So a few months ago, a small group of guilds who we’ve been running with for a while teamed up with the castoffs from one of the larger guilds in the game and started running Molten Core (if you’re one of the brave souls that clicked this without knowing the game, Molten Core is a large dungeon that is designed for 40 people to go in to together). It worked pretty well for a while. We were learning the dungeon, people were getting decent rewards, and we were having fun.

Unfortunately, for me anyway, it didn’t last.

Probably, oh, about a month or so now the the castoff folks got kind of huffy during one of the raids in which their people weren’t winning any of the loot rolls (we were using a straight up random rolling system for distribution of loot). At that point, I made a post in the officers forums of one of our allied guilds suggesting that we address the issue before it exploded on us. I proposed that we might want to consider a Dragon Kill Points system (DKP) if people were going to be upset. That’s when I found out that the random system was actually insisted on by the castoffs, and it was pretty much dropped.

A week or so later, a large number of the castoffs took a week off from raiding with us to go raid with the members of another, larger guild. When they came back, they wanted a DKP system. The about face was kind of odd to more than a few of us, and much debate began about it in the officers forum.

And this is when it started to not get so fun.

See, here’s the thing. As the leader of my guild, I consider it my responsibility to make sure that any decision I make is in the best interest of my guild and the people who we are allied with. To put it bluntly, I don’t like the large majority of the people I’ve met from this other guild. They represent, on the whole, everything I can’t stand about the endgame in Warcraft. Primairly in the “if you’re casual, gearing you is a waste of time” mentality. They also come across as very condescending, giving the attitude that we are lucky to have them along and really working to make us feel like second class citizens.

Not all of them – but enough of them. The family feel was definitely not there.

During all of this discussion, several of the guild leaders in one of our allied guilds got pretty nasty. It was really strange. They kept trying to turn things around on us, and make those of us who were just trying to cover all our bases look like the bad guys – going to far as to imply that we were loot whores.

But we got it all worked out, to a degree, and figured out a plan.

In the mean time, several of my guildies went on a non-MC raid with the folks from the castoff guild, in which they felt they were treated unfairly. I got as many of the details as I could about that run and composed a post in OUR officers forum so that my officers could read it first and tell me if I was being too much of a dick. Once it cleared them, I posted it on a forum that the officers of all the guilds doing the MC runs could see. No reponses were left for it, beyond a few from our side (one of them being about a different run where a similar thing happened).

Then, yesterday, someone from that guild finally responded. In his response, he took some kind of personal attack at me. I don’t know exactly what he said, because one of the other guild leaders editied his post about 2 minutes after it went live then made a generalized statement about not using personal attacks on the board.

Which is cool…But…

That same officer then went to the web site of the castoff guild, and made a post on their forums that included a statement to the effect of me only speaking for my guild and not representing his. He then said that he had agreed with what was posted on his boards, and that “several” of the officers thought I was being a negative naysayer. This opened the floodgates for one of the officers there saying that I came off as an asshole.

So, in my eyes, he edited a post to keep someone from their guild looking bad, then went over to their place and totally trashed me out. He killed any credibility that I had with those people, and he basically confirmed my suspicions that he had his head firmly planted up their asses.

He’s 21. Lovely, huh? I’m 33. I don’t need high school drama in my life.

So for me, it’s over. I’m not dealing with the castoff guild, or the one officer who not only stabbed me in the back but made those statements under the auspices of speaking for his entire guild when his guild leader didn’t even know. It’s just not worth it. No amount of shiny new loot is going to make up for the fact that this game is where I keep in touch with a damned fine group of people I consider friends, and when crap like this happens it takes away from it.

Yet again, the game stopped being fun and yet again, it’s thanks to the fact that Blizzard designed it in such a way that (in it’s current state) the only way you can see new content at the higher levels of the game is to deal with this kind of bullshit.

For me, it’s not worth it. There’s an expansion coming out soon with more content for smaller groups. I’ll wait for that. Besides, to be honest, there are a lot of people in my guild who are up and coming and could use my help, and they’ve been getting neglected with the endgamers running MC three nights a week. Those people are my friends, and they deserve my time…not some jackholes who are going to throw daggers at me for expressing an opinion.

One good thing about it all, though – It makes me appreciate my officers even more. Despite the fact that we’ve all been playing this game for over a year and a half now, and would love to see more of it, none of us are willing to put up with drama to experience it. We’ve been through this several times before – and we’ve stuck together.

So yeah, we’re care bears. Whatever. At the end of the day, we’ve got each other – and that’s much more important than pixels on a screen.