Seeing as how this gets discussed in a very large number of threads, I thought I'd give it its own.

For me what a lot of people miss when they discuss casual vs. hardcore is quite how big an advantage the top guilds actually have.

The difference between the very top guild and even medium strength guilds really is enormous, talent, commitment and spare time concentrates to the top and in many cases the top guilds will have 20+ players all directly better in their position than the next guild down on their server. Good play and good advice helps the top guilds players improve, a sense of achievement/superiority helps hold guild spirit. The next few guilds have the competitive challenge of over throwing the top guild as their goal which, can be a strong driving force.

If you're in a top guild and you ever get annoyed with a specific player being bad in some way, imagine what it would be like with 10 of those players, and 2 players a fair margin worse. Take away your top 10 players and the main organiser, if separate and your getting close to what the average guild is.

Our server quick comparison
Day 1 Euro release server pre BC, 47 active guilds, 4 killed Cthulun, bear in mind several of the extremely casual guilds probably didn't register. At least on my server the average guild was somewhere near Nefarion at the end of TBC.


http://www.shadowsongeurope.com/inde...pper&Itemid=62

I dont think you can really classify average well, other than by progress - what goes into this progress is probably very different.

One thing that I find interesting is how many more alliance raiders there are, alot of them probably dont want tobe called raiders for whatever reason, you only have to look at your local progress thread to see the 20+ alliance guilds knocking on prince malcs door whilst 10 or lower horde guilds are in the same position.

My elitist side likes to illustrate how different things are at the top end now horde have paladins, but thats probably above the 'average' your trying to pin point.

My guild is fairly average. Almost everyone in it has a job or is at university, and while WoW is a fairly big part of their lives, it's worlds away from what you see in hardcore raiders. We have two official raid days a week, but the roster fluctuates a lot and in vanilla WoW it wasn't unusual for a raid to start with 5-6 slots left to fill. Some people don't log on for two or three days in a row because their lives are too busy; most of the rest manage about 2-3 hours playtime in the evenings before they have to go to bed, and a little longer at weekends. Individually they're perfectly good players, but they lack the time to invest for the best gear. It's no surprise that our best-geared player is currently unemployed.

We're up to the Curator in Kharazhan, and our first Shaman dinged 70 last week.

Every time I hear the question of average guilds- of average raiding guilds and the distance between them and the top, I remember a speech from a ballet movie:

Good morning. Would the new students raise your hands please. (Almost everyone raises thier hands) Now which of you was the best dancer in the last class he or she took? (Everyone's hands stay up.) It's a heady thing isn't it? Being the best. Teachers dote on you, other students ask for your help, and an aura builds... and then you get accepted into ABA.

And whether or not you admit it, you start thinking... it's just a matter of time before you're doing Gizelle before packed houses in Lincoln Center.

For most of you, that will never happen. I don't say this to be cruel, I say it to help you clarify your expectations for the year ahead. If you work harder, every day, than you've ever worked in your life- this school will turn you into the best dancer you can possibly be. That may, or may not be the kind of dancer I have room for in the company.


...
There are too many limitations- mostly tied to our guilds, our friendships, and our lives outside of the game. There's also the always present problem of a skewed perspective. The people who get to where we are, cruising forums, theorycrafting, etc... are usually the best in their guilds or fairly well along the way to being the best. Activly seeing out information and advice goes a long way towards "best" in WoW.

Looking at EJ- I'd say the average guild overall has Maulgar on farm- maybe only Nightbane, but on the way to Gruul by the end of the month or shortly after with the nerfs.

The reality is probably closer to the average WoW guild wiping on Attumen/Moroes, and the average *raiding* guild is probably somewhere in the middle of Karazhan.

Even then, where the average lies will depend on what you choose to average together, unsurprisingly.

Leaving TBC aside for the moment, just try to define the "average" guild for vanilla WoW . Do you include guilds that don't raid at all, or are you only looking at raid progression? If you restrict it to raiding guilds - do you include guilds that only raid 20-man, or are you only looking at 40-man raid progression?

Even then, how do you define progress? Say you have a guild that's working on Chromaggus in BWL, downed Skeram and Sartura in AQ40, and even had one Razuvious kill when they brought in a couple of higher-up friends for a laugh. Are they more or less progressed than a more methodical guild which has killed Nefarian 2-3 times, but wants to farm BWL a bit more before moving on to AQ40?

Is guild progress even meaningful? What about reroll guilds, or re-formed guilds where half the people have completed BWL, but things fell apart and they're slogging back through MC with a bunch of new recruits?

You could look at the gear progress curve - average ilvl gear per raider, say - but that will lag the progression curve. If you've been killing Nefarian for a month, that's still only 8 people out of 40 that have their T2 chest.

You need to ask very specific questions before you have a hope of getting meaningful answers.

One thing is for sure, and that is that whatever the question you ask, the distribution will be very bottom-heavy. You are cutting off the upper tail of a normal distribution. So which average do you want - mean, median or mode? The mean will be skewed sharply upwards by the front runners. The mode will be way down because of the casual raiders who mainly do ZG, but have an MC bash every few weeks in conjunction with another guild.

To take my own server as an example, looking at kills of end bosses of the instances:

Naxxramas: 0 (best progressed guild was working on Gothik and Loatheb, I believe. Might be 4H and Loatheb)
AQ40: 3, and 4 more were on Phase 2
BWL: 21
MC: 31

Numbers are approximate, as several groups didn't bother recording progress on the official forums. They're cumulative, naturally - those that have beaten AQ40 have also beaten BWL and MC. There's also a sampling bias in that groups that haven't beaten MC won't be recorded, so we have no data for groups that are working on MC

Looking harder at the actual names of bosses taken by each group, I estimate modal value to be mid BWL. Thus the most common type of group is one that's completed MC, but then brick-walled on one or other of the BWL bosses. Which is fair enough. Vael broke a lot of groups and sent them back to MC as a half-group plus a load of new recruits. So did Firemaw (do *not* underestimate the impact of continually losing your FR-geared tanks to burnout or poaching by higher guilds).

Median value is late BWL to early AQ40 - if you ranked all the listed guilds from best to worst, the middle one has either killed Nefarian or is working on him, and may have taken down one or two bosses in AQ40. I can't name the median guild specifically, as that depends on how you measure progress, as outlined above. It's quite possible that I'm actually *in* the median group :-)

Mean - well it depends what you're averaging together. If you averaged out number of bosses per person, or ilvl of items per person, I guess (and it's only a guess) that it would indicate somewhere mid-AQ40 as "average" progression.


So - are we an average server? God only knows. We're an RP server, so raiding was slow to start and generally slow to progress. On the other hand, we're a release day server, so we've had a lot more time to work on it than many others.

I believe we can get an idea of average progression from the loot curve from 60-70. Quest rewards and 5-man drops in levels 61-62 very quickly boosted gear to a level a little above Tier 1. Quest rewards and 5-man drops at level 70 are somewhere around the Tier 3 level. This is not a smooth linear path - there is a very strong "bounce" at the start, followed by a more measured rise. I believe this indicates that Blizzard aimed to level the itemisation playing field for the "average" player within the first 2 levels, and for all players by level 70. Thus we would conclude that the average raider was equipped in T1/T2 borderline equipment, and the front runners were in Tier 3. That's not out of line with the data from my server, given the lag time.

So - my answer to the question is that the "average" raiding guild is one of sufficient quality and commitment to have been in the later stages of BWL at the end of vanilla WoW, and that the "average" raider therefore had about half of Tier 2 equipment. Not Naxxramas, nor even AQ40, but BWL. The place lots of people here laugh at, and say you're in a scrub guild if you weren't running it for cash, upside down, with a group of 20 alts 6 months before the end of vanilla WoW. It's not a backwater, it's the average. Half of all raiders never got that far - and that's if you restrict yourself to looking at the 40-man groups, which are intrinsically more hardcore than the 20-man groups.


Edit: Sounds about right, Bekah. We're currently working on Maiden, so a little behind the curve for "raiding" groups (because we let people spec how they like and don't enforce attendance limits), but well above the average player who's still working through the standard 5-mans.

I'd be willing to set real life cash on that the above poster is pretty much dead on with his conclusion of what the average raiding guild is / was.

Sad thing is that I took a bazillion words to say the same thing as the OP :-)

EU release day server, average raid guild somewhere around Nef, and bear in mind the more casual ones won't even be registered at all.

This thread should really be retitled "What is the average raiding guild?" so as to make sure people don't run off talking about guilds that hang out in IF having fashion shows as part of their scheduled "guild time".

The difference between including guilds that do not raid or even focus on killing things at any level and raiding guilds really screws the "average".

Well then do you count PvP guilds?

Not sure that matters, to be honest. I've edited my post to clarify in any case - I was talking about raiding guilds. And the conclusion is still that end-BWL looks likely to be the average even for what you would undeniably call "raiding guilds".

Now, you can start moving goalposts again - oh, they're the *casual* raider guilds, I meant the *real* raiding guilds. But if you start down that route, then the question ultimately becomes "Of the guilds that have killed Kel'Thuzad, what proportion have killed Kel'Thuzad?"

Even a warrior can answer that one :-)

PvP guilds would, in my opinion, not fit in no. Simply because they focus on pvp.

Heh.

If a PvP guild would be clearing bwl back in wow 1.x they where probably not really a pvp guild. Confused PvE; maybe, but not a PvP guild.

Then again, if every member got r14 they had a good gear advantage on BWL and could probably do it quite well, presuming people learnt how to tank and heal and what not.

As I'm bored enough, statistics for a server that in general is behind the cutting edge (No Kel'thuzad kills ever; no Gruul kills until yesterday).

MC Cleared: 38 Guilds
BWL Cleared: 22 Guilds
AQ40 Cleared: 5 Guilds
... Working on C'Thun: 5 Guilds
... Working on Twin Emperors: 3 Guilds
... Working on Huhuran: 5 Guilds
Naxx Spider Wing clear: 5 Guilds
Naxx Abomination Wing Clear: 2 Guilds
Naxx Plague Wing Clear: 1 Guild
Gothik killed: 0 Guilds

Karazhan Clear: 6 Guilds
... Up to Prince/Shade: 12 Guilds (Shade on purpose, Nightbane seems relatively speaking less of a block for most people)
... Up to Moroes: 7 Guilds
Gruul Kills: 2 Guilds (Both post-nerf)
... Working on Gruul: 5 Guilds

Also a pattern I've spotted is that frequently it'd be the case guilds would stall on the stage event for a while, until they reported a kill of Big Bad Wolf.

Oddly enough the server is quite popular for people to transfer to in search of greener pastures, at least on the Horde side of things. Despite the fact that no one on the server has ever killed anything beyond Gothik, we did have a Warlock on the server with the staff from Kel'Thuzad.

Speaking to a friend in a lower tier pre-TBC guild last night (killed huhuran in AQ and Razu in Naxx) about Magtheridon, it was really clear when I started laying out the complexity of the fight how silly it was, and I think it put things in perspective in terms of "Average guilds." I know the people on this forum, myself included, enjoy challenging encounters and the thrill of eventually beating tough fights. A healthy chunk of raiders really don't; the level of complexity in many Naxx fights and now everything in TBC is just silly. They just want to play with friends, get challenged a little but not much, and see cool bosses, get item upgrades, and still feel like they are a bit ahead of the non-raider who doesn't put in any time to organize a guild.

The real question is, are we looking at raiding as a niche game element, catered to min/max personalities, or as something Blizzard is actively working towards marketing. If it is the former, then the average guild isn't all that important, as long as your niche has something to do (beatable lower level encounters requiring minimal effort by top guilds).

If it is the latter, I think Blizzard is vastly overestimating the average raider, let alone player, who is not going to be in a guild that can coordiate multiple Cube groups to time a debuff on a Mob, all while dealing with adds and a variety of other abilities (just to use an example).

People in other guilds who I talk to about encounters just respond, "Wow, that is silly. How could learning that possibly be fun." This was mainly in regards to Gruul, but applies to the rest of the current raiding mobs in general now. And really, this will always be a problem in trying to tune fights to such vastly different levels of skill and min-maxing ability. What is modestly challenging for an average guild will be trivial for a top one, and what is challenging to a top guild will be impossible for everyone else. Couple with that a limited gear growth (such that less skilled guilds can eventually just gimp a fight down) along with the insane power and necessity of consumables, and I don't see your average guild raiding much of anything in TBC beyond Karazhan.

Ironically, that sounds a lot like Wow 1.x before they put in ZG and AQ20.

Smaller guilds ran UBRS all day and night becuase that's the highest end of what they could do.

ZG and AQ20 gave these guilds a reason to add a few more friends of friends to the rooster and start working on getting some "real" epic raids.

The average curve of the actual posters on EJ is vastly inflated due to two reasons:
- Hanging on a high end mechanics/encounter discussion board shows that you at least have an interest in the high end game, even if you might not have the skills and/or time to actually be there. Most WoW players lack that interest.
- Posting on subjects with which you have no personal experience is frowned upon and moderated, so low end raiders don't have anything to add to at least half the threads here.

I'm sure there are lots of lurkers in low end guilds though, unable to move forward due to time constraints. They just don't post, due to the second point.

Interestingly, most of the WoW players I meet out in the real world (the several at my workplace, some overheard/met at game stores, etc.) are nowhere near even what people have called the average here.

In December, only about half them were even at the level cap (!) and of the ones that were, none of them had even heard of Ahn'qiraj or Naxxramas. They mostly played battlegrounds and ran things like Scholomance.

This is obviously pure anecdote, but I found it startling.

Based on the people I see, the PuGs that go on and the typical WoW forums post I think the average guild is full of idiots. And of course being a successful raiding guild requires to be free of idiots, so they are pretty rare. Plus there's the whole commitment thing. I think the average guild is full of people who simply cannot be on every single raid day and sometimes is on less than half of the time, and to be a successful raiding guild you need to have most if not all of your crew to be reliable and there at all raids. So I think this is why the vast majority of guilds are pretty low on the totem pole. I think someone said at one point that maybe 40% of all WoW players killed Onyxia? So how many people went into Naxx, maybe 15% at most? That means the vast majority only did 1/3 of the raiding content.

So based on that I would say the average guild is a guild full of idiots, and full of people who can't commit to raid times, and as such the guild is only doing some entry level raids on an irregular basis and is having very little success at it. Taking my server as an example, we have 2,813 lvl 70 alliance players. Out of those, 1 guild killed Gruul so far, so that's maybe 50 players (1.78%). I know of around 30 guilds doing Karazhan, let's say each has an average of 2 groups in, that's 600 people having entered Karazhan (21%).

Drenden (transfer/new/recommended server): (Source: ninja spies in my employ)

Adding up number of Karazhan boss kills Horde side: 22
Number of Horde guilds raiding with a kill: 5
Average Karazhan clear, Horde side: 4.5 bosses.

Or, for a distribution, 2 Moroes or worse, 2 Theatre, 1 End.

Alliance:

Kills: 82
Guilds: 13
Average clear: 6.3

Distribution: 2 Moroes, bunch just around Aran, 3 End.

Lothar (launch server): (Source: website based off of raid progress threads)

RPI (1 boss kill = 1 point, give or take, Gruul's Lair included)

Horde total: 141
Horde guilds: 14
Horde average: 10

Distribution: Ibid.

Alliance:

Total: 162
Guilds: 24
Average: 6.75

Distribution: ~2 guilds at each of the first half of Karazhan bosses. ~5 at Aran. Rest at End.

Conclusion: If you want to strike up a conversation with an average WoW player and they say they're a raider, casually mention Moroes, for example, "Wow, that Moroes fight, eh?" If they fail to light up, continue with, "Quite a trick, but nothing quite like that Theatre event, amirite?"

Edit:

http://elitistjerks.com/showthread.p...579#post308579 : Lothar research on the average from the pre-expansion raid game is either "No true Scotsman" or "Nefarian/Fankriss".

My server had one guild get past Thaddius pre-BC, and ironically the guild went back and killed KT this week. Alliance-side had a few chain-reform guilds who got to Heigan or so and would fizzle out in terms of progression.

My guild did Faerlina once, farmed anub/razuvious, and didn't get C'thun (phase 2 was our best). Most of our 'good' playerbase that wasn't in the above-mentioned 'uber' guild had transferred off by then. As a med-to-low pop. server we had very little to work with.

If you want to check out my guild's progression you can go to our site and look through past posts in the Gen Announce forums. We moved at a decent pace through AQ40 (till twin emps, god that trash...) and now we are tied for top progression with the 'uber' guild post-Gruul-hotfix. Since we had a long time for 2-3 groups to farm Kara and Maulgar I anticipate we'll actually pick up the pace in BC and move forward along with the guild who was previously like 9 bosses ahead of us in Naxx.

I think BC was a fairly big equalizer in terms of early raiding progression, and with the smaller raids and more technical fights (in Kara, or things like Doomwalker/Kazzak/Maulgar) most 'average' guilds like mine will be able to make pretty good progress.

We raid 4-5 nights a week, take Fri-Sat off, and generally have our share of AFKers and people who have marginal downs syndrome. I've begun to weed them out, so maybe one of these days we won't be 'average', but I'm content to be semi-casual and still have a lot of mature players who have lives/jobs/etc.

I found it...almost embarrasing listening to people at my school / uni / whatever, especially the main tank + the highest DPS rogue of the guild, talking together, getting oohs and aaahs from passersby when mentioning they almost killed Golemagg this reset, and having 4(!) epics.

This was when we were working on Sapphiron.

Spending so much time on these forums really give you a skewed vision of what's average and what's not. It's quite a different world than you'd think.

Yeah, there's a guy at my workplace who only bought the game two weeks ago. He oohs and aahs at my 4 60+ toons. I have yet to meet another WoW raider in real life.

Yeah I agree with Lactose, I was reading an industry-related (my work) forum and they were talking about farming for an epic mount and trying to hit 70 with no mention of even doing Karazhan etc. I think the average player is lucky to make it through Shattered Halls with a PUG, much less be farming consumables for Hydross.