I want to ask other experienced guild leaders about something I’ve encountered a lot over the past decade while running guilds.

Most guilds, we can all appreciate, have rules. Some might be tougher than others, sure, but there’s generally a core-set of rules that guilds will live by. These might relate to how members behave on forums and/or in-game. They might relate to how active a member has to be in the guild. They might dictate how loot is divided up in-game… whatever.

But how many of you find that despite applying and agreeing to these rules, you get members who will always think the rules don’t apply to them? That somehow they are “special” and you can cut them a little slack when they break the rules? Because, frankly, I’m currently finding about 1 in 5 people are like this… and that figure just shocks me.

One of the big ones for us here at Beskar, since we started in 2008, relates to activity. We ask that members are active on our forum, in the absence of the actual game, so that we can all get to know one another. That doesn’t sound too outrageous, does it? The rule is:

Beskar membership is a privilege not a right. As such, members are routinely marked “inactive” if they don’t post for a period of two weeks without prior notice to their guild mates. Anyone who remains “inactive” for an additional two weeks is removed from the guild roster completely. In this way, our system gives someone up to a month of not posting, without any prior notice, before they are dropped from the guild, so it’s hardly a “quick” process and you have to be quite a flake to actually get dropped. Having said that, it still one of the tougher membership policies in the TOR community.

Yet when you catch people out, time and time again, they come up with stories. “Oh, I’ve been too busy…”; “Oh, I’ve had nothing to say…”; “Oh, I had some girlfriend issues…”; “Oh, I was too tired…”; “Oh, I’ve been playing {insert game here} and kinda forgot…” and the list goes on.

And all of them, to a man (or woman, as the case might be), think that these are perfectly reasonable responses.

Huh?!?

I don’t know about you, but whenever I’ve had a busy time at work, or girlfriend issues, or been obsessed with a new game, that particular thing still hasn’t taken up my whole life, 24/7. Frankly, I can’t think of ANYTHING that does. And when all it takes is a note on the forums… ONE NOTE… to request a leave of absence — and you have ONE MONTH to make that leave of absence — I just don’t understand the excuses that get made instead.

I recently culled a bunch of people from Beskar who had been flaking out on their forum responsibilities to highlight this issue. As I’ve said before, we’re a guild which isn’t in this game to have the biggest community, but one of the best communities instead. If that meant a community of, say, 50 highly passionate friends, that’s fantastic. I’d rather have that than a community of 150 people where 2/3 of the group hasn’t posted in the last two weeks on its forums and people don’t really know each other.

(I actually did some math the other day and, if I had kept every Beskar member who I’ve tossed out of the guild since late 2008 for breaking a rule — most typically the inactive member rule — we’d have upwards of 150 members “on paper” right now. Instead we have 40 members at the time I write this and, frankly, I’m happier with it that way!)

So do you other guild leaders find this happening? You set rules and people agree to them… then flake on them? And are you as tough as Beskar and actually do something about it, or do you let it slide and, essentially, let the rules have no real meaning?