Raltar's Rebuttal
"Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may."
-Mark Twain
Many years ago, after Zion had died and while I was rebuilding the website for the Golden Shields, I posted a document I gave the title Zion's Rebuttal. It was an email that Zion had sent to me before he died explaining why he made some of the decisions that he made which I did not agree with. During his time as leader Zion made many decisions that myself and others did not agree with and he was forced to hear our critisim of his leadership. Now here we are many years later and as the new leader of this guild I have also been forced to make many decisions which have not been entirely well received by the membership (and former membership) of this guild. I too must now hear their critisim and like Zion I feel the need to make a rebuttal aginst some of the comments made about my leadership. As I said in the most recent book of the guild history, I now understand my lost friend Zion much better than I once did.
About a week before typing up this document I received an email from a fromer member of the guild named Heavens. If you will recall from my goodbye letter I admitted that I had been planning to promote Heavens to the second-in-command of the guild up until he started to give into the drama that was spreading through the guild at an alarming rate. At that time I had assumed that he had some kind of RL issues going on that had put him in a bad mood and in this email he admits that was in fact the case after all. However he also has a number of other "intersting" things to say to me...
I was re-reading the history and your goodbye letter from back in may of 2008 and I have a few things I would like to say if you are willing to listen. I am writing this to you now and not then cause then I was going thru a very hard time in my life and I wanted you to cool off lol. I am honored that you thought of me for a second in command of the guild while you were gone for last summer. First off I was the way I was there at the end for a few reasons. One was I was going through a tough divorce and my patience was at its end. I know a lot of people were questioning your leadership and I did a time or two but I never did or never intended to question you publicly like you said I did. I got a few PMfs about it since I was acting diplomat a lot of the members used me as a buffer between them and you cause they were scared (I guess, I have no idea) to come straight to you, That is where all that came from. The biggest reason was people thought you micro managed everything. All major discisions were made by you alone and not in the officers hall. Everyone gave you there ideas and you always shot them down. And yes Draky was a total ass and nobody liked him hahahaha (I couldnft stand him)
I didn't know Heavens was going through a divorce but it doesn't suprise me either. It explains a lot of why he was acting the way he did and having been in the navy he was away from home often and marrige rarely works in that kind of stiuation (never let a military recruiter tell you differently, no matter how much "support" he says the goverment will offer your family while you are away). What does suprise me about this message from Heavens is his excause that some of the problems he was causing were actually the complaints of other guild members that he was simply trying to pass on. Although its a suprise, I can still believe it as I did often try to explain the concept of a "chain of command" to the members of the guild and ask them to contact officers with any problems they had. But what is more suprising and honsetly much less easy to believe is Heavens suggestion that I micro-managed everyone and did not allow anyone else to take part in the decision making process of the guild. I could explain in great detail how I ran things and why this is not true... but just read my reply to Heavens:
I'm suprised to hear that the others were telling you that I wasn't letting them have enough say in the guild decision making process. I tried to give people as much control over that as they would accept. I tried to force them to make decisions on quite a few occasaions and more often than not they would resist it. When I would make posts in the leaders and officers forums asking for suggestions or ideas people usually did not reply. My posts would go for days or even weeks without a single reply at all. Finally I would say something like "guys, I REALLY need some imput on this" and would get only half-hearted replies at best. In the end the reason I made all the guild decisions was because if I didn't do it, nobody else would. That was the whole reason why the Alchemist Clan wanted me to be their new leader after Wyvernlord stepped down, I was simply the only guy willing to do that job.
There were some people who WANTED to be officers. You for one and I think you know that I gave you as much of a chance as I could, making you the guild diplomat and asking you to help with recruiting. But you were the exception to the rule. Most of the other people who wanted to be officers were people like Draky and Victor. Victor was simply not qualified for reasons that were obvious and Draky, as you said, was just an ass. People who actually were qualified like Mordred and Laat refused to step up and take the job. When I would try to force them, as I did with Laat, they would just do a half-assed job while constantly reminding me to replace them. It was absolutely maddening to deal with. And now I'm being told after all this time that they thought I didn't give them enough chances? Quite honestly I'm not sure what else they could possibly have asked for.
And if it is true that they wanted a bigger role in the leadership of the guild, then I have to wonder why nobody has stepped up to the plate and taken that leadership role yet? Mordred set up a little forum that several members of the guild still use and he calls it the "Golden Phoenix" guild. The thing is, if you ask Mordred if he is the leader of this group he will say no. You will get the same anwser from Laat, Bthorne, Thunda and any of the others who are still hanging around. They all deny any leadership of the group and none of them seem to want to be leaders. As a result of no leadership or direction this group is nearly dead. They have a "steam group" which has all of three members, only one of which is actually still active, Laat. And their forum gets less than one post per week on average. So if its true that my micro management was somehow holding them back, why isn't their group flourishing now that I'm out of the picture? Somehow this doesn't add up for me.
For the record, Heavens did not reply to this message. I suspect his spam filters are preventing him from getting my emails but its also possible that he saw my reply and thinks I need more time to "cool off" before he sends another email. He is free to think what he wants, but the entire point of my rebuttal is that I was the leader of this guild because I am one of the few people on the internet who is actually willing to step up, take responsibility and do the work nessary to keep a guild running. There are a lot of people who think they can do this job and give up after a short peroid of time. I'm not one of those. I do the work, I pay the bills and I make things work. If you don't like the way I do it? Tough luck. I didn't like the way Zion did things when he was leader and now that I've seen for myself how hard this job is when you have people questioning you all the time I can understand why he made some of the decisions he did. I can also see now that its better to have a leader who sometimes makes decisions you don't like than it is not to have any leader at all. I hope some of the former members of my guild are also starting to get that message as well, they surely didn't seem to get it before.