Back story: I have been the GM of a mediocre raiding guild for the last 5 years. I joked that I have seen it all in terms of "drama", but yesterday was the biggest yet.
We lost a few of our regular raiders to Rift a few weeks back in the peak of our progress. No biggie, so we have been actively recruiting. We pick up a new player, and try him out last week. We like him a lot and everything seemed great. One of my newish members who has been standing out in terms of the others, has casually mentioned the odd things this kid says about himself to me over the weekend.
"Don't worry about me missing a raid I am an 18yr old Highschool Dropout...I eat, sleep, breathe WoW!"
I shrug it off, b/c I make random off color comments all the time.
Cut to yesterday....
I get home from work around 4:30pm and I notice I have an In-game mail. I kinda Facepalm knowing that it probably is a raider dropping the news that they will not make it...thus ruining my night of Cho Gal progress.
But this wasn't the average "I wont be online tonight" email...
The Letter:
So I take my officers down to the private vent channel, and ask them if they have talked to the kid at all today. Two of them immediately start telling me about how he was ranting about how his life sucks. His Girlfriend hates him b/c he plays WoW. He is on Unemployment..I mean the list goes on.
I fill them in on the letter I got and we decide to take action. I tell them that if hes over 20 mins late, than I will open a GM request.
Raid invites go out, and sure as shit he is late. I ask my officers if we really want to send the police to this guys house, he could just be taking the night to patch things up with his Girlfriend. I know if I was snuggled up watching some random movie and then the local PD came banging on my door, I might be upset. But then again I also would hate to have not acted had this kid really been in the process of killing himself.
The fact he hit myself and other guildys up that he has only been with for 6 days....was the tipping scale on if this was serious or not.
So I make the Gm ticket and start my raid invites. I understand Gms are busy, and by all means I am not griping at them...we will get to them in a second.
5 mins pass and then I get a 19hr 38 min "your ticket will be seen in:" icon on my screen. I figured this will get escalated in no time flat.
3 hrs pass and the raid is now taking a 10m break before we start Cho Gal. Still staring at a 19hr timer, I start yelling at the entire guild and raid team to make Gm tickets with flags for Sexual Harassment, Racism, anything big and to go look at my ticket, and that this was no joke.
As vent chimes in that the ticket was made, no lie My ticket gets escalated and then serviced in less than 2 mins.
I get patched in with a Senior GM, and he was SUPER! He let us know that they were already working on it, and wanted to thank myself and my entire team. They knew they couldn't do it without us, and we were amazing. He even apologized he caused us to wipe on Cho Gal LOL.
But here's the deal guys, I know there are tons of "FML" jokes etc in the game that we play. But your guild is pretty much your virtual family. I myself would be mad if some dudes on a video game sent the cops to my house. But I think I would be even more upset if nobody acted on my crys for help before it was too late.
Suicide is no joke, and you may be 6-7 states away from a guildy or even further, but if any of you guys see things like this. Please seek help! There are real people behind those keyboards, and for all you know they could be DEAD serious. This is what my title implies, if you just read this bold part, I want you guys to store it in the back of your minds...Just in case... Play it forward or regret it forever
I will update if I see the kid logs on at all tonight when I get home from work..but as it stands I still have no idea if he is ok or not yet.
TLDR; I think myself and my amazing guildys hopefully stopped a new member from killing himself last night.
UPDATE Had one of my close officers contact me via Gchat to let me know he was online and they had a short talk. He was one of the officer he talked to before I had logged in yesterday.
he said he sent that (the mail I received) before he spoke with me and after we chatted he felt better but still felts kinda shitty but he just wanted to sleep things off and not deal with WoW last night i don't know if i have the heart to tell him "btw cops might swing by and chat with your parents" i told him the ingame message was serious shit and everyone was legit worried,
I told him to keep the cop thing mum so he does not freak out and get bent out of shape again. Let them show up and then he might get to talk to his parents and the police and get help...I hope they do show up lol.
Via Reddit
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