Syzygy entered our first expansion, Legion, with certain expectations: we needed to all get gear from sources outside of raids (dungeons, quests, crafting), reaching something like ilvl 845; we were going to raid mythic difficulty and do as well as we could; we were going to do ‘split runs’, which means each person needed 2 characters that were decently strong (one main, one alt). Split runs come with benefits and pitfalls: that each person has 2 characters allows us to do the raid two times a week, and get twice the amount of gear, which means we can become stronger much faster. However, it means a much higher time-commitment, as just getting one character up to par could take 20 hours a week when the expansion starts. All the top guilds did it though, so we were planning on doing it too.

Individually, on the other hand, it appears people had all sorts of different expectations. Those who did not know me well (Amber’s group of people, and some of the newer PUG members) were unsure about how well we would do (remember 3 days before Legion we had just lost about a fifth of our guild, when Leblanc’s people left). Many, if not all, of Amber’s people came in with the assumption that they were going to an inferior guild than the one they were at (Check Please, at its best, had been about world 300. This is the first time I’ve checked, and I’m surprised it wasn’t much better. Give me a second to try to get over my outrage that they treated us as though we were so inferior, with such contempt and scorn, when really at their best they were about as good as us when we were at our best later). Most of the PUGs who knew me well were probably pretty hyped, feeling that they were moving up in the community, having faith we’d do well, and putting in a lot of effort to do their best by us. As for myself, I was almost constantly wondering: can I do this? I actually had no idea what a guild at the level I was striving to be at was like. I had heard about the concept of split runs, that top guilds did them, but I had no idea what that entailed, what I should expect from guildies, what I should expect from myself, what guildies should expect of me… most WoW raiders who attempted to pull together a guild at this level either had been in top guilds themselves, or at least followed the community enough to have a reasonable understanding of what top WoW guilds did. For me, I still felt like a noob. I had thrown myself into the deep end with no knowledge of what deep meant, and though I knew I wouldn’t let myself sink, I swam by flailing about, pushing for what I thought may work and hoping it really would. I wrote about it at the time: my doubts and fears.

So flail about I did. At the same time, I became a bit worried about how much our guild was actually coming together and bonding. Because I live in Asia, the main overlap of time I have with other guildies is during their nighttime, and my morning. Otherwise, the rest of the time I’m doing stuff in game, most others are sleeping. Also, I was so consumed by my doubts and fears that I was spending very little time hanging out with guildies on Discord, and every day that passed was opportunities I let slide to bring our guild together to become one big group of friends. In 2014, 2015, I raided with a group called The Misfits, they weren’t a guild, but they raided together weekly. I have forever felt they were my ideal group of gamer friends. They hung out together as long as they were online, and were extremely comfortable with each other, whether being silent together or chatting. After raids, they would talk about random things (one night we discussed whether people form sentences in their minds when they’re thinking, or use images: I personally don’t do either; another night we talked about how sailors in the past had sex with sea lions to relieve their sexual urges). When I started joining them, they immediately made me feel welcome, made me feel like they all knew each other well and wanted to get to know me well, and make sure I got to know them well also. I so desperately wanted to have that in my own guild as well, yet I was not comfortable with myself or with most other people, and randomly coming up with topics is really only something I can do when I’m very comfortable or drunk. I know, I should’ve gotten drunk more often.

Either way though, I noticed that people didn’t really hang out with each other that much. And at the same time, friction between people started cropping up.

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The cast:
Amber – my main officer, a dps, member of a clique of people from Check Please
Tomi – dps part of Amber’s clique
Ultra – PUG healer who had been with me for awhile (we had 4 healers total)
Tranquility – PUG healer who was new, had only been with me for a week or so (one of our 4 healers)
Fluffed – PUG tank who had been with me for awhile, was forced last minute into the tanking role, less prepared to tank at the level we were looking for at the time (one of our two tanks)
Asterix – PUG tank who had been with me for nearly two years, slotted as main tank from the start (one of our two tanks)
Sunstep – PUG dps who was new, had only been with me for a short time before Legion
Isam – dps part of Amber’s clique
Judy – dps part of Amber’s clique
Tygor – PUG dps who had been with me for a year. Can make inappropriate jokes.

The events:
09/03/16 – Tomi finally transferred servers, and when Amber invited him, she made his rank ‘core raider’. Ultra was upset because everyone else was ‘raider’ at the time. Amber didn’t know so she was surprised, and I didn’t care because who cares about the name of the rank?

09/05/16 – I hear from my last guild Symbiosis that Tranquility was applying to them, which means he was thinking of leaving us. This is less than a week into the expansion, two weeks before we even start raiding.
Same day – Amber tells me she is worried about whether or not Fluffed can perform well enough as a tank, citing his reaction time to some tank mechanics.
Same day – There are complaints that Asterix only played with his friends who aren’t in our guild. This is while he may be needed in dungeon parties to tank for guildies. Also complaints that he was being condescending to people.

09/06/16 – Sunstep invites Isam to his dungeon party, then kicks him later for some random PUG person no one knew. Isam and all of Amber’s clique are furious. I talk to Sunstep and he says he knew Isam from long ago and in his assessment Isam is a weak player, and he didn’t want to bring a weak player into his group.
Same day – I am told that Asterix got a great piece of gear that he didn’t need, and sold it for personal gold instead of seeing if it could be used by other guildies to help our guild, making people feel even more that he’s not a team player.

09/11/16 – Sunstep invites Judy to his group, then kicks her later. I talk to Sunstep and he says he wanted Judy in because in his assessment Judy is very strong, inviting someone else was a mistake made by someone else in his party. He tried explaining this to Judy, but what with how he treated Isam before, Judy has no patience for his explanations.
Same day – Isam tells me Tygor’s chatter and jokes are seriously offensive. I talk to Tygor and he promises to be more careful.

09/20/16 – I find that Amber and her clique had been operating under the assumption that we were to raid 3 hours a day, 3 days a week, totaling 9 hours a week. In truth, and in our full guild meeting, I had said it would be 12 hours a week (we had decided by then on 3 hours a day, 4 days a week). That was an entire extra day above what they (and many of the people Judy had been trying to recruit for us) had assumed. They were unhappy with that, but many others outside their clique would have been unhappy to lower the amount of raid time to 9 hours.

On a side note, since these others outside of Amber’s clique liked and respected me, they probably would not have caused trouble if I had forced the change to 9 hours. On the other hand, I felt it was possible almost all of Amber’s clique would drop out if we continued as 12 hours. As a leader if I were to choose between losing another 5 or so people (Amber’s clique) or forcing a sudden change to less raid time, I would have forced the change. I was loathe to do so though, since it meant forcing the majority, more team-spirited people to change their schedules to accommodate a minority, more diva-minded clique that had not paid attention during our guild meeting. It is an example of the type of calculation I was making on an almost daily basis, with my ultimate decision often not reflecting what I personally preferred, but what would be more sustainable for the guild. Fortunately, in this instance, as time went on, it became unnecessary to force that change, though I have little doubt it added to the resentment Amber’s clique harbored against me and the guild.

 

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None of these bits of friction was a big deal. Some were a bit annoying because they might require us to step in to moderate things, and that took a bit of time, but it wasn’t a big deal. A slightly bigger problem with it is that it founded some feelings of resentment or prejudice between people, and these feelings would later build to become bigger issues of drama later. But at the time, these were just little bits of friction that I still feel were natural as we tried to incorporate people from many different backgrounds into the same guild.

What felt to be a much bigger deal at the time was our roster. One week into Legion, we found that only 20 people had characters at max level (it took me 12~14 hours to get my first character there, and I did it within the first day of the expansion, as is expected of most guilds at our level). Of these 20 people, at least one or two were people we knew to be too weak to truly participate in our raids. But remember, a mythic raid requires at least 20 people. When the group of 6 left a few days before the expansion, one or two people started reaching out to their friends and helping us recruit to bandage the wound, but though we spent hours doing this, all but one or two of these people fell through. Our roster was in a definite bad place. We started recruiting more actively by writing posts on public forums informing the WoW world of our intent to recruit raiders. A day or two later, Amber tells me that she doesn’t think we can do split runs, that this should only be done if we have a very strong roster of nearly 30 strong people (we had announced that we were doing split runs weeks earlier, and by then all the PUG people who followed me and knew me well had spent maybe 20 hours of time preparing their second character. Many of Amber’s people hadn’t though). By the end of the second week (one week to go before the raid opens!), we had made a spreadsheet to see where everyone was at with their gear (by now we expected that everyone be at max level). We found that we had only 19 people total, of whom there were 2 who were so weak I believed they would be a burden for us to bring in. That means we didn’t even have enough to do a mythic raid, and this was the last week before week 0 of the new raid. Remember, week 0 is the week normal and heroic open, and the week after that (week 1) is when everyone starts their sprint in the world-wide mythic race.

A couple days before week 0 of the new raid (called Emerald Nightmare), we were really scrambling to fix our roster issues. Judy had worked hard to help us find some people, because she really wanted to help Amber’s new guild succeed, so we were up to maybe 18 strong people on our roster, with possibly more from Judy’s wide social circle. At the same time, however, I also realized that several members of Amber’s group, and several of my new PUGs didn’t really bother to create a viable second character for our split runs. Which meant that though we had about 18 strong humans who could play, we were far from the 40 decent characters (each person should have 2, and we ought to have at least 20 people) for our split runs. This means that when I split the guild up into two groups to do the two split runs every week, that both groups would be substantially weaker, and some people who simply had no second character would further degrade the benefits from split runs. Tomi and Sunstep are the two among the cast mentioned above who didn’t bother to prepare a second character. Out of Amber’s group, only Judy made a strong second character. This was going to be problematic, because it shows a huge difference between the amount of effort put in by different people: those who kept their word and made two characters spent nearly twice the amount of effort as those who didn’t. Another problem that was to arise from this was: those who only concentrated on one character only were able to make that one character stronger, which meant that those who put in more work would end up with two characters that were both slightly weaker. This would become an enormous point of contention later on (with those who worked less hard denigrating those who worked harder as ‘weaker’ players).

09/20/2016 was just around the corner. Emerald Nightmare was about to open. Most of the guild had put in an enormous amount of time to prepare for split runs, yet because some people didn’t put in the effort to keep their word, we were unlikely to perform well with our split runs. On top of that, there were already little currents of resentment between groups of people in the guild. Further on top of that, and most importantly, we didn’t even have the 20 strong people we needed. Week 0 would be a bit of a leeway, giving us a tiny bit more time to find people, but week 1 we would need our 20+ strong people or else we wouldn’t even be able to raid mythic difficulty. In other words, our guild was likely to start by failing its first raid.