So Much For That Friendship

About 2 years ago, BBB announced on his blog that he was quitting his raiding guild and opening up Sidhe Devils as a social guild. I was one of the first to join, first with a little level 1 gnome warrior, and soon after I created Palintera, one of my favorite characters. I made new friends in that guild, including Bellwether, who has been a close and valued friend, who has been incredibly supportive through the ups and downs my life has gone through. SD was not my primary guild - it was always a lower priority than my weekly sessions with my RL friends and my raiding with Aetherial Circle. But it was always a comfortable place to escape to a few times a month. It was something I valued, and my level of involvement seemed to be fine with everyone.

Last summer I decided to consolidate all of my Alliance toons on one server. Because I felt I no longer fit well in AC, but SD was still a pleasant place, it made sense to move them all to that server. So in came Kinnavieve and Ratdorf, Phoenicia and Vyp. Based on my recommendation, several of my blogging friends looking for a more casual guild chose to transfer there. And, to my surprise, Julie decided to leave AC and move her characters as well. It was a good time. I got to do heroics, Julie and I could play together as a way to bridge the distance between us, and the guild was a happy place.

Last October life took a horrifying turn, when Julie was diagnosed with cancer. My involvement with the guild, and everyone else, dropped off. I stopped writing Need More Rage. All that mattered was focusing on supporting Julie as much as I could.

About this time I was vaguely aware of issues cropping up in Sidhe Devils, but I wasn't paying close attention. The guild had started raiding on Thursday and Friday nights, neither of which I could make, and apparently there were some tensions between the more focussed (compared to AC I would hardly call them hard-core) raiders, and some more casual guild members. Then, suddenly, Bear announced he and Cassie were quitting the guild, effective immediately. But they didn't leave; instead, people started getting kicked out of the guild. Bear had always struck me as a little heavy-handed with insisting on certain rules, such as logging in regularly to avoid being removed, but this was new. Long-time guild members were being kicked with alarming frequency. There were a few posts on the guild forums about issues being talked out between the GMs and the officers, and all was cool now, only to have the gquits and gkicks flare up again. Some of the former guildies started a new guild called Parallel, and apparently it would focus on casual raiding, while SD was going to be a non-raiding guild. However, it quickly became clear that moving one toon to Parallel mean that all your alts would be immediately kicked, and your guild forum access removed. Morale within Sidhe Devils plummeted, and the exodus accelerated. Stop took his main out to join a raiding guild on another server, and within an hour all his alts were kicked. It became very clear to we who remained that we were to be Bear and Cassie's friends and no one else's or we were out, as if we had never existed.

Like I said, I was busy dealing with Real Life during this, and I pretty much kept my head down. I thought it sucked, but I wanted to be loyal to the guild that had been my home, and I hoped once things settled down that there could be a recovery. But there never was. In the end, there were only a handful of people left. Even Bear, who hadn't been around much for months, bailed, converting his main toon to a Tauren and finding new opportunities to raid on the Horde side. So Julie and I talked about it, and decided that being members of a social guild with no one left to talk to was just too depressing. Rather than sneak off into the night, we posted our intentions to leave on the forums. Since the guild was clearly dead, and abandoned by its leaders, we didn't expect much of a response. Silly us.

Bear replied with one of his enormous walls of text, mostly complaining about how much he and Cassie had put into the guild, how hard they had worked, and how unappreciative everyone was. How terrible it was that everyone had walked away from them. But he also found time to tell me what a crappy guild member I had been, how I didn't say enough in gchat or participate in enough activities. Apparently there was a secret quota he hadn't bother to tell anyone about, and I was lacking. When Julie responded that he was being unreasonable, he ran off to his blog and posted a couple of rambling, vague, whiny posts about how mean everyone had been to them. Nowhere did he mention that he had been absent for months while pugging heroics with random strangers, or that people who had tried to fill the leadership void had been squashed because they didn't follow his vision of how a social guild ought to be.

You know what, Bear? Fuck you. If you can't accept that you were the one in charge, the one who made mistakes, the one who tried to have his cake and eat it too, then you need to grow up. Attacking the people who stuck around the longest, who stayed with you while you were busy kicking out our friends for merely trying to enjoy the game, for "sucking the life" from your guild is bullshit. I valued our friendship, but you've gone too far. Way, way too far. Life is too short to waste with people who think that friendship means they can control what you do and who with. Most of us outgrew that sort of thing in high school. Why didn't you?