmiwinks and I used to ROCK Gnomeregan. I wonder what happened to him?" Your example about the guy who stopped playing illustrates my point perfectly.

It's not that you can't get something out of the interaction with people in an MMO, it's just that they're overwhelmingly transitory friends and so it's not worth a deep emotional investment in them. It's not even like work buddies or friends from University because you can hang out with them in the real world

Some of us have to learn the hard way I suppose.

I doubt I shall ever be as invested in a guild as the one which taught me that lesson, however I have some very dear friends I met through online games.  And no matter what I do, I will get emotional if a guild I have enjoyed playing with disintegrates beneath me.

People online are as transatory as you want them to be.   I met Naraa online, we're married now.  We've got friends we've kept in touch with for the last 7 years through games and not.   Crying is the way some folks relieve stress, particularly women.  Were you to perhaps spend more time around women you might understand this, because as I recall you're fairly young and unmarried so I chalk your attitude up to inexperience. 

Anywho, thanks all for the support.  I shake my head going back and reading it all.  Yeah, perhaps I should have left earlier, but there were some very good folks there despite the asshats.  I feel bad for them still sticking with it, but I can understand that they either don't see it or are too afraid to leave because they would miss their friends.   Honestly, I'm over the whole affair and more dissapointed in the other officers who sent me tells saying they agreed with our position, but then failed to act or comment in any meaningful way.

Like Jayce mentioned, I think mostly it was a case of believing things would get better, combined with growing way too fast and pushing way too hard.   Naraa and I are checking out your guild, Dren, and we'll discuss it later.  Don't feel like you're 'too small'  because, honestly guilds that were doing ZG and such are just about 'right sized' these days.  Add in a few Shaman/ Pallies and poof, the same guild is doing the "Uber" content now. ;)  (Just behind the curve - which at Blizzard's pace of new content can only be a good thing.)

No, you have me horribly confused with someone else. I'm in my 30's, professionally employed, and have a wife who I play WoW with which I've mentioned numberous times in parts of this forum, (though not this thread). I think it's great that the two of you met online, as I said, not every online friendship or relationship is transitory, but you'd have to agree that the vast majority are. I do find the "spend more time around women" comment to be presumptuous and insulting though, not to mention laughable. Thanks for that.

It's certainly not a case of "wanting" them to be transitory but in fact something that's come from the experience of playing MMOGs for something like 7 or 8 years now, and seeing a great many people come and go, including those who I once had "good friendships" with. As I said, people leave, and then they're gone. Usually forever. It's not worth a deep emotional investment. Here I'll make a (possibly totally wrong) assumption about you, that you're in your twenties and that WoW is your first major MMOG and chalk your attitude up to inexperience. I will slso suggest that once you've had someone as close to you as your wife suddenly die, then that will give you a fucking big dose of perspective when it comes to random motherfuckers you'll never meet from MMOGs versus the people close to you in your real life. Don't worry, you might understand this when you're older.  :roll:

And despite my hostile tone here, which I will point out is a direct result of your assumptions and quoted text above, you both sound like nice people and did the right thing by leaving, albeit later than you should have.

As an addendum. Meeting someone "online" can mean anything from in a MMOG, to a social chat room, to a dating website and so on and so forth. MMOs are a very different social situation to something like a singles website.

As an additional addendum, I'm not saying you shouldn'tt have online friends and enjoy your time with them. I'm saying don't get too emotionally attatched to them because 80%+ of them will stop playing/leave your guild/server transfer/etc and disappear one day (or you'll stop playing) and that will be that, while 15% of them will have a sudden change of personality and become deranged lootwhores or go on a power trip or some fucking thing. Not to mention the numerous people that aren't worth your time to begin with anyway. As you've experienced already.

Look, neither you nor Merusk or Naraa need pointers about how to behave in online communities, which is how you (originally) responded.  Most of the other responses were ones of empathy and welcomes to the forum, and I think that was more appropriate for the discussion that was happening.

Sure. As I pointed out though, a set of insulting and incorrect assumptions and a condescending tone is what caused my partial change in tone. Please note that I didn't actually go so far as to tell Merusk to fuck off or any of that kind of stuff though, as despite being insulted by his specific post, I do like the guy and often find myself agreeing with his posts. I've even maintained an attitude of "you guys seem much better than those fuckers".

The stuff about meeting online can have many meanings isn't a presumption or speculation on how they met, but is simply a dry comment on the fact that different online communities gather for very different reasons, and have very different tones. (compare the average f13 thread to your guildchat). Or to put it another way, "we met online" can mean as many different things as "we met through a friend" can. They can even be the same thing.  :-P

One other clarification, that perhaps will help to explain my own attitude. Aside from the unpleasant thing I mentioned a couple of posts above regarding perspective, the other thing that's important to mention here is that I play with my wife who also happens to by my best friend. Compared to that, all other ingame-only relationships don't even come close enough to be in the same sport, let alone the same ballpark. My RL friends and such who also play with us are a different matter entirely.

I can apply pretty much everything you've said to people I meet IRL too. The fact you want to make 'online' and 'real' social behaviour subject to different rules baffles me.

Perhaps because you're old you dont understand this technology thing! (Everyone can do cheap shots! Take your own advice and don't get worked up over this 'online' discussion)

No, I'm not applying different rules. Online I'm as friendly and affable as I am with anyone else. But I just don't get as emotionally invested with Zengar the warrior who I chat with while we're concentrating on foozle whacking as I do with someone I know and maintain a real-life friendship with where the focus isn't foozle-whacking. I will grant you that you're correct that pretty much what you quoted there can be applied to many RL people as well, though there's less of it in my personal experience, and it's also much easier to maintain contact with RL friends than e-friends. Chalk it up to me valuing real-life friendships and relationships more highly than those with people I'll never meet, if you like. Works ok for me.  :-)

In case you're not watching, despite the tone, my own "cheap shot" to Merusk was essentially tongue-in-cheek, hence the preface that my assumption was likely incorrect. That was the point of it really. Anyway, shouldn't you be in bed by now, whippersnapper?

Well, MMOG relationships are usually "transitory" in that they don't last more than the few months that you're playing, for most people.  They can be as intense as RL relationships, though, and of course there are a lot of transitory RL relationships too.  We should probably not compare marriage to online relationships; let's compare RL relationships with coworkers and/or temporary acquaintances to online relationships, because they have more in common.  In this case, I agree with lamaros, they're not that different.

Re: your wife, Azazel, sorry for your loss, and condolences.  I don't know you and am a complete stranger, but still, nobody should have to go through that.

Yes, I'd say they have much more in common with workmates or schoolmates, but with less chance to carryover into long-term friendhsips by virtue of their online-only nature.

I may have confused you slightly there though. My brother was the one who died (we played EQ together for years), my wife is alive and well and still plays (WoW) with me. if something happens to her, I'll top myself.  :-P I would say though that my brother and I were so close that the only comparison I can make would be like someone's wife passing away. "Like brothers" isn't close enough to descibe the rapport we had, and so after that happened, well, any online friendship or relationship pales to total insignificance. Hence the big dose of perspective.

So, yeah, while I have in the past, I don't really get too concerned about what happens online in any MMOG guild anymore. :-P  Merusk and Naraa clearly have something much more important than any guildmates or online friends.  :heart:

Well again thanks for all the welcomes and shows of empathy and understanding. Actually Mer is in his early 30s, We have been married going on 9 years now with two children with colorful personalities to match to show for it. We met in an rpg chat room.  :-) and I would have said it to those asshats but they quit before I had the chance to. I'm sorry for the loss of your brother though Azazel. I'm close to my little sister who is about 11 months younger than me and it bugs me even living on the other side of the country from her even if she does stupid shit every now and again.

Believe me the pleasure was mine Lantyssa. My parents weren't perfect but I'd like to think they taught me what is appropriate when it comes to that sort of thing and I have very little patience or tolerance for that kind of stupidity.

As for Mer... want me to smack him?  :-D

Welcome yourself wife of Merusk :p

We're all too old and experienced to put up with that kind of asshatery (um, add that to spellcheck!) so good on you folks for bailing. I'm on Stormscale so no help guildwise. And if you plan on hanging out at f13 I assume Mer has prepped you that we have our own distinct asshat tendency's?

Good hunting.

Interesting read... and seems to be sadly indicative of the state of most "serious" raiding guilds in WOW nowadays. :/ Good on ya for leaving the asshats behind!

My guild is fairly small (about 15-ish active members right now), but we've been (almost completely) drama free since 1997. I've found that cross-game guilds tend to fare better with member retention / stability, simply because at one point the members have to choose the guild over a particular game...

.. but we don't raid or do any of that "hardcore" stuff. Well, unless doing tier0.5 (valthalak needs to die in a Large Brilliant Shard fire), random pvp groups and helping out our lowbies / alts and just messing around in general counts. Though, we might just do Karazhan at one point, since it's a 10-man dungeon and all. (ditto with heroic mode instances)


-- Z.

Yeah I know bout the posts here. Mer has read a few to me or made some other commentary bout them before.  :-P

If he suggested that we're not respectful and polite, he's a fucking lying douchebag.

My guild drips drama, probably not a week goes by without some drama brewing up in the (increasingly incredibly racist) gchat.  Since its inception in Alpha we've had no less than 4 major splinters, each forming full raid guilds that invariably (with one exception) have fallen apart.  Our raiding style is roughly akin to a 5 year old putting change in a vending machine, you're going to get a soda out sooner or later but god knows which one, how many tries and jesus he just put a banana in the slot how does that work?

I wouldn't give it up for the world.   :heart:

Just stay out of Politics.  That path holds madness.


Madness, I tell you.

More MMO Drama stories please, I love this stuff..

Online relationships/guildmates are what you make of them. I live in Seattle, WA and I have 2 very good friends that live in Detroit - I met them in Cazic Thule while playing EQ. I've been to both of their weddings. We've been in about 5 guilds together, currently they are part of a guild of people from mostly Michigan. I used to fly through Detroit a ton for work and if it was on a Friday, I'd extend my layover and spend the weekend with them playing games. It's like real life - you just have to make an effort to make it a worthwile connection.

Nah anything Mer has said isn't bad ..and I avoid politics if I can help it.

I do!  I do! 

Do it! 

(and welcome).

Finally replied to that PM, Az.  I never use them so I never check them.  Oops.

Interesting stuff about the guild. I think you've pretty much hit the nail on the head about two big things that will always cause problems in any guild that decides they want to raid.

1) Lax recruiting - garbage in, garbage out. It's an adage that's as old as time itself, and it plays out in guilds that fold constantly.
2) Related Officers - my view on this may cause a problem with some, but I believe you can never have two people who are related, engaged, dating, or married in a leadership position in a guild. I know it sounds insane, but when you have people that closely connected in charge, a conflict can become much more emotional than rational very very quickly. They also tend to consult each other outside of the leadership, vote together, and cause discention with the other leaders over real or imaginary "collaborations." In short, it's not worth the hassle to have two people that closely connected in a position of power in a large guild.

Note, this might come off that I'm saying Merusk was wrong for leaving, which he wasn't. The situation in his guild stemmed directly from terrible recruiting and a complete shift in focus, coupled with an ivory tower mentality. However, I'm saying that there is absolutely no way that a married couple in charge can remain individually objective in another situation. I've known a great man in my alliance who was married to one of the most horrible personalities I've seen in online games. They were both in charge and his personality which could have been used for the greater good was constantly corrupted by trying to pacify her insane tendancies. Then there is another scenario where I had to boot a member over a breakup with his girlfriend because we wouldn't throw her out of the guild. Then, there was another situation where a divorce caused a haves and have-nots schism that splintered off the guild into two guilds.

In short, never put two people in charge who are intimately involved. It's a fucking headache.

It's been an odd week. I'm seeing posts from Krakrok and now Paelos that I basically agree with.  :-D

The lax recruiting point is a huge one. The majority of WoW's guilds being "invite that guy" revolving doors doesn't help that, either.



There's quite a lot of those around. Soulbound on PM was like that, well, except that I didn't get into any of their poilitics so I don't know if they were loopy at all.



2 things:

Who and which guild?

You don't have to answer that of course, but please ask them (or him):

Did they play EQ1 on Brell in the past, and were they known as Saph dia and Phar ma from SOH?

Wow, Azazel and I agree. That is a banner post.  :-D

The guild on PM in question was called The Order. It's now known as the Order of Exiles. They were part of the PMA (Proudmoore Alliance) which I am a "silent leader" in now that I am the MT but got tired of the political bullshit. OoE left, the woman and man in charge went into new guilds, and life moved on. The man was one of my co-raid leaders, and the woman was in charge of the forums and general police work. Essentially in the end, she screwed over a person on one of her smallers raids because of a petty dispute in chat, even though he had the #1 DKP and attendance on the raid. She sidelined him, I took exception as the MT, shitstorm brewed, blah blah blah. Keep in mind I'm basically doing this MC run in full BWL gear as a favor to help out the new folks and that the guy she banned was the OT, and you get a greater picture of how ridiculous it all was. BTW, the great man was my co-leader in BWL.

In answer to the second part, they didn't ever play EQ.

EDIT: I should add that my memory of these issues sucks, that I was never a part of OoE, and that my own personal guild is a family organization inside the PMA. However, the PMA is basically our larger guild and I refer to it as such. That's the gist.

I like to think of this site as a giant WoW guild.  There are the guild regulars deeply immersed in guild politics, accusations of favoritism, the ones who raid with us once every two months yet everyone likes, and the people who never raid but sit in Org all day and talk shit on /gchat until they are ran out.  (Then they form their own guild which fails and come back under an alt).  Overseeing it all is Schild's level 70 Paladin. 

LF65M for SWG:NGE2 post.

Or your standard office, or any other place where 50+ random people gather. Welcome to our little slice of humanity.

I've been through vaguely similar experiences.  One thing that I can almost say for certain is: avoid brokerage guilds- the type that pulls together a ton of people with different interests and tries to forge some sort of compromise out of them.  In time, this structure will inevitably either polarize or collapse, causing all sorts of grief and animosity in the process.  The typical embodiment of this principle is probably the struggle between "family guild" and "uber guild" that so many seem to go through, and what this really speaks to is a lack of agreement and discrimination at ground zero- vascillating policy, differences between officers, shoddy recruitment standards, etc.  I've had enough of that nonsense.

The guild I've chosen now has an application process that explicitly outlines our objectives and expectations.  If someone writes a good application, they go through a three week evaluation period- to gauge their performance, but almost more importantly to determine if their personality is agreeable.  At the end of their trial, there's a vote in which all members participate.  More than ~20% disapproval, and the initiate is rejected.  As a result, we basically don't have drama, and there is a lessened sense of core vs. periphery.

Sounds like too much trouble to go through for a silly online game?  Well, it saves time in the end, and I treasure my leisure time, and if you're going to get emotionally invested (which does happen) it can save a few tears.  Roars of frustration.  Whatever.

Most guilds used to start out like that.  I guess now the population is more experienced with the game so guilds that get formed have a pre-defined plan and agenda, but the guilds I've been in started as "friends" guilds with the plan of "let's see how the game is and have fun."    Guilds that aren't like that are either: hardcore raiding with hardcore recruiting requirements and a levelup schedule, or not interested in raiding at all, and thus small.

Your guild still sounds vulnerable to the officers or old timers changing their minds about what THEY want from the game, and mostly that happens when the type of game changes (i.e. the transition from a quest/levelup game 1-59 to the raiding game at 60). 

I don't know if we'll get that again at 70; the playerbase is more experienced in the game now, supposedly.  But, a lot of guilds have numbers for 40-man raids AND all these people interested in raiding, and they might believe they have to shrink down to 25-man.   What if the way they do that is "ok, whoever first gets to 70 is gonna be in our raid team, simply because we're not gonna wait for everyone to get to 70 before we start getting keyed and stuff, and the rest of you that are taking it too slowly, are just gonna be secondaries."  That'd break up a guild, especially if it's not spoken out loud, but just kinda expected to happen by the officers.

I didn't mean to stay up this late playing WoW, but here was my guild's incredibly focused activity for tonight, with a group of maybe half a dozen people ranging from the mid-thirties to the low sixties:

*  Show up at Gurubashi arena and get ganked silly by Alliance players.

*  Call in everyone else who was on and kill all the Alliance until they go away.

*  Run into the arena and frag each other silly for a while.

*  Pick up some wandering 63 mage and run around STV killing every Alliance we meet.

*  Run out to the coast and gank some giant to death.

*  Kill some more Alliance.  Practice sitting on their heads and farting before they release.

*  Swim out to that island to find the giant King Kong ape, and gank him too.

I think I gained like 12xp for the entire evening.  It beat the piss out of anything else we might have gone and done.

You can take the fanboi out of UO, but you can't take UO out of the fanboi.

New sig!

Also, I need to ask, is there a way to make WoW take screenshots (http://s38.photobucket.com/albums/e121/GrimDysart/?action=view&current=Kong1.jpg) as good old-fashioned .JPGs and not whatever stupid atrocious bloated format it currently uses?

I've never had to Spirit Rez after a PvP death, but if I recall, it causes durability loss, right?  If that is so, I find it odd that you would participate in this..

Only PvE causes durability loss. It's based on who gets the killing blow, though, so you can abuse it somewhat.

Why is it odd?

WUA has always been a PK at heart. He just refused to admit it.

  "You always hate most that which reminds you of yourself" explains much about his and Sinij's 'relationship'  :-D

The beautifully consequence-free PVP system in WoW has unleashed my inner PK.  I don't have to worry about who's red, or who's grey, or who's a noto, or if I'll get a murder count, or replacing my armor, or buying a new horse, or having my cash looted, or whatever other stupid shit the same six troglodytes still think makes them radical extreme dudes.

As I said to Raph almost a year ago in the thirty-page epic UO thread:

There is no way WUA, but you cazn download a free program caled InFramView, it will batch all your wow screenshots in to .jpg and its a very easy program to use, just search google or download.com for it.

I use FRAPS' screenshotting capability.

Because the moment you cause durability loss, the PvP is no longer "Consequence free".  I thought you were all down on having a PvP loss cost the player anything.

I have no idea whether spirit rezzing after a PVP death causes durability loss or not, having never needed to do it even when being camped.  In any case, why would anyone spirit rez in the face of my little guild squad?  It's not like we were hovering over their corpses waiting for them to rez normally.

Ah, I thought you were, given what was said before it certainly applied corpse camping.

Even if so, only on the most epically equipped characters is this cost anything of consequence.  Maybe it's a gold.  If you have epix, who cares about a measly gold?

The point is that it's not a huge timesink.  You can make the cash back to pay for your repairs in no time, and you can put it off until later if you have any money at all in reserve (which I have to think that most people do).

Or you can log off for a period of time until the campers get bored or you can play an alt or whatever.  Nobody's forced to spirit res - unless they die in midair or an otherwise inaccessible area for a ghost.

Sucks to fall off of Outland.

I jumped off of a cliff in outland to see what would happen.  My corpse appeared near the spot where I jumped, on the same side as the graveyard.

To clear up some stuff:

Spirit rezzing (the act of using the spirit dude at the graveyard to rez yoruself instead of going back to your corpse) causese 20% durability damage to EVERY piece of gear you are carrying (equipped or not).  If you are a well equipped Druid (Full set of healing gear, full set of Feral Gear, + a few backup pieces or something) that can run you an easy 3 or 4+ gold.

Running off outlands doesent incur Spirit Rez.  Your corpse somehow "washes up on shore" around the edge of the zone where you fell off.  You still have to run back to your corpse.

Far as i know, the only time you would ever need to spirit rez is if you either fell "through" the world down on azeroth, or if you somehow die WAYY up in the air in outlands.  (and even that is avoidable, if you can get someone to queue you for an Arena or BG match)

Oh, no.  I was practicing getting my /sit and /fart off before they released to begin running from the cemetery.  (What can I say, I find it funnier than the traditional /spit.)  Once they released, we were on our way to find the next target.

Had some fun that night.  Got squashed by a 64 mage while running back up to the arena solo.  During the furball at the arena, I caught him with his back turned, getting ready to cast on a 63 druid buddy of mine.  Hit him from behind with an earth shock to disrupt his spell, then ran in and smacked him a couple times with my hammer as he was wheeling around and casting on me.  I went down hard, but I actually moved his health bar a little and for a few seconds we were "fighting" and not just playing uberling versus newbie target.

That sounds familar. Hiru, ist that you ?  :-D

I agree completely, I just love the PvP in WoW for the most part.  It can be frustrating when you are stomped by someone against whom you have no chance, but since rezzing and being on my way is trivially easy, it's just mildly frustrating instead of the gut-punch of having hours of investment in your character removed a-la the old UO days. 

Not only that, but I get as much satisfaction defeating an enemy in WoW without being able to loot them as I ever did when I WAS able to loot them on UO.

Do you mean Irfan View?  I use it for all my simple picture editing.

I could have sworn that they patched in an option a while ago that allowed you to simply screenshot straight to JPG or PNG, but I can't find where they put the option.

I'll look around for that.  Thus far I've been reduced to bringing the screenshots up, then taking a screenshot of that screenshot with shift+prntscrn, then pasting it into Paint, saving it as a JPG, and deleting the original.  It works well enough, but it's a huge pain in the ass.

Here.

IrFranView (http://www.irfanview.com/)

Easy and free.

Someone in my guild cleaned out his WoW screenshot folder last night...deleted 8100+ images. I have never taken a singe screenshot; am I missing out?

I often go through my screenshots and wonder why I took a certain one.  Sometimes I notice something in a tiny section of the screen that I meant to capture. Other times, I hit the key by mistake and spend a few minutes trying to figure out what I was thinking.

I could probably do a pretty good flickr trail thingy with my screenshots over the past few years.

I take a good number. Every couple of months I'll take a few hundred, delete 90% of them, and copy the rest over to my screensaver pics folder. I keep meaning to do something more interesting with it, but don't.

What kind of things are you capturing? Cool vistas, big mean mobs, or funny things people say in chat? I guess I can see snapping some pics of PvP ownage; that might be kind of fun.

I do vistas, cool outfits, and portrait shots.

Cool vistas, cool mobs, the occasional funny reference, and character/gear progression. I rarely have my interface on when I take shots.

All of the above.  Examples:
Ding 60.
Someone says something cool/stupid/funny.  These are rare, as I don't screenshot everytime someone's clever.
First time entering a new zone (I have the "you have discovered Zangarmarsh" on my first character for example)
Glitches (I fall through the world, lag and am able to go somewhere inappropriate, etc)
Accomplishments (I have my first raid boss I ever participated in downing (Venoxis) and some notables, like Ragnaros)
Notable occurences like when I drop a 300 tradeskill
 

I'll be damned, this is exactly what I needed.  Thanks, Morph.

Does this individual talk a lot about how awesome their DPS, or their Latest crit is?  The few folks I knew that did that had a ton of shots as well, because the crit-monitor mod they were using (Critline) mod took a picture of each new high.  Nowhere near 8k though. Jebus.

I've got about 600 total after 2 years.  Bosses from different angles, UI stuff, Cool Vistas (Outlands + Flying Mount = Awesome shots), nifty outfits, Sets I've DE'd / Vendored but wanted to remember.    It's usually where I get my desktop images from.

I think most people use Screenshots the same way you use a camera IRL.  If you're not the type to take pics IRL, I can see why you haven't bothered with Screenshots.   Hell I have an archive disk of old EQ/ SWG screenshots, too.

That is my case.  I have some incredibly beautiful pictures I have taken over several games.  They do make for a good desktops at times.

Same here -- I don't use them for desktops (I'm suing an EVE background right now), but I do use them for my screensaver. I also include regular photos and other interesting shots. I tend to put all my desktop images in that folder in any case.

Nagrand has to be the most beautiful zone I've ever seen.

That's what I said the first time I was there!


  Then I got called a woman, but I'm ok with that because I have a chick avatar.

Really though, it's stunning.  It's funny that it feels so much like The Barrens (but green!) and it looks so damn good. The sky only adds to it and it's got a really nifty night sky, too.  I got a really nice vista there the other day on my flying mount.