Ignorance is bliss

Some time ago a friend and guildie of mine asked me how I felt about the concept of putting guild members on my ignore list. When I probed him about what had inspired this question he admitted that he had put another guildie (whom he barely knew) on his ignore list because whenever said guildie said anything in guild chat he just found it extremely annoying. I said that I didn't see a problem with that.

I suppose that in an ideal world everyone in a guild should like each other, but I can't help thinking of my guild as more of a large family (what with it's hundred-odd accounts), which simply has both its bright and its ugly sides. On the plus side it means that we have a strong core of long-time members who are very attached to each other even if they fight sometimes. On the downside you also have to deal with the guild equivalent of "that uncle you can't stand because he doesn't seem to do anything but tell stupid jokes", or moments of bewilderment as your third cousin's second ex-wife greets you warmly and you have no idea who the hell she is except that she's "family" and you're supposed to be nice. (I get the latter feeling a lot when people invite the alts of friends of friends into the guild.)

Anyway, the thing with a big family is that you kind of want everyone to get along, but at the same time you generally accept that this probably won't happen. Since I'm looking at a large guild the same way I see no problem with someone ignoring a fellow guild member, though when I discussed this with my friend I qualified at the time that it would probably be a problem if we were talking about two raiders. After all, raiders are supposed to be able to communicate during raids. In fact, there were one or two people in the raid force in the past year that I considered ignoring because they bothered me so much, but in the end I didn't dare to because I was afraid that it would come back to bite me in the arse at a crucial moment during a raid.

A few weeks ago someone finally managed to make me snap though and I ended up putting a raider on my ignore list for the first time. And I have to admit that it felt good. I found that he hadn't done anything that I could outright complain about to anyone and maybe I was being overly sensitive anyway, but his attitude and the way he talked to people were really starting to grate on my nerves. When he finally started to target me as well and chewed me out in whispers for not knowing how to do something or not doing it the way he wanted, I decided that I had had enough of it and just clicked ignore. It's really helped to make me feel better and suddenly I became a lot more relaxed and cheerful during raids again. At first there was still this vague fear that I might miss something important, but in reality that's extremely unlikely, as he's not in a leadership position or even doing anything remotely related to my own job in raids (which is precisely why I found his constant attempts to tell me and others what to do very annoying).

If anything I only feel vaguely guilty about basically just ignoring the problem, because as I said in the past I believe that a good guild is worth fighting for, and if I think that this guy is ruining the fun for a lot of people, shouldn't I do something? In all honesty though, I'm still feeling the lull and not really in a fighting mood, plus I have a hunch that this might be one of those problems that will sort itself out after a while. Sometimes simply ignoring something can make it effectively go away in my experience, as I've already "outlived" quite a lot of guild members that got on my nerves at some point or another.

Have you ever ignored a guildie or fellow raider?