God damn kids.

[edlavallee]

Part of what keeps me from being "uber" or "leet" in MMOs is because I have an absurdly low tolerance to people like those posted about above. I don't think I will ever be part of a large guild and will continue to be involved in a very small guild with people I know in real life, some of which I am related to. This is not because I don't want those things in BWL or MC or whatever, it is simply because if I were forced to interact with those people on a regular basis and pay attention to DKP, or Points or whatever it is these days, I would end up the night sticking sharp objects in my eyes. I just have more important things in my life to stress about and when the game starts feeling like a job, then it loses the entertainment factor for me.

I have never been a big fan of the train wrecks of daytime talk shows or the new fad of reality TV, so the soap opera/guild fallout thingy has never appealed.

Social interaction theory on the other hand...

[OcellotJenkins]

Below is a recent application to our guild and a perfect example of how age limits and other screening go a long way in keeping retardary to minimum in a good guild:

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Character Name

gherrody

Class

night elf hunter

Level

60

Age

15

Guild History

i hv been with 2 other guilds 2 because i stay till they all leave the guilds hv been blue dragon dynasty and twlilits dawn

Reason For Leaving

i lv because it is fun and it gives me something to do

What You Would Like Out of the Guild

to meet new people and hv alot more friends

What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

?

Who do you hate more, Orgyll or Klepto?

wat does this hv to do with the guild

Spit or swallow?

?

If a southbound tram loaded with drunken pirates leaves Ironforge travelling at 25 mph, and a northbound tram loaded with ninjas leaves Stormwind travelling at 45 mph, at what point will ninjas become extinct?

same

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Regardless of age, if a person can't be arsed to spell out the words "have" or "leave" then odds are they'll contribute jack and shit to the guild.  I really fear for the future with this upcoming generation of kids that have the writing skills of degenerate monkeys.  I'm no spelling champion and my grammar could use some work but this is ridiculous and all too common.  I mean are these kids filling out the application on a fucking cell phone?  We've had recruitment open for about a month now and I'd say we've only allowed about 2% of the applicants into the guild.

[Jayce]

Most of the people in my (casual raiding) guild seem to have kids and/or spouses. We have a couple of teenagers who are younger siblings of other members, but I'd put the average age in the high 20s. I'm one of the oldest at 36. I joined the guild because it had people I knew in EverQuest in 1999. I can't pick a "guild princess", but the leader is a woman with two kids, and is one of the most hardcore gamers I've met. She left a power guild in favour of a slower pace, but that means we tend to have some "slower people" in the guild who frustrate her.

The wider player base does seem much younger than other MMORPGs. I'm not that keen on it. My account has been cancelled for two weeks, not because I've left the game, but because the next raid I can attend is this Sunday :)

I have an update: this guild has just died. MMOG guild politics are always so annoyingly spectacular. Our hard-working leader's husband left a couple of months back, but she was intent on leading our guild through BWL. He continued helping to make up the numbers on our raids and even called some shots due to his knowledge, but some rather petty sniping went on about his presence. She discovered this bad attitude towards him was shared by a sizeable minority of the guild, who had also developed a slack attitude to raids.

So she left. The main raid leader left too. Then four officers, one after the other. Some of the grumpy people left to start their own guild, we went through five guild leaders in three days, and the remaining founders posted "the fat lady has sung" and shut down the forums.

I joined a friend's much happier guild that is roughly at the same stage (MC on farm, starting BWL), so nothing much changes for me. Time to grab some popcorn and watch the remaining fallout.

Funny thing - almost the exact same thing just happened to me.  Everything was basically peachy until the original guild leader left, then we started going through an ever-accellerating series of leaders until finally, when it fell to me, I made a fat-lady-singing post and disbanded the guild.

Does anyone have any success stories of guilds where the original leadership left and someone successfully took it over?  You'd think it would be possible, but I've never seen it in practice.

[stray]

Regardless of age, if a person can't be arsed to spell out the words "have" or "leave" then odds are they'll contribute jack and shit to the guild.  I really fear for the future with this upcoming generation of kids that have the writing skills of degenerate monkeys.  I'm no spelling champion and my grammar could use some work but this is ridiculous and all too common.  I mean are these kids filling out the application on a fucking cell phone?  We've had recruitment open for about a month now and I'd say we've only allowed about 2% of the applicants into the guild.

The smart kids are out there. They're just not the ones hanging out on the net 24/7 or playing games.

Which is odd, because I when I was 14 or 15, it was the gaming geeks and cooped up loners who were generally more intelligent than everyone else. And the delinquents were the ones who didn't make much of an effort (luckily, I reformed at 17).

Nowadays the geeks are no better than the delinquents. In fact, I think they aspire to be something even worse. They've built a whole culture around the idea of being illiterate and retarded. Not even thugs try to do that -- Thugs don't want to be retarded. They just are retarded -- and that's a completely different thing.

[Merusk]

My guild had a successful transition.  In fact, the transition made us more successful.  The original GL was a paranoid sort and insisted on holding all the powers.  Changing the MOTD, promoting/ demoting, etc.  Officers were really only there to invite people into the guild.  At some point just after I joined, he got involved with a woman who had a kid, and he decided he liked playing dad.  As a result he started showing up less and less often, but still held all the powers.  Long story short, after a minor coup, the guild decided it wanted our current leader instead of the original one, and we moved on from doing UBRS/Scholo/Strath weeknights to MC stuff.

One of the guilds on my EQ server made a successful transiont as well.   The old GL retired from the game, and named his successor, someone who was equally respected and had helped to run things for a while.  The transition was smooth because no policies changed, and nobody quit because they felt slighted.  

The key in both cases was the new GL had the respect of the majority of the guild.  If your guild is a collection of loose associates only out for loot, that's where the tensions form and people take-off.  The see slights were there were none, and get pissy about stupid shit.  Same happens if the leadership thinks things are headed one way, but the members think  it's headed another (Or one group wants to push it another way.)

   I'm having some of that tension in my WoW guild right now, because some of our MC ally's officers wanted to be a Hardcore rading cew, merge the guilds and kick the 'dead weight'.  When their GL put the smack down, saying it was bullshit and not the direction either guild leader wanted to go they quit, and pulled one or two folks from our guild to a hardcore raiding guild with them.  Now we're having a hard time fielding some classes for MC, but still feel better than we would have kicking all of the non-raiders out of the guild.

[Tale]

Does anyone have any success stories of guilds where the original leadership left and someone successfully took it over?  You'd think it would be possible, but I've never seen it in practice.

Yes, lots in EQ. I helped start the following guild in 1999 and it still survives after a lot of leaders, wailing, gnashing of teeth and generations of members: http://pub208.ezboard.com/bsouthernlegion  It says "Our Guild Leader is Draxean, and our Officers are Solarise, Welhun, Nanakei, and Williow". I used to be one of the best-known officers, and I have never heard of any of those people!

I joined several of the officers in creating a spin-off hardcore raiding guild in 2000, and it is also powering along after a lot of great leaders and officers came and went: http://www.auroranoctum.net - the (now unconnected) founders still use the name in other MMOGs and have their own site: http://www.auroranoctum.com/forums/forum.php

[Merusk]

Damn Tribunal Aussies.   But we've had that discussion before.

[Lantyssa]

Funny thing - almost the exact same thing just happened to me.  Everything was basically peachy until the original guild leader left, then we started going through an ever-accellerating series of leaders until finally, when it fell to me, I made a fat-lady-singing post and disbanded the guild.

Does anyone have any success stories of guilds where the original leadership left and someone successfully took it over?  You'd think it would be possible, but I've never seen it in practice.

It depends what you call successful.

We had an interim leader for several months.  I then formally took over for our guild in SWG in January '04.  I lasted ten months until I finally burned out after a returning player I didn't know had a grudge decided to incite a wonderful political shitstorm (the basis for which floored me once I found out, but that's a story for later).  I passed the reins to a member that was well respected and generally considered neutral in those events.  Around eight or nine months later he did the same, then that member passed it on to our current leader.  (Both had babies, so no time for games.)  The guild still exists with a few active members, which given the game in question, is quite a feat.

[Phred]

Does anyone have any success stories of guilds where the original leadership left and someone successfully took it over?  You'd think it would be possible, but I've never seen it in practice.

Not in WoW but my EQ guild successfully survived the original guild leader leaving. his successor leaving about 5 months later, the original leader coming back then leaving again in about 6 months. That guild is still going strong dispite half of us leaving for WoW or EQ2. It was alwasys a fairly mature guild with very little conflict or major drama, dispite being a raiding guild that did officer awarded loot with dkp being kept to use as a guideline rather than a bid style system.