Breakfast Topic: It's not us, it's you

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My guild had a pretty big blowup recently. After trying for months and months to fill a 25-man core with the people on our backwater server, it became clear that all the talent was either unreliable, taken or unable to make our raid times. We were left with recruiting people from other servers and the opposite faction. Eventually, we picked up a couple of guys who were leaving their current guild, which had stalled in progression and was dying off. They were good, too. Very, very good. Pretty soon, they had recommended that a few of their friends transfer over to join us. Then a few more, then more. Before we knew it, almost a third of our 25-man raid was made up of this little circle of friends.

Then the drama started. As the stress of focused 25-man progression started to build up, so did the insults in Vent, the backstabbing and the painfully obvious divide splitting our guild in two. Officers were flooded every day with whispers about who said what, who should be raiding and who shouldn't, who "stole the healer" from what 10-man team ... It was ugly. Long-standing members started "taking time off," the GM stepped down and transferred away, a couple of officers quit the game entirely and the whole thing culminated into a night of finger pointing, insult throwing and /gkicks. When the dust settled, we had 10 to 15 people left in our 25-man progression guild. The guild, for all practical purposes, was dead. The only thing left for us was to transfer off and rebuild on another server.

It's one thing for a guild to die off due to burnout, disinterest or a lack of attendance. It's quite another to watch it tear itself apart from the inside. If you're one of the people who's been around a while and has come to consider your guildies friends, it's even harder. Do I blame the people we recruited? A little. The drama always seemed to originate from and center around them. Could we have handled things differently? Probably. A lot of it was simply because a few things weren't nipped in the bud before they got out of hand.

We now have a new rogue who's getting on everyone's nerves and is very soon going to feel the full force of our new desire not to put up with garbage. One of my personal rules is that I would rather play pointless, old content with friends than bleeding-edge progression with jerks and idiots.

We've all heard the phrase about "bad apples." Have you ever watched a guild fall apart because of a few people? Is there anyone that you've had to kick simply because he or she was too obnoxious or annoying?

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