If you get enough people together, drama is an eventual byproduct. This week it happened to our guild. I’m sharing it with you because A) this is probably the only place I can vent where it reflects on me and not my guild and B) I hope someone can learn from our drama or at least be entertained.

So a few days ago I was summoned from my book writing via a MSN message from a guildmate “Check the realm forums.” I yawn, stretch, and direct my browser to the realm forums. To discover this gem.

It’s posted by a level 12 alt, but the genius was intelligent enough to use an alt tagged with the same guild as his main. So it was easy to identify the poster as a hunter we’d given an initiate opportunity to but decided not to retain as a member. The post was clearly bait and the realm community had already responded with some additional trolling but mostly skepticism. I asked my raiders not to respond however the request missed a few of our non-raiding members.

Sidenote: Who starts a flame thread with “I know everyone else like you guys.”

So Operation ignore the troll was put into place and we ignored him through this post:

But I’m afraid one of my soldiers broke ranks and posted a response on an unguilded alt prompting this response:

I haven’t figured out which member it was, and to be honest I haven’t tried too hard, but I suspect it was one of mine because the information shared wouldn’t have been public knowledge. I think raising to the bait does reflect poorly on my guild in some ways, however it is at this point that he moves from the slightly sophomoric to the absolutely absurd, conveniently diverting attention away from my errant member’s misbehavior.

Unfortunately for the poster, he’s now entirely lost the crowd prompting this next gem:

Now thus far it’s been easy for me. Ignore the poster as he slowly digs his hole. I know, if left alone, he’ll dig his own grave and eventually tire out. I know that nothing I say to him will calm him down. But now he’s growing hostile towards my server mates, and he’s told his first complete untruth. Everything else has just been his interpretation of the events that do have some base in reality, twisted as his perception of that reality may seem to me. I know better, I really do, but at this point I feel compelled to make an attempt to reach him, resulting in:

I’m not sure if I reached him or not, but it’s 7 hours since I posted and he’s yet to respond. The “Drama” thread has derailed into a Monty Python sketch. Yes, I did try to recruit in the drama thread. What can I say, I’m shameless.

So that’s my drama story. I hope you’ve been entertained, but I also hope that you and I can learn something from this example. While examining this situation or any unpleasant situation I don’t care to repeat, I try to look at the following things:

Prevention: The drama in this event comes from an initiate who was not granted member status. Unfortunately the purpose of an initiation period is to determine if a player is a good fit a guild and the guild is a good fit for the initiate. If there was a way to ensure a player and a guild will work well together there would be no need for initiation phases. I would say the conversation in which I informed the initiate that he would not be offered a member position within our guild could have been smoother, but honestly that conversation was as pleasant as that kind of conversation can be. We parted on amicable terms and allowed him to remain in our guild on a non raiding rank until his server-transfer cool down was up. (He chose to return to his previous raiding guild, despite my offer of assistance finding a new guild on our server.) Frankly, I was quite surprised to see his post in the forums. That being said, we’ve previously relied on the interview process to inform cross-server applicants that we make no guarantee they will be invited to member status. I believe that due to this event we’ll add this information to our application, so we’ll have documentation this information was provided.

Room for Improvement: The post made with information only known to members of our raider core, should not have been made. Once it’s all said and done I’ll have to track down who and have a heart to heart about why that post, while cathartic, was probably not in the best interest of our guild. As a guild leader, I’m not a tyrant, I’m not capable of nor do I desire to control the actions of my members. That being said, I don’t make requests idly. By explaining the rational of radio silence, I could have gotten higher buy in. Also we did a good job letting our raiders know we preferred they not post, but we did not get to our friend rank members in time to prevent a few of them from making comments. An outside observer doesn’t know the difference between the girl friend of a raider who logs in once a month and a core member of our guild from their forum posts. I’m considering adding information to friend rank induction reminding friends of this fact and asking them to consider how their posts will reflect on our community before posting.

Gold Star: I probably shouldn’t have responded to the thread, but given that I did, I think the response was professional and did not take the bait to indulge in mud slinging with him. I was tempted and could have cited that:

• In our raids he did an average of 400 dps less than he promised in his interview.
• He caused wipes on fights he claimed to understand.
• His ability to follow directions regarding when to misdirect was so bad that we had to create a safety word to be his cue to pull.
• His interpretation of the events of his initiation period was suspect to be generous.

I didn’t (but I must say, it is nice to get that list off my chest in my own personal corner of the interwebz) take the bait, instead I focused my comments productive things that did not lend themselves to debate. I reminded him that I was available to speak with him one on one to clarify and address any outstanding issues he may have. I expressed my regret at his dissatisfaction, without taking accountability for that dissatisfaction. While it may have been in poor taste, I used the free publicity to highlight my guild’s recruitment needs (and to my amusement have had two potential applicants get in touch with me as a direct result). Finally the reaction of the server including the lack of people to jump on the bandwagon with their perceived slights, leaves me to believe that all in all our interactions with our server mates have been fairly strong.

Damage Control: When all is said and done, there isn’t a lot of damage control to be done. Should the thread continue, I may need to re-evaluate, but I feel like in it’s current state this has been more of a nuisance than anything else.