Guildies gone missing

I got a whisper the other day from one of my guildies asking why a certain person had been gkicked. I racked my memory and answered that the particular player hadn’t been online for more than two months.

In our guild we do it like this: if someone isn’t online for more than a month without in some way letting us know he/she will be gone for quite a long time but still wish to remain in the guild, that player is moved to inactive status. After another months inactivity the player is gkicked.

Hmm, not a very nice way to treat people we like, my guildie said, and I replied well that it wasn’t very nice of the player in question to not even bother letting us know he/she would be away for some time. He (I will from now on refer to any player as he unless I know it's a she, not because of any gender issue, just because of lazyness) could have told us before he left, he could have contacted any of his msn contacts, he could have dropped a note on our guild forum.


Well, maybe it wasn’t a planned WoW break, maybe it was just a period of not playing that somehow got prolonged into lasting more than two months. Its no big deal, it's a game and sometimes you get tired of a game and then your top priority is probably something else than letting people that you don’t know and don’t really care about know you won’t be around for a while.

But what if you do care?

Last night our GM and raid leader for the night didn’t turn up. He had scheduled a raid in the GroupCalendar and people had signed up but he himself failed to appear on time. Or after time, for that matter. Long after time.

Three hours after the start time he had still not turned up and his msn was still offline. He is not online every day and but if he schedules or signs up for something he is there. Always.

This is a guy I talk to almost daily. Sometimes we say not much more than hi to each other, sometimes we talk a lot about WoW and our guild, sometimes we talk a lot about more personal things. He yells at me when we raid (well he yells at everyone when we raid so I don’t take it too personally), we have had some severe clashes of opinions but agree on a lot of things and he has helped me through some pretty rough spots when I needed a shoulder to cry on (jokingly referred to him as my online unpaid shrink once). He is from one end of Europe and I am from the other and we had never spoken before we met in STV a year and a half ago.

Had we met and talked like this in person I would without doubt have called him my friend and I would have been very worried if he had failed to appear like this. It was not like him at all.

The next day his msn was still offline and I was at work and unable to check in WoW. In the afternoon my msn chimed with a message from him and I promptly started yelling at him for his making me worried that something bad had happened to him.

Turns out he had had a severe Internet disconnection and hadn’t been able to relog until just now (well, that was bad but not as bad as it could have been).

So this particular story had a happy ending, but what if it hadn’t …

Lesson learned: when someone you meet cease being just a brief aquaintance and become a real friend that you care about, make sure you have some other way of getting in touch with them than just through a nickname on the ’net.