After some careful consideration we've decided to attempt end-game content hardcore-style. Currently we've started Karazhan and I'm noticing that people are having a hard time breaking old habits; like coming to raids ill-prepared. Many of them are undergeared and are very unmotivated to grind rep to gear up via heroics. And the amount of mutual support throughout the guild is thinning out. Some people would rather run Eye of the Storm instead of helping essential healers get keyed for Karazhan. And once we're in the instance the only people who bother to read up on the place are the raid leaders - the rest don't know a single fact about the instance even though there's hundreds of resources for it online.

My strategy is to motivate the guild on a personal basis. The guild leader has attempted to implement rules and regulations that would attempt to break nasty habits but it doesn't work out. So I figured that if the officers spent more time befriending the members then we can convince them to try harder when it comes to preparation.

I'm wondering if anyone here has gone through a similar experience and was able to successfully turn around their guild. I know these guys are capable of raiding properly but they're just so unmotived and disconnected from one another. Things like class channels and other community endorsing tools are dafault in every other guild so I'm wondering how I can promote that kind of comradery in my guild.

Becoming a hardcore raiding guild isnt like turning on a switch. You can change your 'mission statement' and use a sterner sounding voice on vent all you want but that isnt going to change anything. Encourage more time spent outside the raid, weather it be farming consumables, 5 mans for gear, or reading about encounters that will soon be reached. A 'passion' for raiding is what you need. This is something that you cant force on people. They either have it, or they dont, and its very unlikely to grow overnight.

Just schedule 4 hours a night, 6 days a week. Thats hardcore enough. Get good players and you'll eventually clear every zone available with the right leadership and support.

You should know how there's such an abundance of "good players" who are also free-agents willing to join a guild that's now making the transition to hardcore gaming on our server. /rolleyes.

I understand that this is a gradual progression but I'm wondering what kind of things I can do to help persuade the group to make an effort to.. well.. transition.

Do the players in your guild want to raid 'hardcore'? You should find that out first. Trying to motivate casual players to be what you want them to be may work out for a short time if you are lucky but soon you will be faced with burn-out and sub-par play.

Well that brings up another point then. Where do I find hardcore players? I'd like to think that it's beyond shamelessly promoting ourselves in the middle of org with a macro that assures everyone that "we have vent and a DKP system ".

What are some of the more successful practices that you remember from back when you were building your ranks?

For us, we started a mediocre high end guild @ gothik before bc was released. Then we decided to really push keep the more hardcore members not just let people get away with bad performance and try help them improve, if they couldn't they would be replaced.

If you want to be proper hardcore unfortunately you cannot let people slack is what i've found it seems to have worked for us, good luck to you and your guild

Isn't there a simple ten step guide for how to make friends and influence people?

But no, seriously. You can lead horses to water, but you can't make them drink - if the people you have aren't hardcore raiders, you can't make them that - that base is covered, but I wanted to throw in the cliche so we could beat the dead horse while pumping water from a dry well, since this one time my sister's cousin's friend heard about this guy one time getting blood from a stone.

I ran instances with people - the cult of the main tank is heavily reinforced by the strength of recruiting as a capable tank. People enjoy being in a party with you because they die less, and can futz around more, and you get to feel them out - do these people routinely group with you, go everywhere, want to get attunements and better gear, or do they show up once a week and ask, "Hay wan 2 run teh Crpytz?"

If you don't put the personal touch in, and lead by example, you won't get anywhere, and anyone you find will be because you took the bathwater in with the baby. Get to know people, get people to know you, and you'll eventually find like minded people, or you're a poor soul on a really unpopulated server.

There's also the question about reinventing the wheel - is there already a hardcore guild out there that needs you? Do you need to be the boss? Maybe these casual folk would be happy being casual, and you'd be happier being hardcore with some hardcore folk. If Messeur M., won't come to the mountain, maybe the mountain can be brought to him?

I've tried this, and while it may work for some, I was at some point running strat/scholo 4-5 times a day, weeks on end. Attempting to lead by example will in my experience only cause you to burn out. Everyone has a breaking point.

It certainly doesn't sound like your current guild is cut out for hardcore raiding. The way I see it, you can recruit people who really want to raid and kick the slackers to the curb, or you can take Dakous' (very wise) suggestion and move your core raiders to another guild. The latter option would be the less painful one.

As for recruiting raiders, there's really no way to see someone's true colors until you've grouped with them for a bit. Take people in on a trial basis, see how motivated they are, ask/tell them to leave if they don't measure up.

Few people really want to go Hardcore in the way its implied, and the problem is that unless basicly everyone is also Hardcore there will arise some annoying issues and most likely result in the Hardcore people reforming in a new guild without the Softcore ones or simply joining another raiding guild =/

We generally do 7~ -> 12~ with the possibility of staying late if required, we expect everyone to have flasks and full potions, keep loot done by a strict progression > dkp initially, and strongly read into the damage meters to monitor off the slackers, and are pretty much always the 1st in raid progression on our server. And by no means are we a Hardcore Guild, we only have about 5~ people who could truely be classed as it.

Ironically it was easier to go "hardcore" before the expansion if you could get the numbers. By having an MC-esque instance you can get people to form bonds, see progression and get loot. With Gruul being pretty much the 2nd boss you see, there's no progression, very little loot, and lots of farming. Its hard to motivate people through that.

Hardcore is about the attitude, not about time spent online. Going after that boss 8 times until it dies, instead of giving up after 2 attempts. Learning on your mistakes and never doing them again instead of being stupid. Spending those extra hours farming consumables and improving your gear, instead of idling in IF. Trying to find a clever way to beat the situation with the people you have instead of saying it's impossible. Reading the boards from work to find out all the latest information instead of not doing it. Every member needs the right attitude for a hardcore guild to work, and a small group can't push a guild for very long if the majority are slackers. And that right there is a major issue in so many raiding guilds.

I'm interested to see how you define 'hardcore', after stating all the things you guys do and yet state you are not a hardcore guild. 5+ hr nights, expecting flasks and pots, progression loot and performance monitoring? That's pretty damn hardcore if you ask me.

Because while we may try give our members high standards, we cannot give them the mentality of a 'Hardcore' raider, people do every now and then loose abit of hope, we can get serious downtime and sometimes several people are really quite stupid on a regular basis.

We have people more interested in their own loot that they loose sight on the progression potential of it being used elsewhere, we have more ppl online for Kara than we do when its a 'wipe night' at Gruul or Mag.

But sometimes people really do show the Hardcore quality and its really quite amazing to really see everyone plow through the crap and keep at top performance, unwavering and willing to go full out and further. I wish it happened more often however :P but I completly understand why people would want to be Hardcore due to it.

Agreed lol. That is pretty hard core I'm afraid =).

To the OP:
Did everyone in your guild agree to this? If they all agreed and said yes! we want to be hardcore, thne simply put you need to start demoting people who slack. You can create a new rank, raid member.

Raid member = 80% availability, always prepared for raids.
Say that in 1 month you will recap each member and check if they were prepared and ready to attend 80% of the raids and if so they will get promoted. From that month onwards, ONLY raid members will be able to loot.

You will soon find the less hardcore cannot make the requirement, can stay in the guild as basically a friends rank, but can only ever get loot on farm bosses. If that is all they want, then meh, at least you have some people to help down doom lord kazzak as well as to fill out a raid.

IF you do not have enough people with Raid Member rank, then you just recruit with the above requirements in the app. Recruits get raid priority over members (but NOT raid members), but only loot rot loot. This lets you evaluate recruits, lets them see you are serious about being hardcore and will allow you to progress faster as you will have a smaller core of members for all the 25man raids, and a larger base of people-you-know who help out for the outdoor fights.

Raid member rank can be called what you like, I believe when my old guild on the US forums changed from casual to more hardcore it was called "Raiding Core" rank.

The timing for you is very unfortunate. There really is not raiding content to get people excitied or feel involved like there was before. People are not going to get excitied about the two purples that drop from Maulgor and then 3 days of wiping on Gruul. Similarly, it takes a fair amount of learning to get through the latter parts of Karazhan, as well as the difficulty of making your 25 man raid an evenly balanced two groups of 10.

I don't imagine the small loot upgrades in the 10 man zone will be enough to motivate anyone not previously interested in the subject of raiding. And honestly, I have noticed a larger number of my old hardcore friends turned off of raiding all together. Many have run Karazhan enough to get the 1-2 loots they actually wanted, and they have little desire to go back for more void crystals.

I think the better question you should be asking yourself, is WHY do you want to be a hardcore guild? While it is a nice idea, no matter how hardcore you become, its likely you will not be able to beat anything in the 25 mans past Maulgor. No longer does hardcore mean the difference between downing Nefarian and downing Patchwerk, but rather the difference between not going to Gruul, and Gruul to 40%.

Yeah, it's a toughie.

Why do I want to be ... well, let's say "casualcore," because I'm not going to be raiding more than three nights a week, and I can't call myself hardcore under that schedule. Bunch of reasons:

I want to see as much of the game as I can. I want to experience the joys of working with a good team -- some people play in their company softball league, I raid.

I want to find out how good me and my friends really are. It's all very well and good for us to strut around cause we can one-shot Ossirian every week, and yeah, that's a trickier fight than anything in Molten Core, but if I'm honest with myself? Ossirian isn't exactly the pinnacle of fight complexity.

I put this out there and I got 30 people to sign on and say "yeah, we want that too." This already puts me at an advantage over the original poster, I think -- I'm not dragging people into it, and everyone theoretically wants to put forth the effort. I'm not sure my strategy would work for him.

And... then we get an expansion with no introductory 25 man instance. There's nothing I can use to build teamwork and accomplishment in the group as a whole. Karazhan's good for some things, but it's not going to make us all tighter together. It's puzzling.

My guild never intended to be what some people call "hardcore". We just made it clear to people from the start that if you show up to a raid without flasks, potions, and your A-game than you'll be replaced... thats it.

However, we have some compassion for our members. All my officers help people with attunements, we troll forums like this one and others looking for good info and we try to teach people, we farm herbs all week long so we can supply some flasks at raid time, we bring enough potions for everyone.

But we do these things to make sure the raid is successful. Most of the time we don't have to hand out anything except maybe a flask or two. And eventually, when members see how hard the officers work they try harder too, because they don't want to let us down.

The other thing we do is raid 6 days a week and often times we'll raid in the morning, give everyone a break, and then pick up later that night. Again, this was never a decision that anyone made, it just kind of happened.

All that being said, it really has to do with the people you have in the guild. If you have people who are dedicated and want to raid like this, than they will. If you have slack people who could care less, you won't change them.

I am personally fast with the /gkick button too. If you suck, you have a bad attitude, or you don't come prepared you'll get hammered on quick. First you get a lecture, then you sit out of raids, and by god, if you give me any shit during that time, you're gone.

There are two ways to lead people. By fear or by admiration. I try to lead using both. People who are loyal to me admire my leading style and people who don't, fear it. I know that sounds kinda cliche or whatever, but it really does work.

The above statement pretty much sums it up.

Don't try to make a race horse out of a donkey. Your Guild will crumble and relationships will suffer. If you truly want to experience the best end-game content be patient, or join an elite Guild.

We're in a very similar situation. And we're on KJ. CRAZY. Maybe we should talk?

I'm worried that it might just be time for the officers and 5 or so people who care about raiding to just pack up and go somewhere else. It sure seems a helluva lot easier than trying to turn a casual guild into a hardcore one.

But then again, no one ever said "10 hardcore raiders LF new guild" would be easy, in this day of smaller raid sizes.

That doesn't mean you aren't Hardcore, it just means people slack off occasionally or lose focus, that's generally, I speak from my experience at least , down to the leaders. To keep the focus and keep people on thought. (No offense to your members) Of course you said some people are just regularly stupid, well maybe they are holding your "better" players back? Who knows. Flasking up every night, and 5+ hours seem a hardcore line to me, everyone being perfect every night? Not likely. ^^