Just an FYI… I hated it, you hated it, fine. It’s done. Anonymous comments are live again!

If folks come in and are asshats, I reserve the right to punt ‘em like a gnome.

This is going to be a very long post. I’m serious, this is a long post. It is my intention to, at one time, in one place, bring to a close my discussion of the sharing of our Guilds’ Raid ID that was mentioned in a previous post, as well as address the leaving of one of our guilds’ officers. I’m getting it all out here in one shot, and I hope not to mention it again in the future. Please feel free to bypass this post if guild drama bullshit is not one of your interests.

I haven’t written a follow up to the events described in previous posts before now, because honestly none of it is fun. Generally, I try to refrain from posting things that may depress you, my friendly readers.

Hey, I said generally! If I’m on a tear, all bets are off!

Regardless, hey, I know I abuse you guys sometimes. For a blog, I treat this place as my diary of grumpiness half the time. I know that. I struggle against it.

And I lump my thoughts on the drama that’s been going on in my guild, and with my online friends, into the ‘grumpy diary’ category of subjects.

As you can imagine, it’s been easier for me to try to ignore all the drama, and focus on the good things that have been going on lately. Not just the fun of knowing I would someday soon have an article with my byline in WoW Insider, but also the success my guild has been having in raiding, a success I feel I have helped contribute to. My son continues to grow into a happy, well-adjusted, friendly little guy that says and does the cutest things, and my wife continues to play WoW and likes it, a source of never-ending fascination and joy.

I don’t feel as though, as I get older, I’ve grown less passionate about things… but I do think I’ve found it easier to get past the crap to focus in on things that make me happy.

What has surprised me, however, is finding out last night that there are many guildies that have been reading my blog daily, wondering when I was going to talk about the drama, the events that have been going on.

Kirk has touched on it a lot in his Guild Drama articles, but I felt the touch of it last night. Even though I pour myself out here for all of you to see, big ugly butt and all, I got the feeling last night from some of my friends in the guild that my own motives are under suspicion. One of the main sources of guild drama we are experiencing was someone that I had long defended, right up to the critical blowup, leaving the guild without warning.

Now, I have never been the kind of guy that slaps the blame around with a wide brush. I have my paranoic side, but hey, plenty of folks will tell you that if you practise counter-terror techniques long enough, you’ll start watching everyone like a hawk… because you just don’t know. “Better safe than sorry” is a favorite phrase… as are “Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get me”, and “Hope for the best, plan for the worst.”

But I manage to keep a sense of perspective… I remain aware that I have a tendency to over-analyze, and read things into what people do or say. Perhaps because I’m aware I do that, I bend over too far in the other direction in making myself play devils’ advocate and give everyone the benefit of the doubt, until absolutely proven otherwise.

The fact remains that one of the biggest sources of pain in my guild right now, surpassing the pain of the hacked Karazhan Raid ID, was invited into the guild at my suggestion. I had defended his actions and attitude to everyone far and wide. And now that, by his own actions, he has proven everyone else’s suspicions true and me to have been a gullible sucker, I suddenly realized last night that suspicion has come to rest on me that I may be just like him, because I have not talked about the situation here.

Well, I certainly don’t feel I have anything I have to justify. I personally feel that, more than anyone, I have been burned the worst. I was the idiot that mentored him into the guild, and when others talked about his behavior, his attitude, and the actions he was taking, I am the one that placed my complete trust in his integrity and reassured everyone that they had nothing to fear. It honestly was inconceivable to me that he would abandon the guild and his friends in the way that he did, and when it did happen I realized that I was 100% completely and totally mistaken in my judgement. Now, the loss of friendship from someone that shows that they never really thought of me as a friend doesn’t exactly bother me. Not in the slightest. But the realization that I got played, not just in the last few weeks but for literally months, makes me feel like one of the biggest dumbasses in the state.

Jayboi came into the guild, and the other members of the guild met him, when he was already in his early 60s. But I had been introduced to him by Lucily, an old friend and guildie from a long-defunct guild named Exiles of the Star, and when she vouched for him and introduced him to me, I was in between guilds at the time, and she explained that he had been a long time friend from Star Wars Galaxies, and she had encouraged him to play WoW for the first time. He was level 1, brand new to the game, and I took upon myself the role of mentor. He didn’t ask me to, I took it upon myself to help with questions and advice. When Lucily took a job offer that required her to travel a great deal shortly thereafter, and effectively left the game, I and my handful of other friends with our alt guild were pretty much Jayboi’s main online WoW friends, outside of those folks he met while PUGging.

Over the course of time and study, I eventually joined the guild I’m in now, Legatum Ignavis, and found it to be much like a family… a little dysfunctional, but a good home. When Jayboi became an early 60s player, still PUGging his way through the game, I encouraged him to talk to the guild officers and ask for an invite.

Jayboi, being young, living at home and with minimal outside activities, spends a great deal of time playing WoW. As often happens with intelligent, highly active players that learn their class well, are unafraid to PUG anything and everything in pursuit of better gear, and are always there when people need a group, Jayboi became very popular in the guild, and quickly became one of the people that was counted on heavily. He could be relied upon to be there for any run in which he was needed. He was highly skilled at playing his class, and he was very, very active in chatting and joking. He had a couple of quirks, he earned an insane reputation as a terrible flirt with women players, and he could be hostile and abusive to people that asked questions he thought were stupid in guild chat, or people that asked for run-throughs all the time, or pushed to be in raids before taking the time to get minimally geared, that sort of thing. But his active playing and generally boisterous good humor seemed to compensate for a lot.

Jayboi came to be considered one of the key players in the guild, and eventually was offered an officers position, which he accepted. He raided every time there was one scheduled, he participated in most of the PvP Arena teams in the guild, and he was just a constant presence.

As has been mentioned previously on this blog, the start of real drama came when he and another senior member of the guild, Plyaroo, had an argument. The results of that argument were the offiiers’ decision to stand by Jayboi instead of removing him from the guild at her request, and in response Plyaroo left the guild, apparently deleted her character, and quit the game for good.

Things seemed to go on from that point as normal for several weeks. We welcomed a lot of new players into the guild, we continued to raid and run instances and have a good time. Eventually, a new female player joined the guild, one that lived, in real life, fairly close to Jayboi… and to the astonishment of all, the two of them developed a real life relationship, something heard about often but rarely ever actually seen.

Now, right around this time, Jayboi became increasingly distant from me, my long-time friends in our small alt guild, and to all of his other friends in Legatum. Wheras before he would be on Teamspeak all the time, chatting and joking and horsing around, suddenly he was almost never on voice chat, and almost never responded to tells or whispers.

He played online as much as ever, but began playing with other Legatum guildies less and less, spending most of his time in PvP. When he was playing with Legatum members, it was typically either in raid events, which he never missed, or in Heroic instance runs getting Badges and Primal Nethers.

Now, I of course started getting whispers from folks, wondering “What’s up with Jay lately?”.

And my answers were, “He is newly in love, give the guy some slack. Would YOU be online if you were young and had a great new girlfriend to hang out with?” Or, “The Arena season 1 gear is gonna be available for honor soon, I think he’s just running PvP so he can get a full set.” Or another one, “I think he mentioned to me he spends his time in voice chat with his girlfriend, so he’s not on our Teamspeak much anymore”.

All reasonable answers, right? And I believed every single one of them, too.

Now, Jayboi has continued to run PUGs when enough guildies aren’t on, so a lot of new members have come in from invites by Jayboi. He’s made friends, from PUGing and being great at his class, with members of nearly every high end raiding guild on our server. Many new level 70 faces have joined the guild in the last several weeks, enough to make Group 2 in Karazhan a solid and successful venture.

And now we come to stage two of the guild drama. We have had so many new guild members come in, that when Group 2’s Raid ID was hacked, as mentioned before, we had plenty of candidates to choose from.

As you may remember, we worked hard to try and deduce who it was that had done it… and eventually, we decided that the most likely suspect was the only player that had been invited into the run, had had a major fight with guild leadership a week previous, and had coincidentally enough quit the guild the very next day after the hack was discovered.

It was all circumstantial evidence, but it was good enough for us. We had no proof, so we never officially named him, but he is the person we all laid the blame on, and we moved on.

Time passes… and Jayboi continues to become more distant. His girlfriend mentions he has been feeling very sick lately, he only shows up for raids, and other than that is on infrequently. Still, there are plenty of explanations for what nmay be going on… and when I see him on and ask him directly if he is okay, and explain the worries that people have over whether he is pulling away from us, his friends, and if there is anything at all wrong, he explains that he has been sick and a lot has been going on, but he is great. Nothing whatsoever is wrong, he loves the guild and his friends, he’s just been distracted lately, new girlfriend, you know how it is. And yes, I agree, I know how it is. Absolutely.

And then the newest guild drama explosion hits the intraweb.

Two people that Jayboi had invited into the Guild, Haruki and her husband Wewillfearu, both level 70s, along with Haruki’s alt Ikurah, have all left Legatum to join Green Dragonflight. And Haruki was one of the new guildies that had been in Group 2’s hacked Karazhan run.

Among the Officers of Legatum, the debates began. Had anyone seen them quit? Or heard why they quit? No, the answer is they stealth quit. How did we find out where they went? Wewillfearu it turns out had said some nasty things in trade chat to a Legatum officer, saying Legatum denied him something that none of us understood. Basically, it seemed Wewillfearu felt Legatum was screwing him somehow. None of us understood how, since he had been in for only a few weeks, and he and Haruki had asked for help in leveling Engineering and such, help gladly provided, but it still seemed Wewillfearu had hard feelings towards the guild… and on a whim the officer he was talking to did a /who and saw Wewillfearu was now in Green Dragonlfight, the guild that had boasted proudly of looting Group 2’s chess event.

So the core of the debate amongst the officers became, could anyone think of any reason why someone that was NOT the person that intentionally shared the Raid ID would quit Legatum in order to go join a guild with that kind of reputation?

And none of us could come up with one. After the incredibly bad name Green Dragonflight earned, and the way they gloated about it afterwards, it was just imporssible for us to come up with a reason why someone fro our guild would go join them a week later… unless that person was already a close friend, or tight with them.

So we, the officers of Legatum, in tones of wonder, decided that Haruki, Ikurah and Wewillfearu, possibly all alts of the same person rather than the characters of a husband and wife team like we thought, were identified as having been the real cuplrits all along. At that time, Jayboi’s having been the one that initially invited them into the guild was brought up, but just in terms of wondering if he had suspected they were to blame, and fely guilty about it, and that might explain why he was distant lately. There was speculation that maybe he was afraid that he would be blamed for the hacked raid in part, because he was the one that invited the ninjas into the guild. I dismissed that as being a concern, since Legatum has an incredibly lax invite policy.. basically, anyone that has ever asked for an invite, if they were not personally known to be an asshat by an officer, has been let in. If they turn out to BE an asshat later, action gets taken… eventually. So it’s not like anyone can be reasonably worried that they’ll be held responsibile for the actions of another. Something we need to change, of course.

Anyway, it was brought up, but I dismissed it.

Now, hilariously enough, about a half hour after we had made the big decision over Teamspeak that, yes, as far as we could see, there was absolutely no explanation why Haruki, Ikurah and Wewillfearu would leave Legatum and join Green Dragonflight EXCEPT that they were the hackers… I get a random whisper from a previously unknown player, asking if I’ll come tank a heroic instance.

As I ask around on Teamspeak if anyone knows the fellow, or their guild, the player whispers me again, to tell me that Haruki is in the group, and they are ready to go.

Now, I’ve had people I don’t know whisper me plenty of times asking me to tank. And to mention that someone that you know is in the team, to reassure you that it’s not some out-of-the-blue PUG with strangers, is common practise.

I of course am laughing my butt off. So, mere minutes after we figure out what Haruki did, I’m getting a whisper asking me to come tank a PUG with Haruki in it? Classic!

All the Officers except Joppers are still on Teamspeak… so I get to give them a running commentary on everything that happens, play by play.

My first action is to whisper the fellow back, and explain that, while I am flattered by the invite, I have to decline because I do not group with known ninjas, and Haruki is known by my guild as a ninja. My apologies, etc, etc, nothing personal.

I get whispered back, ‘lol why do you think she is a ninja?’

And I relate the short version of our story to him, explain that he is more than welcome to play with her, but we as a guild are solidly convinced of what has happened, and I thought it only fair to wanr him to be careful.

Now, I have Haruki on ignore… but I am still surprised when the fellow whispers me back, to say that Haruki says she did not ninja anything, and it is completely untrue. And I reply that if that is what she says, that is fine. It is only my word against hers, and I had no way to prove my allegations. However, I personally will not play in a group that includes her. He thanked me for the info, and I heard nothing more.

Now, about 30 minutes later, I logged off Windshadow to bring Windstar up for herbage runs. Instantly, as I buzzed around the Ogre overlook above the Aldor area, I get a whisper… from Haruki. Oh yeah, I forgot to add her to THIS characters’ ignore list.

And what she whispered me, was that she wanted me to know that she never intentionally hacked our Raid ID or ninja’ed anyhting. She had no idea when she went into Karazhan with Green Dragonflight that that would happen, and she was not a ninja, and it was all a misunderstanding.

Now, Chris Rock has a joke… he says women are just like the police… they may have all the evidence in the world, but they still want the confession.

Well, that’s me, too. And now, I had the confession, handed to me all gift wrapped and with a pretty bow. She admitted she had shared the Raid ID with Green Dragonflgiht, and had gone in with them… what she denied was that her actions made her a ninja, and what she claimed was that the looting of chess was a ‘misunderstanding’.

So… thank you for admitting it, that’s really all we could ask for. Have a nice day.

How could anyone imagine that we would believe that, after walking into Karazhan with another guild, and finding every boss dead already up to and past Curator, just as you had left it with your other guild the night before, you had ‘accidentally’ attemtpted Illhoof and failed multiple times abnd then ‘accidentally’ made your way to the chess event, completed it, and looted the chest. Right. Uh huh. And the next day, when this was discovered, you took the opportunity, when you found out, to… say absolutely nothing, wait a week, and then do a stealth /gquit. Have fun, bye-bye, and thank you very much for giving us closure.

We come now to the final acts of this drama.

With the revelation that Haruki had been the one that shared our Raid ID, and with her leaving the guild on their own, closure was finally brought to the issue, and everyone could move on.

What remained, however, was an increasing feeling among the officers of the guild that ’something was up with Jayboi’. The guild leader, in particular, had strong feelings that Jayboi had suspected Haruki was responsible, and had failed to bring this suspicion forward. He attributed Jayboi’s withdrawal from guild conversations and non-raid activities during the preceding two weeks to a feeling of guilt on Jays’ part. For myself, I continued to defend Jayboi’s actions, reiterating the whole ‘has a girlfriend now’ argument for his behavior.

In the course of the last weekend, however, everything ‘blew up’.

The first shot acrtoss the bow was Slevanna, the character of the lady who in real life was dating Jayboi, who logged into the game to announce that she had “had a massive argument with her parents, and she will not be able to play WoW for at least many months… maybe years. Sorry guys.” She then logged off, and has not been seen since.

There was some speculation as to whether she was going to be okay, and what could happen that would make someone have to quit playing for months, maybe years. We had all, I suppose, assumed that Slevanna lived in an apartment on her own, so the sudden idea that maybe she lived with her parents, and they had withdrawn internet priviledges or some other explanation came as a surprise. The unanimous results of the conversation the officers had, however, was to hope that she would be okay.

Jayboi himself came online, and did not mention it at all. When asked if Slevanna would be okay, he answered me that everything was fine, he was just busy and had been sick lately.

In the evening, I noticed that Jayboi was in Zul’aman, and not with our guild. Our guild leader told me that Jayboi HAD approached him about running ZA with another guild that had invited him… and since it was the last night before server reset, he said, “Sure, have fun”.

The next day, I asked Jayboi how it went. ‘Great”, he said. “But I know Whirlish will be pissed. I was invited by a friend of mine to raid with them in Black Temple.”

Now, I refer you to my previously mentioned gullibility. I tend to go with the idea that my friends don’t lie to me. Jayboi has had a history of screwing with me, but I still go along with the idea that people I consider my friends don’t lie to me. So when he said he was invited to raid Black Temple by a friend, I recalled that he was tight with some of the former members of Reason, what was once one of the premier raiding guilds on my server, Alliance side. He was known by me to pug anything and everything, and he had tons of friends and was on at all hours of the day and night. It was entirely believeable to me that he could have been in runs in the past with other friends, even on full Reason runs, where he could have gotten attunement out of the way. So who am I to say bullshit? What I did do, however, was tell him that this would easily be looked at as him getting ready to bail on the guild. “Oh no”, he told me, “You know me better than that. I’d never do that kind of bullshit.” I replied to him, “Seriously, I don’t give a shit what anybody does, this is a game, and if someone isn’t having fun anymore and wants to go somewhere else, that’s cool with me. I left my last guild of many many months because I felt constant pressure to raid more than I felt was good for my family. Some of the old guild I’m still good friends with, and some took it personally, but either way you do what you have to do to be happy where you’re at. But if you’re planning on leaving, you really need to just be open and honest about it. Nothing will make a paranoic get worked up faster than silence. If something is going on, you need to explain it to Whirl personally.”

“Oh hell no”, he says, “I’m not going anywhere, unless Whirl gets all freaked out on me. I have no intentions of going anywhere.”

In the course of good time, our guild leader comes online, and I relate to him that Jayboi had told me that he planned on raiding Black Temple with a friend’s guild that evening, and he wasn’t sure how to bring it up with Whirl.

“That’s bullshit”, says Whirlish, “he isn’t attuned. He’s playing some kind of game, he’s not going to Black Temple. I have no idea what’s wrong with that boy. I like him, but lately he’s acting squirrelly. He hasn’t talked to me in weeks.”

Now, feeling like a ping pong ball, when Jayboi comes on I ask him if he was serious about raiding Black Temple. “Oh hell no,” he says, “We’re raiding Tempest Keep, The Eye. I never said Black Temple.” “Yes, you did Jay.” “Well, I meant The Eye.” And of course my reply, “Well, I’ll let Whirl know when I see him, but he didn’t say anything either way. I still think you need to talk to him, you really need to get this shit straightened out. At any rate, have fun tonight.”

That evening, I noticed that Jayboi was in The Eye… and no one ever brought it up on Teamspeak, because it was a non-issue. Sure as hell ain’t none of us anywhere near going to The Eye.

The next morning, Jayboi whispered me to say that he had a great time in The Eye. “Check this out” he says, and links me an epic. “Everyone else already had this or better, so when it dropped they let me have it. I almost got a second drop, but someone decided they could use it if they respecced someday. “That’s pretty awesome, Jay. Grats.” “Thanks.”

That was the last time I spoke to Jayboi. During the course of the day, the subject of Jay never came up, and I certainly didn’t go running around saying ‘Jayboi got loot from The Eye!’ Mainly cause I don’t really care who has what from where. I know that Jay has, as long as I’ve known him, been ever improving his gear and working towards upgrades. But don’t we all? But it did give me a moment to think about Jayboi and his gear. Having been invited to run in the Eye, it made me realize that, yes, his gear is as good as it can possibly get from Badge rewards, PvP, Karazhan, and Heroic instances. With his winning of both Tier 4 pieces from Karazhan, and the blade from Prince, and other pieces recently, the only place he can get new upgrades is by the guild progressing further, and finally taking down Gruuls Lair and moving on. In fact, except for the Tier 4 pieces, I am in the same position. There are a few of the 50 and 75 Badge pieces that I can still use as upgrades, but other than that, I only need Tier 4 to be done with upgrades from Karazhan and all other similarly leveled areas. It made me excited that Legatum is getting serious about Gruuls Lair now.

That evening, as we played our toons and chatted in Teamspeak, the final event occured. Jayboi came online, announced in guild chat “Sorry guys, I’ve been invited to join the guild of some of my friends irl, so I’m leaving. It’s been a lot of fun and I wish you the best.” Followed instantly by Jayboi leaving the guild.

There was a moment of stunned surprise… we were in the middle of running regular Steamvaults to get my hunter a chance at Beast Lord armor, and no discussion was made of the event. I think we were all just too pissed, for our own reasons.

But afterwards, I talked about it with my wife, and I have narrowed down the two key reasons I am so incredibly pissed.

The first reason, is that I honestly thought he was my friend. I really did. I knew him from level one all the way to the present, something no one else in the game can say. And I made it clear that I care more about people being happy and being true to themselves than in staying someplace and being miserable. I saw that he was following the classic trend of someone acting like they are in a guild to gear themselves up, using the other guildies to get where they need to be in order to be attractive to a more progressed raiding guild, and when I called him on it, and told him how it was starting to look to others, and asked him to clear the air so people could relax, he flat out lied to me. Lied vigorously, and with great skill. He denied he ever had any plans on doing such a thing, and joked about it afterwards to put me and everyone at our ease. In fact, we had a Gruuls attempt Friday night that he was present at, and after my talk with him he seemed to be back to his old joking and laughing ways, being fun and messing around just like the old days. And he made jokes about the whole idea, saying things like “After the Gruuls run, I’ve got a date to run Chess event with some buddies in Green Dragonflight, and then I’m gonna go quit to join another guild.” And you’d have to know Jay to know that is classic bullshit… he /whispers me seconds later to laugh about it, and says, “Let’s see what Whirl says, lol.” That kind of thing. Classic Jayboi. So yeah, I’m pissed now, cause there was no reason on earth to just completely lie to me about the whole thing. If he’d simply said that he was getting tired of always running the same thing, and never making it past Gruuls Lair, and that some of his friends in Frostwolf (where he ended up) were trying him out on a raid in The Eye, I would have understood. I wouldn’t have given him shit for it.

I’ll be honest, I would have been pissed as all hell, because of my second reason I’m angry, but I wouldn’t have given him shit for it. I said, and I truly believe, that everyone plays the game for their own reasons. If his reason is constant progression and gear upgrades, and he is getting frustated over our lack of progression, then I could understand that, and still continue our friendship.

But that brings me to reason number two… he totally screwed the guild to further his own advancement. If he’d approached things like an adult, it’s one thing… but he played games and lied to everyone, and the second he had the very last drop he could use from the progression that Legatum Ignavis is on, he /gquit and moved on to a further advanced raiding guild.

We use a dkp system, and he went on the runs, and he played very well, and nobody ‘carried’ him to get the gear he has. He earned his gear, fair and square. Not a problem. The main issue is that there are plenty of people that could have used upgrades more than him in our guild, that sat out on runs specifically so that Jay could have ‘one more shot’ at getting his Tier 4 helm, or some other item. Some of those players have been in the guild longer, have been JUST as dedicated, and even more dependable than Jayboi. But since Jayboi has played so much more intensely in a short period of time, he needed much less gear to be done in Kara… and the general feeling among Raid Leaders was, “Let’s get Jayboi finished and then start getting xxx into the runs. Jayboi can then go to Group 2 and help then get progressed faster since he won’t need any of the drops.”

Remember, Jayboi accepted a position as an Officer in Legatum. This isn’t us talking about some Machiavellian plans to manipulate guild members, or being pissy cause a regular member moved on to greener pastures. This is the way guild officers try to plan things so that all of their raiding members have the chance to get geared up so we can attempt further progression. It was talked about and understood, we got Group 1 geared the HECK out in Karazhan, and then started seeding Group 2 with people to buff them up and help them get past any trouble spots. Whirlish, Joppers, Nawat, Jayboi, Gerolan, Leviathan have all taken their turns in Group 2 to help them get moving.

And Jayboi goes along with it, and the same week he gets his last upgrade, he’s gone.

So, yeah, I know he has proven he’s not worth my time. He managed to make the guild officers and his other friends feel like suckers, and he succeeded in making me feel like a chump, too.

So that’s the end of all the drama, right there. To be honest, no one has expressed any regret at Jayboi leaving. None at all. The waqy he left pretty much killed any desire by anyone to talk to him. The only thing I know said by anyone, were a few comments about how he had begun to be abusive or rude in whispers over the last two weeks, and the people involved were glad he was gone because they were getting very uncomfortable. The kind of thing you know people can have a hard time bringing up to officers or the guild leader, when it’s another officer their talking about.

So yeah, not a whole lot of sadness at his passing… except from me. Because he brought a lot of fun when he was there, and I believed that when he acted like a friend, it meant that he really was one.

But there comes a time when you have to move on, and accept that sometimes… you just got played.

As Denis Leary might say, “Life sucks, get a helmet.”