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.

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.

In my experience, you can't. Your either have raiders, or you don't. While I don't have any experience raid leading in TBC, from WoW 1.0, you could by and large struggle through ZG/MC with half a raid of barely non-comatose monkeys, and the rest just being /afk and /follow. The way you progressed was then by losing the less hardcores, who simply didn't like raiding ("I don't like what the guild has become"), and then hire greedy asses who come seeking the lure of epics (hopefully weeding out those greedy asses who are incompetent)

Either road is nasty and ugly, and the road to top-tier raiding guild on a server is extremely hard and not easy to navigate.

From my experience, raiding guilds are entrenched. By attempting to pull the guild, you'll most likely just suffer officer burnout amongst your skilled members. In the end, the people in your guild are human beings, and you know how changing human beings often work out.

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?

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.

To be perfectly honest, right now is not the best time to go 'hardcore'.

Take the pulse of your guild - see where the majority lies. Have a clearly defined set of goals that embody a 'hardcore' mentality as you see it, and establish what will be required to achieve them. If support for such an approach doesn't hit more than double figures, then you probably won't make the transition intact.

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.