And So the Drama Thickens

Things are looking pretty rough for the guild right now.  Yesterday I saw new sides of Mom & Mr. Moderate which dismayed me quite a lot. 

Basically, Mom kinda flipped out from the stress of having only 11 raiders show up for the past 4 raids, and kicked a whole bunch of people from the guild… injudicously kicking certain people who didn’t deserve it & threatening others who have been busy IRL for the past couple of weeks.  She did this in the middle of the raid, which brought the low morale even lower. 

Then Mr. Moderate showed cracks in his perfect raidleadership… it became clear that he’s got a real needing-to-be-in-control problem.  I hate criticizing him because honestly I think he’s the best thing since cheesy bread and flying mounts, I probably have a little e-crush on him and in real life I think masterful guys are totally hot… but it’s not good for the guild.  It really isn’t.

Mr. Mod is our One and Only Raidleader.  I think having more raidleaders would be beneficial, actually it’s necessary.  We are lucky enough to have a few leader-types in our guild who are very capable, love to research new fights, are patient and good with explanations.  They are currently sitting around twiddling their thumbs feeling bored and redundant because Mr. Mod never misses a raid and always takes the MT/raidleader position. 

My suggestion was that it would invigorate those would-be leaders AND take pressure off Mr. Mod to let those other guys try leading a raid once in a while so we could see how they do.  If they do well, maybe we can create some new Raidleaders so if Mr. Mod needs to miss a raid (which he’s had to recently), we won’t have to hit a panic button (which happened the first time he was absent) because we’ll have other known raidleaders able to smoothly take the lead.

To be honest, I thought Mr. Moderate would like this suggestion.  I half-expected Mom to object because I’ve noticed she doesn’t like changes to tradition, and indeed she did object strongly, but I really did think Mr. Mod would approve, be relieved to shed the burden of being sole raidleader and take the other would-be leaders under his wing.  Mm.  Nope.

If the would-be leaders were lacking in some way, I wouldn’t be so disappointed in their reactions.  But I wouldn’t even propose someone that I didn’t have confidence in, and in any case what I was suggesting was to give them a chance to lead a raid, to test them and just see how they’d do. 

Last night Mr. Mod had to work late, so I talked Mom around to letting one of the itching-for-more-responsibility guys, Angel, lead the raid.  He took a straggly group of 15-18 people into TK and we cleared up to Void Reaver with 2 wipes.  He was quick with the marks and positioning, delegated target assignments to class leaders (something Mr. Mod never does, he assigns everything specifically himself), and generally I was extremely impressed with what he did with such a half-assed, lacking-in-DPS raid.  Biggie whispered me, “Who is this guy? He’s good.”  The people Angel delegated class assignments to seemed happy as well, they really stepped up to the plate and became mini-leaders to the others in their classes, I’ve never seen them act like that before when Mr. Mod made all the decisions.

Mr. Mod logged on when we hit VR.  He re-designated himself as the MT, which had the other tanks sending me unhappy tells, and took over the leading.  Mom, surprisingly, told him in officer chat to be quiet & let Angel continue leading.  I didn’t say much because, as a junior officer, I felt I’d pushed my opinions enough with the suggestion in the first place.  It was truly disappointing to me that Mr. Mod behaved, there’s no other way to put it, childishly for the rest of the night.  He complained in officer chat through everything, saying “We’re going to fail, this is gonna fail, what a waste of time,”, etc.  And continued to interrupt in vent.  And seemed inappropriately pleased when we wiped.  It was bad.

We took VR down in 2 attempts.  After 4 attempts on Solarian, Mr. Mod cheerfully called a wrap.  The guild, having been greatly reduced in size during the raid (Mom had her rage-induced gkicking spree, remember?), was full of discontent, which all poured out on me in a barrage of tells.  And let’s not forget the unfortunate gkicked people who directed their angry tells to the person who didn’t agree with their kickage.

Mom & Mr. Mod are not happy with me or the guild.  The guild is not happy with Mom.  The tanks and wannabe-leaders are not happy with Mr. Mod.  QQ ensues. 

Bottom line, one of the people Mom threatened to kick is NiceGuy, who hasn’t been online lately cos of real life issues and job searching.  If he really gets kicked, it’s going to set off a chain reaction in which Biggie will also leave.  If Biggie leaves… well…

It’s an ugly thing when guilds get to this point.  It’s all really depressing.  I just wanna raid.  Preferably with people that I like.  That’s all.