Nihilum is one of the top-ranked WoW guilds in the world. Housed on Magtheridon, this European guild is credited for many World First kills and even some service-wide first kills. Some ranking sites consider it the best raiding guild in the world.

And for all you European readers out there, take note – they’re recruiting! But according to this post on WoW Insider, if you’re a girl gamer, you’re out of luck. The guild avoids doing so because (a) girl gamers tend not to be able to take abuse and (b) girl gamers cause drama, by their very existence.

The first point, in my experience, is bogus. Yeah, a lot, perhaps even most, women aren’t tolerant of abuse enough for the standard MMO sausage-fest, and hate being constantly hit on or harassed every time they go to town. And improving the play culture for women players is something that definitely needs to improve if we want to get past the parent’s basement demographic. That being said, if you’re a woman player who has gotten to 70 and is good enough to consider running with the big dogs, while having endured that level of harassment the whole time, you’re probably plenty thick skinned. Hell, you’re probably built like a Sherman Tank, emotionally.

The second part is more interesting, and probably more likely, but not necessarily because the women themselves are drama queens. I’ve heard of many male players become gibbering idiots once the female blood elf is confirmed to be a woman in Voice Chat. Often, the woman’s only crime is having a ‘cute’ voice – no apparent attention whoring or anything. Still, there are plenty of folks more likely to cause drama: the guy who uses ‘gay’ as an adjective to describe a pull. The guy who forgets to repair or mix potions before the raid. The guy who screams at the healers because they couldn’t heal through the damage he wouldn’t have been taking if he’d been managing his DPS correctly anyway. The guy who ‘accidentally’ rolls need on shit he can’t even wear, or who can’t hold aggro because, instead of using his taunts, he was reloading his bong.

The whole case reminds me of the gays in the military political issue. Yeah, a gay guy in a platoon can result in friction in the unit, but that friction often comes from the straight guys who need to better deal with it. The only way either issue will be overcome is if those situations become normal and common place. Once we get to the point where a woman who joins a voice chat channel is treated simply as ‘one of the guys’, Nihilum’s current anti-girl policy is going to seem even sillier and more ass-backwards than it does now.

Original comments thread is here.