Losing Friends

Since my recent blog post about guild roster activity management, specifically about having to remove offliners, I had a look today and found myself facing a difficult task. Now it may appear easy when people just see ‘%+&@ has been kicked out of the guild by Bigticket’ spamming guild chat but trust me, there are many tasks around guild management that I would gladly do instead of /kicking offliners.

Today I came across some well known names but two names in particular stood out and made me think twice. Actually a few were alts who can easily return when the guys return to them but our old friends Prozackk and Bigooliess were among the offending group this time with the omenous status of ‘2 months’ beside their names. I removed Prozackk with little hesitation because I know he has had stuff going on irl and I am sure he would understand the situation and recognise the need for me to keep the roster clean these days. He is welcome to return any time ofcourse.

Biggooliess is a different ball-game all together. This is a guy who was the subject of a blog I wrote a while back and described him as the classic Dambuster. However, since he is wary of the internet’s dangers and tries to stay away from stuff he doesn’t fully understand, including this website, I suspect he might miss this. I really hope he is well and is reading this because I would hate for him to log in one day again to find himself in a guildless wilderness when really I should be making sure his home is always here for him.

What I will say is that I have not yet removed him but I simply must because although our old friend Lee is such a legend around here, the rules must apply to all no matter how hard I find implementing them sometimes. I have put them in place for the good of the entire guild so he’s gonna have to be removed and I dearly hope that if/when he returns, he will understand what has happened and why, and contact us immediately to rejoin his home where he belongs.

This brings me onto a more poignant consideration. I am sure Lee is just fine, busy doing other stuff, playing his ‘Faceache’ games happily with no pressing desire to re-sub WoW at the moment but you can rest assured there have been people in the past who have vanished for more painful reasons. There have been so many people through the front doors and out the back over the years that inevitably some of them have fallen foul victim to tragedy and are no longer capable of rejoining our friendly ranks. It’s thoughts like this that make the roster clearing difficult for me because I know only too well how fragile life is.

People often make light of the clean-ups I carry out from time to time and I’ve been known to reply with similar care-free banter but in reality I am deadly serious when I proceed with this chore. I neither want to remove these people nor do I feel easy about the possible reasons for their absence as I fulfil my duties. You just never know the real reason for someone’s extended absence.

On a lighter note, anyone with more simple temporary absence who returns to find themselves guildless is absolutely welcome to give the guild a shout and return home where we will all be blasting along, business as usual; killing shit, trolling Spyrot, rofling at Bigticket’s surprisingly common noobishness, hunting Diputs’ horde abomination, checking in with the Wenya library, getting mass rez’d by Skankas and having the evergreen Debbs plastered all over our faces!

Let me just offer my warmest applause for those people in the guild who hold together a fulfilling real life outside but still maintain a healthy schedule to balance with some solid game time. Real life time management like this provides a solid platform to ensure you are best placed to get the most out of your WoW career and also helps prevent the dreaded ‘burnout’ which is a phenomenon I am delighted to say, I have yet to experience…

/Salute