Waking up after my nightly wet dream of throwing off the shackles of incompetent oppression exerted by the EJ leadership, I got to thinking. With as many players as WoW has, and the many guilds that exist as a result of that, there must have been many where bids for power were made.

I'm interested in hearing about those that took place in relatively advanced raiding guilds. What circumstances led to them and how did the takeovers happen? Were they meticulously planned in advance Batman style, or was it just something along the lines of "[Guild] *guildleader* is a douchebag, everyone /gquit and join me"? Have any failed, resulting in the mutineers being gkicked?

In the early days of wow my guild had a skilled but deeply bipolar and unstable leader. Eventually he went beserk because one of our paladins stole his girlfriend that he met in EQ (she was also in the guild - lol)

The cataclysm ended with naked pictures of said girlfriend being distributed by him to every one of the server's guilds' webpages. I think someone even posted them on SA.

Needless to say our MT at the time took five of his buddies and quit. This made the bipolar GM "quit" and everyone else joined the MT in a new guild, which is kind of a standard way to do a coup like you mentioned.

Eventually this new GM/MT got loot hungry for his priest girlfriend and we chased him out.

Ah, those were the days.

Oh no. :(

My currect guild is the result of a 'split' due to the previous guildleader being terrible. Essentially the guild had fragmented to such a state that we were 4 or 5 cliques, none of which were happy with the 'old boy' mentality of the leadership. Numberous snap desicisions were made regarding item priority and raid selection, the most notable being that the people who were least active, got priority spots in raids as 'it was their only chance to be online, so they should be allowed to raid on it' regardless of the 100% activity people being better prepared and geared. It reached a breaking point where the loot rules were changed (for the better as it happened) mid bidding in a MC run so that a paladin could not bid on QSR (we were a 'pvp guild' who had decided to raid to gear up for it) and people were unhappy enough to start talking about leaving openly. This resulted in the guild leader kicking one of the members and saying that he was the cause of all the problems and the run continued and killed rag.

After the raid a number of the cliques moved into their respective channels on teamspeak and were openly talking about leaving and starting afresh, when the guild leader burst in and demanded to know if any of them were thinking about leaving. They admitted they were discussing it, and he kicked one or two more people, before announcing in guild chat 'anyone else thinking about leaving should probably go now' (or something along those lines) which in turn resulted in about 20 of the guild /gquitting and forming my current guild.

These people now form the core of the guild im in now, and we're progressing happily (although not without our fair share of drama) through naxx, while the other guild failed to kill rag again and disbanded. In actual fact, we're one year old TODAY :D yey!

Not exactly a coup d'etat, but its as close as i have ;)

Goon squad on Mal'Ganis has had several splinters, most of them didn't last very long on their own. The guild dynamics basically made it so that the first couple times a "perma-group" formed, someone would get the idea that it'd be a great idea to cut out on their own. There's the requisite comedy guild name, the tells to specific people about going or staying, and a good amount of name calling in any of the "goon" chat channels.

500+ people makes it a bit different from your standard guild setup though.

My current guild had a takeover, of a sort. Old leader simply wasn't leading the guild efficiently, and new leadership was required. Leadership was given up (mostly) willingly for the good of the guild. I wasn't in the guild at the time, so I can't elaborate. I left the game for a couple months, coming back recently and joining this current guild instead of my previous one. I came back to find this guild transferring servers, and I decided it was worth the jump, so I made it with them (Cenarion Circle --> Dalaran).



I'm sure you were looking for something more interesting than that, so...

Seeten (Character name: Cherise) of Cenarion Circle, is the leader of Juggernaut on Cenarion Circle. Previously, many of its members were in a guild known as Heaven and Earth. Heaven and Earth had nearly every server first to its name, but at its core there were problems with leadership, including respect for members of the guild. Eventually, I believe it was Meghara who had enough and began trying to change things, her topic addressing her concerns being removed from her own guild forums, and subsequently being posted on the realm forums, the guild's dirty laundry out in the air. Meghara split off from Heaven and Earth and started her own guild, but it didn't take off so much for some reason. Heaven and Earth took a while to break down after Meghara left, but eventually a substantial number of members split off from Heaven and Earth, and created the guild known as Juggernaut. Some members from other raiding establishments also joined, a decent number coming from CCRA.

Juggernaut is still farther ahead in progression than any other guild on Cenarion Circle. Because of the bad reputation Heaven and Earth had obtained, a lot of that reputation has carried over to Juggernaut. Some of it's jealousy, yes, but there remains some truth within the lies. There will always be bad apples in any guild, I suppose. Heaven and Earth is slowly rebuilding itself, if I'm correct with only its old GM and a few members close to him remaining from the previous establishment. Their raids, while not as successful as before, I hear are more fulfilling than previous Heaven and Earth raids.

This story would be a lot juicier if I could manage to find Meghara's post or if Seeten/Cherise would mind elaborating on the story, perhaps even with other perspectives of previous guild members who went through the transition. I just thought I'd bring this story up because it really is a rather interesting piece of server history.

Keep posting these great ideas guys!







gurgthock ur ded

Like you'd be upset if Dios formed a mutiny.

"Yeah, sure, I'll come lead raids for you......... you /gquit first, ok?"

Haha, this should be a good thread.

Pro Baddies (Unforgiven pre server transfers) started in a similar way a year and a half ago.

An impulsive bipolar GM that most people in the guild didn't like much led arguably the best guild on the server... so people didn't want to be cut out of the loot flow and stuck around through the drama. Over time though it got progressively worse and one day the GM kinda lost it and gkicked a few people that stood up against him or he just didn't like. That group decided to make an attempt to reform the old guild with new leadership and it somewhat worked out.

It ended up causing a big stirrup of drama leading to a 50/50 split and at the end of the day, there were two half-guilds that couldn't do much of anything. The old guild was stuck on razorgore, new guild stuck on ragnaros (pre-split, both were on ebonroc). From there, another 3 guilds on the server died to people leaving for either the opportunity of joining a new guild with potential or an old proven guild that had lost some members. Ended up causing a lot of chaos and a huge rivalry (which was a lot of fun imo, competition at its best), but both guilds went on and did pretty well, killing server first Nef within 15 mins of eachother (at like 4am :P) and both went on to do pretty well in AQ.

"Back in the day" I was an officer in "Holy Circle". We started raiding MC in October 2005. Took us until March to kill Rags. We started right away in BWL and after a couple of weeks had Razor down. Then the Vael ****block happened. Various small issues within guild leadership that were always on a simmer slowly built to a boil as Vael continued to laugh at us. Best we could ever do was 6%. Weeks and weeks of this. At the same time, the GM had gotten a new job and was rarely on, leaving a fractured leadership that had never really trusted each other to spend more time squabbling rather than leading.

All of this led to the inevitable show-down weekend around July 27th. A trusted friend (also an officer in HC) and I quickly formed a new guild (the current House Atredeis) and took anyone who wanted to come over. He became the GM and I have been the raid strategist/bank "investment officer"/DKP guru. We formed a distributed leadership structure (Class Officers have a ton of autonomy - they invite to the guild for their class, but cannot gkick).

We cleared MC the next weekend and then took off on Vael. Vael dropped about 4 weeks after we formed and 36 days later, Nef was dead. It was amazing what a change in leadership did for progression.

We had what could probably be called an 'attempted guild assasination' end of last year. At the time, we had a very large raiding group, probably too many to support one raid, not enough for two.

Anyway, the 'top' 40 or so raiders defected in mass over night to form a more 'hardcore' guild. Our guild was left to rebuild for a few months before we could work on MC again, since we needed to regear an entire raid team. In a true poetic justice however, both guilds ended up killing Ragnaros for the first time on the same night months later. And they finally just killed Nef this week.

The first raid guild I was a part of had an attempted coup by a rogue who tried to split off and form his own guild. He had this entire conspiracy chat channel set up and everything. It failed miserably because a lot of people didn't like him, and were quite loyal to the guild's current GM. The GM later took a hiatus from WoW and the guild then fell apart.

I and some others considered splitting off from what was my previous guild and forming a new raid guild, but I decided (for various reasons) that I wasn't going to do it, and I transferred to a new realm and new guild.

Eh, we were going to make an officer based permagroup - along with hand-picking the highest JP earners of course - for the expansion anyway.

Glad to not be a part of this.

I was originally in GSA on Kel'Thuzad and we had two major splits. The first occurred before I really understood anything abour guild politics or what being 60 meant; Pacifist was formed (my current guild, irony). I can't tell you much about that other than the remaining GSA officers telling us to /spit on Pacifist whenever we saw them. I was still naive and confused and just sort of ignored it all!

I was a participant of the second split. These were the pre-Ragnaros kill days when GSA was regularly running MC and the problem was that the 'top 40' MC raiders were having to split time between the up and coming 60s. The up and coming 60s assumed they had a right to spots as soon as they hit 60, with their greens and all. Instead of trying to run 2 MCs, or having minimum gear requirements, or simply trading spots, a huge undercurrent started. A few of the leaders decided they wouldn't take this injustice anymore and started quietly getting the buy-ins to a new guild from who they deemed good enough. It started with the few leaders and then fanned out like ripples on a pond. I was approached by an officer and was promised that all my friends had already agreed and everything was in place: guild name, forums, Vent, leadership.

I remember it being very hush-hush until the mass gquits that occurred over a day or two. I believe my excuse for leaving was "all my friends are leaving and I don't know any of you." Thus, "Pubbies" was formed and disbanded about 24 hours later for a violation of TOS. Reformed immediately after as Banana Syndicate, we went on to down Ragnaros while leaving GSA tattered and torn.

When we hit up Molten Core a year and a half ago, in a guild called The Void, there were tons of issues from day one. The GL was a great guy, but unfortunately the guild had started out as an RL friends guild, so all the officers were his friends, rather than people chosen for their leadership abilities. This put us in a position where the majority of the guild was more skilled/active/contributing than the officers, which was a recipe for drama. I was a regular member at the time and very tired of being lead by people who knew practically nothing about the game.

One day, one of the officers (I think the only who wasn't part of the RL clique) contacted me, and asked if I was interested in forming a new, more serious guild with better leadership. About 15-20 of us left the old guild and formed a new one, and since this was back when very few guilds had started raiding, we had an easy time filling up with a ton of skilled people with whom we still raid. We progressed at a decent pace for something like 9 months, when we finally hit a block a few months ago on first Huhuran and then Emps due to low manpower. We had always been very picky about who we recruited, which came back to haunt us.

In the last days of July we merged with another guild that also had Emps down, and since then we've had some pretty remarkable progress. We've killed C'thun, Ouro, Visc and 8 bosses in Naxxramas in just under two months, and if our server allows, we'll get Thaddius this week before the two month anniversary as well.

So: The Void -> About 20 people left because of horrible leadership and formed Carnival -> Did well until we finally had huge manpower issues and merged with another guild to become Explicit Content. (Which is now also doing very well).

It seems thus far that no coup ever results in two successful guilds :/

The two most high-profile situations I can recall would have to be the demise of NA and 12P, respectively, though I'm not entirely sure I know more than vague bits of info about either.

Some guilds need a mutany...

Once upon a time, there was a particularly charming and charismatic GL on my server. He was apparently the former GL of a fairly succssful guild that stalled on some content and collapsed, so this was a reroll. Soon after the initial rush of zerg guilds, his guild picked up the better casualties of those and became a prominent raiding force, rushing ahead to down rag very quickly, followed by decent progress in BWL. All the way up to Nef, where they...stalled. And bleed members, very badly. My guild ended up picking up some of thier members (which is how I know some of this story)....only to lose them when he announced he was rerolling on another server.

A new server, where they quickly zoomed up to Nef and...stalled. And collapsed, bled members. After a short break, he did it again.....and this time they got Nef, and managed to down Huhuran once. They have since imploded, and I fully expect the next server open he'll be grabbing up his former guildmates and convincing them to follow him, once again.

I'm being nonspecific, but I admit I'm baffled- how many times can you follow a single leader to fall apart on the same stuff? Sometimes a change in leadership wouldn't be a bad thing..

12P had a GM (Taelon) that went MIA for a longish time (in a raiding sense... not that long 'Real Time'), during which time an officer (Seretogis) assumed a GM/Raidleader/Guildspokesman role. Then Taelon came back and tried to push Seretogis out and pretended like he'd been there the whole time, trying to assume back his old role. Seretogis was basically forced to quit, and joined Illuminati (#3 horde guild, within which he had many friends). After most of the guild realized they wouldn't get far with Taelon as leader, they formed Predestined with Seretogis as GM.

I've never been more than a trial member at 12P (I quit Mannoroth soon after my trial membership began and rerolled on my present server), so my facts are mostly from people I know who used to be in 12P.

EDIT: Taelon also kept a lot of guild bank stuff, forcing Predestined to start mostly from scratch (albiet with some help from Illuminati). Taelon rerolled ally on the same server to join a top flight guild alliance side (I forget exactly which guild) with the guild bank, and subesquently quit the server altogether (probably due to his low rep on the server).

one maxim i've always found true: Any guild formed in spite will fail. Its like the cheating girlfriend. If she dumps someone else to date you, she'll certainly do the same to you eventually. The same dissatisfaction that someone experiences in one place will eventually bubble up to the new boyfriend, so to speak.

On gorefiend, virtually every single splinter guild has failed miserably.

Our guild originally formed under the tag of The Cartel. At the time, we basically had a non-existent GM and things were shakily led by officers. One of our Paladins who wanted a bit more of a role in the guild tried to vie for an officer role, after initially being shot down, he took a group of friends and quit. To basically patch things up in a hurry to get back to raiding MC, we gave him officership, and they all came back in.

Things being still rocky with no solid leadership led to the next event. The GM basically came back and said he wasn't going to be around much if at all anymore. During this time, the majority of the guild members and officers still had no respect for the Paladin who was now an officer. Well said Paladin decided to "fix" things, by offering to buy the GM's account on the sly without guild knowledge.

His grand scheme of taking over power occurred. He bought the account. Transfered GM to his Paladin. Now he had the power to lead us right? Wrong, the guild left him. 95% of the members reformed under new leadership under the Transcendence tag which we have held since then, and thus our cycle of continued drama still lives on.