“Crisp” Guild

Crisp was built from the ground up with the intention of providing a fun environment that would be inclusive of all people and welcoming of diversity. That said, Crisp has undergone many historical changes and growing pains involving misconduct by its members. This most recent event involving sexual misconduct was not the first time that Crisp has been forced to grow and change for the betterment of its members.
In the year 2009, a small number of guild members would routinely engage in hateful speech, often directed at members of the LGBT community. It was our stance then to not police this behavior. We allowed our LGBT members to fend for themselves until one member made his feelings known to us and showed us how wrong we were to ignore this behavior. We grew from this. We changed from this. We began outlawing the use of hateful speech in the guild community and became a better guild for doing it despite the effect it had on our membership as people quit and made complaints of abuse of power.

It is now the year 2020 and we are still imperfect. Seven years prior, in 2013, a member of the guild approached the leadership and sought justice for sexual misconduct from another guild member. At the time, the leadership felt strongly that the alleged victim should pursue justice through the justice system and advised her to report the event to the local police. The leadership felt that the best course of action was to have local law officials conduct an investigation and seek justice on behalf of this guild member. This was cowardly and representative of the guild’s historical stance of not wanting to police the behavior of its members. It has taken a very long time, but the truth of the matter was admitted to by the perpetrator and subsequently the guild has taken action to permanently remove the member from the community.

These events have shown that more change and reform is needed in order for us to maintain the community that we know and love. We will not ever be perfect, but we can own our mistakes and continue to do better for our guild family. Self-improvement is never easy, and it will continue indefinitely. We will be working with the victim to seek forgiveness and provide her with anything she might need to potentially press charges or otherwise involve law enforcement to seek justice against the perpetrator.

Our hearts are heavy with feelings of sadness, remorse, and frustration that we did not take a more proactive stance toward these allegations in 2013 and, instead, allowed this perpetrator to remain in our community for so long. We would, again, like to apologize to the victim and to the greater gaming community for our own inaction of the past. We will both publicly and privately seek forgiveness from the member who was wronged by our inaction, and we will continue to develop proactive policies to prevent any similar future events.

While the future of Crisp remains unclear, we will remain true to our promise to listen to the voices within our community and move forward accordingly.