We all know what Guild Drama is. We’ve seen it, endured it, lived it. Some sick folks seem to actually love it.

Hell, check the forums out sometimes, or WoW Insiders’ Guildwatch, and it seems like some idiots thrive on it.

But what about the little shit?

What about those uncomfortable moments in your life, when you’re logged in and all you want to do is play, and there is a little bullshit going on in the guild that makes you uncomfortable?

Something that’s not serious enough to cry about, or to contemplate leaving a guild over. There are no real sides to take since what happens is pretty cut-and-dried.

It’s not really Drama. Drama means serious business. The very term carries weight, denotes heavy meaning. When someone is going to discuss Drama, you can picture them sitting in an overstuffed leather chair, in a room whose walls are decorated in first editions of the classics, sipping on wine, smoking a pipe (not that kind of pipe, Whirl), and wearing a blazer with leather patches on the elbows.

SERIOUS BUSINESS.

No, I’m talking about something less important, more inconsequential, the annoying fluff, the background nuisances…

The tabloid sleaze of a guild.

The “who talked trash about who, but nobody cares because both of them are idiots” kind of guild crap.

I hereby propose the creation of a new term for this low-grade guild kerfluffle.

I think I’ll call it…

Guild Babble

And today, coincidentally enough, I have some Guild Babble to share with you.

A few days ago I mentioned that my guild entered SSC and had a good old hoedown. We kicked our heels up a little, we danced the fish fandango. It was fun.

And I mentioned how we had 25 signed up and in the raid, but in the end we went live with 23, because we had two AFK as soon as they were invited, and over the hours we spent in there, they never came back… but neither of them disconnected, either.

Now, here is the babble bullshit. The two of them are a couple, live in the same place, have two computer setups, yadda yadda. And they both were part of one of the highest ranked raiding guilds on our server… before that guild self destructed hardcore.

After the blowup, we had the lady of the couple in our guild, and she was pretty decent. She played a Priest, and while she wasn’t as good a player as our main Priest, Kellas, not by a long shot, she wasn’t bad, either. She seemed very nice, showed up mostly on time for runs, seemed friendly. But no one expected her to be master raider, because she hadn’t been one of the hardcore raiders of that guild that blew up. All in all, she seemed pretty cool.

But she was all about wanting us to organize raids around her and her boyfriend. Because her boyfriend WAS one of the hardcore raiders, and once his guild blew up, there was nobody for him to run with anymore.

As an example of the kind of babble I’m talking about… she started going around to other guild members, telling them that she and her boyfriend were organizing a Zul’Aman run, and would such-and-such like to come along?

Well, that’s well and good, I love to see initiative and enthusiasm. Awesome! Except that the guild had plans to run Zul’Aman already, and the only non-guild member going in her plans would be her boyfriend, and she wasn’t asking anyone but the core guild group.

So what she was really doing was trying to get a guild run in Zul’Aman with her boyfriend as a guaranteed member of the run.

And yeah, that was what she was doing. The guild officers cut it off, said thanks but we have a guild run already planned, and if he’s online we’ll see about inviting him.

And when the time came for invites, she went frantic telling us he’d be home soon, he’d be right there, don’t invite someone else, he’d be there soon, just wait a few minutes guys, here I’ll log his character in so you can invite him, here we go throw him an invite, he’ll be here any minute, have you sent him an invite yet, don’t invite anyone else.

No, I’m not kidding.

But hey, he had a very well-geared character, and we just didn’t care. It was transparently obvious what they were both doing, but frankly we didn’t care. If he turned out to be a nice guy, a good player, and fun to be around, then it would be great to find out during a run, right? We couldn’t ask for a better chance to see what he was like.

Well, during the run he turned out to be a bit of a dick, but hey, that’s okay too. I’ve been known to be one myself. We were willing to give him some leeway for having to scale back a bit from his normal run speed. He was also a bit of a know it all on the run, which would have also been fine if he knew what he was talking about all the time. You know what I mean, “You tank this one, the Mage sheeps that one, yadda.” Oops! Turns out that one can’t be sheeped! Guess you were WRONG, son! lol.

The things that make it clear he didn’t actually run anything where he had been, he just went with the flow.

Well, the decision was still made to invite him into the guild, mostly on the basis that we liked his girlfriend, she was really nice, and if it made her happy to run with her boyfriend in the guild, well, so be it.

So what happens not even a week later?

Our big, much anticipated SSC run. The run we had made clear, time and time again, was meant to get us together as a guild, work on coordination, see new things, and maybe get some new stuff. To have fun and give it a shot.

And the two of them came on a little late, but got invited into the raid, and went AFK a few minutes later.

And never came back.

We ran it anyway, with two short in the raid.

We did just fine, we ran it short staffed for a few hours, had fun, had much success. Some more people eventually came online that wanted to come on into SSC. It was the work of mere seconds to boot the two of our AFkers from the raid, and bring in people eager to run.

So what happens the next day?

Dude comes on, and when the guild leader asks why he went afk, expecting to be told something serious came up, instead he is told, over open guild chat, that we are a bunch of assholes, he went afk on purpose (apparently to kill the raid by making us wait forever on them to return until people had to leave), and that if we think we can just walk into SSC and farm trash to get items we are the biggest losers on the server and a bunch of assholes.

Serious! The guild leader himself told me this!

So, two assholes booted from the guild seconds later. And a LOT of laughing to be had.

See, this kind of thing isn’t drama. No one liked him in the first place. He ruined nothing, he affected nothing, he stopped nothing and he did nothing that endeared him to anyone. No tears were shed at his going, in fact there was a general lightness of being.

All he succeeded in doing was NOT take part in a run, and make sure that everyone involved knew that he and his much-bragged about raiding experience had nothing to do with our successes. Nothing at all. If he’d gone with us, he could have made the claim that we would never have succeeded without his guidance and ‘wisdom’.

By bailing on the run but taking up a raid spot, all he did was show everyone that we can not only do it, but we can do it with only 23 people, succeed in style, and that he is as worthless as tits on a Felboar.

It’s just too bad that he took someone else with him. But hey, it was apparently her choice to go afk too, so oh well. Some tears were shed that she got loot on guild runs that could have gone to people that gave a shit about being in the guild, but hey. It’s only loot.

It’s worth a pretty large price to get shit like that out of a guild before they suck up to other guildies, and when they do eventually need to be booted, people start taking sides and real drama occurs.

When you nip it in the bud this early, it’s just not enough if a blip on the guild’s radar to count as drama. They aren’t worthy of the term.

Guild Babble. I like it.