Why you should write your guild farewell letter today

The last few days we’ve lost a couple of veteran players from the guild. One went to another server since he felt he needed a change. Two left because they’re quitting the game altogether. (This makes me wonder a bit if WoW is starting to lose players after all? The queues when you’re logging in a Sunday night speak against it, as well as the lists over the top selling games. But still I can’t completely rid myself of the feeling that the top peak has been passed. Tobold put a finger on it yesterday in a post which left me a bit uneasy. This is another issue though.)

Each of those leavings has been followed by a beautifully written farewell letter, making my eyes go a little bit wet. My ex-guildies are talking about how the guild is the best they’ve ever been in since they started to play years ago, how excellent players we all are, and how much they’ll miss us. They express their appreciation for our guild master as well as for other officers in a personal way. A typical example:

“Never before had I been in a guild of such a high standard, with such a great mix of characters and with such dedication and drive for raiding … I wanna thank [GM] and the officers for putting up with my faggotry and tomfoolery - it must take a lot of patience to deal with a character like myself. I'd like to thank the healer team for keeping me alive during all the crazy stuff me and the rest of the tank team have done (I think we had a triple overpull somewhere in BT once...), and I want to thank the tank team we have here, for being the best community of tanks I've been a part of, and for showing such maturity, friendliness, respect and fairness to myself and each other.”

Now, reading a farewell post is never fun. They’re all written by great players who will be deeply missed. Not because they’re irreplaceable in their raiding roles - frankly no one is, you can always recruit someone else, even though some classes will take you a bit longer to find – but because they’ve been a part of our community.

At the same time I can't help thinking that this kind of posts actually boosts the morale in the guild and make us stronger. The farewells remind us about all the things we appreciate but so rarely say aloud. They also make me wonder: why do we have to wait until we leave the game before we tell our fellow players how much we like them?

We run all over Azeroth, doing /love to silly critters or /hug to enemy players just to get an achievement. But for some strange reason we forget or don’t dare to hug the players we see everyday and let them know they’re wonderful unless we’re about to say our last goodbyes.

A thought experiment
I have a suggestion: Make up a farewell letter to your guild in your mind, even if you have no plans of leaving it. What would you write in such a letter? Who would you thank especially? What epic moments would you recall and how would you sum your time in the guild?

This thought experiment will help you to remember and value important aspects of the game that sometimes are blurred by trivial everyday annoyances such as server lag, gold spamming or bad loot luck.

Maybe you’ll realize that there are people around you who make the whole difference for your game experience – people who you’ve never actually thanked properly. If that is the case – do something about it. There isn’t any law against showing some love for each other.

Of course you can also come to a very different conclusion. It may dawn upon you that you’re not entirely happy in your guild as things are now. Then you should certainly act accordingly. Either you try to help the guild change and go in the direction you’d like to see. A good start is to express your thoughts and wishes to the officers. Communication ftw! Or if it seems like a lost cause, maybe it’s about time that you started looking for another guild?

“Begin with the end in mind”, says one of my favourite authors when it comes to leadership, motivation and self improvement, Steven Covey. Visualizing what you would say about your guild if you left it – and what your guildies would say about you is a great tool to help you make your own choices and priorities in the game.

Another sort of goodbye
A few final words about farewell letters. You can’t help getting a bit let down by them. The real farewell letters are generally only written about players who cared about the guild and who the guild cared about (unless they’re bitter and the final of some kind of guild drama of course.) If you have a couple of them in a short time it’s inevitable that you feel a little depressed. Yesterday morning when I logged in on the website and saw another post titled “bye all”, this time by one of our officers, I let out a sad sigh and thought “not one more!” Then I opened the post and read the rest of it: “I’m off to work now :)”

In spite of the losses and some really bad recent raiding nights where we’ve had to call the raid due to the insane lagging in Naxx, we’re still capable of joking about it. That’s the best sign of a healthy guild. I’m so lucky to be where I am. And hopefully my real farewell letter won’t be written anytime soon.