I wrote this at the beginning of August of 2017. At the time I wrote it purely for myself. I found it again upon rereading old drafts, and have decided to post it with no changes. This was a particularly raw time and the situation mentioned in here was traumatic for me. I will likely spend a lot of time writing about it when I get to this period.

I need to rant. Maybe none of what I’m writing will be fair. Maybe all of it will be whining about no big deal. But I don’t care, I need to rant.

I’m going to go ahead and say that in my opinion I have done an incredible amount and poured a ton of myself to being good to each and every person in this guild. And I’m also going to go ahead and say that many people do not pay much attention to the good that I do, and focus on what they don’t like.

What they don’t like is legitimate. In trying to be stricter as was asked of me, I understand that I have made the raid environment an unhappy one, and it hasn’t contributed to our progression. So people have been unhappy, and legitimately feel they don’t desire to play a game while being unhappy. However, when this happens, everything that I did that was good for them, all the ways I helped people and protected people, all the ways I sacrificed myself for them became something that no longer mattered at all to them. And they felt legitimized in trying to hurt me, to get the anger off their chest.
This is the life of a leader, yes? If things don’t go well, no amount of good you have done in the past or still do now matters to many of those being led. Your feelings don’t matter, you cease to exist as someone worthy of consideration. Yesterday, I listened for 4 hours to people telling me how bad I was. There were 20 people in the group of people speaking to me. I was bad because I didn’t bench people quickly enough if they did badly. I was bad because I benched people and made them feel like shit when they did badly instead of helping them. People don’t like how I don’t spend enough time between attempts on bosses discussing things. People don’t like it if we spend too long between attempts on bosses discussing things. And through all this, not a single person felt the need to let me know that despite a variety of pushes and pulls and different people insisting on different things, that I have worked hard to get to a good middle ground to make things work for us. Through all this, people just continued telling me what they don’t like about how I do things and what they think I do badly. Thank god they were rarely rude or directly insulting. But really, all I do for everyone seemed to me like it meant nothing to them. They felt legitimized in hammering at me over and over in all ways they think I did badly, for 4 hours, one person after another.

Then, I understand monscape, nectarines, and sithdk all plan to leave immediately, without giving us the 2 week notice they agreed to. They understand that by leaving, we would be in a dangerous situation and it hurts all the players that stay, and would likely cause them to want to leave (as it has done to nearly 10 people, whom I understand feel like it may be too difficult to fix things after the “exodus” that’s going to happen). The 2 week notice is what allows us to find someone to replace them, and is in my mind a reasonable request when we gave them the gear and the everything else they needed to be able to prove to the new guilds they’re going to that they are capable players. It’s also, in my mind, basic respect and courtesy to the 20+ other players that have made arrangements through their lives to be able to be here and raid with us. They agreed to this just a couple weeks before, and have decided to break their word now. I cannot respect this. I cannot respect a situation where when you are upset, you don’t care if your lashing out hurts 20+ of your team members and your friends. I cannot respect people who are so wrapped up in how upset they are at the moment they ignore all the good that we have given them through months and months and think nothing of hurting us even if it ruins us.

In the end I was able to keep us going, with the help of my officer at the time. But I think from then on I have hated the game.