"My guild won't let me…"

As a guild leader and avid blog reader, I see this all the time. 

It has more forms than a Feral druid:

"My guild won't let me raid on my brother's character."
"My guild won't let me play my Warlock instead of my Paladin."
"My guild won't let me PuG Heroic Obsidian Sanctum."

And my personal favorite (not to mention the one that inspired this particular rant):

"My guild won't let me tank."

First, the idea that your guild "won't let you ______" is absurd.  You pay for your subscription, not your Guild Leader.  You control your characters, your playtime, your actions and your interactions in the game.  Your guild simply does not have the ability to prevent you from doing something that you want to do, nor does it have the power to force you to do anything that you don't want to do against your will. 

What you really mean by "My guild won't let me ______" is "My guild won't let me ______ and still be a member of the guild."

The difference is more than mere semantics.

"My guild won't let me ______" suggests that your guild is some kind of totalitarian state that exerts absolute control over you and your actions. 

If joining a guild automatically e-mailed your password and secret question to the Guild Leader, and gave each of the guild's officers the option to take control of your character and your interface at any time, and disabled the /gquit command line ...  Well then.  You might have a case!

But unless my spam filters are re-directing a whole lot of e-mail from noreply@blizzard.com, it doesn't quite work that way.

Sure, I can ask my members not to PuG heroic raid zones, but I can't actually prevent them from doing so.  I simply don't (and shouldn't) have that kind of power.  The most I can do is penalize them for breaking the rules, either by barring them from future raids or removing them from the guild.

"My guild won't let me ______ and still be a member of the guild," on the other hand, is a fair statement.

Most guilds have rules.  Good guilds publish these rules and make them available, if not publicly, then at least to prospective applicants and current members. 

Generally speaking, when you join a guild, you agree to abide by the guild's rules.  You also agree to be removed from the guild if you break those rules.  If these agreements aren't explicit (and they often are), then they're at least implicit. 

Either way, this doesn't mean that the guild controls you, but that you've entered into an agreement with it: to abide by the guild's rules in exchange for membership and whatever privileges that conveys — from access to /gchat, to help with group quests, to a raid spot and epic loot, depending upon the focus (and relative success) of the guild.

Semantics aside — I said it wasn't "merely" about semantics, not that it wasn't about semantics at all! — there is often a reason for the things your guild won't let you do (and still be a member of the guild).

"My guild won't let me raid on my brother's character."

This one came up last night, when our sole tree (one of only five healers in the raid) asked to play his brother's mage instead of his druid, because his brother was called into work but still "needed" gear from several bosses in heroic Naxx. 

I denied the request for two reasons:

1.  First and foremost, we needed the heals!  Allowing the tree in question to play his brother's mage would have forced one of our hybrids to respec (at the guild's cost) or one of our DPS mains to switch over to a healing alt.  I'm not going to force someone into a spec or onto a character they don't want to play to accomodate someone who isn't even in the raid.

2.  The tree is a much more consistent raider than his brother.  It makes more sense from the guild's perspective to gear the druid who seldom misses a raid over the mage who shows up for one in every three.  The guild is not interested in gearing individuals; it gears the raid, so that the entire raid can progress.  There was another mage, two warlocks and a shadow priest in the group who would have made better use of any cloth caster drops anyway. 

"My guild won't let me play my Warlock instead of my Paladin."

I read a post over at Greedy Goblin a few weeks ago that is at least partially responsible for this post.  Basically, Gevlon encouraged a friend not only to leave her guild because it "forced" her to play her paladin instead of her warlock, but to steal almost 24K gold from the guild bank to compensate her for the hours she spent raiding on her pally, as well.

I understand why she /gquit.  In her situation, I might have done the same thing — minus the theft, of course. 

What I don't understand is the idea that the guild somehow deserved to be punished for "forcing" her to play her paladin.  Far from being forced, she agreed to level a healer and, in return, recieved help from the guild on the long grind from 1 to 70. 

Ultimately, she raided on her paladin, saw content, took gear ... and, by Gevlon's account, had fun doing it.

Now, ten levels later, because she thinks she would have had more fun playing her 'lock, she feels entitled to 24K gold in bogus opportunity costs and the moral high road? 

Seriously, this has to be the stupidest thing I've read in the Blogosphere to date, and I've read all of Renoobed's Melvin stories ...

"My guild won't let me PuG Heroic Obsidian Sanctum."

As easy as Sartharion is, Sartharion + 1, 2 and 3 drakes is still progression.

We attempted Sartharion +1 unsuccessfully in our last two Heroic OS raids.  As long as Malygos remains undefeated, the Sartharion achievements aren't a priority for us, so we gave it three attempts each time — just to assess our progress — before killing Vesperson, downing Sarth in "easy-mode" and moving on for the night. 

Still, that's three more wipes than you're likely to endure in a halfway decent Sartharion -3 PuG, so I suppose I can understand why some guildmembers would prefer to PuG OS early in the week, /roll on "free" loot (i.e., gear with no GP cost attached) and pass on the weekend run. 

I understand it, but I don't like it, and have made it very clear that anyone caught PuGing Heroic OS will be wait-listed from Heroic Naxx — a much longer instance that's harder to PuG successfully.

For the most part, my guildmembers support the decision.  After all, they want to raid too, and can't if a handful of members are saved to a PuG ID.  Still, there's a small minority of players who feel the rule is too restrictive, including a certain Death Knight ...

And that brings me to my last "My guild won't let me ______", and the one that inspired this post in the first place.

"My guild won't let me tank."

Shortly before WotLK shipped, my guild's MT announced that he would be making his rogue his new main.  He felt that tanking was "too easy" in the post-3.0.1 world, and wanted to play something more challenging.  Even if rogue DPS was relatively simple to master, he hoped, then the opportunity to compete on the damage meters would at least keep things interesting.

We only had one raiding rogue at the time, and fury warrior who was more than capable of stepping up to tank, although it would have been as fourth tank in seniority rather than first.  (Even without our former MT, we had a solid tank corps consisting of a Feral druid, second Prot warrior and Prot paladin.)

Even though our MT's spot was filled before the change became public knowledge, the moment it did, it seemed that everyone in the guild who had ever had aspirations of tanking spontaneously respecced or rerolled in an attempt to claim his spot.  >.<

I might be exaggerating.  A little.

The problem I'm running into now is that I have more would-be tanks than the raid can possibly support.  I am constantly asking the paladin to respec Holy, the Death Knight to respec Unholy, and the warriors to respec to ... whatever it is warriors do for DPS.  None of them are thrilled about it, and I suspect they'll be even less thrilled when I announce on the guild forum that I'm going to start enforcing Main Tank priority on loot — something I've never had to do before, because in TBC our tanks were such a  close-knit group that they made all of their own loot decisions, largely by consensus, with PR invoked as an occasional tie-breaker.

Now, the junior Prot paladin (who is usually given a choice between raiding as Holy and not raiding at all) is resentful of our Main Tankadin; our Death Knight complains about being asked to respec DPS every other raid (and attempts to organize a Heroic OS PuG week simply so he can MT it ...); and the warrior we had initially tapped to replace our MT after he went rogue has bowed out of the competition and is raiding on his Frostfire mage.  To top it all off, our real tanks are alarmed by the fact that the wannabes are attempting to bid on tank gear ...

If this sounds like a recipe for drama, it is!  

What frustrates me so much is the fact that none of these would-be tanks talked to me about their desire to tank — and the likelihood that they would recieve much-coveted tank spots in the guild raid — before they the invested time, effort and gold into their Frost, Feral or Protection gear.  I would have been happy to explain to them that our tanking spots were filled, and perhaps forestall this "My guild won't let me tank" nonsense. 

Instead, I'm doing it retroactively, and with as much sympathy and support as I can muster (which, frankly, isn't a lot). 

But, really, why would you assume that speccing tank and signing up for raids automatically makes you the MT of an established raiding guild?  Is there something I'm missing here?  Or do I simply have "Pushover" written on across my Undead forehead?