LoDBlog

The Problem –

We all know how it goes in raid guilds.  When you’re raiding and things are dying people are happy.  When you’re not raiding and when things aren’t dying people are unhappy.  It’s basically that simple.  There are many different flavors of drama, but most of all of gets solved, or ignored, if raids happen and stuff dies.

So it’s leadership’s responsibility to make sure that raids happen and bosses are killed, preferably making worthwhile progress each week.

When guilds struggle it’s typically for the following reasons

1.  Nobody is showing up – Your guild killed Yogg in Ulduar and right when you were trying to figure out which hardmode to start out with first, Blizzard rescued you from a decision with another raid instance in ToC.  Now you’re completing ToC 25 each week, on your first raid day of the week, with an average attendance of 30 people… but when you schedule ToGC 25 on the second raid night you’re only getting 18 people to log on.  On rare nights you do get enough to venture into ToGC 25, people are magically needing to leave after 3-4 wipes.

2.  Your guild is in above their heads – Your guild just finished ToC 25, people are excited about trying ToGC 25 and breaking into the “hardcore” raiding scene.  After three weeks of wiping to Gormok, making valiant switches to 3 tanks to keep the debuff from stacking up too high, swapping to 7 healers to handle the heavy tank damage, and subbing in more or less DPS to compensate, you just haven’t found the answer.  Your guild members start to resent that rogue who is only doing 2500 DPS and still doesn’t have a shoulder enchant.  You assign class mentors, post strat videos on your website, and debate minutiae until you’re blue in the face.  Nothing is helping.  This invariably leads to Problem #1.

More progressed guilds suffer from those two factors, but to a much lesser degree.  Chances are that people in progression guilds won’t cherry pick logon days, and if they do they’ll soon find themselves out of the guild or riding the bench.  And chances are that skill won’t be as much of a factor with most of your raid group given the content Blizzard is currently putting out.

Progression / Hard-core guilds have their own unique problems including

3.  Your guild is bored – LoD hadn’t really gotten to this point in previous expansions because we were never on the cutting edge of progression.  We always had more instances and encounters to look forward to.  Each new kill served as a gateway to the next bigger and better boss.  However once you’re guild starts to catch up to Blizzard’s content releases and finishes current content well before the next promised instance boredom becomes a huge problem.  A lot of people think that hardcore players raid for gear, which is true to a degree, but mostly they raid because they’re rabid for new challenges and encounters.  Once you reach the end of the line, with nothing to look forward to, it becomes harder and harder to keep your raid group interested.

4.  You don’t have the right group comp – When you’re a progression guild you often need to min/max your raid composition for certain encounters.  As much as Blizzard has tried to make it so that you’re bringing the player and not the class it still stands that some classes just excel on certain encounters.  If you’re trying to tank heal Algalon with resto druids or AoE down Anub adds with volley you’re probably going to fail.  Top guilds keep large rosters and create group comps which give them the best chance to down bosses.  LoD has had to actively recruit a number of classes and specs during the past year.  Our 5 hunters (before Misdirect buffs) just couldn’t cut it on Anub and we needed more heavy AoE melee.  We looked for another holy paladin to cross beacon heal our two Anub tanks and provide another BoP for our kiting strat.

5.  You have burn outs – Realistically the average raider raids with LoD for 6-12 months.  We certainly have people that have been with us for many years, but for the most part we overturn about 40% of our raid group every 2-3 tiers of content.  Progression raiding requires you to show up and perform at a high level week in and week out.  For most people this simply becomes difficult given RL responsibilities.  The same characteristics which make LoD raiders good players (attention to detail, intelligence, dedication) also find those people in jobs with more responsibility or in school to become doctors or lawyers.  Important stuff that they need to put aside at times.  Over the course of a year a raiding guild is going to be about 1000 hours of raiding (10 + 25 mans), which translates into half of the time most of us spend at work each year.  People burn out.  It happens.

The Solution -

The solution for all of these problems, for both the casual and hardcore guilds, is recruitment.  I see a lot of guilds that simply refuse to recruit players, feeling as though they’re so unique that they couldn’t possibly find like minded individuals that would join their guild.

“We’re a friends and family guild!”

Make new friends!

“We’d rather give our players a chance before we recruit other people”

Once you recruit someone they become “your” player!

“We just don’t feel like other people would fit in well with us”

News flash:  WoW has 15 million players, you can find a million people that you’d get along with!

The reason I’m so adamant about recruitment is because I’ve seen such positive results from opening recruitment and being proactive about adding good players.  For a long time LoD had a pretty closed borders type of atmosphere.  We raided with people in our guild, only really invited friends of other players, and created guild alliances to bolster our numbers.  I’m not really sure why we took this stance, but we definitely fit into that “we’re small and unique and wonderful, we don’t want evil new people!”

We even made it into some hard content in Vanilla using this philosophy.

Once BC hit the real turning point for our raiding situation and status came when we became more aggressive and open about recruitment.  We’d post recruitment threads on the realm forums, encourage our players to have their friends apply to the guild, and keep our ears to the ground when guilds fell apart on the server.  Every time a guild collapsed, however sad it was for that group of people, it would infuse us with 4-6 new players that brought experience and passion for raiding with them.  For the most part these guilds were below us in progression, so these players were often taking a substantial leap forward in content, but guilds of any progression level always have cream at the top and skilled players.

Recruitment also helped LoD form a new image and direction.  In Vanilla we kept our progress on the down low, finishing a very quiet 4th-5th on the server, and it really hurt the server’s perception of us.  Not a lot of people knew that we had progressed so far and nobody was looking to join the guild.  The number of applications we received when we weren’t advertising was very low.  Rather than recruiting friends and family members, with various focuses, we were now looking at adding raiders.

With the infusion of new, capable, and enthusiastic raiders we were able to transform into a more serious raiding guild and end BC well into Sunwell.

Recruiting solves a ton of problems within guilds.  Complacency, laziness, attendance, and energy levels can improve by adding new people.  If your guild is struggling and you don’t know what else to do, looking inwards is often a lot less effective than looking out for some help.

Recruit!