Thank your Officers

I'm an officer in a kinship in LotRO. I have been an officer in a guild in WoW as well as a second-banana GM and a kinship leader in LotRO during open beta. In my current kinship, there are some people applying for officer positions and I'm not sure why. Being able to help steer the direction of a kinship is neat but the best ones don't really need much steering if the recruiting process is sound. Most of the neat stuff I do can easily be blown out of the water by days like today.

*ding* A rant is about to commence. Please fasten your seatbelts and make sure your tray tables are locked and the seats in their forward and upright positions.

It all began when a group of friends and I decided to help a couple kinshipmates through the long and painful book ten questline. This questline involves much swimming across Lake Evendim so I really wasn't looking forward to it. But I was getting to help some folks with some stuff they needed so I focused on that and just swam my little hobbit legs off.

Then the tells start.

Officer A had send a private message to officer B explaining why he didn't like "hardcore" raiders in such a casual kinship. Officer B decided that rather than talk to officer A, he'd send the contents of the message to some raiders in the kinship but only the parts that make it look like officer A hates all raiders (which would actually be really funny since officer A is the raiding coordinator). Officer B blabs to several kinship members who start sending me tells to complain about officer A's out-of-context statement fragments.

Someone in the group, one of the officers, asked me why I was still on the shore instead of swimming again and I replied in /officer that I was talking to a member about something officer B said officer A said when I realized officer B was still online. Instead of attempting to diffuse the situation he started, officer B attempts to use the 'duck-and-cover' method of leadership by spending the rest of the night incommunicado.

Through tells the other officer in my Evendim group (three of us in the group were officers) inform me that the same individual has been assailing them with tells demanding to speak with the kinship leader, who wasn't online at the time, or to be involved with the officer meeting the next time we have one.

Throughout the rest of the Evendim excursion, I kept receiving / replying to tells, watched two members quit the kinship, assured the other online members that in fact, no, two members leaving does not mean we'll be disbanding the kinship any time soon and also apparently managed to help kill a bunch of stuff and get book ten done. Though I do remember riddling the troll on the way out of the building with our guardian behind me carrying the Palantir. I love doing that.

The drama passed relatively quickly after the two members left and once things seemed stable I logged for the night.

The situation outlined above was not particularly special or unique. I've also seen worse. A lot worse. It's bad in tells but worse when people are actually screaming at each other on Vent.

So thank your officers, those of you in kinships / guilds / supergroups / whatever. We make sure people get help getting gear. We help organize raids, events and whatnot. And occasionally we have to sacrifice our playtime to deal with silliness.

Two good things came out of the whole thing tonight:
1) I got to riddle a troll.
2) I remembered to write "beer" on my shopping list before the next officer meeting. That's going to be an interesting one I'm sure and I'm also sure I could use a drink for it.