Holding Back the Tide

When your guild gets embroiled in a bit of unpleasantness with a player or another guild, it can be difficult to control the public responses of your members. The best you can do is request that people keep their heads and not sink themselves further into the argument, but if outrage is high and members are slapping out responses before they think, can you really turn the tide back?

In any dispute, there's always the threat that members will ignore leaders and go off half-cocked into the fight. This makes things worse instead of better by escalating the drama and even giving credence to people who don't deserve to be acknowledged.

In IVV right now, a single player master looted an item that he'd lost the roll for from a 25-man and then taunted and harassed the involved players for trying to seek justice through GMs. Several of his guildmates joined in abusing IVV.

The question for a guild when you fail to see justice in a situation such as this is how to act. On the one hand, individuals may want to strike out to appease their own anger. On the other, the group as a whole is implicated by an individual's actions and leaders want to keep members in check.

This rule -- that a guild can be tainted by the inappropriate actions of a member -- is obvious in our discussions of how to interact with the ninja's guild from now on, since they chose to keep him and (several of them) defend him.

The reining agreement in IVV is to avoid his guild, Pure Insanity, but not to harass them. One of our best players, recently returned from a tenure in a top US raiding guild (and even left behind a Gladiator title and frostwyrm on his alliance toon), says he'll ask any group he joins with a PI member to drop either them or him. He won't group with them. And he's sure to have a solid reputation as a player on our server just like his last.

The actions of a few taint the whole. Perhaps on a small server like ours, you can't afford to get rid of bad people even if it ruins your credibility as a guild because there's no one to take that person's place. Or perhaps Pure Insanity just doesn't care if members reflect badly on the guild.

Either way, when it comes to your guild, public relations demands that you keep player behavior in check whether you possess the offender or the victim. I don't care how connected a person is or how many friends he or she will take -- if a member is willing to soil your guild's name, and if they know they can get away with it without punishment, they will never be worth keeping.

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Beth Blevins is a former officer in In Vino Veritas.

She's currently working on her writing.

Beth's been married since her junior year of college.
Whenever that was.