Hide Helm.

I have raided with Fancy Hat Club for 8 months. Over those months, I have found a home -- after almost three years of playing the game. A place in which I feel comfortable raiding, and don't feel the need to reach through my monitor and throttle the other 9-24 people with whom I'm wiping on bosses. The 6-hour-per-week structure was perfect for a 10-man guild: Not as many nights as would be needed for Icecrown Hard modes -- so, when they come around, raid extension lockouts will likely be needed so that time isn't spent clearing normal mode bosses first off -- but enough to clear each wing of Icecrown before the new one had been released, and more than sufficient competency to form a solid basis for defeating Arthas.

Apparently, though, I missed the point completely. Today I was kicked out, after assisting with killing Putricide and Lanathel (Shadow and Discipline, respectively, and damn hard roles they are to fill successfully) and assisting with the acquisition of Proto-Drakes and Tribute to Insanity. -- Apparently, even that sentence misses the point completely.

The reason why I've been rejected after an 8-month trial period (Because that's effectively what has happened: I've never been a member; just a very very long-standing, very valuable triallist who has now gotten on the members' nerves to the point where they would rather I leave) is something I'm still struggling actually to find, but I think the best summation of it is: "Some of the core of the guild decided on my behalf and without consulting me that I was not happy where I was, and mistook other 10-man raiding guilds on the same server or on other servers as more suited to my needs, and so have given me a push in that direction."

Yeah. I know. This is going to be a long one.

Firstly, let's look at the guild structure. Or, more to the point, let's look at the perception I had of the guild structure which apparently is not actually how things work at all. At the top of any guild, you have the GM -- in this case, Chayah. Below that, you have the officers. In this case, the officers were the two assistant Raid Leaders: Razzmatazz and Tinytran; with assistance from the Main Tanks -- Finaldo, Lucian, and occasionally Asmodeus (Matsumoto). Below that, you have the raiders.

That's it. That's how a guild works. The GM calls the shots with assistance from his officers. Specifically in this case, there were always two raid leaders in one raid for the purposes of debate and consultation in officer chat -- two out of the three (Chayah, Razzmatazz and Tinytran) were present at all times.

Now I'll explain about myself as a raider: I have a capacity for leadership. I am perceptive, intelligent, and extremely good with language and communication. I can see what goes wrong on a wipe, how to solve it, and how to tell other people how to solve it. That's what you see in a raid with me: I don't pay attention to membership, ranks, or anything like that. If I have something to say which will assist in killing the boss, I will say it in /ra and I will, perfectly justifiably, expect my opinion to be taken note of, because I know what I'm talking about and it will benefit you to listen to it. If you read those last few sentences and thought "What an arrogant jerk", you can click the red X now. No one will judge you. I'll call you an ignorant scrub for thinking that successful raids could operate without people giving their input, but apart from that no one will judge you.

Since I have a capacity for leadership, I understand the importance of a command structure. 10 people with opinions is great; but if no one speaks out to say, "Right, we will take THIS element of this strategy and THAT element from that strategy, because it is most likely to result in success" then a raid will be all theory and no action. Conversely, if everyone says in whispers or in some other chat channel with just a few of their friends what should be done, and doesn't communicate with the whole of the group, bedlam occurs.

FHC has no command structure. Outwardly, it appears that it does, and I truly challenge anyone to come to a different conclusion about the guild's structure when you see three different people rotating who wears the Slightly Darker Text hat, two of them always being present at one raid, and pointing out that "Stuff" is being "Discussed" -- with the rest of the raid listening to what they eventually conclude. I'll let Chayah explain what I mean by that:

You see, I think that your impression of what FHC is is still a bit skewiff. I didn't "found" it, I just "did the paperwork". It was founded by Matsumoto, Finaldo, Lucian, Tuonie, Tinytran, Sinthaya, Clavicus, Maudlin, Riel, Razzmatazz, and myself. I'm not being diplomatic - these are the people who got together, said "hey, we're fed up with 25s and with all the raid group baggage, what if we could do 10s together? as friends instead of as "members"? what would it be like?" I'm GM because they all trust me to manage the guild effectively - I was one of the leaders of the old raid groups that most of them were part of and have been friends with most of them for even longer than that. I'm GM because I'm something that everyone has in common. I'm a unifying factor to the sometimes disparate elements of the group. I'm everybody's friend. I've not got any greater authority or weight than any of the other founders except what they give me because of that friendship. (And I have to be very careful not to abuse that.)

So, underlying the seemingly straightforward nature of GM-->Officer-->Member, what we actually have is a group of friends. This is where problems start.

Count the names, if you would. You'll notice there are 11 people. That's enough for a 10-man guild as it is, and it's a structure that works more than successfully for CakeFM -- a very greatly progressed 10-man guild on the same server who have just that: 11 members, with one of them on near-permanent standby because all of them have 100% attendance to every raid.

The problem comes when not everyone can attend all the time. And this, presumably, is why FHC recruits other people: Not everyone is able to attend every raid, and there are so few raids per week that even dropping one raid reduces that week's productivity by 50%. All it takes is two drop-outs from that 11-man roster -- say, the girlfriend/boyfriend duo in that list of names -- and that's a raiding week gone. There's nothing wrong with that; but if it happens too often then one moves from being a stable raiding guild to a collection of people all of whom log on very occasionally and clear an instance: without the stability, no progression can occur -- and, while progression isn't a focal point of FHC's raiding goals, it factors in at least to the degree that they want to be raiding the current tier of content at any point of time.

So, you recruit extras to fill the gaps. But the extras don't necessarily fit. They might want something slightly different to what you want. In my case -- my "problem", as it were -- the clique (Since that's what it is) seemed to think that I am solely focussed on progression. I must clear hard modes. I must get my proto-drake. I must beat the game. At one point in time, maybe 18 months ago, that may indeed have been my goal: I did beat the game when Illidan was the final boss, and then I burnt out. What I am actually interested in is bringing out the potential of everyone else in the group. As soon as I started raiding Ulduar with FHC, I saw how much potential there was for greatness. Not "Greatness" in terms of a 10-man Strict ranking, or a "Beat everyone else to kill Arthas Heroic", but "greatness" in the sense of the guild fulfilling the latent potential it had in every single one of those incredibly competent 11 people.

My way of helping this potential to be filled was to contribute quite vastly to the discussions of tactics in /ra and on the forums, to make sure that I was always aware of what I had to do -- and to maintain two gear sets, two specs and five playstyles (I'm not even joking. There's more than one way to play Shadow and more than two ways to play Discipline) for those two specs so that I could contribute as much as I could to the success of the group. But, I'll refer to Chayah again:

People in FHC don't want to wipe, but they want to be allowed to show up to raids after a hard day at uni or the zoo or whatever and not necessarily know everything about every boss, or to be allowed to choose gear based on their own terms rather than on hours of theorycraft, and so on.

I've emboldened two things there, because this kind of hyperbole has always irritated me whenever I've seen it; two different and equally strong arguments can be made against it, which I will come on to after I've explained the context of this quote.

Rarely -- and I do mean rarely; I can count on one hand the times that I did this, and over 8 months that's a very small number of occurrences -- I have questioned people's gear choices or spec choices. Not criticised, not blamed: questioned. The times when I've done this have been when we've been chasing that elusive 1% on Anub'arak -- when I was looking for ways in which we could take him down; looking for ways to improve. (And, yes, before you suggest that I didn't look at myself, I did look at myself; hard.) So, fine, occasionally I have crossed the line with one foot, dipping my toes into unknown waters, and perhaps that generated a negative reaction. That is an excuse for an eight-month campaign not to accept me into the rank and file? Something tells me not. Oh, but, Sinespe, what about your arrogance in correcting people's grammar? Short answer: Again, single-hand counting on how many times this happened, and grow the hell up.

The two arguments against this lazy hyperbole are the following:
1) The reason why there are condensed, and very enjoyable to read, strategies on
the guild forums as opposed just to linking people to Tankspot is because it takes 5 minutes; 10 at most; to read a boss strategy. Combine that with the staggered nature of releases in Icecrown, and you're looking at 10-15 minutes per week of reading forum posts detailing strategies. You can do that while on a break at work, or checking e-mails, or while you eat your breakfast. Same with the theorycrafting: The good sections of Elitist Jerks (Off the top of my head and from experience at the ones I have used, Blood Simple springs to mind) tells you what you need to know in a concise and easy-to-read manner. This does not take hours. It takes the mathematicians and casual theorycrafters hours to come up with numbers and prose that you can devour in ten minutes.

2) Since when does everyone need to know "everything" about a boss strat? When did I even imply that? You couldn't do that in Vanilla WoW, and even in TBC the guilds I was in tended to have separate chat channels for Healing, DPS and Tank roles to be assigned. I like to know everything about a boss fight because I like to be able to analyse for improvement -- but on Blood Prince Council, for instance, I could get by knowing the key points: "DPS the one with the healthbar"; "Throw a SW: D on a Kinetic Bomb if you see it's getting low to the ground"; "Be prepared to run when Taldaram is Empowered"; "Stay away from vortices [not "vortexes", you asshats. I've been drilling that into people since TBC.]".

I have digressed slightly. Back to the guild structure, and recruitment from outside: Sometimes, people won't fit. So, what do you do? You'll find out they don't fit pretty quickly -- so, you could talk to them about it and try to see where they're coming from, or you could silently allow your irritation at them to get worse and worse over an 8-month period, recognising that they're incredibly strong players and very useful to your progression, until you get one of the people from the group who knows the Problem Player well -- the GM, of course, because he's the token Fall Guy (Sorry, C, I meant you're a "Friend to everyone" -- that's the term you used to describe it. I prefer "The mask behind which all the bitching can go on" myself. You say potayto, I say "Get stuffed with this cliquery". I mean ... Potahto.) -- to kick the person out and try to explain the unreasonable in reasonable terms.

The problem with the latter choice is that I've been left feeling like an object. An alien. I knew, when I joined, that I had caused a bit of friction. In the first month, this was, I thought, all smoothed over. Chayah was a constant source of sanity in the madness that appeared to be sheer insanity -- For instance someone reportedly got offended during one Ulduar raid when I said "Be careful of aggro in the first few seconds [on Auriaya's pull]." Really. Someone got offended at that purely neutral, sensible reminder. I persevered, because he reminded me that FHC was about accepting others for their faults. So I accepted others for their faults. Seven months later, the clique decided that they didn't want to accept me for mine. But it has been dressed up to me in a way that makes it seem like it's for my own good. Chayah, once more:

So we revisited all the stuff that we thought makes us us and how you could fit into that. The conclusion reached was that both FHC and you would still need to change significantly before we could be comfortable bedfellows. And - I know it sounds hard to believe when you've just been kicked out - but people were genuinely concerned as to how "fair" it was to you to "require" you to change so they didn't have to. They genuinely think that you'll be better off in another group. I think nobody except myself really realised how much you regarded FHC as your home, which I suppose isn't their fault.

And why did this happen? Complete lack of communication. Chayah has been my only point of contact -- ever -- for how I have behaved within the guild; and his disposition to be friendly and see everyone's point of view has resulted in my failure to see just how much people apparently hate me. I don't even know who those people are in the list of 11. I suspected that Maudlin might, but apparently he didn't until four or five months into my lack-of-tenure. Did Clavicus hate me? I spent whole evenings talking with him about everything and nothing. Tuonie, I know, did not -- and he reacted with surprise when he discovered that I was no longer in the guild, and the reasoning behind it; so is it the case that some members of that clique were not even present at the decision-making process where what would make me "better off" was decided without my own voice being heard? Same with Lucian: not so often did we speak, but we did speak, and I enjoyed his company immensely; was all that enjoyment one-sided?

It strikes me that I have not been treated as a human being in this. I have been treated as a problem that needs to be solved; a problem that wasn't solved because everyone was too lazy to practice what Chayah was preaching when he told me that everyone accepts everyone else in FHC in spite of their flaws -- if, indeed, this was the philosophy applicable to new members too. The very fact that I've been kicked out is proof that at not one moment did anyone, with the possible exception of those that I have mentioned, consider that I am currently sitting on a chair, looking at a computer screen, and typing on a keyboard: just like they are. I am feeling the pressure of the keys, my heart is pounding in my chest and blood is flowing around my blood vessels. There are people in this world -- outside of this online guise of Sinespe and those who know it -- whom I love: faithfully, passionately, filially, fraternally and sororially. There are passions I follow: my poetry, my archery, my (simple, by comparison) maths, my explorations of philosophy; that none of them know anything about. My fate within this guild has been decided by a group of people who do not know the first thing about me, because I was an outsider and they were determined to keep me that way.

But how could I say they were determined to keep me at arm's length? Simple, really: None of the people who are likely to have been instrumental in my removal from FHC have ever tried to talk to me. They've never tried to get to know me. They've never tried to reconcile what they perceive as differences with me. Throughout, they have not needed me, thus they have chosen to ignore the problem as best they could rather than tackle it. If all goes wrong? Well, doesn't matter, really, does it? They still have enough people to raid with.

And this is the problem with the guild's lack of structure: Letting no one new into the ranks will cause their ranks to stagnate, and eventually they will die off. What's Chayah's reaction to this?

As I said online, the end to an affair is not the end of its meaning: endings complete meaning. They're a necessary component of meaning. Some day, maybe very soon, FHC will end and we'll all move on to other stuff. When that happens I'll still have some very fond (as well as not so fond) memories of FHC and I'll still have things to be pleased about or angry about and to learn from.

Everything ends, therefore we'll just sit back and let it happen. I'll give you my direct response to that:

You may have accepted "One day it will die", but that's laziness, in my opinion. It's a casual, shameful excuse for not wanting to do anything about it. Yes, one day we'll all die. That's why we make an effort to last as long as we fucking can.

This whole situation has been about a lack of effort. Not in whether to approach me or not, but in the very essence of whether it was worth it to try to approach me. It must have been deemed quite early on -- perhaps even from the guild's creation -- that it was better just to keep themselves to themselves. Perhaps it would have been better for them to stick to that model completely, and recruit no-one, instead of selfishly stringing along very good, perfectly legitimate members only to ditch them at a moment's notice later on.

FHC very quickly became my home. The landlords, who are also the tenants, have decided that I'm "too good", under some ludicrous, hashed definition of the word, for FHC -- that I am unhappy where I am. They think I'd be better off in some flying-pink-unicorn guild where I can be myself. They seemed to think that their lack of desire to integrate me into their group was a two-way thing: That just as they didn't want me in, I didn't want to be in.

I did not go into FHC wanting to be myself; I wanted to be a Hatter. And I damn well did try, okay? To say that this is a two-way thing is ludicrous, Chayah. I have reached out to people; and I've been met by the cold silence of a group banding together and deciding that I'm not suitable for that empty chair on your raiding roster. It was a perfectly comfy chair. I don't want a super expensive and technologically advanced massage chair, thanks; I'll quite happily sit in the comfy, old, moth-eaten armchair into which one can sink and from which one never has to rise.

Sinespe will no longer show her helm, as proud of every single one of Blizzard's cloth helm artworks she may be.

(A side note: Coming in at 3,499 words in length, this is longer than any essay I wrote while I was at University.)
(Another, far more bitter side-note: The last person who suggested on my behalf that I was "unhappy" is still working in Tesco without any kind of analytical brain beyond the shallow. Completely unrelated; I just thought I'd throw something very venomous out there while I was in a "Looking at the people in my life who have sucked hard" mood.)