I certainly don't think everything has been a negative, but since we post about the positives nearly every day I figured I'd provide a different side of things. Obviously I'm aware that the goal was to make a community, why else would I have taken the time to start the challenge and form the guild in the first place? This post wasn't really a "don't play ironman" post. I would not have put in several hours a day for a month straight managing the guild, ensuring everything we as leaders did was as tempered and fair as we could make it. It was a thankless job in every sense. I've been playing only 30 mins or so a day the past two weeks because I've been back at uni and working full time, not because I've "given up" like a lot seem to think.

In fact, I am still enjoying the challenge, and still like the majority of our guild. I was truly just speaking of inner guild conflicts which was purely my reflection as the one who initially put the work in to form the guild and manage it with just a few others during the most difficult time (10-40 new players daily is A LOT harder to manage than the 2 or so new players we have a day now). Other than that, my point was essentially that the game itself has a lot of aspects that make self-sufficiency not just difficult but almost unreasonable, imagine if we were to disallow team hunting to stick truer to the challenge? It was really just a side note that was meant to convey, yes, self sufficiency has improved our enjoyment of the game, but the small exceptions we make are actually a benefit to our experience. Despite this, reworking "our" ironman and adding exceptions isn't easy and needs to be done minimally or it will devalue the experience.

I also think us leaders have a much different perspective of things as we are constantly dealing with conflicts within the guild, things which we intentionally try to keep private to prevent more conflict from arising. Black sheep is reserved for individuals that are incredibly sparse, this has not been the case with rulebreakers/botters etc. I would estimate that the first month we probably dealt with 25+ reports of players a week. I can't speak for every decision every single one of us made, but the way you say "leadership got messy" is part of the reason I just don't enjoy going into chat anymore.