Guild Wars 2

My guild in Borlis Pass has been around since day 1. We grew in size and eventually another guild joined into us. We agreed that the guild’s highest power would be held in a Counsel. We had and always had 5 members of the Counsel, to balance power and agree on decisions. Everything has gone smoothly for months now, until recently.

At a counsel meeting we agreed NOT to make a FB page. We all recognized this and it has never been done. Recently I created a website for the guild (with no affiliation to FB whatsoever) and it caused these problems.

The 2 Counsel members that have caused these problems are buds in real life. At first they were mad and began to talk around to the guild when I wasn’t online, about how I went “against the counsel decisions”. Then after some more time they made their own guild and began to take members from our guild and into theirs. I would be all for this, except they convinced them to leave our guild completely to join there’s.

It gets worse. Now these 2 Counsel members decide to make themselves fool-proof. We play online at different hours of the day (different time zones) so they act at night. They take several gold from the guild stash, demote all the members of the Counsel to a slightly lower rank, change the name, symbol, and permissions to exactly mimic the original Counsel, and finally change the original Counsel rank to God. Now I have ABSOLUTELY NO power compared to them 2, and the guild has basically undergone a hostile takeover! I have gone to GM support…

And there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

Tell me this isn’t messed up! I fear that now he can do whatever it is he wants with the guild I CREATED way back when! We easily trusted them and they were good guys until they slipped and changed everything before we could stop them! THERE NEEDS TO BE ADMIN TOOLS TO GRANT ME AND/OR MY OTHER COUNSEL MEMBERS OUR POWER BACK. Or somehow these 2 need to be removed from the guild, before they even decide to destroy it completely! We need some support on this! Suggestions on what we should do??? I don’t want to bring this to a ransom…

Absolute power corrupts absolutely?

I have run many guilds over the years in many differen’t games. Here are my tips for future referrence.

The original creator should have all the power, making it impossible for someone to perform a “hostile takeover”. Not saying there shouldn’t be democracy, as my guild has now, but one person should be at a rank in which nobody can demote him. If he turns into somebody less pleasing, everybody just leaves the guild. Secondly I dont merge guilds. Never will. It never turns out well because the previous guild leaders/people in power like that power. They want to keep that power.

I mean, I dont understand how they can demote you, the creator. It was from my understand that no matter if someone is the same rank, there is always someone who is considered the guild leader and hence can not be demoted or kicked, even by people of the same rank as him.

Honestly your story makes no sense to me especially since you cant demote people who are the same rank as you.

Deified.7520:

I mean, I dont understand how they can demote you, the creator. It was from my understand that no matter if someone is the same rank, there is always someone who is considered the guild leader and hence can not be demoted or kicked, even by people of the same rank as him.

I’m not sure that’s true. According to the wiki, Leaders are able to demote others of the same rank, even someone who was the original guild founder. The OP’s story seems to suggest that he made the mistake of promoting the two leaders of the other guild to Leaders of his guild, and that’s how they conducted the hostile takeover.

To the OP, I can only offer my sympathies and echo what Deified suggested; NEVER, EVER, promote anyone to the Leader rank other than yourself, unless you absolutely trust that person and know their character to be an upright one. Many people love power and authority, but very few have the wisdom to use it fairly and responsibly.

Thing is, they have always been good guys… this minor event has just made them turn for the worst. I would never have expected. Plus this merge was when we were a small guild, at the release of the game. Now we have 100+ people and I don’t want to have to delete it…

There is no real way to fix it.

In December, they added the feature that allowed leaders to demote people of the same rank. This was mostly due to leaders quitting the game or accidental promotions causing issues.

So either you accept a situation where the leader has more power than anyone and risk him quitting the game, or you risk running into situations where someone with the highest priviledges decides to screw your guild over for whatever reason.

You can still have a democratic leadership even with just one person with absolute power. What you describe happens daily (or close to it) in MMOs.

Asking for more security measures doesn’t do jack kitten if people continue to give out the keys (access) to people right and left.

It’s not as if you’ll ever be one big happy guild again anyway. While these guys obviously weren’t the most ethical people, it says something that a number of members sided with them instead of the rest of the leadership.

In the end, someone was going to have to create a new guild anyway, and it looks like the choice has been made for you. Time for a fresh start. Anyone worth playing with will follow you to it. Hopefully you now understand the ramifications of having full admin privileges for all leaders, because you’ll find that this kind of thing happens all the time.

Deleting the old guild (if you still can) just seems pointless to me. Why do it, other than revenge? They worked toward earning that influence too, after all, and deleting it just hurts them without any gain for you. I’d probably take the moral high ground, because if you’re telling the truth it’s all you have left.