Originally Posted by Amera
Aside from technical factors you have no control over (like game design and whatnot), by far the biggest cause of stress/burnout in this game for almost any raider is feeling like you are significantly better than most of the players you are raiding with, and that they will never get better. That, or just feeling that maybe they are lazy or unreliable.
Basically to echo Trouble's points, a guild should have a uniform goal and a uniform purpose, with as close a playerbase to that goal as you can get. It can cause a lot of pain and drama in the short term, but in the end everyone is better off, even the more casual players who will be happy doing something else.
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You're very insightful Amera. I started this thread because there was rising tension in my guild between the various raiding factions.
As another poster stated, hardcore vs casual may be too simplistic. Now that I think of it, it was a bunch of factions. The variables were how often people wanted to raid and how seriously they took it.
Several of my more "hardcore" players, the ones who wanted to raid every day and treated raiding almost like a job were making noise. These are the players who believed they were better than anyone else (and in some cases, they might have been right). I thought that because they were so vocal and so important to the guild, that I needed to give them a lot of attention.
I ended up drafting a mission statement, as well as writing up what I thought worked and didn't work for us as a raid. It really helped me understand why we have worked so well as a guild for so long. It had a positive impact on most of our players, because I was writing down some common goals that nearly everyone could agree on.
It had a demoralizing impact on a few of the "hardcore" players. They were upset that there were people in the guild who were happy raiding 3 days a week, or thought it was okay to be unprepared. So Unfortunately we lost one of our best raiders to a server transfer, and another to a larger guild. I wish it didn't happen, but if I had done what those two players wanted, I believe I would have alienated far more of my guild.
It bothers me, because I wanted to find a happy medium. The "hardcore" raiders had a great motivating effect on the guild. They were the ones who kept us going one more hour when it looked like things were going great. However, they were contributing to the burnout that the "casual" players were feeling. And every time we weren't raiding 5 hours a week, the "hardcore" players getting closer to burnout. I thought creating common goals would have united the factions. And it did for the most part, but some people on the fringes got cut.
We still have a few players who believe they're better than everyone else, and I'm not sure what I can do at this point to make them happy. We have agreed as a guild that we're not going to push raiding 6 days a week. And we're not going to be treating raids as a boot camp. The "hardcore" players stay in the guild because they like the people and the atmosphere, but I think their competitiveness is going to keep gnawing away at them until they snap.