For me, one time something didn’t feel right. The GL called me a friend, the first conversation we had. When I was in discord with, I believe his girlfriend and other members of the guild, she mentioned making tee-shirts with guild logo and offering to sell them. GL was really good at organizing low level events. And the biggest thing, is he’d reward gold and mounts for participation in these events. Like 2k gold for like making a level one toon and participating in a little event for half an hour.
It felt like there were two possibilities, either he’s trying to get a YouTube/twitch thing doing, or he’s getting people attached to the guild, like a cult.
It turned out to be the latter, someone figured out who he was, and there was some documented history as to him manipulating guild members in RL. It was all pretty weird, I quit the guild after looking up the thing, didn’t return any money or mounts I got.
Seems like you found out via people who knew the GMs history that they were kinda sketchy, but the behavior you listed isn’t anything bad on its own. Calling someone ‘friend’, offering tangible incentives for participation, nothing wrong there. It’s hard to get a guild started, let alone keep a smaller guild active. If that was his idea to keep people coming without bailing before the guild had a chance to grow, so be it.
The biggest guild on my server back in Cata ran regular raffles for their guild members. Not quite the same as paying out for every event, but same kind of idea.
Additionally, BDO guild membership runs on a contract system with daily pay and larger payouts for specific higher group content. It could have easily been that this GM came from something like that and wanted to try and emulate it in a basic way here.
Frankly, it’s a not a greeting actual friends use with each other, its more of a greeting for wanting to come across as friendly to people you don’t really know.
When making chars on new servers and getting invited to rando guilds, I’ve bailed on several the moment guildchat filled up with homophobic and racist “joking around”.
For me, it is always the same thing whenever I leave a guild. Cliques.
All these guilds advertise friendly, welcoming community all the time. Always talking about how you won’t just be a number or we’ll help you out when you need it and social guild etc.
Yet when you join them, they all stick to their little cliques in the guild and never acknowledge any of the newcomers. They run their raids and dungeons with their little circle of friends, and never invite anyone else or even socialize with any of the new members.
So eventually the new people just leave the guild cause they feel left out or not welcome. They try to have casual conversations and get ignored, they try to invite others to do stuff together, and no one says anything. They offer to help, and get no response.
Yet the clique of friends in the guild will converse with only themselves and only do stuff together on their own and won’t talk to or invite the new members to do anything.
Always my pet peeve about most guilds out there. And the main reason I leave a lot of guilds. Cliques. (sorry for the long post)
Sorry, but I don’t trust somebody if they immediately call me their friend; it shows that they just want something from me and are trying to scam me or backstab me. It should only be used if the person is actually a friend.
If you refer to your friends as “friend” in casual conversation, I think you might be the odd one there.
Cliques are definitely frustrating, but I feel like some form of it is only natural within a guild. People figure out who they like pretty quickly and want to spend more time with those people. Once a clique grows big enough to do content all on their own, there’s little need for them to worry about people not already in the clique beyond the standard pleasantries.
There’s definitely a scale of intensity for cliques though. The worst ones won’t even attempt to chat or interact with others, the “ok” ones might respond to chat if a question is being asked or if they’re called on by name, and the “good” ones might group up with others if there’s some tangible benefit for them in it (or its something relatively quick and the clique isn’t collectively online at the time)
It’s an interesting problem when searching for a new Guild to call home, because I can’t find myself blaming people for forming cliques. It’s not like it’s an active “I don’t like this person, ignore them” thing.
That said, recruiting new members can actually help combat that. The clique is still going to be the clique, but if recruitment is going well, there will be enough NEW members outside of the clique to interact with each other.
Many guilds that do Heroic or Mythic raiding also run a Normal day to let more casual members participate if they want, clique or not. It’s reasonable to not let every new member into the core raid if that’s already established and the ads aren’t recruiting raiders, but there’s no reason to be too picky for something like this.
And if you’re searching for a guild and find one recruiting for an actual core spot? Well, that’s your ticket to getting into the clique yourself if you’re a decent fit. Raiding often forces the clique to interact with new people when they otherwise might not.
The racials for horde and the new server population made the Guild leader, all the raid leaders, and all the lieutenants in my alliance warlock’s guild transfer from alliance to horde.
Out of an active group of about 200, the alliance guild is now down to 7. We rarely are on together now. And one player has taken to posting in guild chat ‘1/200’, signifying that he’s ever only online alone.
I once left a guild because I couldn’t stand the Degrassi-ness of it all.
The guild leader had a bunch of supplicants all fawning over her and it caused no end of relentless drivel flooding the guild chat. The guild leader also happened to be a raging narcissist, naturally.
One day, I “Falling Down-ed” and called them out for their unending nonsense. Unsurprisingly, this did not go down well and I left before I could get removed.