Blog Azeroth

On the topic of "No Female Allowed" Guilds

A guild I do not wish to name on my server recently came up with a recruitment policy dubbed "no vag", ie. no female players allowed. The reason paraphrased is "female = drama, don't pretend you are different when it comes to treatment, loot etc because you are not. I'm sick of dealing with all the drama that comes along with females so if you have a vag, do not apply. as well if you are a male but pretend to have a vag, the same rules applies to you as well"

I recently came across another guild on the guild recruitment forum that says the following "Due to our history and experience we've had with female gamers, we currently do not recruit players that lack a penis. This can be taken another way but in this case, we mean literally lack thereof. Some of you may think this is sexist, but you have to understand, when you put a female in an organization with a bunch of sex deprived World of Warcraft nerds, their hormones get the best of them. Women in World of Warcraft guilds cause more drama than 'TNT' and this is a no-drama organization."

This lead me to think that there are more guilds out there that are using this policy to prevent possible drama.

Now for the possible blog topic. Of course at first glance I expect immediate flaming from the female community as this is "sexist", "inappropriate", "too much generalization/stereotyping" etc. But please keep your heads cool for a moment and think a little bit more before responding. Let's go with the old "put my foot in someone else's shoe" for a moment of thinking.

What lead to this extreme measure of completely banning females in these guilds? Have you experienced the so called "drama" yourself? More specifically, what kind of people causes the most drama in your guild? Are they gender exclusive? Or rather personality based? Is there any funny, interesting, odd drama cases you wish to share?

Female players are often thought to be "bad at the game". What do you think lead to this conclusion? In what way do you think this can be changed? Do you think this is a fair statement based on statistics?

As a player, what do you think is the best way to eliminate drama? How should a player play or act in a raiding environment to be drama free?

And finally, do you agree with the guild's decision on their recruitment policies? Do the policies justify based on the guild's past experience?


Edit: based upon the controversy that this could cause, i have broadened the topic to guilds which exclude based on any reason. This will allow people more scope, and hopefully not cause too much drama within the community.

I may not be getting this whole shared topic thing.

It seems the idea is:
1) someone has an idea for the whole blogging community to write about.
2) idea is posted here
3) everyone writes about said topic.

That stuff is easy. What I don't get is, what topic is the "approved" topic? Has this practice fallen out of use? Since I am not sure, and I think this idea is a good one, I am going to write about guild exclusion policies. I will publish on the 18th, as it seems that is the date it is supposed to be published.

Am I missing the link that shows all the "rules"? I know blogging is about individual preference, but I would love to see what other bloggers say about the topics I am writing about.

Anyway, I will have mine posted on the 18th. Great Idea BTW.

It also helps if the person starting the topic actually has a blog post linked so that we can build off a blog post & not just the forum post.

I am sure that the 'rules' are stated up in the announcement thread up there, but I shall restate them here for clarity

1. Shared Topics are at the moment decided by myself. Simply, I decide based upon how many shared topics that person has had approved previously, the amount of interest that this could generate in the community, the availability of shared topics, and how long a shared topic has been up for.

Currently, most every Shared Topic up there will get a go at some point, simply because there are not enough ideas for Shared Topics being put forward by the community. Every week I have a small panic before I check, hoping against hope that I will actually have options to choose from. As you can see, this is not often the case.

2. When a Shared Topic is announced, a date is put before the topic. This is the Monday that the topic STARTS. Each topic has a week duration. The post is also made a sticky so it can't get buried under suggestions.

3. Ideally, people who suggest Shared Topics will write a blog post on said topic. However, this is NOT a requirement - if you want to wait and see if your topic is going to be chosen before you write about it, that is perfectly fine. At this point I am not going to put restrictions on suggesting a Shared Topic, since I do not get enough ideas put forward as it is!

4. As I did this week, I will occasionally 'edit' a topic - I know that a similar topic to this was covered about 6 months ago. If I think a topic will be more successful after editing, then I will go ahead and do so.

At the end of the day, the success of the Shared Topic comes down to you guys, the bloggers, participating. Don't interpret this as forced participation: I personally only answer one Shared Topic a month unless the muse seizes me, and there is nothing to say that anyone HAS to do these. It's more about fostering a community and encouraging link sharing.

Feel free to ask me any questions you may have (I am pretty easy to get in contact with, thanks to AIM, the forum, and various other methods). And please, please, PLEASE feel free to suggest topics!!

Bit late, but as I've seen this before I thought I'd post on it

http://www.tristanpej.com/Zap/?p=417

I did a small post on this topic. You can find it here.

http://graymatterwow.blogspot.com/2009/ ... -poor.html

Additionally, Sar is kind enough to put up a post detailing the shared topic on Twisted Nether website under the Shared Topic category. You can get directly there with the link below.

http://www.twistednether.net/category/sharedtopic/

Slightly late and slightly wall of text like .. ok, I got a bit carried away and ended up with more questions than answers.

http://harpysnest.wordpress.com/2009/05 ... the-apple/