Didn’t expect this to happen…

At the end of a week in which I had the opportunity to work a bit more than I had originally expected, I was pretty tired, but also looking forward to finally putting the screws to Horridon on Sat./Sun. Little did I know how the weekend would actually unfold.

This is a story about raid team drama resolving itself in a bad way. Not the worst possible way, mind you. The worst possible way (team-wise) would be if the team completely imploded, its members scattered. That hasn’t happened, and doesn’t look to be doing so, which is good.

Anyway…

At 9:30 Saturday, our scheduled raid time, we had 10 people, out of 11 who were invited, online and ready to roll. We made a quick detour to Krasarang to kill Warlord Bloodhilt for the three of us who needed to complete A Change of Command (woot, got my extra socket!) and then hit up Throne of Thunder.

Other than killing Jin’rokh the past two weekends, we hadn’t attempted Horridon since March 17th due to people going away for Easter week and so on. So we killed Jin’rokh and worked on Horridon until sometime after midnight, making some progress, and vowing to get it done the next night.

Since I was looking forward to having Sunday off, I took the liberty to stay up late, kill some rares, and complete a few quests in order to cap Valor, since that would make anything I did on the warrior the next day worth 50% more in terms of Valor gained.

I should have just gone to bed.

At around 1:30am, I was on my way to answer a “Mumta up” call-out when this happened:

Now, for a little background on the situation: the person whose name is blacked out is a friend who has run with us on occasion for a long time to help us fill out raids. His main is the tank on a team that, coming into this weekend, had out-progressed our team in T15 by ten bosses. He’s a great player, brings very valuable perspectives on the boss fights – since he’s done them several times already – and is a positive presence on the team in pretty much any way you can imagine.

The person whose name is blocked out in red is a guild-mate, and she and I have been good friends for a while now. She was the eleventh invitee, who wasn’t online when we had ten people and had started the night’s activities.

Over the past few weeks, one of them has usually had to sit out for the other on our Jin’rokh kills. This is where the drama kicks in. Of course.

Friend-of-Guild is completely fine with sitting out, understanding that he’s playing an alt. Guild-mate is apparently not fine with it. Which is odd, because Guild-mate is someone who, when we were transitioning from Cata to MoP, was telling me that she wasn’t sure she even wanted to raid, or even play the game. Who always hates the changes to the class she plays. Who whispers me “I suck” in between boss attempts, along with “I should just quit” and the like. Who types things like “we’ll never kill this boss” in raid chat when we’re working on progression. Who regularly sits at the bottom of the damage meter due to things like turning to run away from bad rather than strafing, and having low uptime.

In spite of this, she has remained a member of the team, which is all well and good. We’re friends, after all. Which is why, for a while when she would say those things, I would respond with “nah, you’ll be fine” or offer some advice… which eventually gave way to me just not responding at all, because saying “I suck” and other such comments, without seeking high and low for possible adjustments and improvements to make, is completely unproductive, as well as being highly annoying and deflating for the person(s) having to read them

…

The above screenshot started a short conversation that did not go well. She was apparently unhappy with sitting out for Jin’rokh. When she was invited in for our attempts on Horridon, she declined, from what we were told. So that was the end of the story… until she whispered me in the manner you can see above.

This shocked me. I personally did not ask her to sit out on Jin’rokh. In fact, I don’t know that anyone did, but the reality is that we had 10 and had started our raiding activities when she logged in, so it wasn’t an issue. But I’m a teammate and friend – not even the guild master or raid leader. And yet, she waited until the guild master and raid leader had both logged for the night before lashing out at me.

I was shocked and appalled.

And then I got very angry. I was tired, and that didn’t help. And so I responded with a short litany of my objections to her attitude, letting out my frustrations with her that have been building up, unsaid, since our time in Dragon Soul, at the very least.

And in the course of the conversation, I also strongly objected to the disrespectful way that she addressed me. It was, given our friendship, something that I never, ever expected to happen.

But that didn’t matter. It was like something had snapped, and she decided to take it out on me. And I didn’t respond in a way that was “whoa, hey, calm down,” so my reaction didn’t necessarily help things. But I had had enough, and I didn’t like being treated that way. (Pardon me, but) I’m not just some asshole who likes to fuck people over. I’m an adult, and so is she. So to be treated that way by her was extremely unpleasant.

It began to feel like I was talking to a baby. Talking to a completely different person than the one I had known. She told me things like:

And at that point, I had had enough. It was getting a little too 9th grade for me. Things were pretty clear: for some reason, I was at fault, and had stopped being her friend because I had played with Friend-of-Guild – just like I do every single week – so I shot off that last line and left it at that.

…

Now, my original plan was to kill a couple of rares, etc. and then hit the hay at a moderately reasonable hour. But at this point, I was wide awake, pissed off, and my heart was pounding. So I didn’t get to sleep until a few hours later, didn’t sleep much, and wasn’t feeling that great when we downed Horridon for the first time on Sunday night. In fact, I was distracted all day by what had happened, and I couldn’t shake it, and as such I played like crap, including dying for a really dumb reason on our kill – I shot War-god Jalak without Misdirecting him. But I was super proud of the team – it was a lot of fun to see that huge dino finally hit the ground.

…

She left the guild on Sunday night as we began to pull the trash before Horridon. By that point, everyone on the team had heard what had happened, and nobody was really happy about it.

As it stands, it appears that I have lost a friend. I would’ve liked to have had a reasonable conversation with her, but I kind of killed that by not being the better person and refraining from throwing my own frustrations back at her. Sunday evening before she left, she was being super fun-time chatty in /gchat about things that she normally didn’t seem to give a crap about, lighting up everyone’s screen with a green wall of text about rares and skeletons on the ground and the virmen on her farm and PvP… even said something to the effect that she loved being positive. It was hard to watch it unfold, in addition to feeling like she was mocking me.

Why I was the target of all of this, I’m not sure. But now, I have to get over it and move on.

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Thanks for reading this post by Mushan at Mushan, Etc. Comments are welcome!

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