Trouble

The problem is that people are trying to describe multiple scales of attributes in a single dimensional scale.

Plays a lot <----> doesn't play much
Sucks at game <----> awesome at game
Reads strats/theorycraft a lot <----> never reads anything
Farms a lot <------> never farms

There's probably more. Some of these have some interconnection but they all definitely stand on their own. For example, I am good at the game, I play a lot, I read every strat and tons of theorycraft, and I never ever farm. I'm a welfare baby when it comes to materials.

People try to describe everyone on a scale of hardcore to casual and that's just dumb. Hardcore and casual tells me nothing at all. In order to understand what they mean, I have to try and understand what the person saying it actually means. A hardcore raider saying casual often means a sucky player. A casual player saying casual often means someone who doesn't play much. But it's still a guess until they describe in more detail.

 

affamu

I think it's much more skill than gear. The same Hunter in the same gear can go from 750 to 1150 from night to night due to lag, group composition, available buffs, consumable use, or just not pushing the right buttons.

For instance, my personal high and low over the last couple weeks:
Wow Web Stats (1150ish)
Loading... (750ish)

Note that I'm a Survival Hunter, too. A BM Hunter with similar gear should be higher.

On topic more, the above is probably a good example of why some players aren't in hard-core guild. I can perform as well as some hard-core players (and I do it with worse gear). But I can't perform at 100% every night. I've gotten better, but I'm still too inconsistent.

That's a good point. But any of those can have an affect on progress. If you have a bunch of great players who can only raid 2-3 nights a week, you can make progress if everyone has high attendance. But what if you have a bunch of players who can each raid 30% of the time? You're going to have all kinds of problems with training people on each encounter, gearing up much more slowly, and with general class balance. But by some definitions, a group of highly skilled players with rough schedules would be "hard-core" even if they didn't make much progress.

Likewise, if you have a group of skilled players who raid often, but never farm, you're still going to run into some issues with progress. Or if you have a bunch of players who raid alot, but are not quite skilled enough for BC content so you have to do every boss over and over until the worst players get lucky.

I tend to judge how hard-core groups are by progress more than behavior.

Based on your criteria, I should be hard-core. I play too much. I'm above average in skill compared to the playerbase at large, but I'm no Howitzer. I read strategies. I farm so much I've head people say things like, "Where did all the mobs go? Oh, Nyidi is here." And yet, I consider myself casual. Guilt by association, I suppose. I'm in a group that is basically 1/6 SSC. I wouldn't presume to be hard-core from that. But the vast majority of the playerbase does not raid at all, so compared to them I'm hard-core. I'm definitely hard-core from a game designer's perspective. I'm the sort of player than MMOs don't make much profit from.

If I was a better player, I'd probably be trying to join 11th Hour or even looking for a server transfer. Casual raiding can mean very slow progress. Frankly, it can mean a few players end up wasting everyone else's time while they learn basic MMO skills that hard-core raiders learned in EverQuest or at least in AQ40/Naxx. But there's no shortcut to that learning process, apart from recruiting people who have been through it already. And on my server, the pool of skilled raiders is unusually limited. If you're serious about raiding, you're likely in one of the serious raid guilds. There's a bunch of less successful groups like the ones I'm in that can either choose not to raid or attempt to raid with less than ideal players such as myself.

On the other hand, being in a more casual group means not getting kicked out for having inconsistent DPS. And it's more compatible with my unpredictable work hours.

 

Trouble

Well that was my point, I didn't say what hardcore or casual is. My point is that people use these words but they mean different things to different people and really aren't useful at all.

 

• Daboran

We have a reasonable mix of "hardcore" and "casuals" in our guild. We might be unusual, but most of us work and/or have families to look after so we limit our raid days to 4 progression nights a week and always end before midnight server time.

Having said this, we hammered raiding before TBC and were on a 5-6day schedule so our expectations of progress are pretty high. The main issue for us is that we are riding the fine line between keeping those who want progress and those who can't or won't raid for longer hours all happy. Add to that a finite server pool of experienced player and it's a tough job to hang on to your best players on our server - there are no shortcuts to experience and no substitute for ability.

We have more of less settled on a pool of 30 for learning new bosses - these are the players who can learn encounters quickly and consistently perform well. We rotate the other more casual players in on bosses gradually so that the raid maintains its strength and doesnt wipe needlessly on already-learnt encounters. This means also that the regular raiders can take a break to avoid burn-out or if work/family committments get in the way wiithout having to rotate too many "hardcore" players who desperately want a raid spot every night.

At the moment I think we are keeping everyone happy in the main and we are 6/6 in SSC, Alar/VR down but it's not easy balancing it all. If we have too many "core raiders" unavailable the raids are noticeably more difficult and progression slows down to a crawl.


I'd have to say that ability is a lot more important than whether the person wants to raid every night of the week. I think every guild has those few players who out-heal/out-dps/out-tank the rest regardless of gear levels or how often they raid.

 

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.

 

Shandara

I second this, perceived reality or not, for our guild it has been the biggest reason for people leaving/transferring out/going inactive.

The problem is, some people truly don't seem to be able to shake the pre-TBC raiding attitude (i.e. show up, somewhat prepared, ready to be told what to do) which makes progress a painful thing, with random wipes on farm content for no reason.

We've been stuck on Kael for weeks now and it's not letting up. People showing up with strange specs, no consumeables, no grasp of the strategy.

What are we to do? Like many servers ours is very limited in the amount of quality players to be had.

 

Nightson

This is what tore my old guild apart. We started out as a very laid back and casual guild, but we had some very skilled people in the guild and so we breezed through Karazhan, killed Gruul in three pulls and were doing pretty good. But then we officers tried to get on to people to improve their performance (mage who did about 10% more damage then the tank) and then those people stopped showing up, their friends stopped showing up, the people willing to put in the time left because we couldn't recruit fast enough for their tastes.

Basically, I think a guild needs a pretty clear vision ahead of time as to where it's trying to head.

 

Fagrim

I buy most sentiments in this thread, but it contains a bit too much theorycrafting for my taste. Yes - you need a clear vision what to do with the guild, and recruit and raid with that in mind. Yes you always need to give feed-back and be ready to kick someone who does not perform. And many guilds do not do this right.

However, at the end of the day you will have a guild with serveral deltas along dimensions such as /played per week, skill etc. The art of managing these deltas (that should be manageable if vision, recruitment and kicking is done right) is the true gordian knot for most officer groups as I see it.

 

Eulogy

After two years of raiding I find only 1 answer to OP's question:
There's no way in hell to have both casuals and hardcore players in guild. It may work for few months at most, but at the end one type will start to leave the guild.

 

Inkm

We've allways been "casual and friendly raiders" of sorts. And we've allways had a leak of well geared and skilled players to the "pure" hardcore guilds.

So basically, my sentiment is the same as the above.

That beeing said, I'm trying to coordinate just this and I'm running into the same problems as mostly everyone else in this thread.

 

Akka

I beg to differ.
What I think is incompatible, is having a mix of "casual" (for what the word is worth) and "hardcore" in a guilde with hardcore ambitions. In this case, skilled people with lost of investment will feel held back by the less competent players, which will lead to tensions, and the "casuals" will probably resent both these tensions and the fact they are pushed hard to play more/better.

But I find it's possible (though, of course, it has its own problems) to mix both kind of players if you announce from the go that your guild likes progression, but will stay somehow casual, and that you keep your ambitions somehow low.
Such guilds are more interested by social interactions and friendship/ambiance. And there is no game skill needed for these, so they can accomodate both hardcore and casuals - unless, of course, you consider that a "hardcore" player is a player whose main ambition is progress, and not just time played/skill/involvement.

If violence doesn't solve your problem...
... you simply haven't been violent enough !

 

Valjean

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.

 

Valjean

I think that's what happened/is happening to us. We adopted hardcore ambitions but we've always been a casual guild. When the more skilled, hardcore players started seeing so many boss kills in a row, I think they realized that what they truly wanted wasn't the atmosphere we provided, but the competitiveness from raiding.

I made a few changes in the past few days. In our recruiting section, I added our mission statement, and was very clear on the type of raiding environment we have, and the players we're looking for.

 

gunsmithx

Coming from a guild that has tried since lanuch to balance the so called casual and hardcore divide I can relate to alot of whats been said. When the game first started and we got together we were able to do quite well with the balancing act in MC and later BWL and even AQ40 for a while, people were happy and it seemed to be working.

Where it feel apart, and I think this problem is magnified in TBC, is when the fight start to require that the whole raid pay attention to whats going on(twin emps, cthun, various naxx fights) and most of the fights in TBC. It takes a clear vision to keep a guild like that together and even then it's very hard to do because the casual's don't always see or learn as fast as the hardcore, they become frustrated as they sometimes feel looked down upon by the hardcore and the hardcore feel like they are wasting their time and get tremdously frustrated by what they feel are silly or stuipd mistakes. Whats a guild to do in this sort of mess? I'm not sure there's a good answer here simply because at the end of the day each end of the guild wants different' things and I'm not sure those ends are compatible. I'd say you need to see where most of the guild wants to go and try to lead the guild in that direction. You can' t make everyone happy all the time and trying to is just not going to work.

 

Ghorthor

This is me you describing there. The guild went into BC with the mindset, that a heavy mix between casuals and hardcore would work out for our benefits this time. Right about now the guild totally broke down to about a half a dozen of casuals. Everyone else left into totally different directions. I lost all motivations within this process to achieve anything advanced within BC's lifecycle. E.g. rather waiting for Zul'Aman than to go through the usual process of finding a new guild, socialise within, gaining DKP and so on. I'm done with this for now. At this point i'd rather start from scratch.

To add something to the topic. Honestly i do not think a mix of players will work in this current content. Not try to pull this into hardcores vs casuals again, but for a mix of playertypes to work out, you need to give players room to breath. This expansion doesn't. When your healers or tanks burn out and want to switch to DPS for a while, you're screwed. You need people who farm their stuff before switching specs, who trade roles with others, all the things you can not expect from casuals. So my result for the last months is, it will not work out to mix playertypes.

You will experience situations where people have to throttle down their personal goals, this will lead to all kinds of drama, sooner or later. You just can not expect everyone to work as replacable ressources for raid leaders. This has nothing to do with "think for the greater good" but with "this isn't my kind of fun". Many players to not accept the loss of accessibility when raiding the current endgame, while others seem to urge for it. Trying to bridge between those two factions is something every player should try to avoid at this point.

 

Benegesserit

Our guild was founded on 9/11/2005 with a casual raiding guild M.O. in mind. 3 days (12 hrs)/wk. We only ask for about 2/3 attendance, though most of our active raiders can make all 3 days. We have never changed the days or the start times since our first guild run through MC.

This has been a huge benefit for our members, as they are able to enjoy the game as well as tend to RL activities w/o fear of "missing out" on the important events. It is not uncommon for us to run into a more hardcore player in the guild crying out for additional days or an "unofficially official" raiding off-night to handle some of the more obsolete content (for our guild) like Gruul's and Mag.

Darkspear's progression is quite behind the usual curve despite being a launch server (no one has downed Kael yet), so this has contributed greatly to the hardcore's morale as the race (for those who choose to compare themselves to other guilds) isn't very fast-paced. So casual speed progression still leads to being high up on the "leaderboards" for our server.

This does lead to issues of those who are concerned about the lack of TC and min/max (green gems, not everything enchanted) among some raiders, but at the same time gives those who TC more of a pivotal role in deciding how our guild will go about a certain encounter. So those w/o an officer rank can still feel like they are leading because there aren't so many at odds on how to tackle something because they haven't crunched the #s.

I personally believe the success of a cross-breed (call it what you want) guild will largely be based on the level of progression on your server, and what % of leadership is casual or hardcore. Some players, like myself, fall into a grey area of casual and hardcore as we TC but don't put in as much /played as the hardcores. Having a solid mix within the guild should provide some synergy for your guild to discuss all aspects of the game, rather than causing a divide.

If your server is well progressed (near end of Hyjal and up), hardcores are not likely to be happy with a cross-bred guild unless the raiding casuals fall into that grey area I mentioned earlier.

The other benefit to having a good mix is the active nature of /g. We could go into a long conversation of how gay someone is (joke), and at the next moment TCing about shadow priest vs holy priest viability in the different arena brackets. A guild swinging one way will likely be focused in one area and not providing the most variety a member can get out of the social and gameplay aspect of WoW.

I've raided with an active hardcore guild (5+ days 23+ hours) and the chat mediums were very boring but the raid was very focused. I've raided with a pure casual guild who have spent several weeks in Kara but were wiping on Huntsman ad nauseum. Vent and /g were loads of fun, but the gameplay aspect was failing.

Not only do I believe Casual & Hardcore players can co-exist in a guild, I also feel that this this type of guild makeup is critical to long-term success -- unless a hardcore guild is consistently competitive and the casual guild has no honest interest in progression (that or a large portion of the roster has at least one IRL buddy in the guild).

At least this has been my experience being in a guild for two years that has survived surrounding explosions/implosions/transfers and still progressing competitively within our own realm.

 

Jakt

I know this is slightly off-topic, but one thing I don't quite understand is why there aren't more hardcore (in terms of skill, consumable use, strategy, theory-crafting) ~3 days/week raiding guilds out there. After spending some time in the recruitment forums I came up with very very few guilds in that category. It seems that you either have a low time committment and no performance requirement or high time committment and performance requirements. I know that there are a few guilds like this out there, but not nearly the number I was expecting. Does this mean that the number of people in the A category is so small that successful guilds like this will only happen on really high population servers? Or do the group A people generally have schedules that vary too much? Any thoughts?

 

Lambach

Its tough to be both hardcore, and only raid 3 days a week. The amount of farm content quickly builds up on you. And Its nearly impossible to drop some of it if people still need keys and such. For example, pretty quickly after you down vashj, you can be on to learning kaelthas. It would be very difficult to stop killing a new vashj, to get time in on kael, yet, a full ssc/tk clear(with probably still some wipes on vashj) will probably take the majority of 2-3 days. Thus leaving you stuck on kael til you can convince your guild to just stop doing vashj. This kind of long roadblocks go against the hardcore mentality. Thats why you don't see many of those type of guilds.

 

Nezralix

I think there's just too much pressure in the raiding game for more and more time investment; there are drastic benefits to things like rigorous, consistent attendance and spending 5+ hours in a raid. Things that just aren't very tenable to the demographic that wants to put in 10-15 hours a week raiding and leave it at that. I'm going to go way out on the speculation limb here and say that it's high school and college students who (a) drive the raiding game, and (b) can most easily afford that kind of unrestricted attendance. These players are going to push for a guild with the dedication characteristics that fit their ability and desire to raid.

Guilds that can't field those kinds of attendance numbers either fall behind in progression (and consequently bleed the better players to the more advanced guilds), or they compensate with strong, performance-oriented raid leadership that adheres to schedules and makes the most of the time they choose to work within, while at the same time not being so rigid that they burn out their players (who, if they're working professionals, won't be interested in taking abuse or unwarranted criticism on their offtime). That kind of leadership is exceedingly uncommon in the business world, let alone an MMORPG.

Given that guilds like that are rare, and raid spots in them are finite, it has a tendency to force the competitive players with significant time restrictions to either sit on the bench quite a bit, or find a guild that isn't as good, or find a guild that's as good but pays for it in terms of time investment. And from what I've seen on various gaming-but-not-WoW messageboards, a lot of them just give up or start an alt parade.

 

Valjean

So the conclusion I've come to is.....I LEAD A FEEDER GUILD!!! We should print t-shirts.

 

Lambach

Well...your guild IS called "months behind". I don't think you could expect a whole lot more then that right?

 

Thandi

The 10-15 hours crowd that wants to maximize what they can do in the game is pretty small. Overwhelmingly what has happened to guilds like this on my server is that they are inevitably polluted with people who do not value their playtime nearly as much. When you only have 10-15 hours a week you NEED all the progression time you can get. This means faster and faster farm clears and speedy loot distribution. When you have 1/3 of your raid uninterested in the pursuit of efficiency, you have people afking after any wipe for at least a few minutes, not paying attention on farm content so clears of farm content actually take longer than first kills quite often, not bringing any consumables to farm content, again meaning slower clears. Eventually the people who are really trying to maximize their return for the playtime give up and decide it's not worth spending 80% of their free time in a week trying to motivate a bunch of people who just have tons more free time than they do and don't care if it takes all week to just kill farm content.

Our server has exactly 1 alliance guild that has lasted for any length of time (> 6 months) while progressing with a 3 night/week raid schedule. Quite frequently the excuse given for not tightening up performance is a desire for a more "relaxed" raiding environment, usually by people not realizing how stressful it is on the leaders when they are being "relaxed" and causing wipes and unnecessary delays.

 

gnuoyiy

I've read a few of the posts in this thread...That being said, the terms 'Hardcore' and 'Casual' are still being associated with skill in a few of these posts where I do not think skill applies to these terms but rather a time investment and attitude towards raiding.

"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."

This quote is the main reason I finally transferred to a "better" guild after I spent two years with my one guild. I expected a raid filled with skilled players on a higher ratio than my previous guild, nothing more. This expectation was more or less fulfilled, but there were still those "bad eggs". I don't know if there is any guild in the world with 100% magnificient or above average players in a raid at all times (which I consider myself to be way above average in PVE) but it's what I've always wanted but finally understood it's simply impossible or extremely difficult to create. These "bad eggs" severely hampered my gaming experience with my old guild, but with a higher ratio of good ones, it was alleviated. I may be tunnel-visioned though as if I saw a bad player, I only saw their weaknesses and the same with strong players and their strengths.

I haven't read all the posts in the thread, but the aforementioned is my experience regarding skill level and guild, I'm not sure if you associated the terms: 'Hardcore' and 'Casual' with skill but I explained myself with that in mind. These terms should not be associated with skill level but rather time invested.

C) Raids 3 days a week, and will never be above average.
D) Raids 7 days a week, and will never be above average.

Your C's can be dropped or demoted to a rank where they are not prioritized spots for raids if they are longtime guildmates (depending on how you run your guild).

You should look at the D's and see if any of these actually have room for improvement as raid attendance can make or break a night. And if these people have absolutely no room for improvement and perform poorly, my personal opinion is they should be dropped or demoted as mentioned.

 

◊ Gryth

Our server has had some serious raiding issues, hasn't it?

It has definitely been an exercise in frustration to be in the "2-3 days a week, with solid focus and reasonable skill"-seeking crowd. It's complicated by the fact that certain days are blocked off due to other commitments, and the option of cross-server transferring is reasonably unappealing due to having played with many of the same people for two years or more.

From my perspective, once a guild turns it's eye towards any serious amount of successful raiding, there needs to at least be a consistent attitude amongst the raiders. Things should be laid out ahead of time, and everyone needs to be on the same page. Otherwise, you'll end up with people getting frustrated on all ends. The more laid back people want it to just be an extension of having X number of people online, the others who want to be focused get annoyed that "persons Y and Z aren't pulling their weight", and people from both sides end up not showing up, or come to the table with a less-than-stellar attitude.

Basically, homogeneity is key. Or, at least, a healthy amount of long-term/RL friendship, so that the issues can be mostly ignored.

 

Trouble

Consider that people who can only commit 3 days to raiding a week usually have less overlap simply because they can attend a smaller percentage of days. That means it's harder to fill a roster with 30+ people who can attend those exact days. People who want to raid more will seek out a guild that raids more so you won't be able to fill up with those people. It would work if there's people who only want to raid 3 nights a week, but no because they have certain days committed.