Fortune Favors

TL;DR version:

1. Guild Bank is ninjaed again.  Barn door is not as open any more but too late now.
2. We’ve recently lost 7 level 80s (including alts), several of which were Officers.
3. 2 of the 80s belong to a former officer who will probably not let us use his Vent server anymore because the Guild Bank is empty, even though he didn’t play in our guild any more anyway.
4. Since most (all?) of the 80s we lost are in the same guild and some are family, they may all hate me at this point.  I don’t know, I was too tired (emotionally and physically) to ask last night.  This morning my wife told me at least one of them has removed another of his alts, so it seems likely.
5. I am a horrible, unskilled, and now paranoid Guild Master who’s waiting for <Fortune Favors> to collapse in shambles around me.  Evidence to the contrary is scarce.

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It’s bad.

Why? In part because I stink as a Guild Master.  This is in fact the thesis of my essay – remember it, I’ll be bringing it up again.

Exodous

It started with some of our 80s leaving to join more hardcore raiding guilds.  Not all at once, mind you, but over a period of several months.  This happens with casual guilds, and <Fortune Favors> remains a casual guild because myself and several of our officers are casual players.  We don’t have attendance or raiding requirements and I can count on one hand the number of characters I’ve /gkicked from the guild for any reason.

I don’t hate anyone for leaving.

It might make some people feel better if I did, but I don’t.  This ties in with my whole “If the game isn’t fun change something” philosophy – they wanted raiding experiences we couldn’t provide even with our guild alliances.  They found guilds that could provide those experiences and made the switch.  In their shoes I would have probably done the same thing.

A couple members approached me before they left to see if I was OK with it, promising to leave their alts in the guild and all that.  I appreciated that, especially since it wasn’t required.  One of those members was the guy who owned the Vent server we’d been using up until last night, but he was cool with letting us continue using it so long as we didn’t abuse the privilege.

This past Thursday we lost two more officers.

I took their departure harder than usual for several reasons, but mostly because for most of that day my wife whom I love more than life itself was getting one of these replaced by one of these.  It’s a pretty serious downgrade but the techs at her dialysis clinic were afraid that her fistula had been used so much that any time the needle goes in it could burst.  In their words, “If that happened with a doctor right here we’d still have no way to save her.”  I mention this only to put my emotional state into perspective.

As you can imagine I was under a lot of stress, which led to an outward display of my thesis:

I posted about it.

It wasn’t meant to be rage against them so much as it was against the situation of 80s rarely staying in the guild, but I don’t know how they took it.  Other opinions were expressed by other people, who will not be named here (because I’m keeping this post name-free), but I will say that 3AM posts to the forum while under the influence of doctor prescribed post-surgery painkillers should be taken with a grain of salt.

The official guild stance (and my own stance) is that we wish them the best.  It looks like several ex-guildies have found their way into the same raiding guild so they’re getting the same camaraderie they had with <Fortune Favors>, which is good for them even if it stinks for us.

Officer Account Compromised, Part 2

Yesterday I came home from work to find our guild roster was down by 3 more toons – those of a real life friend who I’d lived with for years and who’d even been the Best Man at my wedding.  My train of thought went something like this:

1. Oh crap why did he leave without telling us did he at least send an in-game mail?
2. Wait, his account’s been inactive for months and even if it wasn’t he hasn’t had time for WoW because he’s directing a play.
3. I’m just going to take a peek to see how the guild bank is doing andohlookhetookeverything.

A quick phone call determined that he had in fact not reinstated his account, let alone removed three of his characters, and I helped get the information he needed to get a ticket open with Blizzard.  The only good thing about this happening before was that the steps were familiar.

We’re not sure how his account was compromised.  My best guess is a keylogger got his password for another site or service (he uses semi-public computers at a local gaming store) and they got lucky when they checked to see if the same username and password worked for WoW.

He had two characters that the hacker had not pulled out of the guild yet, and I demoted them to Probation in an attempt to close the barn door now that the horses and a decent amount of mats/gold had gotten out.

Meanwhile, his main was spending it’s good old time in Storm Peaks – I assume to farm Relics of Ulduar.  Someone in Gen Chat told me they’d seen him at the Library killing Mechagnomes.

Enter supporting argument for my thesis #2.

In a move that was unprecedented for me, I reduced the powers my Officers had over the guild bank.  Before now they’d been whatever astronomical amount of withdrawals that Blizz would let you put as the cap.  It’s now 200g per day and 10 items per tab per day for officers – still more than most people use, and I can always alter it if the need arises.

To complete my round of barn-door-closing, I went through the guild roster and demoted all inactive officers to Well Prepared just in case this scenario reared it’s ugly head again.  We’d still get hit hard, but not as hard as the first two times.   I also figured that should those players return to the game (it’s happened before) I could always bump them back up o Officer.

In my haste I also demoted a couple of our Vent owner’s bank toons, but left his 70 Rogue an Officer.

Obviously my fault

After a miserable Wintergrasp and a not so successful attempt at heroic HOS (3/5ths of us were new 80s and needed gear upgrades, which was in fact why we were there in the first place) I decided the day couldn’t get any worse and went to bed.  Not an hour later my wife woke me up, totally livid.  The aforementioned Vent owner was on his rogue, calling myself, my wife, and my hacked friend out for ninjaing the bank on purpose and trying to cover it up.  I was half awake, but I’m pretty sure he called my wife stupid, too.  Not the worst of insults, but still far from polite.

Insert the rage /gquit here, followed by my wife getting kicked off of Vent.  When I logged into vent to see what was up I was punted off myself before I could finish asking what was up.

<rant>

What adds insult to injury is that he actually thought I would be tempted by the guild bank.  Hello?  We’re not a raiding guild, it’s not like it’s full of Frozen Orbs and Abyss Crystals, or whatever expensive mats you get in Ulduar/ToC/Whatever.

For all his talk of getting the funds together to make chopper mounts, I actually did it by saving up and building one – without borrowing funds from the Guild Bank, thank you very much, which is something I’ve never done and something my accuser couldn’t say for himself.

(Note at the time he asked first and I didn’t have a problem with it.  I’ve let officers borrow from the bank before, I just never saw the need to do so myself because it’s really not hard to get gold in game if you’re patient and work at it.)

As for my wife, she has a bank guild we helped her make that has the tabs so full of herbs & mats she’s gathered herself that if she took the stuff in the guild bank she wouldn’t have anywhere to keep it – she’s already mailing things back and forth between her characters because items in the mail don’t take up bag slots.  For crying out loud the fact that we need to wait before each run so she can empty her bags is almost a running gag now!

And my friend the hacked Officer?  He doesn’t even play anymore.  We lament this fact, but it’s true.  Even if he had the funds he doesn’t have the time, and WoW requires both.

</rant>

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

So there you have it.  Unless things turn around soon I expect ….

Know what?  I don’t know what to expect.  Every time I expect something good I’m disappointed, and I really don’t want to focus on bad news any more.

Most of the people I look to for emotional support in-game are now most likely blaming me for said bad news.

This isn’t fun anymore.

I have to get ready for work.