Posted by iTZKooPA on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 - 37 Comments
Tags: casual guilds, eye of eternity, heroic, Instances, naxxramas, projectlore society, PvE, raiding
 Seen this kind of image? Then you aren’t casual -via ElitistJerks |
Recruiting issues promoted me to write the latest in the line of DPS guides. By the end of the day, the guild’s officers and GM had tossed in their towels and canceled raiding for the foreseeable future. For most of us the news wasn’t exactly shocking. Over the past few weeks the mighty force in Naxxramas known as the Warriors of Faith had degraded into Warriors of Whenitseemsnecessary. Sign-ups remained incomplete, those that did lend their John Hancock were no where to be found for invites, and players began disappearing earlier in the night than normal.
It isn’t that the guild is dead, far from it. The former trio of raid leaders simply got fed up with all the extra work they were putting into the guild, with little to show for it besides stress. After all their recruiting, hand holding and calming efforts, raids failed to materialize. Rather than continue their struggles, they have put the pressure on the rest of the guild to step up and form raids ourselves. The irony is that this is exactly what many of the newer members were doing rather than joining the guild runs.
I think that the current raids have harmed casual guilds. Being a group of older players, our time is often limited by other obligations (family, friends, work, this blog). This in turn means that many of us have unexpected things come up fairly often, causing us to miss invites, sign-ups or raids altogether. Who cares when you can PUG all of the available instances? My point is this, since you don’t need a guild to get through the content, most players feel less inclined to actually support their guilds. This is especially the case if they have no other reason, like long standing friendships, to guilt trip them.
At first, I simply thought that it was just our little guild that was having issues. But if my other WoW playing comrades are anything to go by, that isn’t the case. According to them, their guilds are also struggling to get guild runs together. Their plight is for the same reason, many members are running PUGs on their own time. Hopefully, most of you will read this post through before commenting, because here’s the kicker. It isn’t a big deal. Yea, there are some hiccups to scare out, but casual guilds won’t be going anywhere, ever. The early raid content has shaken things up a bit, but as Wrath of the Lich King matures and Blizzard ramps up the difficulty - we are looking at you, Ulduar - the guilds, all guilds, will collapse back into themselves.
It’s just interesting to see how fleeting these online relationships can be. One minute you are joking about this druid’s mom or laughing about how the RL proposed that all Gnomes are drunkards IRL. Then a freeze on raid leader lead raids is handed down, and boom, a fistful of long standing members gquit. It’s fine that they are leaving to pursue what they want from the game, but I have never been one to guild hop. How are the more casual, small scale guilds doing for the greater ProjectLore Society? Possibly more importantly, how goes those Heroic Naxx/Malygos PUGs? I have been somewhat successful in my PUG attempts, still haven’t managed to take on the Eye though.
Related Posts: Switching Guilds: Hard to Say Goodbye, Bad Tuning, Too Many Guilds, Or Too Many Bad Players?, A Casual Guild’s Growing Pains, What Casual And Hardcore Mean To Me, When is Content on “Farm” and What Does That Mean?,
By TuLaBeRrY on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
Is there something wrong with your itunes RRS feed? Your new episodes dont seem to be showing up
By Azui on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
my guild has the same problem, people dont care about signing up or showing up for raids, it has lead to some major issues that we are trying to solve right now.
good luck with yours
By Grido on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
I find my casual guild do runs that don’t work with my schedule so I think they have trouble getting a run going.
I wish there was a better method to find the right guild.
Like having filters to find a guild in game.
Example:
This guilds focus is PvP or PvE or social
We play 8-12 server time (PST)
We raid Tue, Thur & Sat
We need warrior’s & priest’s
By Stiverton on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
I’m in a small guild with some IRL friends, and it’s pretty much just for chatting. No guild raids as you can just pug almost anything.
By Hasoondi on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Being in a casual guild myself I find that there is a lot less stress in everything I do. Even when I am asked to help run someone through an old school instance. But the upside to a causual guild is that if there are people your level that are not too busy you start a group quite quickly.
By Ommadon on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
I have been trying to put together a raiding guild for some time, and just as expected, nobody stays in for long. Koopa, I am hoping you will be right as far as Ulduar pulling guilds back together, but for the foreseeable future, it looks like PUGs are going to be the only way for people to raid unfortunately. I happen to hate PUGs with a passion and would prefer all guild runs of even Heroics.
By Eugen on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
My guild is having pretty much the same problem … They started running Naxx 10 and I believe they finished it but pretty hard… with raids scheduled like a week before with confirms and over confirms. And ofc we’re lacking what every guild is lacking - healers
By Sathas on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
I’m the GM of an extremely laid back guild. We have 200+ members from lvls 1-80 and do 10 man raids. I haven’t had anybody Gquit in 6 months =D
By Penrose on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Yeah, we have the same problem. Of course, there are only three people in our guild… maybe that is the problem…
By PatrickD on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
My guild is so laid back that nobody is above level 60. We’ve got a 60, two 58s, and a bunch of lower levels. It’s not all alts either…just people who play when they feel like it and play for fun.
By Rhev (Koopa's GM) on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Yeah its not really a big deal. We decided that it wasn’t worth the hours of work a week just to cancell it when people who had signed up / said they would be there weren’t.
The healer shortage was what was really killing us.
By Dulica on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
I’m co-guild leader of my guild, and while we’re all a little lower level, we are trying to get into raiding. We have fun and that’s all that matters to me really. The only problem we have is people leaving half way through.
By Taskun on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Our guild is coming across the same problem, just simply not enough people. We even have to team up with another guild to run 25mans, which is fine because they play the “parent guild” and run most of the details. But recently we haven’t even gotten enough people between our TWO guilds to get things going.
A lot of people have resorted to PUGs. I can’t really blame them. I’m with those people who miss the occasional raid. Being a full time student holding a 4.0 is extreamly time consuming, not to mention keeping up with my various blogs (go PL ^_^)
Its tough, but you try to fit in what you can and hope for the best…I still wish our guild would give EoE a try.
By Khayne on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
I found my guild by randomly getting tossed in the 5th spot of an Occulus group with 4 current members. I hopped on Vent with them, found them to be really cool guys, and joined up.
The point is, I like the people I’m playing with, so I make time for our raids, even if they’re later in the week and I know I can get in on a PUG as soon as Naxx unlocks on Tuesdays. The best motivation for any person staying with a guild and participating in guild activities is friendly people. These are the kind of people that will keep joking through multiple wipes and can keep things light all the way from Anub’Rekhan to KT.
People first. Everything else falls into place.
By CappyG on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
One of the things my guild has done is made a commitment to carrying on with scheduled runs even if it means PUGing some empty slots. This system rewards the players who commit and live up to their commitments, and shows those who aren’t able to show up that their absence won’t hold the guild back. It eases stress for all parties by making it so progression isn’t held hostage to flaky schedules and emergencies.
By Magradon on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
I’m GM of my guild and this blog raised an eyebrow for me. I’ve got a small guild, maybe 30 people and their alts, and I’m the only lvl 80. I run VoA whenever possible, but other than that, most of my time is spent helping my friends. Most of my money goes to lend a little help when a guildie just can’t wait to make that extra gold for their flyer, etc. We all get along very well and I’m anxiously awaiting those lvl 80 achievements so my friends and I can kick some butt! It is difficult to recruit any higher levels to my guild though. They see the few lower levels and run screaming for the hills. Sad really, because they’re missing out on a great guild experience.
By Baek on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
While I am not the GM of our guild I am the RL. While this can be a slight issue with our guild, people running pug’s outside of the guild, it doesn’t bother us for the most part. And why is that? Because eventually, they will see that what happens when you pug (at least on our server where horde pop is very low) is the next day, you don’t get back in or they don’t run it again or they found guild mates that wanted to go. Then when the time comes that we are getting a 10 man going and they are already saved, too bad, we just did a full clear. How’s that spider/plague quarter run goin for ya? Oh that’s right, you aren’t going any further… On top of that, if people pug and people complain about not having a raid going we make it abundantly clear if we didn’t have the right people online to get something started that if people didn’t pug we could get this done, but oh well maybe next week.
However the one thing that gets me frustrated is when we are going to run a 10 man naxx (which we typically do every week just because) and so and so who just recently joined the guild or is a pug’er says “we need some more heals for naxx anyone wanna go?” it pisses me off to no end because now they are trying to fill their crap pug with people that usually go on our guild groups and occasionally a couple people go and when we get groups together and start sending out invites we get “oh I’m saved already” or “dang it I’m saved already.” After a while, the people that do want to go regularly will figure out that they will go with the guild and get stuff done or just get a few things done with a pug.
Really what seems to plague our guild and, in a larger perspective, our server, are guild hoppers and people that just want to loot and split saying “I don’t really like how you guys run things, I don’t think I’m a good fit,” but what they really mean is “I think I’ll go to this higher level raiding guild now that I have my T7 and epics.”
By Johhnyboy on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 6:10 pm
Right now i’m in a sort of laid back guild.. we have cleared 10 man naxx many times and attempted 25 man but never found the time to finish it. Our real leader is a nice and funny guy, but it seems he doesn’t like to lead. I joined right after wortlk came out, when there were only 6 members in the guild. Ive been in it up to this point, and still am the lowest raiding level which gets me mad.. i even do the most dps in the guild (this shows that we are laid back because my dps is 3.3k). I never have been a leader in wow… failing many tanking tries when respeccing. So when i see that this week we’re only doing a 10 man i ask my guild leader why we aren’t doing 25 man. He says that it usually fails, even though we’ve cleared 3 wings on 25 man in one night. (the continuation failed because not enough people showed up the next night). This discourages me because i feel that the time i put into the game isnt worth the runs our guild does. But i recently ran an extremely succesful fast 25 man partial guild run. Everything seemed robotic and there was no sense of humour. It was like running with a group of wanna be “pro wow players”. On the fights that you have sole responsiblities to keep yourself alive such as heigan and thaddius the raid leader would tell us that if we died on that fight we would not be able to get any loot. So i decided that my laid back not extremely but pretty succesful guild was the guild to stay with.
By onthebuses on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
I have just left a guild, which was in 2 words an epic fail. The guild master left and promoted someone who clearly had no idea what he was doing.
Now i am in a new guild, , and its much more fun , we do raid naxx etc, but we also have raids on horde towns, plus classic instances, just for nostalgia. And within casual guilds, you can go about your daily wow duties, be it questing, pvp-ing , which is alot less stressful. If you are invited to a raid, and you accept, your there, if decline, no worries your doing other things. Casual guilds, are the way to go. I am not a fan off trade chat invites..such as ” only level 80s please” i like the fact in this guild, we have all levels all classes, so we can advise on best armor for the class, best profs, and boost. It makes the game more fun. And the chat is always friendly and helpful.
By Alayea on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
I’m the Guild Healer and an officer in my guild. It’s a family-run, and so that pretty much equates to laid-back (no offense meant in any way). That suited me just fine during the waning days of TBC since I only did a heroic 3 times during the entire expansion. But I was determined to not be left out in WotLK, so I leveled my main and hunter to 80 a.s.a.p. and began pugging the heroics (I was the only 80 for quite awhile). That was back in December, and it is only now that the rest of my guild seems to be catching up a little. I still have to pug heroics and raids, which — because of the hassle and drama involved — irritates me. The announcement of patch 3.1 has served only to exacerbate that because I’m afraid that I’ll never be able to progress enough to get to Ulduar. (FYI: my guild never got beyond Karazhan. That says something.)
Don’t get me wrong, my guild has good-natured people in it. I just want to do guild heroics and raids instead of having to pug.
By Ozzel's Cousin Fred on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 7:56 pm
SSC and TK hurt my guild more than naxx has. We suffered a lot of departures because the content was so Difficult and we had many undergeared players, so we weren’t able to make progress at a rate people were patient enough with. So a number of our better players abandoned us, and hit up other “more advanced” guilds. We lost a lot of players because of that, and some finer points of the early fights which proved confusing and problematic (such as the healers adjusting to Lurker, and people in general dodging spout).
So yes on the one hand having content so easy people just pug everything is bad, but on the other having it so insanely difficult that nobody wants to stick it through is just as bad.
By Ozzel's Cousin Fred on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 9:31 pm
I completely empathize with the raid leaders who just got fed up with it all, I’ve been a senior officer and a raid leader in my guild for ages, and in all honesty the amount of headaches are almost not worth the struggle for epic gear. There’s so much drama, handholding, immature and selfish behavior, and lack of respect at times it’s very disappointing and distressing
Not only do we have to figure out how to do the fights, we have to nurse people’s different issues, farm ourselves sick getting mats and stress out over the different boss fights. It’s really aggrivating and I’m glad it’s somewhat less of a headache thanks to the “so called” nerfed difficulty (which I mainly attribute to the many publicly known strategies well in advance of the instance re-opening)
By Illithian on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 9:35 pm
I can’t imagine leaving my guild. I’ve been in it for more then a year and a half and I really enjoy talking with all my guildies. Also, our guild isn’t struggling at all; our 25 man team is as active as ever on their alts and as you said, those alts can do PUGs, and the less-geared people in my guild can also do PUGs or ask for help in Naxx10 on our Naxx25 geared mains.
However, I do think it has put more stress on casual guilds. Its now so easy to get to level 80 and get raiding that the quality of people is starting to deteriorate; imagine that someone was leveling all through BC and didn’t get to experience any content. Then they got WotLK and sped quickly through the massively-nerfed Outland and rushed into Northrend and hit 80 with virtually no raiding experience at all. These players are the definition of casual, and yet they can do the raids that hardcore guilds still do. Blizzard is trying to merge hardcore and casual together, while there should probably be an imbalance anyway, and its hurting both casuals and hardcore. Hardcore players are bored and casuals are pissed at all the newer players.
By pixiestixy on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
I can barely find enough time to even play a little here and there with my RL friends in my guild. I would definitely not be able to keep up with demands of the hardcore guilds out there. It sounds like they have a ton of fun, but I wouldn’t be able to contribute. I guess we all go through busy and not-so-busy points in our lives. I’m looking forward to the next lull so I can get lots of WoW in
By Mike on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 11:33 pm
At one point I was in the top progression guild on the server with many world firsts. However I started college and now most my focus is obviously towards that. I’ve noticed that most content is easily pug’able (vaults/OS/naxx) Naxx 25 / Maly 25 isn’t as simple. Maly 10 isn’t that hard but the pug needs a standard of gear and a clear understanding of how that boss is engaged. (especially phase 3.)
I’m truly looking forward to new content and a guild which will have fun and not only focus on progression and guild position on content. I rarely run Naxx 10 anymore unless it’s to help the guild or a friend in need of an extra heals.
By Chillidog on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 6:16 am
My guild is really laid back, but thats that I wanted. For me the guild is another way to have fun, people to talk ingame and people to help.
By Ombrenoire on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 6:17 am
On my server (Terenas US) we have what is called the Small Guild Alliance. A grouping of some 30 or so less-than-300-members guilds who ally themselves together to increase bodies in raids or parties and increase access to crafters and resources. We have been together since about 2005 (the beginning basically) and have stuck together since.
Now, what I’m coming at is this: The SGA is by no means a raiding association, but we do have hard core raider guilds within the alliance. These hard corers have had to re-think their policies with the lack of bodies lately. Not that people don’t want to raid anymore, they just have real life issues to take care of.
In the past, raids and instances were filled with strictly SGA member guilds. It wasn’t unusual to see 3 or 4 guilds in one 40 man raid. There was no such thing as PuG’ing the remaining people we needed.
Now a days, the calls go out to the SGA chat and to regular chat to call for people to join in. Real life gets in the way far too often and the raid leaders we have realized this early on.
Does the group lose dynamic with the PuG’ed members? No.
Does this mean we will stop the raids? No.
What it means is that, until new content comes out, most raiders are looking at their different priorities in game and rl and figuring out that some things need their attention more than others. Their times to raid in the day may have changed too (see Shift Workers).
It’s always hard to see a once great raid group fall apart, but game life often reflects real life.
Besides, when Ulduar opens up, we’ll see all those raiders come racing back. Maybe not at the same times as the rest of us, but they’ll come back.
As for guild jumpers, their loss if they can’t tough it out. Hard core raiders often miss out on some of the most spectacular areas in the game by driving at only the end game instances.
By Jondare on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 6:23 am
im the Raidmaster of a little (ok we might not be little, but sometimes you would think so) raid guild.
we have 20-30 lvl 80 members in raid-ready gear, and still we cant get raiding -_-
ppl just dont show up for the raids, leave quickly or dont sign up at all.
good to hear that i’m not the only one with those problems
By Lil ole me on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 6:35 am
We’re in the same spot: The people who have been level 80 for a few weeks, pug their Naxx raids. Which leaves the guild to pick up the ones that just hit 80 and are not geared well at all, and trying to carry them through Naxx. There are only so many people that can be carried, and for us, it generally means that the guild is unable to complete Naxx. Which means that more people join pugs for Naxx… and thus we’re in a vicious circle.
Maybe I’m old school, but I’ve always reserved my raids for the guild. I try to stay up as late as possible for the raids, but I am one of few with this hardcore mentality.
By Deadtree on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 7:52 am
Right now I am the guild master of a casual guild and we don’t really have this problem. I think the reason for this is out raid time. Because we are an old group we find the best time for us to raid is around 5pm to 7pm. most players don’t raid at those times so our guild is a good place to go for people that want to hit up a raid and then go out to a bar IRL at 8 or 9.
I think one of the other advantages is that because there are those of us with so little time we work hard to avoid waisting time. everyone knows their part and what they need to have to make things go smoothly. Engineers bring bots for repairs and selling trash, Alchemists bring elixirs and if there is an item people don’t need we DE it and put it in the guild bank. I think a guilds willingness to work together to make raiding better is what keeps my guys coming back for raids.
By Loridi on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 10:14 am
Read the articles all over the net about Age of Conan losing over 50% of it’s active players in the past few months, and the summary hinting at lack of end game content.
Blizzard is ratcheting up the difficulty of raiding to appeal to the crackhead wow players that want to raid or farm mats 5:30pm-1:00am daily, but it’s putting off the casual players and guilds that may in fact make up a majority of subscribers.
Raiding in WoW has gone from tank & spank with the _occasional_ wrinkle here or there - to an endless spiral of scripted gimmicks to learn. Standing on the wrong square at the wrong time? You die. Don’t have Deadly Boss Mods running to time your Mind Control re-application before it wears off? You die. Don’t have poison cleansing totem or a druid to cleanse players non-stop? You probably can’t even run H-AN. Blizzard put 10 man content into the game allegedly to make raiding “accessable” to small guilds, but the cheesy tricks and hoops you have to jump through aren’t that drastically different than their 25 man counterparts. There is nothing “casual” about pre-raid “homework” including watching videos on Tankspot for 30 minutes + another 30 minutes of reading user comments on Wowhead and strategy guides on Wowwiki for _every single boss encounter_.
As a guild leader, I won’t even go into the frustration of calendared raids that have 50% no-shows or lurkers who neither accept/decline. We’ve tried multiguild runs for 25s but it just introduces another clash of conflicting time schedules, personalities and play styles.
Gone are the days when you could jump in to Kharazan with 9 friends and plow through the content at an enjoyable pace. Perhaps the hardcore players enjoy Lich King raiding, but for many of us semi-casual types, the shiny has worn off and it’s starting to feel like a second job.
By Ambermist on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 10:34 am
Our guild hasn’t struggled, but we’re kind of on the boarder of “casual.” I think most people refer to us as a “casual raiding” or “casual progressive” in that we don’t have strict attendance guidelines, and we have no problem waiting (okay, we might have a little impatience) while the priest goes to tuck his kid into bed for the 4th time. But we have a group of core raiders with a few that cycle in and out, and attendance determines your ability to get invite. In the end, those of us who have been raiding with the guild for years continue to progress, and the others stick around for the companionship or move on to “greener” pastures.
That being said, there has been a HUGE disconnect in our full time, four-night-a-week raiders and our occasionals, for the same reason you’re talking about. In Burning Crusade, there were many 1 or 2 nighters, usually dependent upon that particular night’s instance, raid comp, and who needed what gear. Here, so far, because we’re not slamming our head against the same walls week after week (anyone remember A’lar and Vash?) and we effectively now clear everything in 2 nights, those occasional raiders aren’t getting spots.
So they go off and PuG and get themselves geared up, but how do you ask the mage who has been there night after night to sit out for someone who you haven’t raided with in months? It’s been terribly hard on our officers, and we’ve had many gquits because of it. You’re absolutely right; when a guild is no longer needed for progression, those without ties will go seeking elsewhere.
By Kalcifer on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 11:23 am
Our guild is casual-rp but that has so many problems. We get people telling us they want to do stuff, so we organise it and then no-one shows. (ever seen a one lock shattrath warming party, it ain’t pretty and led to several hours of jumping off high stuff)
Seems you can’t please all of the people all of the time. Just do what you can and then if no-one cares then blame them when they complain that you do nothing.
By HawkWing on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
My guild is a endgame raid guild where u need to be 18 years old to join, this and a gm with a lose /gkick finger have made ppl step up to plate and raid even tho all 25 man is on farm when u are raiding in a mature guild ppl dont want the /gkick cause that will meen that they need to go pug naxx maly or os and lets face it a maly hardly ever works forget about doing a OS +drakes and if u to do naxx 25 nu need to use all day where a guild run in naxx25 can be done in only 4hr’s what i meen to say is dont take slack from anyone if the guild is a raid guild u do NO pug u bug a 25 raid u get a /gkick u slack on /sign to raids u get a /gkick siple as that
Getting OS with 3 drake and the immortal titel from naxx can only work in guild raids, this will make sure u only have the true raiders left the ones that care about the progress of the guild and the toon ofc
By rannar on Monday, April 13th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
I’ve been struggling with this issue for the last few months.
I’ve been with my guild ever since I took my first steps in Azeroth, back in january, and when I and a couple of others who had dinged 80 decided to start preparing for raids, all seemed wonderful. It was a month ago when we realized it wasn’t going anywhere. Nobody seemed to care enough to gear up in heroics, the teamspeak channel we set up was empty most of the time (except for us), only one or two had read the strategy we posted on the guild forum and we saw player after player gquit, leaving us with a couple of 80s and a whole bunch of people leveling from as low as 20s to 60s.
Some weeks latter, we, with the permission of the gm, created an alternative guild, one specifically made for raids. But, once again, the same issues kept ruining our attempts at raiding and we dissolved the new guild and went back to the old one.
Only now are we starting to raid properly, if we can even call it that! We can’t even find enough people, of the 30 or something 80s raid geared members, to run a clean normal naxx raid (mails go unanswered, guild events on the calender go unconfirmed, etc.). I’ve found myself having to spend days and hundreds (if not thousands) of gold farming gear so I can respec into a tank, healer, or whatever the raid needs. All of this on my own too, the guild won’t even realize I could use some help with the respec cost and gearing, let alone some counseling on specs, gear, etc, or, if nothing else, some motivation!
I could quit, but I know most of the people there (not just the raid people, but the leveling and even new members). I guess I’ll have to start putting together pugs if I ever want to complete a naxx run : /
By Taco on Thursday, April 30th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
I am an officer in a casual raiding guild, and I read this and am going through the same things. We cannot seem to get a clean naxx run in despite the fact that we have nearly 40 80’s in the guild ( not all are raid gear or speced ) The ones that were raiders ended up leaving for higher level guild and just kept knocking us back to pugging 10 man, if everyone just stayed we could be progressing nicely but we get more new members, gear up a few they leave and then we do it all over again, a few of us who have stuck it out are geared in full 10 man naxx gear and would love to try EOE or OS with drakes up but we have to gear up new people who join and want to raid and teach them all the fights just for them to get recruited by a bigger more progressive guild it is really frustrating.
By GuildLeader on Saturday, May 16th, 2009 at 5:02 am
My guild is having similar problems. We have 21 lvl 80s, but, when we put an event on the calendar, only like 5 people sign up - and only 2 or 3 of those 5 actually show up. I schedule events a week in advance, and I even mail letters to every person who was invited, but still more than half of the invitations go unanswered.
Because of our low attendance, I end up PuGing the rest of the raid team, which is a nuicance by itself becasue it wastes another 30 minutes. Then, once we finally get zoned it, we get nowhere. Twice it’s been like this in naxx, where we’ve gotten together a group of some guild members and mostly random people, and we can’t even defeat Anub’Rekhan. I don’t think it’s a gear issue; I know the guild members are geared enough for it, but I didn’t check al lof the PuGed members. I’m thinking that it’s an issue of people not knowing what to do, but they still fail even when I spell out what to do before the fight. We have the same attendance situation in OS, but we mange to get through that one (not without dying at least once on Sarth the first time, though).
After reading this post and the comments, I think I’ve come up with a solution. I’m going to have all of the members who want to raid do Naxxramas on their own. When a members thinks he/she’s ready, then he/she can show me his/her gear as proof of skill, competence, and readiness for higher level content. Once we amass enough (about 12 or 13) of those members, we’ll start on 10 man EoE and 10 man Sarth + drakes, and, within a few weeks from that, Ulduar.
I’d like to know what you think of my problems and my proposed solution. I’ve heard repeatedly that Naxxramas is incredibly easy, but the two times I’ve tried it, it’s failed, and, unfortunately, I and my guild take the blame, for something that was probably the PuGed players’ faults. However, I find myself thinking the same way, with the mentality that I should just do a random PuG and it would work out fine. Is the guild really the problem? Are PuGs a lot easier? Will telling people to gear up themselves make them mad or want to quit, or will they enjoy the freedom?