I know I don’t blog anymore, but I needed a place to talk about this. For better or for worse, this has always been that place.
I’m leaving my guild. Which really shouldn’t be a big deal since I only joined it in June, but I got really close to people really fast. The vibe was good, the people were good, and it was nice to have a group of friends again.
Maybe that’s why I overlooked a lot of things for while.
When our guild council repeatedly kicked people without talking to them first, for instance, I never liked it. If you’re going to kick someone, the least you can do is send them a message to explain why. I even shared with the guild leadership how strongly I believed in communicating directly with people to give them a chance to change their behavior before kicking them, and while they agreed with me verbally, their actions denied that. I even agreed with them on every choice they made as far as who they removed from the guild and why, I just disagreed on the way in which they carried it out. But that’s a minor thing, and I let it go. After all, I’m not an officer in this guild, just another raider.
I had some personal issues with them come up as well. I was in a static key group with all three members of the guild council. (Triumvirate? I feel like that’s such a cooler word). We had agreed to do keys on Friday and Saturday. This was confirmed for me several times, as Friday night’s conversations would often end with “we can do that key tomorrow” or “we can do Dawn of the Infinite tomorrow.” So I waited to do keys on my hunter because I anticipated that we would be running at least 5-6 keys per weekend. Then, after one rough Friday night, I logged on the following day and discovered that two of the three were in a different key group. They never sent a message to any of us or in our group chat–just moved on to another group without us.
In the interest of full disclosure, I could’ve handled the situation better. Frustrated with feeling abandoned and also frustrated with how little it seemed they wanted to help people if it didn’t directly benefit them (and perhaps feeling petty because they hadn’t said anything to us), I didn’t confront it when it happened. I just ignored it and ran with a different key group the next week. I mirrored their actions, and that was immature of me. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I let that one slide, too–I recognized the role I played in making that situation messier than it needed to be.
Following that, I and another friend teamed up to play Classic Hardcore with them, and when they were bored of it or tired of waiting for us, they decided that we should all split up. It felt like a repeat of the key situation, but this time I was less surprised, so I let that go, too.
But then some more serious stuff happened.
For one, the way they talk about other members of the guild when those members aren’t around made me uncomfortable at times. I don’t mind talking about people’s raid performance or attitudes; I recognize that I can be a gossip. But I also believe in directly talking to people when these issues come up, just like I said before with kicking people. If they had taken our post-raid conversations and messaged the people privately and said, “Hey, we were looking at your performance after raid, and we wondered if you could work on [X,Y,Z],” then I wouldn’t be adding this to the list.
More uncomfortable to me was commenting on people’s personal lives or appearances in public discord channels. In the one that stuck with me the most, I was in discord with the two leaders I’ve been discussing here along with several other people, random members from the guild. We were talking about their old guild, and I found a picture from that guild. I commented that one of the people looked exactly like I pictured them, and one of the leaders of the guild replied with a derogatory comment about their appearance. I was a little taken aback, and I started carefully considering what I shared in discord because I was sure they would say similar things about me.
But the final straw for me and the reason I’m writing this post is because of the way these same two leaders bullied one of our guild members.
One of our members came to this guild from a different guild on the same server. He left that guild because there was a person who constantly spoke over him and was undermining him as the raid leader in that guild. His friends in that guild told him to stand up for himself, and when he did, this person called him a slur and told him to kill himself. The leadership in our guild knew about this–I know that firsthand because I was in a discord channel with them all of them the first time he related the story to me.
Then, earlier this week, this member was told by a friend in his old guild that our leaders had reached out to them and asked them to consider joining one of our raid teams.
I can’t help but put myself in his shoes. He left a guild because they were being actively toxic to him, came here to be safe with friends, and then the leadership in his new guild is literally personally inviting his bullies into our space. Can you imagine?
Edit to add, I want to make this clear: most of the guild from which he came is fine. In fact, several of them are still friends with him. I don’t want good people to be thrown under the bus because of a bad one. But the point stands: if you leave a guild because of something that made you uncomfortable, you should never be blindsided by suddenly having that group invited to your new space.
Worse, they intentionally kept it a secret from him. The friend who told him about it said that he was directly told not to inform this member–I applaud him for being more loyal to his friend than to a toxic guild. What a horrendous surprise. If he hadn’t been told, he would’ve logged in one day to see the people who chased him away from his old guild hanging out in his new one with no warning.
When he got understandably upset over it and said some things, definitely said out of anger but, in my opinion, justifiably so, they kicked him from the guild.
I can’t in good conscience watch a member get bullied by their own guild leadership like that. If they’ll do that to him, they’ll do it to anyone, and I’m leaving before they do something equally mean to me.
I know that they’re going give lots of excuses and reasons. They’re very good at justifying their actions; I’ve seen them do it. They’re going to demonize me and anyone who leaves because of this (or ever, really) and make us sound like the bad guys. I can’t fault the guild members who believe them and I won’t hold it against those members–these leaders can be very convincing.
But that’s why it was important to me to say all of this—if they want to twist me into someone evil, then I wanted to tell my side of the story before it’s twisted into whatever it will become in their minds.
And it wasn’t all bad!
I made some really good friends, and it was nice to get into mythic raiding again. I hope I get into a new mythic guild (anyone looking for 4 dps and 1 healer?), but if not, it is what it is. It’s so much more important to me that my online home be a place I feel comfortable. On to the next!