I had decided that I would really build a guild at around early to mid July, 2016. I’d made announcements to that effect in my PUGs, and some people had started preparing to swap servers to join me. Though I had raid led hundreds of mythic raiders by this time, and had maybe 20-ish regulars, not all of them planned to join my guild (some out of loyalty to their own guilds, some because they only liked to PUG). I probably had about 10~15 people who said they would commit from early on. I expected that with time and with work, we would gradually have enough (a high end raiding guild requires at minimum 20 people, but most like to go for 25~30 people, for each raiding group). I named my guild Syzygy, partly because the idea of stars coming together in alignment seemed fitting, and partly because it’s just such a cool-looking word.

In early July, we started doing ‘guild activities’ by selling raids. In WoW, since mythic bosses drop loot (when killed) that isn’t available any other way, the loot is in high demand. There are people who are unable to play at the mythic level, but who have a lot of in-game gold: they are likely to try to ‘buy’ raids from high-end guilds, wherein they join the raid but don’t need to perform, and the other 19 people ‘carry’ them, and when the bosses die, the ‘buyers’ get the loot they paid gold for. High-end guilds use this to make gold, which is often necessary because raiding requires gold. To be optimal when you raid, there are certain consumables that are necessary, and people need to use certain gems and enchantments to enhance their gear. All these things can require spending gold (unless you choose specific professions that allow you to craft these things, and spend time leveling up these professions). On top of that, whenever you take damage (which you do constantly while raiding), your equipment gradually wears down, and you need to spend gold to ‘repair’ it, or else it will break and become useless. Many guilds try to make gold so that they can offer consumables and gold for repairs to raiders. Selling raids is a quick way for high-end guilds to make a lot of gold, though it can be strenuous for the raiders, because it’s harder to kill a boss when not everyone in the group can hold their own, when you need to ‘carry’ someone. By July 2016, my groups were finishing the entire raid so easily that it wasn’t much of a difficulty for us to carry buyers, and part of the gold made from those sales were going to Syzygy.

Around this time, a friend who had previously raided with me in Symbiosis called Leblanc threw in her lot with me. I knew from the moment she joined me that I would make her my officer. She had a knack for getting along with people well, and a natural ability at organization and administration. Shortly after she joined me, she told me that one of my PUG group people, called Amber, who belonged to a guild called Check Please, was thinking of leaving that guild to join me. Amber had the same abilities that Leblanc showed, and was at the time an incredibly important officer in her guild. Both these women were great administrators, and both enjoyed socializing with people and doing human-resources type things. These are things that I personally have always disliked doing, and do not do naturally. So, from the beginning, I had asked both Leblanc and Amber to be my officers, and they immediately started working on things like making spreadsheets for sales and raid rosters, setting up our website, setting up our Discord server, etc.

In mid to late July, both of them also approached me about groups of people from their previous guilds who wanted to join as well. Leblanc had once been in a guild called Apophasis, and there were 5, 6 people from that guild who wanted to join wherever she was. These people had stopped playing WoW for months, but since there was a new expansion they had decided they wanted to come back and find the people they used to raid with, and raid with them again. Not enough of them were coming back to reform their old guild though, and that’s why they found Leblanc and asked if there was space to join her new guild, Syzygy.

That Amber was considering leaving her guild to join me at all was because, although she dealt with all things administrative in her guild Check Please, her performance as a raider was viewed as weak by her guildies, and they would often mock her behind her back. She had been dealing with this for over a year, and she was getting to the point where she felt too unhappy staying. In the past, she said she had threatened to leave, but each time her guild master had ‘guilt tripped’ her into staying, by saying if she left, then he would shut down the guild and it would be her fault. He said he refused to run the guild without her. This time though, she was determined to leave, and felt she was making a good decision in joining me, saying that my groups never had the type of toxicity her guild had. Her guild master followed through with his threat as well, and with that, Check Please ended, and its raiders scattered to either stop raiding, or look for other guilds. Out of the raiders in her guild, there were 5, 6 people who wanted to go where she went, which was my guild.

By now, I also had some other new PUG members that, though they weren’t regulars, were interested in joining a guild that would be led by me. With the two groups of people from Leblanc and from Amber, we were up to about 30 strong people. Of these 30 ish people, the least experienced and weakest were probably my regular PUG people who had been with me for a year or so: Leblanc’s and Amber’s people had all been in highly progressed mythic guilds, and knew what it was like to raid in high end guilds. On the other hand, Leblanc and Amber’s people hadn’t had time to get to know me, though they all liked what they saw of my raid leading. Of course, Leblanc’s and Amber’s people didn’t know each other either, so my new guild was basically made of three separate cliques of people. I wouldn’t know how completely terrible it is to have cliques like this in a guild until months later.

In early August, I knew I had three separate groups of people to integrate into one guild, and I started working on facilitating this. Each raid needs 2 tanks, 4 healers, 14 dps at minimum, preferably with 1 offtank (a person who normally is dps, but can tank too), 2 offheals (people who normally dps, but can heal too). I picked one tank from my PUG group, the second tank from Leblanc’s group of people, the third offtank also from Leblanc’s group of people. I picked two healers from my PUG group, and two from Amber’s group of people. Most everyone else wanted to be DPS. I spent a good amount of time with the 2 tanks and one offtank, talking to them for hours individually and making sure they got along well with each other and were comfortable tanking together. Tanks that don’t work together is a large source of discontent in WoW, because they’re supposed to take turns holding the bosses’ attention, so the bosses don’t turn around and kill a healer or a dps, but how long each tank holds the bosses’ attention can affect how the other tank plays, and one tank messing up can cause the other tank to look bad. For DPS and healers, what others choose to do have less of an effect on your performance, so the trust between them is not as vital as that between tanks. Another way I worked to integrate people into the guild was to talk to each of them to figure out their available times. Unlike other guilds, we did not yet have a set time for when we would raid. Everyone joined because they wanted to raid with the people in my guild, not because our raid times fit their schedules. So I wanted to figure out raid times that would work for almost everyone, and use this as an opportunity to speak with each individual member, to get to know them, to help them to get to know me.

At about this time, Amber had health issues within her family that were quite a scare to her and required her to go visit them in the hospital a lot. Because she had been treated so badly by her last guild, I wanted her to know she was valued by us, and I wanted also to set the tone for what sort of people we would strive to be. So I decided to buy a gift basket for her family, and created a card that included well-wishes from every single guild member, as well as a couple of the PUG members she knew well. I reached out to the 31 people, asked them if they wanted to add their name to the card (no one said no), and offered to have a short sentence added onto the card from each of them if they wanted. I spent a good amount of time putting the card together and talking to the gift basket company to ensure that it be added. I was happy to do all this because I felt that Amber was a great person, and I felt support like this can go a long way when you have crises in your family. My father had died less than a year before, so perhaps this was also on my mind. It was time consuming and expensive though, and I remember Noci telling me that I could show my support without spending so much time, especially in tracking down each new guildie for it. I waved his concern aside, saying it was a great way to allow guildies to bond, by coming together to support one of our members in their time of trouble. I was also in the midst of working to integrate all three groups into one guild, so I figured that it was a way to take a bad situation and create a little good out of it. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it also gave me a bit of insight into many peoples’ personalities. It struck me a bit strange at the time that many of Amber’s people seemed to not care too much about this gesture, and while some others offered to donate some money to this cause, most of Amber’s people didn’t. I would remember this thought months later, when trouble would start arising in Amber’s clique.

Throughout all this, we were clearing HFC on mythic difficulty twice a week, still in the form of LijiPUGs. Since more people were joining us, and the special mount that dropped from the last boss was still in high demand, I started wanting to give out even more mounts. To illustrate how in-demand this mount was, and also to take a snapshot of the behavior raiders can have, here is an example of some minor drama that arose because of it. One week in late July, I had decided to give Amber one of the mounts, and a PUG member called Fearless got upset about it. I eventually heard about his complaints to his friend, quote, “I spent 16 hours helping Liji because she gives the mount to the person who deserves it and it goes to the last dps” (incidentally, all I remember is Fearless spending just a bit of time discussing how to play druid with me, which may help me personally, but doesn’t really affect the group much, he also had only joined us for maybe 2, 3 weeks, and wasn’t planning on joining Syzygy). In the end, we ended up doing three runs a week to give out even more mounts, and I made a post on our forum to that effect. This was not an easy thing to do, as each character can only do one mythic raid a week, and most people only had 1 or 2 capable characters. I spent hours every week figuring out the groups and making sure people could make the times for whichever run I put them in. Luckily we were a PUG so I could also bring random people in, and LijiPUG was so well-established by then that I always had people vying to join. In the end, though, I feel that being able to give out more mounts was worth it: people appreciated the mounts, and also looked forward to getting their time in the spotlight when I would use the moment of giving them their mount to highlight their strengths and contributions.

Description for video written at the time: “I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, if every raider could be like you: could spend hours upon hours studying and practicing outside of raid, to be able to be great; be willing to stick by me without complaint when we wipe or when we take forever filling; be willing to give up high numbers if necessary to make sure we get the kill…… if everyone could be like you I’d have the most amazing raid. Thank you for being here Keith.” 1 min video.

The new expansion, called Legion, was set to open 08/30/2016. That was when we were going to officially start as a high-end raiding guild, and go full steam in preparing for our raids. When Legion opened we would have three weeks to get our levels up from 100 to 110, and do what we could to prepare for the raid that opened on 9/20/2016. By mid-August we had almost 30 people: about 15 from my PUGs (some whom I knew were not skilled enough to raid at the level we aimed for), 6 from Leblanc, 6 from Amber. Things were going smoothly, we were giving out many mounts, the groups were starting to integrate (especially the tanks), and everyone was getting excited for the expansion. Some people (the tank from my PUG, called Asterix, and a healer/dps from my PUG, called Xanort) were starting to create spreadsheets as guides for the raid that would open in September. Everyone was just hyped.

Then, setback 1. On 08/24/3016, Leblanc said that she would not be able to join after all. She had gotten a new job recently, and had realized that she would not be able to do her job as well as play WoW. She had warned us of this possibility for awhile, but we had all hoped that she would be able to manage. But on this day, a week before Legion was to come out, she finally realized she just couldn’t do it. I made Noci my officer instead, but didn’t expect him to do nearly the amount of stuff Leblanc was supposed to, since Noci was perhaps even less interested than I was in administration work and socializing with people (but he could deal with guild gold stuff, and I had known him long enough and well enough to at least trust him implicitly). However, once Leblanc made it known she couldn’t continue playing WoW, I knew that I essentially only had one officer in Amber. This was not a huge deal for me though, because Amber had been the only officer of Check Please and they were able to run things smoothly there. Leblanc’s leaving seemed only a tiny setback at the time. We called a guild meeting for everyone shortly after to go through all the guild expectations, and everyone stayed just as excited (even though the meeting was boring, even for a meeting).

What was said at the guild meeting. Listening to myself even I find it boring now. 25 min video.

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Then, setback 2. On 8/25/3016, drama erupted during our raid. This will be the first of many such mini-stories about what can happen during a raid. This was the last week before Legion, so the raid was extremely easy, and even if people messed up a bit here or there you wouldn’t think anyone would actually get upset. We weren’t selling, we were just kind of hanging out and getting the mount (it was so easy that’s what it felt like). What happened was this: Keith, a healer, (I called him Death at the time, because one of his characters was named Deathveil, he is the one the mount video above is about) wasn’t able to join Discord that day because the software was having issues on his computer. This meant he wasn’t in our voice communication system, and if anyone spoke up he couldn’t hear anything. This wasn’t expected to be a problem, because Keith had raided with us for over a year at this point, and all of us knew him to be a strong player that doesn’t need instruction at this point to do what the raid needed him to do. Well, all of us who were in my PUGs. Amber’s people didn’t know him. And Amber’s people were apparently not only in the Discord we were in (so they could communicate with us easily), but they also had a private skype call going on (so they could communicate amongst themselves even more easily). Within Amber’s group, there was a healer called Carain.

Early on in a fight, Keith used two major healing cooldowns when the raid was taking a bit of damage. These healing cooldowns were not necessary then (though it certainly wouldn’t hurt), and he did it to ensure that they would be available to use a second time later in that fight (you could only use them once every 3 minutes). Apparently, this annoyed Carain: she felt he was being ‘greedy’ with his healing and doing an unnecessarily large amount of healing to make his healing numbers look higher. She spoke up in Discord about it, but since Keith wasn’t in Discord (which Carain didn’t know at first), he didn’t respond; and since I didn’t think it was a big deal, I didn’t respond or deal with it either. That no one responded annoyed her more, though she didn’t speak up again in Discord. Instead, she complained about it in their private Skype call. We wiped, that attempt, due to random other issues. In fact we wiped a total of 4 times on that boss that night (none of which seemed to be a direct result of not using a healing cooldown at any particular time). Wiping at all at this point in time was bound to lead to some frustration, because the raid should be so easy for us. Since Keith continued using his healing cooldown the same way, Carain kept getting more frustrated, and complaining about it in her private call more, and all of Amber’s group felt by this point that Keith was a ‘greedy’ healer. They mentioned this in the raid chat window, and Keith privately asked me if he should change anything, but since this was not the reason we were wiping I told him to do whatever he felt was right, I trusted him.

During these wipes, there was a time when because other people messed up, Keith ended up positioning strangely so he was often standing near our tank, Asterix, to prevent the situation from worsening. Not being in Discord, he couldn’t communicate this to us, and a confused Asterix spoke up about it in Discord. But of course, again, Keith wasn’t in Discord. By then, Keith was scrambling to find ways to get into Discord simply because he knew the importance of communication when we’re wiping, but he didn’t know that most of the raid was thinking the same thing. People were frustrated, and Keith’s not being in Discord was on their minds (though he was not the reason we were wiping), and hearing people criticize when he used his healing cooldowns or where he positioned didn’t help. In the end, he still wasn’t able to get into Discord, but he did change the timing of one of his healing cooldowns (he kept one of his others at the same spot though). When we finally killed it, because we ended up killing it so quickly (no one else messed up, which was the real reason we wiped the 4 times previously), he didn’t end up using that healing cooldown at all that fight. He typed this in raid chat, in what I interpreted as a compliment to our having amazing dps, and in what Carain and the rest of Amber’s friends interpreted as him being snarky. They were exponentially annoyed by him now, as I later heard that in their private call they had said they looked up the logs of how he used his cooldowns, and he never changed anything no matter how many times we wiped (which was incorrect, I checked later. They either were bad at reading logs, or else they only saw one cooldown used that way and jumped to conclusions). Carain responded in raid chat about the usages of his healing cooldowns with “you should have better opportunities to use SLT and Tide than on the first Imps hoie” (SLT and Tide are the names of his two healing cooldowns, and the first Imps was to indicate the timing in the fight he had used them the first few wipes).

“Hoie” was “Homie”, but both Keith and I read it as “Hole”, as in “Asshole”. I never allow any sort of insults like that to exist in my raids, feeling it’s always fine to mention what can be fixed, but never ok to turn that into personal attacks. I didn’t immediately react though, partially because I did read ‘hoie’ correctly, and though my first reaction was that it meant ‘asshole’, or maybe ‘hoe’ as in ‘whore’, I didn’t want to actually jump to any conclusions about it, or do anything rash without fully understanding the situation. Not jumping in to nip it in the bud was a mistake. Keith apparently responded typing something like it was stupid not to do that (since to him, not using it then resulted in not using it at all, which was simply a waste). Someone else jumped in and typed he should’ve coordinated with the healers, and Keith responded with something along the lines of “you’re being squeaky” (which I again took to be a joke, based on my interaction with him for over a year, in which he has never insulted or attacked anyone that I knew of. But which Carain and co. took to be an insult, along with saying ‘stupid’ earlier). Then I think Asterix joined in again to type about how Keith should’ve positioned differently (Asterix still didn’t know that Keith’s choice in positioning was a hail mary way of trying to save us at the time). Then maybe someone else jumped in to type he should really be in Discord. And maybe someone else seconded that to type really, why aren’t you in Discord. Escalation, escalation, with Keith on one side, unable to fully express himself because he was still trying to use different methods to get into Discord, and with at least 3, 4 people on the other side all saying things like “why would you do this”, “you shouldn’t have done that”. By then, Keith was pretty upset, and typed he wanted to step out that night. He was one of our strongest healers though, so his stepping out would most certainly hurt us. So I think that’s when I stepped in and made everyone shut up about it, and typed privately to Keith that I still wanted him to stay, to which he said he would if he was needed (and he was).

Later, when everyone (myself included), had calmed down about the whole thing, I spoke up in Discord about it. I said that the situation earlier felt too much like many people ganging up on one person, that we should all be careful of if our criticism of any one person can result in a situation like that, which was more likely to make people defensive rather than improve the situation. This, apparently, blew things up in Amber’s skype chat. Carain became furious, she felt that she had just pointed out something that she felt should be fixed, and Keith had been a diva about it, and I was siding with the diva and chastising her for voicing her opinion. Her fury most certainly affected all of Amber’s group, and they were all just as furious about the whole situation, and felt that I was babying a diva and not allowing people to speak up about problems that needed to be fixed. Carain typed to Amber “hey sorry for actin like a major cunt about the whole thing, just got totally rubbed the wrong way by all of it/how it was handled. i’m really not gonna be content to stick around if im not going to be able to tell people that they shouldn’t be playing greedy”. Amber came to me to tell me that Keith had been abominably rude by calling Carain stupid and calling someone else squeaky, that people should be able to accept criticism, that Carain did nothing wrong and she disagreed with how I handled things. We talked for hours about this, trying to figure things out, with my feeling like Keith had done nothing wrong and hadn’t been rude, whereas Carain had insulted him over something that was immaterial to whether or not we succeeded in killing the bosses (in truth I felt she made a mountain out of a molehill). I also felt like how was it at all acceptable for 3, 4 people to gang up all on one person, especially when that one person was trying to do their best for us. (Incidentally, I felt surprised at the time that Amber would take the side of those doing the ganging up, when she had been the one ganged up on in her last guild. It would surprise me time and time again in the future, when I found she became one of those people who would treat others the same way she was treated in Check Please). (Incidentally 2, I didn’t learn from this situation and allowed myself to be the center of a much worse ‘gang up’ by my own guildies a year later, which resulted in my being sure that I must be a terrible person and didn’t deserve to keep living, directly leading to my depression and suicide attempts).

After a very, very long discussion, we finally realized that most of our reaction hinged on the word ‘hoie’, with that being the turning point for when Keith and I thought he was being insulted and attacked, perhaps prompting him to use the word ‘stupid’ at all. It was the branch in the road where Carain and Co. felt Keith was being unreasonably rude, while Keith and I felt Carain and others were being unreasonably rude. After this was figured out, I went to talk to Carain, to try to explain to her that I would never feel someone cannot speak up to voice their opinions, and that I was sorry I made her feel this way. She accepted my apology and said that she would try to forget about it since Keith wasn’t going to join us in Syzygy anyway (he belonged to another guild that he wanted to be loyal to).

The issue was resolved. But it was a setback. It was when I first realized that Amber’s group was going to act like a ‘clique’, that they would be in private channels and work themselves up in a lather and then approach me afterwards when they were all pissed about any one thing. It was also the first time Amber and I would be in conflict, neither she nor I would back down from our standpoints, and it was only the fact that there was a misunderstanding that allowed for a resolution to be possible. It was the first time we probably both felt that the other person didn’t have our backs. It also probably drove a rather deep wedge between myself and Carain’s friends, and I would later learn that Carain is a mean-girl type person, who requires her friends to be ‘on her side’ or else they get excluded. And to be ‘on her side’ would eventually mean to ‘not be on Liji’s side’.

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Then, setback 3. On 08/27/2016, three days before Legion was set to open, the whole group of Leblanc’s people (the 6 or so people, the second tank and the offtank, both of whom were people I’d spent hours with working to create a good tank partnership with Asterix) left. They told me that enough of their original guild Apophasis had come back to the game and they wanted to play with their original group of friends. Both Noci and Leblanc were furious about this (even though Leblanc wasn’t going to continue playing WoW, she still cared about us). Noci pointed out that that group of people must have been in talks about this for awhile, and basically kept us as a back-up plan in case their other plan fell through, even though telling us last minute was sure to be a huge blow to us. It was a huge blow to us: losing such a large group of people, especially losing tanks, was devastating. We scrambled to deal with it: I talked to Asterix and we were able to talk to another of my PUG members, Fluffed, and ask him to tank instead (which means he had to change which character he was planning on leveling, and prepare for something completely different). I didn’t feel that Fluffed as strong a tank as I would’ve liked (much later I would completely change my mind about this), but he wasn’t weak, and we absolutely needed a tank. I wrote a post about it on our forums, hoping to turn a bad situation into some sort of catalyst to make people want to work even harder. We were down to a bit over 20 people now, which while technically was enough, included several members from my PUGs that I wasn’t sure had it in them to do high-end guild progression. But, well, what can you do. At least we weren’t at a spot where we were completely unable to raid. Yet.

Then, lastly, on 8/28/2016, I experienced a bit of a personal blow. Remember how I worked so hard to make sure we could give out more mounts? Remember how I used mounts to make speeches to show my gratitude towards each person? I still couldn’t get it to everyone. Among those I wasn’t able to get it to, was someone called Conkoura. She had been with me for a long time, but she was very weak. Whenever I brought her all I hoped from her was for her to not make a mistake that would wipe us. With a lot of time and practice, she eventually got to the point where she was unlikely to wipe us, yet though she was not a burden she didn’t really bring anything that made her an asset to the group. As such, she got benched a lot. Still, she had been so devoted to my PUGs that she felt I might still give her the mount and the speech that was by then tradition. When the last raid day came and went and I didn’t do that, she was very upset and she left. When she left, she wrote a post on our forums, in which she indicated that she felt I didn’t value or respect those who are reliable raiders and contribute to our guild. That this fosters a selfish atmosphere, and I was likely to censor this sort of thing by deleting her post.

Sure, I knew she was upset, and when we’re upset criticism is given in hyperbole (whether or not there are elements of truth in them), but it didn’t change the fact that I knew I had worked hard for my entire group, and that I couldn’t make everyone happy, and that there would always be individuals who don’t appreciate that and put any perceived failures of my guild on me. In truth the situation didn’t hurt me too much, it was just a small blow that I was easily able to deflect. But it was the first of many such blows that would come my way, where any one person being upset over something would expand it to telling me there are serious problems with my values or the values I instill in my guild. At the same time, validation would lessen: guildies would get used to me and no longer feel there was a need to tell me they appreciated me anymore. The lack of validation and constant blows would gradually, over years, add up, and the day would come when I could no longer deflect them, and felt that all the problems in the guild were on me. That would all happen later. At the time, I was still able to absorb any setback without letting it affect my mentality, and would always be thinking about how to turn any situation into something positive for the guild.

And so, amidst these setbacks, Syzygy formed, and we began to get ready for raiding in WoW‘s next expansion: Legion.