It's not very often that someone in our guild is deserving of a /gkick. For the most part we make room for anyone and are very tolerant. I'm
so not saying that we always get along. We don't. There are little squabbles going on constantly, petty animosities repeatedly bubbling to the surface. Sarcasm gets overused. Feelings get hurt. Grudges get held. Maybe these skirmishes are more for the sake of alleviating boredom than anything else. Who knows? Most of the time it just make us better raiders. We strive to beat our nemeses on the damage meter, hitting them where it hurts the most. But once in a while someone comes along that is pure poison. Outhealing them doesn't make you feel better. Outbidding them doesn't give you satisfaction. Their personality is so obnoxious that you cannot ever think of them without cringing. You do not tease them, knowing you don't really mean it. You don't lash out and then immediately wish to apologize. No, every hateful word you say to them comes from the heart, and they revel in making you sink to that level.
We haven't had many guild members fit this description. As I said, we generally manage to work with anyone. If we can't, that fact often becomes apparent during our recruit stage, when both the new members and the guild are checking to see whether or not they fit. There have been a few who slipped through. The pally who
seemed nice enough, until he went psycho in gchat. The priest who complained about everything from loot to raid invites and wanted us to worship the ground she walked on. And most recently, a shaman who criticized other members performances, insisted on being lewd and crude in gchat, and reveled in being the guild asshole.
The shaman is no longer our problem. He was removed from the guild tonight after he chose to continue ranting even after our GM told him to shut his mouth. He picked the wrong day to push, as in the past two days the officers had been arguing amongst ourselves about what to do with him. In the end, on the GM's orders, another officer gave him the "it's not us, it's you" speech and /gkicked him.
The sad thing is, no one minded. This man had been in our guild for nine months, had raided with our A Team for almost as long, and not one person questioned the /gkick. There were some whispered comments of "omg!," one person who had never seen the speech before (like I said, we never use it) laughed at that, but no one stood up for him in gchat. In officer chat, yes. His champion left the raid in protest and expressed his displeasure. Another officer was unhappy that this individual was removed when another that he detests has remained in the guild for two years. But there was no outcry of "Why??!" from the general population. No one was surprised. No one was outraged enough (or at least not brave enough) to question the decision. They simply accepted this as the inevitable outcome, long awaited or long expected, and moved on to other things.
So now, as I let out a deep sigh of relief, I also find myself thinking about how and why this happened to us. How can we allow someone to hang around for months infecting us with their malignant attitude? Are we really so desperate that we have to accept the kind of people that elicit nothing but relief when they are removed? Is this a product of apathy or the side effect of democratic management? I don't know for sure. I plan to post more about it later, analyzing where we went wrong and how we can do better, but for now, I'm going to /smile and go to sleep.
