OK so, this is hardly specific to gaming, but it's where I figured it out. A few weeks ago my Castle Age guild had a guild battle with a certain other guild, and I remarked in battle chat that I'd bounced many a time in festival duels with one of their members, and she responded that she remembered me. ("In a good way", she added, after a brief pause.) Then she sent a friend request so we struck up an ongoing casual dialogue. And it turned out she was dissatisfied with her guild, although she'd been there a long while, and after doing her due diligence she jumped ship to join my guild. And there was much rejoicing all around.

Why was she dissatisfied with her former guild? They're an established, alpha-ranked PvP guild. But apparently there is a maturity issue. Going back to Chaotic Union in FFXI, maturity conflicts were a simmering contention until Pag and Argo left to start their own guild with blackjack. and hookers. What they rallied around was "language" but when it was Midknight or Mani using "language", it wasn't called out, so obviously there was more to it than that. And knuckle-rapping over "language" did not stop the most memorably annoying members from being annoying. What made them annoying was somewhat more subtle, which I'll try to characterize more accurately as negativity, and being "noisy" in the technical sense of signal-to-noise ratio.

My new friend Laura nailed this with a remark about all-caps "shouting" on the guild wall (her former guild, not ours). Well, ours is a guild of predominantly older members, almost exclusively "adults" and by that I mean out of college, on our own, many married with children, several of us in retirement or getting close. CA is not stimulating enough to attract the attention-deficit narcissism that characterizes the worst of more immersive MMOs.