Van on Fire, Suggestions on helping a Guild disintegrate

When I was driving home today, I saw a van on the highway engulfed in flames. It was freakin' awesome. A giant pillar of smoke in the air, miles of rubbernecking traffic, hundreds of phone calls from onlookers to their friends and families, updates on the news and radio. Everyone had to tell everyone else they knew about this awesome flaming van.

Odds are very good that your guild is eventually going to die. Do you have the will and desire to make it like that van, or are you going to let it go quietly into that gentle, dark night?

With your help, your guild can turn into that van.

You know its coming, when its coming. One day you're corpse camping a level 58 Deathknight the second he steps out of his protective bubble of phasing, and the next you're watching all this green text fly across your screen with an epic display of uncreative gay epithets and nerd rage.

The normal reaction is to try to help everyone settle the issue. Why would you do this? It takes work and patience to try to get unreasonable people to cooperate about a grouping of pixels. Besides, this is no fun to do. You also get yelled at, and it takes precious minutes away from your griefing.

When I was driving by that burning van, who looked to be having more fun, the police and firemen that were setting up to put out the blaze, or the lazy maintenance staff gawking from the side of the road and taking pictures with their cameras?

This answer should be pretty obvious to you.

The key to the most effective demolition of a raid guild is to completely undermine the most trusted person, while doing it in a way that appears as you expressing your feelings about the situation in what seems to be a a caring and heartfelt way. This is known to the professionals as a concern troll. Question the most dedicated guy's commitment to the guild. This will enrage them beyond all belief.

Once you have this guy riled up, you can hope that he does something crazy that legitimately pisses off another really prominent and dedicated member. Now we have the fun of faction warfare, as the entire guild splits into three parties, Team A, Team B and the trolls and lazies.

For most guilds, this is really all that is necessary. You can then sit back and marvel at the multi-page rage posts from half the guild on your forums. This alone should result in several hours of entertainment. Lord of the flies type governance will occur, often with some ninja looting, sexuality questioning, and guild bank theft.

There really is nothing more entertaining than drama that you are not a part of. Entire channels and genres of entertainment are based upon this notion.

Why would you do this to your friends and guildmates? Perhaps you're a horrible person, but consider this:

Your guild probably has cancer. You can either let it kill itself slowly a la Nicholas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, or you can trick it into an elaborate murder/suicide which involves several tankers full of gasoline, a fireworks factory, a country wide police chase, an asian adult film star, and a small dog named Barky being shot out of a cannon.*

Honestly, you owe it to the rest of us. Not every guild can be held up as something amazing to be learned from, but you can help make your guild's story a cautionary tale to be remembered for generations.

Your guild can either be a slow, depressing descent into madness and oblivion, or a flaming, exploded van burning in the middle of the highway.

Which would you choose?


*Animal lovers: Barky survives, and is put out to stud. he also wins a grammy for best spoken word album.