Many of you are probably coming here wondering just what happened while you were offline. Well, let's fill you in and bring you up to speed.
Let's face it. Attendance at events was been dwindling, RP in guild chat was dead, and the guild itself was going belly-up. The very same people that complained about a lack of participation and then didn't show up at role-play events for no significant reason had begun to take its toll on those of us who were trying to organize and set it up.
Beginning a guild is always a risk, especially one made of rerolls from other servers. We'd have 50 people online at once the first day, and then slowly everyone began to trickle back to their mains after the whole "puppy love" effect of role-play had worn off. We started off strong, with a good system in place. A triumvirate of Top 3 officers to ensure no one takes too much power, four lesser officers and four rotating positions, and a vast number of guild members with innumerable ideas. We thought we had a winner.
As time passed, our officers (myself included) got absolutely slammed with real life. Everything hit all of us practically overnight. Vellanan had a move to make, Galjun's working his bum off to try and secure a job, I'm in the same position. All the officers we've appointed gradually disappeared due to "IRL complications." Guild membership dwindled to a steady 10 on average, and then dropped even lower.
Every time we've gone to the guild to ask their opinions on what they want to see, or what they think, we were met with silence generally. The replies we were given, when implemented, did nothing to encourage membership despite the ideas we were throwing out (which we *know* were good ideas).
In the end, the will just wasn't there. However, there's another side to this coin.
Recently, the level of disrespect from members towards the leadership has been growing substantially, reaching a head when two members would begin to openly buck me in guild chat and in the OOC channel. These attacks I took very personally, considering that they came from members with 0 contribution to the guild where as I've spent the past month more or less by myself trying to establish this against the odds. As such, and as the other officers and members who witnessed agree, that level of disrespect after the stress and work that we've all put into this is not to be tolerated.
So after much deliberation, we decided that it was better to just disband the guild now. "Why not just hand it over?" you ask. Well. As we stated before, there was no one left in the guild who we felt had contributed near as much as we had nor who had put in the time and effort to build it, and so we weren't going to let someone else take credit for our work. Sure, call it selfish if you want. Tell us that "the members build the guild, not the officers" all you want. When you step back and look at the big picture of what was happening to the guild, we think you'll agree with our decision.
That said, I've taken the liberty of forming a small friend/alt guild under the name <Above and Beyond> for members that we think are nice, drama-free, and positive people. Those of you that actually rolled here to re-main, you can whisper myself, Galjun, Vellanan, Sindaroth, or Rasuto about gaining entry. To the rest of you, we wish you all the best of luck, and we apologize for how abruptly things ended. We know a lot of you were looking forward to what we were doing, and we have intentions to continue that in a lesser capacity with our new guild. Many of us rolled here to role-play, and that's exactly what we're going to do.
-Varía
