miko2

I've been in the same Supergroup in City of Heroes since I first joined when the game came out over a year ago, and I just quit that group on Saturday. At first I wasn't even certainly why I wanted to quit exactly, just a bunch of things that led to me feeling like I should quit.

This is a group of people that I knew from the Toontown message boards -- with one or two exceptions I'd never actually played with them in Toontown or any other game, but we all knew each other from the message boards so there was a kind of connection there, and they're mostly reasonable and friendly people so for a long time the supergroup felt a bit like my old Everquest guild. But ultimately, I realized that there were signifigant differences, and in the end I came to the conclusion that I wanted to quit.

The progression of events went something like this:

A) A month or so ago, we migrated our message board from EZBoards to Guild Portal Hosting. EZBoards sucks seriously, and Guild Portal does a good job, so the move got full approval from me. However, our leader immediately deleted everything that had been on the EZBoard. Sure, we weren't going to use it anymore... but that's our entire written history of our group, wiped out on one person's whim. It really pissed me off.

B) The new Guild Portal site is set up to only allow posting by approved members of the super group. I guess that's okay, except nobody in the supergroup every posts anything of any importance.

C) I haven't really grouped with anyone in my supergroup in probably two months. Further, I haven't communicated with them in that time really, because the only way to communicate with them is to be online with one of my characters that is in the Supergroup when others are online, and most of them don't play the hours that I do.

D) Friday the leader asked that we remove any characters listed at the new message board site that are not officially in the Supergroup. Guild Portal has a nice feature for listing your characters, and naturally I like to list any characters that I play whether they're official members of the Supergroup or not, so that others in the group can know who to look for if they want to find me. This request... logical as it is, since it might confuse people who view all the listed characters and expect them to all be in the supergroup... this request was the final straw for me, even though I didn't really know why at the time. It just angered me, and I thought, well, why don't I rememove ALL my characters? And after considering that, I decided that I really needed to do it. I felt like the Supergroup was doing nothing for me. I deleted all characters listed on the message board, and then logged in my three characters who were in the Supergroup and removed all three of them. Then I went to my special City of Heroes livejournal and posted a rant about the whole thing. At the time, I was feeling kind of sad about doing this, and thought that maybe after I got it out of my system I'd rejoin the group.

Well, late Saturday night I was in the middle of a big mission with seven other players, when someone in my former SG sent me a tell asking why I'd left. I didn't have time to go into it (and I still hadn't isolated what it was that caused me to want to leave) so I just gave the short answer, that I still liked them but never played with them and didn't feel the group was doing anything for me.

Sunday morning I woke up early (before 11 am which is early for me) and I was trying to get to sleep but all these thoughts about why I'd quit the Supergroup kept going through my mind. I was composing a lengthy explanation of my actions in my head, and finally I had to get up and write it out. I went to our message board, and guess what? I'd already been removed from the message board roster, so I'm no longer allowed to post anything there! The irony of this all is pretty stunning -- first, that nobody ever posts anything on that board and I was ready to make the first post of any real substance since we created it a month or so ago, but I was now barred from making that post, and second, that the two reasons I left the group came down feeling that it was being run in a way that made things feel unfriendly, and that I never communicated with anyone there -- and in less than 24 hours of quiting the group, I'm barred from the message board (so funny since it's almost never used anyway). No waiting to see if I might change my mind, no discussion, just kthxbye, don't let the door hit you on the way out. Unfriendly Atmosphere? Check. Lack of Communication? Check.

I tried to write out a full explanation of why I quit using the Guild Portal e-mail system, but after spending more than an hour writing out a lengthy, coherent explanation (to the person who'd contacted me in-game the night before), I hit "send" and was informed that I needed to be logged in to use their e-mail system. I guess I took too long, and the system logged me out, and of course it ate my entire e-mail instantly. At that point I said screw it, sent her a short e-mail explaining how I'd tried to explain everything to her but that I wasn't going to write it out again, and that was that. I guess they'll never get to know why I really quit, becuase I have no other way of communicating it to them except by in-game forms of communication, which are completely inaaddiquate for the task.

Between thinking about it and talking to some of the people on the CoH livejournal forums, I realized that all of it comes down to communication.

Communication to me is one of the things that holds a group of friends together. It's why I have this livejournal, to keep in touch with my friends. I'm not the most communicative person in our circle of local friends but still, we see each other often enough and talk and in between I can keep tabs on what's up with people via the livejournal or e-mail.

My Everquest guild was formed by people who all posted on the Druid's Grove message board and all became good friends that way. Our in-game guild chat channel was always in use even when we didn't play together, and later when the guild itself was down to just a handful of players, we had a server-wide chat channel that included many of our friends who had once been in the guild and were now in other guilds. And even now people still post to our guild message board, so most of us still keep in touch even though it's been years since we played the same game. My EQ guild always felt extremely friendly because we talked to each other and got to know each other so well. And the funny thing is, I still know most of these people by their game names rather than their real names, but they've been friends for years.

Recently in City of Heroes (for the last 2-3 months at least) I've been talking to people in two specific chat channels. One is "Tankers" which was formed from people who used the Tanker forum on the main City of Heroes message boards. Similarly to how my old EQ guild was formed, we all knew each other from posting to a message board, and now we talk to each other all the time on the chat channel, and sometimes group together because of it. The other global chat channel is LegionofCatgirls, which has always been my "second" supergroup -- I had one character in the Legion of Catgirls chapter on my server, but they're a large group spread out across many servers. With the global chat channel we can all talk to each other no matter what server we're on, and I've been grouping more with people from this channel as I've gotten to know them. I started a character on another server just so I could play with the people there on occasion.

Another thing I've been doing for a few months is talking to people on the City of Heroes group on Live Journal, using a second free LJ account I created for this purpose. They also have a global chat channel that I need to join, since I'm getting to know them. One of the reasons I started a CoH specific live journal in the first place was because it seemed pointless to post anything to my Supergroup message board, nobody ever replied to anything I said or had anything of their own to say. So since I feel the need to ramble on about my CoH adventures, I started doing that in a special livejournal.

The point of all of this? The people in my supergroup were nice people, but in more than a year of playing with them, I really didn't learn that much about them. The only way to communicate with them was to be online when they were, which only really happened on the weekends, and not every weekend of course since I do other things on weekends too. Nobody posted to the message board. They had no global channel. I almost never saw any of them online. There were really only six or so people left in the supergroup anyway. These people always insisted on using your real name in conversations, but when it came right down to it, I realized that despite this I didn't know them well at all. They didn't feel like close friends because we really almost never communicated.

I hadn't thought of it that way when I quit. It was only after that I realized why I felt like leaving. I have a lot of friends in City of Heroes who I talk to on a regular basis, and as it turns out, none of them were the people in my Supergroup. And aside from knowing that the people in my SG were nice people who had also once played Toontown, I really had little in common with them.

But, you know, I didn't get to explain any of this to them, and since I feel the need to write it out somewhere, I'm doing it here. ^_^