My EverQuest Experience

[July]

Got kicked out of 3 guilds in the span of 6-weeks, so I felt compelled to talk about my experience in this community.

For starters, I'd like to mention that I'm no stranger to rejection. The first time I was treated poorly for being an autistic person, I was 5-years old. That's never stopped, and it will never stop. It's merely a fact of life. But diving in:

Guild One

With the first guild, I have no idea what I did wrong. The GM basically just said someone thought I was acting weird.

Weeks later, I received a message from one of their members which suggested I'd offended them. They were confident I'd done so knowingly & maliciously, so kicking me was their revenge.

Guild Two

This one was largely my fault: I told someone in Discord to shut-up. In my experience, people are at their worst in groups -- when they're being seen by others. The wrong person took deep offense and wanted to hurt me in return, so I was kicked again.

When I tried to explain my intent to stay out of chats so I don't offend anyone in the future, it was treated as proof I should be removed.

Guild Three

By this point, I'd hidden guild chat entirely & resolved to never use public Discord channels. I didn't want to accidentally offend anyone like I'd done with guild #1, and I didn't want to lose my temper & offend someone like I'd done with guild #2. But one day I found myself AFK in the entrance of TOV for about 10 minutes, (while playing Warcraft in the background), which apparently makes things harder on the DKP-counting-robot.

Understandably, the guild wanted to discourage that behavior. And to their credit, about a week prior I'd AFK'd for several hours in the entrance, not knowing what a problem that would be. The following morning, I woke up to discover I'd been "temporarily" gkicked under the rationale: "so the officers would have to do less work in managing the dkp robot." However, we were killing Vulak at the time... there was no more possibility of DKP administration.

As it turns out, they'd assumed I was maliciously AFK for that 10-minutes, and they expected me to see their gkick as some kind of warning to stop. But autistics don't communicate in hints, subtext & clues. They largely go over my head.

Since I'd assumed they were telling me the truth and behaving irrationally, I pointed out the irrationality.... which made them upset. Having misunderstood this as an attempt to insult them, they escalated with insults & power trips. I basically told them "this is a shitty way to treat people." And that was gkick #3.

Wrap Up

Guild #1 and #3 were aware that I'm autistic. It made no difference.

I'm not posting this for anyone's sympathy, nor to shame anyone, nor to change the outcome of these events. I wish all of these people nothing but the best, and I don't blame anyone for behaving the way they did.

I'm only posting this in the hopes that people will go a little easier on the next autistic person to come through this community. As I often say, our suicide rate is about 7x higher, and it's almost entirely because of how we're treated by others.

Please don't assume all odd behavior has malicious intent. Try to remember there are alternative explanations. Forgiveness & mercy are good for the soul. Wrath is not.