EPISODE I:
Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute. Hoping to resolve the matter with a blockade of deadly battleships, the greedy Trade Federation has stopped all shipping to the small planet of Naboo.
I hate Monopoly. We played board games a lot in my family growing up, and while I was more than happy to show off my verbal skills in Scrabble or flaunt my pop culture, literary, historical knowledge in Trivial Pursuit, I loathed Monopoly — everyone else’s game-of-choice. No matter what strategy I devised (buy up the yellow and green ones, cockblock my brother’s plans by buying Water Works, build hotels on the cheap-o properties), I’d end up broke, groveling at some family member’s feet so I didn’t have to mortgage everything in order to pay their rent. My dad was a ruthless bastard, always the banker, and I swear to god, a cheat. He’d laugh at my poverty, laugh at my bad luck with the dice, laugh at my second place in the beauty contest. So in a fit of frustration and bankruptcy one night, I pitched the Monopoly board across the living room. “I hate you all,” I screamed and stomped up to my room.
Needless to say, my family has never asked me to play Monopoly again. But nor have they let me forget the episode.
EPISODE IV:
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…
It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire.
Aftermath was the definitive hardcore raiding guild: the best players recruited from servers across the game, with best-in-slot gear and min-maxed raid composition. They not only raided daily (as content and progression demanded), but members were “on call” for contested mobs. The best loot in the game dropped from these contested raid mobs, and so these kills were important for gearing an elite raid force, but they also symbolized control of the server and effectively shut out other players and other guilds from these items. From time-to-time, other guilds would try to challenge Aftermath by trying to kill a contested mob; but these upstarts almost always failed to assemble their raid, let alone kill the mob first, and as they gathered and as they wiped, they faced ridicule and harassment from Aftermath members. (The classic example: this video made by an Aftermath member after they’d tricked another guild, Strike, into thinking the Three Princes were about to spawn. The guild waited 2 days at the spawn point, when in fact Aftermath had already killed them. Strike transfered servers shortly after.)
Phantom was the guild leader of another raiding guild, Exodus. Phantom had a good guild with good players in good gear. Although Exodus was raiding end-game content, and attempting to get some server-firsts-seconds, they were not killing contested mobs, and as such were always reminded by Aftermath that they were very much the also-ran. While Phantom’s guildmates were happy to log in in the evenings to raid instances, they weren’t willing or able to drop everything when the Avatar of War or the Pumpkin-Headed Horseman spawned. But Phantom wanted to kill contested mobs. He wanted Exodus to rival Aftermath. And if he knew a mob had spawned or was about to spawn, he’d still try to assemble a raid to kill it, even if this meant pugging a sizeable portion of the team.
Protocol dictates that whoever gets to a contested mob first, with a raid force that’s big enough to pull, can take a fair crack. If you wipe, then anyone else ready and able gets their turn. You don’t interfere (well, unless it’s a PVP server). You don’t train nearby mobs onto the healers. You sit and watch and wait your turn and discuss your strategy and ok admittedly, chuckle in vent when their tank gets one-shotted or their melee eat a face full of AOE or their casters get pwned by adds.
Protocol aside, neither Aftermath nor Phantom were on their best behavior under these circumstances. Phantom would ask anyone online to join his raid then complain when people had no clue about strategies. He would screech and splutter in vent (in that high-pitched voice that, sorry angry raid leader, makes you sound like a howler monkey not like a commanding presence). And the members of Aftermath would mock and taunt and point and laugh. Phantom didn’t handle this well, and following an embarrassing wipe to the Matron, quit his guild in a huff and deleted his toon.
“Rage quit!” became the most popular phrase on the Butcherblock server. Aftermath renamed their alt guild “Rage Quit.” Anytime someone left a group or a guild, anytime someone didn’t get their way: “Rage quit!”
RAQE QUIT!!!111
EPISODE V:
It is a dark time for the Rebellion. Although the Death Star has been destroyed, Imperial troops have driven the Rebel forces from their hidden base and pursued them across the galaxy.
I have very little respect for those who “rage quit” or for those who similarly “emo quit.” (The former consists of “OMG FUCK YOU ALL.” /gquit. The latter consists of “OMG IF THAT’S WHAT YOU THINK OF ME, FINE! I GUESS YOU R BETTER OFF WITHOUT ME.” /gquit)
Actually, no… I have no respect for them, and very very little respect for people who subsequently re-invite these poor sports to the game.
And yes, I threw a temper-tantrum once, threw the Monopoly board at my dad, and stormed off in a fury. I was 10. Should my parents have coaxed me out of my room, back to the coffee table and rewarded me with a few extra 20s and something shiny like St. Charles Place? Um, no. That’s not how you deal with children.
So why, then, do we respond to juvenile bullshit in a guild that way then, eh?
The other day, my fellow priest 
As a priest, one has three specs that are very viable and very desirable for raiding: Discipline, Holy, and Shadow. While some people might’ve been able to accumulate off-spec gear over the last few months and prior to the release of the dual-spec option (seriously, don’t all paladins have a full holy set? Damn Naxx itemization), many players might now be faced with the expectation they “suddenly” have the gear to support another spec, should the need to switch arise.
The other night, I saw someone ask in General Chat for a Disc Priest to whisper them. The person had some questions. And being a know-it-all, I thought I’d supply the answers. Like most of us, the priest was trying to reassemble his talent points that Blizzard has so graciously reset with Patch 3.1.1. He wanted to know what he should do with the points for the Holy tree, and I rattled off how I’d allocated things. He wanted to put points in Renew, and as I tried to explain why I felt the spell was underwhelming, he said, “Well it keeps my group members alive just fine.” Oh, group members. Heroics. Yeah. Okay. Ooo. Ouch. Disc. Buddy, reroll druid or something kkthx. Turns out, he’d hit 80 over the weekend and was just entering heroics, and with about 15K mana (and the nerfed Rapture) and only about +1400 spellpower, was running OOM constantly.
I don’t know about you all, but I’m bidding on the 
Shadow Weaving 