Boneitis

My guild raids 3 days a week for about the same amount of time each night that you do, we're 3/5 Hyjal and 3/9 BT. Infact I'd say when we started 25s (in march?), we were almost identical to what you are right now - with regards to the 15/10 split. Before TBC we were at Twin Emps with Anub / Raz dead in Naxx, nothing special. Here are the differences between us based upon what I garnered out of your post.

• Everyone uses vent. Usually I'm the raid leader but that doesn't mean I'm the only one with something worth saying, I don't have eyes everywhere and we have about 10+ people that are calling things out. Like the main tank is calling out tanking assignments on the fly, I'm calling out changes in healing or when I see people clump up, someone calls out broken sheeps, or incoming patrols... etc.
• I do use bosskillers or other strategy sites, especially when picking which boss to go after next. I don't know about your hardcore raiders, but mine like to win. Mine like to see new zones and get new drops and it's hard enough to do that when we have such a limited 3 day schedule, let alone walk into a fight with 25 people having no idea what's going to happen. Sometimes this yields amazing results, like our 1shot first kill of Kaz'rogal due to me handing out Nights End capes from the limited hearts we got from Rage -> Anetheron.
• Our loot and invite policy rewards good / productive behavior. All loot is handed out via committee and thus it's your peers who determine if you get it or not, instead of your attendance. And your peers are watching the dps meters and they know who is and who isn't doing their jobs better than I do.
• Furthermore I guess we use a shame-based model for education. If you're low on the dps meters, heal meters, mess up shield block and die, we'll talk about it over vent if it gets bad. And each time we have to talk about it, the matter is less joyful to the point that you won't get invited anymore and we'll roll with 24 if we have to. Our first kill of Anetheron was with 23 people I think.

It seems to me that you are fostering this casual attitude by having a Lewis and Clark approach to raiding. Hardcore raiding isn't about the journey usually, it's about the destination. At the end of the day people aren't talking about how cool it was they figured out X boss ability, they are talking about how we did / did not kill X boss and what we're doing next. At least that's how it goes in my guild. Maybe your fun does stem from figuring things out as if it was new but that also seems to waste such vast amounts of time when you have no time to begin with. Time is your enemy.

I do spend a lot of time researching fights and class rolls so I can see the fight from everyones perspective, thus I can figure out who is doing things wrong. I spend a lot of time teaching and showing players specifically where to stand, where to move to, what to watch out for, etc. and I think it has given great returns and changed some people from "that guy you bring along" into a full fledged quality raider. Most people want to do good, they want to be important but they sometimes need a little help to get there. For some players it was simply helping them get a better UI, like grid for the healers, and they went from mid-meters to top-meters. Figure out why the bad players are bad, correct that, make it a positive experience and you have a new good raider for life.

When I say I'm the raid leader, I guess I mean that more like I'm a moderator. I have tried very hard to make this "our raid" instead of "my raid". I ask everyone what they think about our progress, what I planned for us next and sometimes we'll change plans. We usually have a monthly meeting of veterans to discuss problems / revisions to policies. I want people to be involved because if they are involved they care more about the raid because then it's "their raid" instead of "that raid they belong to". I think that has also allowed us to transition from one of those mid level raids into a very strong group and we have actually surpassed guilds who raid more often than we do. We just do it better and faster, and I attribute that completely to the atmosphere we've created.

I think you need to get off the fence. Are you a raid guild or a casual guild? If you are a raid guild, then start acting like a raid guild. Read boss strategies, hold players accountable for their actions, recruit people to take their spot, etc. If you want to be more casual, that's fine, have fun however you want to have fun. But I strongly believe you can't have your cake and eat it too.

 

Kink

Well, I posted earlier on this thread, but now I have an update.

We have a core of hardcore raiders, there for every raid. Then we have a lot of other raiders who raid 1 or 2 times a week. Our raid schedule is semi-hardcore. We raid 5 days a week for 3 hours a night. We have maybe.. 10 people with 85%+ attendance (4 or so over 95%). Of the other raiders, most are at around 30-70% attendance.

We expect you to be 100% prepared and to be 100% focussed when you raid. We are lucky in the sense that there is not a single person I could point to and say he is a bad player. Our last raid we took Illidan to P3.

So yes, it is still definately still possible to have hardcore and casual players, and still make progress. A hardcore raid schedule makes a difference, and short raid times force people to focus more, as well as making it easier for those of us (95% of us!) with full time jobs =).

You do, as the poster above me says, need to choose what you want for your guild, not the individual player. If you want to be hardcore, then you set a raid schedule that is more hardcore. Then all you need to do is ensure that your raid slots are filled with competant and prepared players and you will see progress.

And Boneitis, you use no strategy guide or walkthrough? What about addons? I find it very very very hard to believe that not a single person checks out a guide. Otherwise how would you know to save hearts for Mother Shahraz etc? This could definately cause problems for your more hardcore players who want to progress. I would suggest you bite the bullet, read up on the fights, go in prepared. It is not like reading the strat will prepare you 100% and you will now 1 shot every encounter, trust me =). However it might just save you losing some hardcore players to more progressed guilds.

There is light at the end of the tunnel.
The only problem is, it's often an incoming train.

 

Akka

...

You realize you are talking to supposedly "casual" guilds, and your advise to them is :
- Get 100 % raiders who are here 100 % of the time.
- Get at least 4 raids 6 hours long a week.
?

That's not casual by any stretch of the imagination. That's not even POSSIBLE for most people. Do you realise what 18-00 even means in a normal life ?

Basically, you're saying "my advise to casual guilds is, stop being casuals and become ultra-hardcore".
Uh, great advice.

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

 

Linnet

The only way I have seen a casual/hardcore guild work well is if they don't all raid together. So the hardcore raiders find a raiding alliance that suits their playstyle and the casual ones find a different one, but they all stay in the same guild. Course, this depends on being on a server/faction where there is a good range of raiding alliances that don't require people to join their guilds ... but it does work really really well if that infrastructure is in place.

 

Trouble

No, you don't have a problem. You have a solution. The people that have dedication problems have shown their true nature and now you can get rid of them. A great guild is born from leadership that is willing to do what needs to be done. You need to get rid of the slackers, regardless of how good they are. A good raider has a set of qualities. Good at the game is just one of those qualities. One of the first items on our recruitment checklist is dedication. If you want to find yourself back in the same rut you'll just cow to those peoples' demands and in a month or two when you're on the next hard fight they'll all be running for the hills again. LEARN THE HARD LESSON NOW. Get rid of the dead weight.

 

Denogran

Fascist a bit much? This quote honestly frightens me : Keep me the hell away from any guild you're running, no matter how "successful" it is.

I'm in a guild of decidedly mixed causal and hardcore raiders myself. I would like to, and will eventually, see BT/Hyjal, and possibly even Sunwell. My guild's on KT right now, and should have him down this week or next. Last night, on our best attempts yet, we nearly had KT to phase 5 with a recruit mage, another mage that showed up specced frost, 4 prot-specced tanks, and a hunter who raids maybe 1 to 2 times a week and it was her first attempt. Are we killing Illidan at the moment, like a number of guilds out there? No. But if my guild leadership went all nazi on us I'd be out in a heartbeat. I've done the military model of guilds before, and I do not enjoy it.

Which would be my advice to everyone in this thread, OP included. If you're not enjoying what you're doing, re-evaluate where you're at and make a change. If you're like Trouble here (fun name to quote by the way ), then you're going to need to find yourself a hardcore guild that's progressing and getting lots of epics. If you're like me and enjoy progressing, but not at the expense of personal freedom and good friendships, find a less strict guild. They exist, they work and while they might not be the most successful guilds in the world, they can be a blast to play in.

 

• Amera

Well, inadvertently that really comes to the topic of the thread. Do you prize success or fun? Efficiency or friendship? Either you learn to deal with poor players or you learn to deal with poor progression. It is very difficult to have both. You need to have a clear purpose and have everyone on the same page (read the EJ recruitment post as a clear example to make sure everyone who would app knows what they are getting into). The number one thing I would go back and change in my own personal experience would be to do just that - set a path and stick with it, don't try to mix and match different types of players.

Amerah, Selaste <Serious Casual>

 

Denogran

But I'd argue it's far more of a spectrum than you're making it out to be, and given that there are 9 million odd accounts, it's probably not unrealistic to think that you can find a guild that fits your ratio, especially when you consider server transfers as an option. My guild is neither super-efficient, nor super-friendly (I've read of guilds having get-togethers in RL before), but a mix of both.

Disclaimer: I'm not a guild leader, nor even an officer. I don't want to deal with people bitching at me, I don't want to have to set and enforce rules. I just want to show up and have fun. My guild might not be the most enjoyable and stress-free thing in the world to run, but it's awesome to participate in. I'm also good buddies with one of the officers, so I'm fairly certain the guild leaders as a whole are enjoying themselves as well.

 

Trouble

My point is: Why are you raiding for people that are leeches? They suck the fun out from the people who are actually doing the work. They had a core of people that worked for weeks and killed Kael'thas and then all the leeches showed up asking for handouts. To me the solution is clear and I find it hard to understand the opposite point of view.

 

Trouble

There's a lot of truth to this. I'm not a "casuals aren't people" person. I've always just advocated that the best guilds are filled with like minded people. If you mix them then inevitably problems arise when the different desires clash. You need to set the right expectations. A "friends/family" guild sets the expectation that relationships are more important than progression, and progression will be outright sacraficed in most cases to achieve that. Hardcore raiding oriented guilds must also accept that sometimes people with relationships to others in guild will be cut.

I'd like to point out that it's not all necessarily contradictory. Our guild is made up a tight knit group of similar minded people, actually similar in many ways. It's a "crafted" community in that we strictly self-censor who is allowed in. This works to the benefit that we have many people with similar interests and personalities and as a result get along well and have a lot of things to discuss. They are also selected for their ability at raiding. So we have success and fun, efficiency and friendship all in one bundle. I realize this isn't something that can be universally done, but it can happen sometimes.

 

• Calantus

There's a difference between people being casual or having slow reflexes or being slow to learn, and people dodging hard fights and then expecting people to go back and get them keyed so they can get in on the loot flow. Cutting the first lot of people can be considered "nazi" by your words, but cutting leeches is nothing less than being sensible and fair to the rest of the guild.

 

Denogran

Who decides who didn't make it cause they're "leeches" and who didn't make it cause they had legitimate excuses? Who's going to be the arbiter of all that is true and right? If you want to be in a fascist guild, that's fine. It's not an untenable leadership style to be sure, especially on a small scale like WoW, and without the real-life consequences like death. Most of the government styles you're probably aware of make perfectly valid guild roles, given the right group makeups.

But don't pretend like it's not harsh, or not unforgiving as a system. If the system you have in place dictates that people who have missed a lot of time are purged from your raids and guild, and they know that ahead of time, then fine, I have no problem. But don't think you can count that as a casual guild in any sense. The suggestion posted was to drastically change the system in place basically without any warning besides that of "you should have known better." That is inherently unfair, and as such I personally disapprove. But I suspect that's why I'm not in one of your guilds.

As an aside, the most effective way to keep people from coming back as "leeches" is to insure that it isn't an attractive option to take in the first place. If you're reactively kicking people then you're doing something wrong.

Back on topic, I find it weird that the people who most vehemently argue that casuals and hardcore can't exist in a guild tend to be people that are in very hardcore guilds, or who are hardcore and unhappy with their more casual guild. I can tell you as a fact that having a mix is possible. I cosider myself a hardcore player. I play 35+ hours a week, and raid for 20ish of them I theorycraft. I show up repaired, with consumables and reagents. But I play with some decidedly casual people, which as I mentioned earlier, are involved in our raiding even on progression nights.

Usually I'm against anecdotal evidence. Just because my situation works doesn't mean yours does or will as well. But in this case, where the question is whether Hardcore and Casual players can coexist, all it takes is one(1) affirmative in order to answer the question.

 

• songster

Thing is, it really is very rare for it to be that clear cut (i.e. someone turns up for no progression raids and then signs for them all once it's on farm status). It's much more likely that there's a large group who have ~40% attendance on progression nights and ~60% on farm nights. Some of these will have been there for the Kael kill, some won't, but there's no real difference in mindset or abilities between them.

 

• Orestus

Prior to TBC, my guild had alot of issues with the "leeches" issue. 50 people online for MC farm night, 35 people online for Vaelastrasz tries, etc. We changed our DKP system with TBC release and added a second tracking item, "Marks of the Syndicate" (See our guild name). Every one attending a progression raid (either in the raid or waiting outside on standby) receives 1 Mark of the Syndicate.

After a couple months it was very easy to tell who showed up for progression raids and who was just finding time for farm content but not new content nights. (One mage had 20 Marks, one mage had 5, etc). When we are thinking about cutting someone from raiding, its very easy to look at their Mark total and determine if they are a "leech." We ultimately cut a few long-time raiders who could just blend into the background in WoW 1.0 days, but now couldn't really do that anymore, and recruited replacements more interested in progression content.

 

Trouble

In a small group like this someone has to make the decisions. Are you saying your guild is a democracy? I don't think I've seen any guilds that operate on a true democracy, or representative republic. It'd be interesting, but I doubt it'd be very effective. It's definitely not common.

Most guilds start out with a very faint idea of where they are going. They evolve over time and sometimes they die. Some guilds get more hardcore, as the leadership or a large portion of the membership decides they want to succeed more. New goals means new rules. Sometimes people get left by the wayside as a result.

If your choice is that group A will get fed up with carrying group B and quit the guild, or that group B gets the shaft, what is your choice? Some people always seem to see it as "poor B getting cut for those soulless hardcores!". This is a game, and we're all here trying to have fun. If you mix two groups with contradictory goals then you end up with strife and not-fun. Either one has to eventually leave or the whole group will explode and end up as nothing. It's my opinion that good leadership is able to make the transition, choose one of the two paths, and make the hard decisions needed to get there. Bad leadership lets the guild die.



I agree on this point. There are many methods that could have been employed to prevent even landing in this spot. The fact is most guilds are lead by people who are sort of doing it by the seat of their pants and don't know how to look ahead and plan for this kind of stuff.

If I had to guess I'd say it's because casual players generally don't come to forums and argue about things in the game. I'd guess they spend all the limited free time they have playing the game. I personally also generally think of casual players as "along for the ride". They don't play a whole lot so they don't put a whole lot of thought into things like guild politics and whatnot. They show up for a few hours here and there, get in a raid a couple times a week, occasionally get bitched at by frustrated hardcore players, etc.

Of course it's possible. I'd imagine the majority of guilds are similar to yours in that respect. That doesn't change the fact that in the long run mixing different player types is the biggest guild killer by far. This thread and others like it is filled with stories about how the hardcore core of peoples' guild eventually get frustrated and quit the game or jump up the raiding ladder to a more serious guild. It's also filled with stories about how their guild exploded under the strain of conflicting goals between the hardcore and casual people. Mixing the two types is a huge killer of guilds, whether you've been lucky to stumble upon one that happens to work or not.

I submit to you, yes there are exceptions. There's exceptions every which way. We're talking about general results here. We're talking about a thread full of people bemoaning their guild's problems due to mixing the two groups. Providing counterexamples is great so that we can have our bearings of course, but don't take it as completely destroying the main argument.

 

Trouble

This is absolutely true and my initial statement was definitely simplistic. We ran into this problem a long time ago pre-TBC before we had filtered ourselves. Officers would be ranting in our private channels "those bastards who don't show up for progression nights! we should bench them all!". And then I would look at the list and say "well it's not necessarily the same people really, it's just that overall attendance is lower". It was a very general trend, even 100%ers would find time to take a night off if we had been doing really bad.

Looking very closely at attendance did reveal that there was always a small group of people that really did skip out on all the hard stuff. If we were missing on average say 15 people, it'd usually be like 2-4 chronic skippers, 10 or so who missing 20-30% of the hard stuff, and 1-2 high attendance people who were just wearing under the strain. We did ultimately replace the chronic slackers with people who were reliable and that alone makes a huge difference.

Even more eventually, we recruited people who were able to meet 90%+ attendance, generally 100% discounting special things like vacation and emergencies. The problem has dissapeared of course, because on our worst days we still have almost everyone anyway. I realize this isn't a realistic solution for most people, but I figured I'd put it out there as how we "fixed" our problem.

 

Kewangeder

I remember having some of the same problems. Whenever a raid was called in an old guild, there was often one or two officers out for blood, typically including the raid leader. It wasn't just the officers; in many cases, members were actively shuffling their busy RL schedules to make raids, only to have them cancelled because others didn't show. While I perfectly understood (and indeed, was angered by) that sentiment, I also found myself having to steer the witch hunt away from good raiders who just happened to not be able to make that night.

Part of the problem was an insufficiently strict attendance policy, which in turn stemmed partly from a limited pool of talent. One of the strongest correlations I ever encountered as an officer of a raiding guild that was not top in progression on its server was: the farther back in progression, the more relaxed the rules. Moreover, this is not one-way causal; these two things feed off each other. Lax rules make for slower progression; but slow progress also means the officers are limited in how much they can tighten up ship. Any raider who can live up to stricter rules is either already in a more progressed guild, is just an invitation away from leaving your guild for it, or is that rare gem who is committed to your guild out of loyalty.

The situation isn't quite hopeless, though. One "out" you have here is to make the second category of raiders decide that they like your guild enough to stay. If they're loot whores, by all means, let 'em move on up to be the top guild's problem. But if they're mature, progress-oriented, high attendance, high performance players, make them understand their your guild's most prized assets; praise them; help them gear up in lower instances; help them help each other farm needed materials. If they can't make a raid, or mess up in one, ask them why, with an undertone that you're ready to assume they had a pressing event or made an honest mistake.

Another out is to just play the patience game. If your raiding pool isn't enough to field a raid, make do with smaller instances, and keep recruiting wherever you can, and hope that that's enough to keep your stalwarts coming. Patience is what a great deal of WoW is, after all.

 

Falwell

We are doing something quite similar to this ourselves. We've also had a problem with farm feeders. Not as serious now as it was in WoW classic, but it's still there.

We've instituted double AP for time spent on working on new bosses as well as double kill AP for killing a boss for the first time. This, coupled with what we call "beggar status" (basically applicant status) at below 50 percent raid attendance (we're only a 3 night a week crew) will show you in short order who is putting in time on the progression days and who is just showing up for farm drops as it will skew the attendance percentages heavily in favor of those who show up to put in the work. Deservedly so as far as I'm concerned.