As part of the video production over the last couple weeks, I have been logging into World of Warcraft and poking around.
I started with our original guild, the Twilight Cadre on Eldre’Thalas, which I consider to be our home.
At one point though, I decided to check in on our horde guild.
After finishing up the last instance in Wrath of the Lich King (at the time), in October of 2009 we rolled up on Lightninghoof, an RP-PvP server, and created a guild called Dawn of Anarchy.
That was our attempt to find new experiences by doing as much different as possible. And it was reasonably successful I suppose. But there was another hiatus, time spent in Middle-earth, and then Cataclysm. So our last venture out with the guild on Lightninghoof was back in June 2010, when we were doing Burning Crusade instances. (This is why I blog all this, because I would never remember it.)
The guild has been quiet since then.
But when I went back to check on it this past weekend, I found that my characters were no longer in the guild. None of us were in the guild.
It appears that somebody named Deviuus… and I am not even sure who that is… I think it was an invite based on a friend of a friend sort of thing… petitioned to be made guild master since we had all be absent for so long, then kicked us all out of the guild.
Deviuus by name and nature...
Not that this is a big hairy deal. I don’t think we were headed back to WoW until the dawn of the Age of Pandas, and even then I doubt that the horde guild on the RP-PvP server would be our destination. The guild bank was probably full of stuff of dubious value, and we hadn’t advanced the guild or even gotten any guild achievements, since we didn’t play on Lightninghoof when Cataclysm launched.
When it came down to it, I couldn’t even remember the name our guild there until I asked Potshot. Somehow I hadn’t even mentioned it in a post. I just knew one was missing.
It is just one of those little lessons in life. If you are not sure you know somebody well enough to trust them, then you probably can’t.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
WoW implemented a new “take over the guild” feature – if the Guild Master is away from game for 90 days (30 days?) I think it’s 90, there’s an automated system where you can usurp the guild. I did so with my own characters (two separate accounts) it’s just a click of a button on an icon at the top of the guild roster.
LikeLike
I don’t even see where “trustworthiness” enters into the picture. Effectively you abandoned the guild. Why -shouldn’t- the only remaining active player take it over?
Had a similar issue with one of my guilds (err, kinships) in LOTRO. Guild leader simply stopped logging in. The designated heir stopped logging in. A month later, all the officers stopped logging in. LOTRO uses a tiered system: after X amount of time, the next lowest rank in the hierarchy gets the option to “usurp” leadership of the guild.
After three or four months of paying upkeep on the kinhouse, my lowly “initiate” got the “usurp” button on her kinship page. Darned straight I “usurped.”
LikeLike
@Vatec – Take over. Sure. I had to do that when the guild leader for our Eldre’Thalas guild went MIA. That was back when you had to petition for it and explain the situation to a GM.
He is, by the way, still in the guild.
Take over and kick EVERYBODY else out of the guild. Nah, that is bullshit. There is no “upkeep” to be paid, there is no burden in having absentee players. Heck, the timer must have just dinged for the guild because I had logged in back in November.
Like I said, in the grand scheme of things, it probably doesn’t matter all that much. It just irks me a bit.
LikeLike
OK, then we’re basically on the same page.
I guess I undervalued the “kicked everyone out” part. Under the same conditions, I just demoted everyone to Member (and only to make sure the characters couldn’t raid the kinhouse chests if they suddenly decided to log back in, or if a hacker gained access to the dormant accounts). Heck, I even made an Excel spreadsheet of the contents of the kinhouse chests, on the off chance the leader or officers returned within a reasonable amount of time….
So yeah, kicking everyone is rather extreme and somewhat difficult to justify.
LikeLike
It’s 30 days.
I think Blizzard would be happy if the moribund guilds just went away and the people moved to guilds that were still functioning.
LikeLike
@Paul – The thing is, a lot of people have pet guilds on an alt just for the storage space you get. Giving guilds levels and achievements made guilds more important. But player storage is what is keeping a lot of such single player guilds around.
It is all just entries in database tables when it comes down to it. I am sure that low level characters that got played a couple of times then abandoned are a much bigger annoyance to the Blizzard DBA’s than lifeless guilds.
LikeLike
Dark Age of Camelot had (probably still has) a feature that automatically passed guild leadership to the next-most senior member if the guild leader did not log in for a set period. For several years, long after I stopped playing, I would get emails from Mythic telling me that I had lost the leadership of a guild and then a few weeks or months later I’d get another telling me I was leader once again as my turn rolled round in the guild-with-no-players.
I do think it’s necessary to have some kind of system for passing Guild Leadership on when guild leaders stop playing. Mrs Bhagpuss and I are the only active members in our guild on EQ2’s Test server. It was our main server for five years until we moved to Freeport when EQ2X started. That guild doesn’t belong to either of us, though. We joined it when it started and Mrs Bhagpuss came up with the guild name, but it was started by someone else and a couple of their friends and family.
Within a few months the only active members were Mrs Bhagpuss and me. Apart from one or two brief pop-ins several years ago, we’ve never seen any of the other members since. We didn’t know them out of game and don’t have any real-life contact details for them. The Guild MOTD for years has asked the Guild Leader to pass leadership on to one of us should they ever log in, but they never have.
I completely agree with you, however, that kicking people out of the guild is Not On. When Guild Leadership is passed to a new person through an automatic process, that new Guild Leader should not even get the ability to remove members who were in the guild before he or she took over unless those players are online at the time. Instead they should be able to flag members as “Inactive” if they have not logged in for, say, 30 consecutive days, rendering them invisible to everyone but the Guild Leader until they log in, when they would become “Active” again.
LikeLike
Find out who this asshat is in EVE. I have locator agents.
LikeLike