A huge thanks for both reading that long post and replying.
Yeah… I wouldn’t even use that term but others on this very forum use that and “ranking mafia” for this… and yes that gatekeeping term gets used for many other things too like PVE grouping.
You can’t gatekeep honor. People have always been able to farm as much as they can.
Most “ranking mafias” were simply groups of people working together and I’d just call it a PVP community because that’s way more accurate. Within it, you’d meet people from all over your server and find people to group up with etc if that’s what you wanted to do (and you didn’t have to). Something that I find just so good for this version of the game that’s now kind of been cut off from PVP now which was my fear in the first place.
There were some bad PVP communities on some servers or some not-so-nice people who would hold spots and that’s the only thing I keep going back to because I mentally understand choosing to play Era but hating people working together so much. There is already Retail right there for you to play if you don’t like talking to other people. So what would you even be doing here?
Yes GM/HWL did typically require time and not everyone has that (for me how much free time I have is very fluid. Sometimes I have a lot and sometimes I have practically none. Right now my schedule is so messed up that I can’t join a set-time raiding guild. That’s how life goes - and that’s ok. Not everyone needs to do everything. When my son was younger I didn’t even really play video games because I didn’t want to spend my time doing that).
I did the bracket lead thing past when I hit R14 on one of my toons and helped after because some of my friends wanted more help and it’s a lot of work. The whole time I did that I was trying to help people. I’ve also run and been leadership in guilds for collectively 8 years. That whole time this was trying to help people.
A lot of the people who say this stuff do not try to put together their own groups. They do not volunteer. They do not lead. They sure do like to whine and complain and moan about others “gatekeeping” them though. Meanwhile, they’re just sitting there being useless. They’re obsessed with gear or whatever and are mad that they aren’t getting it handed to them with minimal effort on their end, and they think they need it all too.