Guild Leaders: How to handle cliques?

[Freedom]

OP isn't listing the facts right. I'm the monk, and it's literally about the GM and the Co-GM (Who is also his wife) and their feelings. No one in their guild ran any content except for us, which makes us the target for his wife to bring serious drama our way. We are also the only ppl that use any voice com, and because we told them we don't use the guild one anymore, we got crap for it. The only two people that use their mumble are the GM and Co-GM, why should I sit in there alone until they get on? I have a mumble with my rl friend, his wife, and some other rl friends I chose to go to to relax while I ran dungeons.

It basically came down to my shaman healer friend, who isn't a raider, was the only healer geared in the guild in the first 2 weeks, and he exclusively ran content with me, his RL friend. I think that's fine, it's his choice. I brought plenty of guildies, I can name off at least 10 runs in which I brought guild members to mythics, that's not listing any heroics. We also geared the leather wearers, who happen to be the rogue/druid/monk, with loot share. God forbid.

They list in recruitment as semi-hardcore, refused to set up dungeon times, or groups, or professions, and refuse to admit they're really just a social guild.

TLDR: GM and his wife don't get their way, don't run content with anyone, blame us for running content. We're not in there anymore though, after seeing this, and I honestly don't know why we stayed so long.

Glad you saw this thread. OP's pathetic. Infarct me if you like, but... not surprised at all. Controlling humans tend to be pathetic.

[Tankitbetter]

@Tankitbetter Like I said, I fail to see how that matters. Let your ego go.

(1) FYI, your phone number is showing in the first photo, and your battle.net tag is super easy to find too. May wanna fix that.
(2) Being in Death and Taxes means nothing as you weren't a guild leader or officer there. The games completely different now from then. I ran a server first guild BWL --> Naxx 40. Who cares? No one. It has nothing to do with how to run a guild well in the first place. What does matter is I have been a GM almost my entire WoW career.
(3) Your current guild is a large, spam invite guild which is confirmed via WoWProgress who went 11/13 normal HFC. You have streams of people coming and going from your guild which is a terrible sign of how its run.
(4) I handed my guild off (8/13 heroic HFC) to my officers early WoD (as I hated it and was playing ESO), and it still progressed further than yours as a group of casuals. Your Guild vs My Guild w/me not even present. Again, no one cares. Stop trying to impress people because you're just making yourself look like a fool. Only reason I'm even comparing is to show how my casual, not very progressed guild did better than someone claiming to be so good they were in Death and Taxes so there opinion is more valid.
(4) Trying to make yourself sound prestigious and legit, as though your opinion is more valued and accurate than mine, reeks of insecurity.

You're fucking hilarious. You have no idea how D&T worked. Don't pretend you do.

1) don't care
2) see above
3) We quit for most of the shittiest expansion ever.
4) I've cleared mythic HFC personally as part of a friend's guild. Because I'm still friends with the people I raided with 11 years ago because our community was awesome. And it was full of cliques.

Your incredibly personal attacks show your insecurities.

[Deleted]

Kick em. /10chars

Just to elaborate. Cliques are basically the guild equivalent of cancer. A single clique inside a guild is bad because it's effectively a clique within a clique (the guild). It creates division and a "we" and "them" mentality. If allowed to fester, this will only get worse over time.

I've seen cliques tear guilds apart. One guild I was one that existed since vanilla died in MoP because of the formation of several guilds. Started with some of the main raid group people who formed their own "elitist" guild and various other people forming counter cliques in response. It lead to a low boiling conflict of this "pseudo elitist clique" and the other cliques (who were at least neutral towards one another) that eventually tore the guild apart within a week or two.

Fed up with them I and some others from my clique had a honest talk with them on team chat. This lead to them completely freaking out. Because how dare anyone talk back to them. They are afterall the core of the guild. They pressured an officer into kicking several people under threat of leaving (taking 3/4 of the main raid with them in the process). The officer gave n and did so, this lead to the rest of my clique leaving the guild in protest.

They came to blows with the other groups shortly after, as everyone about had it with them at that point. In the end the guild fell apart entirely in a very short time after having existed 8+ years. With pretty much everyone leaving including those parts of the main raid who weren't part of their clique. Last time I checked the guild does effectively not exist anymore. There's still a handfull of people left in it but there hasn't been any proper raiding since late MoP when this went down and even said clique of pseudo elitists appears to have dispersed and joined other guilds.

This is what you can look forward to. Because people WILL inevitably pick up on being excluded and seen as outsiders within the guild and react in kind.

[OrcsRLame]

From my perspective, it really depends on the individual people. I'm actually part of a 5 person group within my guild, (I guess you could call it a clique if you want) but I also like to think that I'm fairly self aware of how destructive that could be if things got out of hand. To that end, I do make a conscious effort to include other people when I can and I always try to be helpful to my other guild mates. I've also let everyone in my group know that if they do something retarded and get themselves benched or kicked off the raid team, I'm not going down with them. I will throw my "clique" under the bus before I throw my guild under the bus. I also don't hang out in the guild mumble very often, but I just don't always feel like being social.

Why did I type all this up? Idk, I guess I'm in a clique so I have a bit of a unique perspective on this matter. I know my own intentions, and I don't want to make my guild implode, but I guess I would be worried if it was someone else. I guess that's a little hypocritical, but it's true.

[Littlepwny]

OP, please rename the topic to Guild Leaders: How to handle the GM's wife.

[OrcsRLame]

OP isn't listing the facts right. I'm the monk, and it's literally about the GM and the Co-GM (Who is also his wife) and their feelings. No one in their guild ran any content except for us, which makes us the target for his wife to bring serious drama our way. We are also the only ppl that use any voice com, and because we told them we don't use the guild one anymore, we got crap for it. The only two people that use their mumble are the GM and Co-GM, why should I sit in there alone until they get on? I have a mumble with my rl friend, his wife, and some other rl friends I chose to go to to relax while I ran dungeons.

It basically came down to my shaman healer friend, who isn't a raider, was the only healer geared in the guild in the first 2 weeks, and he exclusively ran content with me, his RL friend. I think that's fine, it's his choice. I brought plenty of guildies, I can name off at least 10 runs in which I brought guild members to mythics, that's not listing any heroics. We also geared the leather wearers, who happen to be the rogue/druid/monk, with loot share. God forbid.

They list in recruitment as semi-hardcore, refused to set up dungeon times, or groups, or professions, and refuse to admit they're really just a social guild.

TLDR: GM and his wife don't get their way, don't run content with anyone, blame us for running content. We're not in there anymore though, after seeing this, and I honestly don't know why we stayed so long.

That escalated quickly.

[Deleted]

The biggest problem with cliques is the people that aren't in them feel left out. Feeling left out can trigger a pretty heavy emotion response. The clique makes people that are vulnerable to feelings of being left out (which is most of the population). Every time someone looks at the clique (in the guild rooster) they'll feel like shit.

Is that really the clique's problem or fault? If their location status was hidden you wouldn't be able to tell they where a clique. You probably wouldn't even notice their absence on the comms.

Cliques form every where, schools, work, bars, gyms, (insert random thing where you have a group of people).

It gets a little tricky when a clique gets attacked though. At work our manager got fired and the whole team ended quitting the next day leaving 3 people of what used to be a 10 man retail team at the start of December. Same things happen in-game. We kicked a player that was part of the clique for being abusive to other guild members and almost the whole clique left with him.

Cliques are part of life, they're our little mini tribes.
It's awesome to be part of them.
They are hard too manage.
It will always suck to be close to one but not in it.

[Barnabas]

Well this guild drama seems resolved at this point. It was a pretty good read even though how obvious the end was going to be lol.

[Deleted]

I've had something similar happen in cata when they made the same loot available for 10 and 25 man. We went from a 25 man guild to two 10 man groups. There were good and bad players in both groups, and the bads were as usual girlfriends and long standing guildies that never managed to improve beyond patchwerk type of fights. After a while a lot of us were fed up having to struggle clearing normal bastion of twilight, carrying the bads, and some guildies privately discussed about reforming the groups into the good and the bad one, one that'd push heroics and the other that'd maybe kill the 1st boss.

When the GM and officers heard of it, they went bananas and gkicked a long-time tank, while the rest of us just couldn't be bothered raiding with bads anymore. And so a long standing social-raiding guild fell apart almost instantly, except I blame the leaders for freaking out. Yeah the bads might have felt left out and feeling bad about themselves because they'd be wiping on the first boss forever, but they'd have noone but themselves to blame.

That so similar to what happen to our guild, except we forced it before the expansion hit. The more serious raiders left the guild and reformed on a new realm. I wouldn't call the people we left behind bads, but they where fine with not doing heroic content and didn't what the same thing we wanted. The guild started out as a pretty casual raiding guild, our group was the group that changed what we wanted as we progressed. I harbour no ill will to the people we left behind and I still hang out with a couple of them.

[MoanaLisa]

This was fine as long as the topic was about handling situations like this in a general way. It's gotten very specific this afternoon and public and now the conversation is more about that. As such, I think it's time to bring this to a close and let the guild work out whatever it is they need to work out before it becomes even more so.