Or I’ve seen where people not in the clique could still get help they needed, but only if they posted on the guild forums a week in advance and organized things. But the people in the clique never organized in advance they’d be on vent 100% of the time and organize dungeons the last second and not ask anyone not on vent if they want to go. In that situation it’s really hard to get them to see the 2 classes of players because they’ll say “but I help people when they ask on the forum so there’s no problem!”

To combat that I tried to organize more events (I was an officer in that guild), help people out more when they asked in chat. The reason I left though was the guild leader outright lied to me about an event and there were serious trust issues after that.

Actually, its open to anyone who wants to join. The original intent was for more leadership based members, but we have a diverse group of various leaders and non-leaders.

Matticus, glad you enjoyed your visit and hopefully we will see you for the next meeting?

This is my first comment here, but I’d love to contribute my experience with guild-cliques.

We’re a small non-raiding guild, our goal is not end-game progression. We make sure we communicate this to every applicant. Our goal is to provide a close-knit community for players who do not want to be part of a raiding guild. We’re 2 and a half years old and only had the clique problem once and it nearly finished us off. At the time I was guildmaster (now I am co-guildmaster) and we had invited first two then three friends of a member.

These friends just got to 60 a week or so before BC hit the shelves. They played a DPS Warrior, feral Druid and a Mage. They had made friends with a Priest from another guild and one of our long-time members a Rogue. These 5 – one not even of our guild – managed to race to 70 ahead of nearly everyone else. Only 2 others – founding members of the guild and former officers – managed to keep up. At 70 the clique started doing group quests and instances right away, quickly proceeding to heroics. Only when one of their number was not available they would ask anyone else and refuse requests to help anyone – they were instancing constantly anyway. The other 70s regularly complained about them. As more and more people became 70 the problem became more and more obvious. These 5 wanted nothing to do with the rest, only occasionally looking for healers and complaining how we had a “healer problem” in the guild. They skipped any and all guild events.

The complaints from the rest led to the guild leadership becoming the target for not intervening all the time. The complaints were varied and very aggressive towards me and the officers. We had emergeny TS meetings to try and find a solution beyond the “we just kick everybody who complains”.

I then tried to talk to these people to make them see they would have to play with the guild. They seemed rather reasonable at the time and I had hopes it would work. To make the rest of the guild see something was happening and we were finally fixing the problem, I did something stupid and degraded them to the “Novice” rank. The next day the whole group left, followed by a couple more people who took the chance to quit in this “mass exodus” without anyone taking big notice of them.

The problems were not even solved then, because the leadership had lost the trust of a certain group of members – those who had to suffer from the clique the most. This led to further trouble and we lost more members. In the middle of all this I resigned as GM and took a month-long break from WoW. It took us about 7-8 months to recover from the BC leveling phase. Most of those who left after the clique have by now returned and we are currently having a lot of fun together.

The clique proceeded to found a raiding guild forming the leadership and recruiting aggressively. They had a joined Kara raid with a guild that is friendly with ours and would only play if all 5 of them could be on the team despite “their” allied guild being much larger. So this raid broke apart. They then progressed on their own. But the leading a guild is a lot of work … and one day they must have had a good offer .. and the whole leadership – the clique – quit their own guild.

Much later I found out that they seem to have hoped to convert our guild to a raiding guild. That was the moment I was very happy I managed to make them quit before more damage was done.

I hope to have learned a few lessons from all this.

Thx for reading
Bye Yashima