Over the last decade I have grown along with the MMO industry, social interaction has evolved a great deal.
Back in the Pre WoW days guilds were groups of people who spent days huddled in spawn locations for great monsters who's spawn times were legend. And then a phone tree would go out and players who were offline, would start to appear ready to fight this monster that their guild mate was running in circles with while dozens of other players looked on all hoping he'd screw up and get killed so they could start running it in circles until their guild got there. Eventually the once every 10+ days monster would be killed and he would drop his super awesome item and some sort of predetermined outcome would happen. Maybe it was sold and the profits shared among the members who were present. Maybe it was given to a particular member for their service, and maybe some day in the future, if you helped enough, months from now you could have your very own once every 10 days monster loot.
Placating dozens of players who all want cool things takes an extreme degree of skill. I've been there, and I hate it.
As I grew into WoW I started to become involved in the guilds I was associated with. I always put in extra effort to make sure I was bringing everything I could to raids as a personal contribution. Buffs and gear, rep grinds and such. I played a lot, hours every day plus raid times. I was calm and well spoken in voice chat and outwardly reasonable when it came to loot distribution conflicts. This lead to promotions to Officer rank all the time, and ultimatly to my frustration and abandonment of the guild in the long run.
What most people don't tell you about running a guild is that it becomes the game. More than that, it becomes the only game, because the primary asset it takes to lead a guild is time. You can be a great leader, but if you aren't giving the game 40 hours a week your guild will fall apart. Of those 40 hours maybe you'll spend half of them raiding. That's the content you are interested in, that's why you are leading this guild. The other 20 hours, you'll be recruiting, dealing with member disputes, learning boss strategies, keeping up to date on server activities, game news and helping guild members get various tasks completed. Very rarely will you have the freedom to just find something fun to do in the game.
This is why I don't want to be involved in guild leadership anymore. I just want to play the game. I would like to Raid and tackle challenging content. But I also want to have the freedom to just log in for raids for a couple of weeks, or to just not log in at all for a month. And you can't do that if you run a guild, because it's nearly impossible to recover from it.
This is the situation I am in with my guild. It is run by friends, and we like to play together, but we are no longer interested in "leading." As life has, over the years, shuffled our schedules only 7 of us are remain consistently active, and it's a rare time when we can tackle challenging 5 man content. The nature of our overlap means that usually there are only 3 of us at a time, or there are 6 or 7. Almost always too few or too many
I gave it quite a bit of thought and I have determined the only real fix is for someone to get sick of doing nothing and find a new guild. The rest of us would follow. We need to find new leaders and step into the crowd of their team. I am not interested in doing that, as much as I don't want to lead, I am just as uninterested in being lead. But I do enjoy playing with my friends, so I will follow them if they move forward. I feel, though, that they are feel much the same as I do.
Maybe we all just got old.
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