On a recent raid, our RL asked the raid who would like to stay late to help work on a new boss.

So that got me thinking, is this a fair question to ask? What if there are people who have things they need to do, but feel obligated to stay because 20 or so other people want them to? Is the raid times not a promise to the raid?

What if it starts becoming a trend? Is two times a trend? You don't know!

How do other guilds do this? Is this a common thing, or should it not be expected?

Just curious what other people think.

If it's not done all of the time, it's a reasonable request.

For instance, my guild raids 4 nights a week but when working on Kael'thas, we were close to downing him and discussed a fifth raid on Monday. We had a full group turn up and ended killing him so it was worth it.

But there's also a point where people need a break and asking too much or too often is going to burn people out. It's a fine line but also depends on the attitude/availability of your raiders.

Not sure if this warrants a thread on it's own, but in I'll reply anyway.

It wholly depends on the situation really, I've certainly seen raidleaders ask their raid to stay later then raiding time, just because of wanting to try out something new (to not having to waste time on trying it the next day e.g.) or just because it's really getting close to a kill. Often it has led to a kill and then no one is unhappy, however yes sometimes it ends up being wasted time which makes people somewhat annoyed I suppose.
I've asked my raid, back when I was leading raids in my previous guild, to stay "for a few more tries" which ended up being for 45 minutes past raid time. Last go of the night; Gurtogg down. I think there is no clearcut answer to your question, but if you ask me what I think of it?

I think it's a perfectly fine question in a higher end raiding guild. People do want to progress, simple as that. In a more casual guild, maybe not so very.

When progressing through T5, we found it was a bad idea to stay late without warning very often. Now we maintain a pretty strict end time, with a specific night or two reserved for staying late if needed.

If you legitimately believe that you will get a kill within the next (period of time), probably no more than an hour, then I'd say go for it. It shouldn't be done more than once a week, probably even less frequently than that.

If you find yourself continually doing so, then just discuss extending raid times further - but just staying late for an extra 1-2 attempts every few weeks when you know you're getting close is not at all a bad thing.

Personally, Im used to slightly flexible raid times. Usually we start near a set time then go till people start crashing.

There is really no set answer to the idea of going past raid time. Sometimes you have to push for 3 or 4 extra attempts on a boss, other times you need to know when to quit. I like to base raid time solely on momentum. If attempts are constantly getting worse, with more and more stupid mistakes being made, it is better to call it early or on time. If you go from a 60% attempt to a 30% then several >10% attempts, then yes it is usually better to keep pushing. As a raid leader you need to know when to push an extra hour and when to call it quits. Constantly doing back to back long drawn out raids causes burn outs, and people to stop showing up for progression.

In contrast, if you go late on some days, it is also nice to call raids early on other nights. Nothing feels better than like a nearly full BT clear with an hour left of normal raid time and hearing you don't have to deal with doomfires till tomorrow or such.

It really depends on your guilds atmosphere I suppose. If you want to progress quickly and get in rankings, then you have to push that extra bit. If you want a fun time going at whatever pace you manage, call raids on time.

There are reasons to go a bit further, but there are also very good indicators that the time will be wasted, which are usually also good indicators that you should call the raid early. If your attempts are going downhill rather than progressing, don't expect the next attempt to magically get better. Even if you had it and it's just 2-3 attempts of stupid shit... people are losing focus, and losing consciousness, and you will likely see the same stupid shit for the next 2-3 attempts. I've been in raids that slogged on an extra hour that, quite predictably, did not yield any progress. If you think the decision to push on is unrealistic, call your raid leader on it in tells. Getting 24 hate tells may alert him to reconsider after the next wipe.

It's also very very good when asking to stay extra that you set a hard cap. For example, "two more attempts, MAX" or, more commonly, "we have 20 minutes until trash respawns and I want to make the most of it." I don't mind staying a little over sometimes, but I also don't like it when it gets extended to an hour and a half, one attempt at a time. It's easier for people to give that extra push when there's a definite end in sight. This usually also involves an inspirational speach to the effect of "don't fall asleep on me now."

I recomend polling people on whether they would be willing to keep going, and looking at your waitlist, before making the decision. This can be done discretely, via class officers casually dropping the question in their channels, rather than a ctra /ravote command, if you prefer.

Really it's up to the group as a whole. I'll never say, "Ok guys, we're going to extend this another hour until this bastard dies." I'll ask: "Ok guys, I think we're pretty close, want to give it another couple of shots?" Usually the general sentiment will be in favor of it. If, however, 23 people want to stay late and 2 people need to wake up at 6am for work, and there are no good replacements for those 2, then we're done. It wouldn't be fair to ask someone to make a sacrifice they aren't naturally willing to make.

The only time I can remember us really pushing very, very late, with a bit of arm-twisting involved, was when we killed Kael at like midnight on a Monday night and went to Hyjal for the very first time. We had I think 22 people, and actually wiped to the trash a couple of times since it was all new to us and we were very, very healing-light (4 healers I think?). By this point it was about 2am EST, but we knew we could kill Rage with a bit more time, and killing him vs. giving up meant the difference between having 35ish people attuned for BT the following week, and having only the 25 that we could bring to that particular Rage kill. Huge difference. And people agreed to stay for one more, and we got him.

It's all a delicate balancing act regarding morale. If you extend the raid 30 minutes later and get your first kill of a major boss, then it's awesome and no one regrets it. If you extend the raid and people make sloppy mistakes because they're tired, then you have a bunch of upset raiders on your hands.

And, as everyone has said, it's a product of expectations. When I put together our TBC raiding structure, I said that our raids would be 8pm-midnight, and would end early where possible, but I did contemplate the possibility of some extended raids where truly needed. Obviously also having a mix of different schedules helps -- we have some EST folks who can't stay up late, but we also have PST folks who get home a bit late from work and have all night if the raid needs to be extended, so no one is forced to decide between exhaustion and letting down guildmates.

I think it's a reasonable request but it also depends on the guild. Personally, I'd never ask my guild to stay later than intended anymore no matter what we're doing. I pushed us one night a month or two ago and caught a bit of flak for it - if anything, I'm more inclined to end early now. Even on the night we got Illidan to 20% and knew we could kill it, despite having a few members hint at doing one more attempt way past our official end time, I refused and held off till our next raid three days later.

I don't know, maybe it's easier to say that as a guild with all current content cleared. Instead of setting curfews and punishing bad performances I tend to put the responsibility on the members. If they only want to raid three days for the week and spend the extra days doing arena, PvP, Halo 3, whatever, it's up to them to perform at the level needed to earn it.

This is based on pre-TBC but we found that progression improved once we had set end-times and stuck to them. (I think the RL finally believed me when he yelled at me about what went wrong with healing on the late night tries and I kept saying 'people are tired, they can't concentrate'). We sometimes had a vote on whether to stay for another try or two on a boss but if even one person voted no then we called it.

It really depends on the situation. I've always seen posted raid hours as the general contract you sign with the guild (I will make at least x % of raids knowing that our raid times are Y-Z on days abcd) with discretion from leadership about going under/over.

In higher end guilds, you generally find few people who wont push raid times back every so often, regardless of circumstance, because thats what they are there for. Leadership, though, has the responsibility of not getting carried away with asking this. If you're getting a late start, or something just didnt go right, and you really want to finish off a zone in a sitting, I dont know many situations where you couldnt get half an hour or so from everyone to finish that last boss off. If you're trying to propose something like starting Kael 15minutes after your scheduled end time, having never come close to beating him before, you should probably expect a whole lot of pissing and moaning (and a called raid).

One thing I've learned from years of doing this... never trust people on exactly how late they are willing to stay. Personally, I've stayed on a few raids hours past the time we were supposed to go to (applies to groups deciding that at 5am they really want to get a quick heroic BF run in, would you please stay and heal for it? as well) where every other sentence out of my mouth not caught on vent was "I just want this fucking thing to end already, goddamnit, just forget the SS and call it already". This was at 8pm on a sunday scheduled to go till about 5, having not eaten (and already canceled dinner with my family a few hours ago) for about 30 hours. I knew if -I- was feeling that disgruntled, there were a lot of people who were even more so, and just not saying anything for fear of disappointing us (and this was true).

The relationship between guild leadership and raiders is a special one. These people will generally do anything they are capable of doing as long as they arent asked to do everything they are potentially capable of doing at every opportunity. Even the most hardcore of players doesnt like doing that all the time, and even the least hardcore player will push himself for pride or success if its not an everyday thing.

Oh I'm loved! But yeah what Soul said, depends how things are going if I push us or not. Like our first kill was Council was an hour past time due to we had a 7% wipe an attempt before the ending time. It all depends on what you want to accomplish with the guild. If you are pushing on content then it might be worth it, but if its not priority of the guild then it wouldnt be. I guess letting them off early might help too cause Soul actually remembered and posted about it. Just a balance of early/late is needed. It shouldnt be done much as pretty much everyone has said but every now and then shouldnt matter unless people really have something important to go to. The easiest way I have found to see if people really want to go is ready checks. Its just a private thing so people dont feel like the person leaving is letting them down, which could lead to drama crap which is very fun irl.

Some very good responses here. As the RL of a mid-SSC/TK guild and now the member of an Illidan-killing guild, the keys I can pick out are:

-Depends on how progressed your guild is; Progression/T6 type guilds will tend to contain members willing to push later more often than less progressed guilds. This is not to say a guild working on Gruul atm won't have 25+ people wanting to stay late to kill him - its just generally less likely.

-Are replacements available? Generally if I had 30 people in the raid when we were set to call it, and some ppl zoned in had to leave for sleep or whatever, if I could get capable replacements in that were willing to keep going, I'd do it. If it brought us to 6 healers or we didn't have the tanks or whatever.. it wasn't worth continuing.

-Depends on your momentum. If you are working on a boss, have 30-60 minutes left on trash repop and have been consistently getting sub-20% attempts or the attempts are going from like 50 to 30 to 15 or something.. its a lot easier to ask people to push on for another 1-2 attempts to get the boss down.

-Are people getting better due to experience or worse due to tiredness? Your decision as a RL based on that question should be obvious.

-Attunement bosses, especially near the end of the week (Monday nights)

I know in my previous guild I had several EST people who were always well on time at the start of the raids but were really wanting to get to bed by our 11pm end times (start at 7pm). We also had a lot of PST people though who were able to push through to midnight without much fuss. As long as class balance was maintained, this made late raids much less taxing on the guild as a whole. When my current guild was pushing the last 4-5 bosses in BT, we extended our posted raid times by an hour. Used to be 6pm - 10pm, we did 6pm - 11pm for a few weeks until Illidan died. We also even added in a 5th (semi-optional) day to push progression after Mother died. This resulted in us progressing from RoS -> Illidan quite quickly, even under a pre-nerf Mother. As the top Horde guild on our server, racing 2 alliance guilds to kill Illidan it was a lot more acceptable than say.. a guild working through Karazhan.

And yea, having people message you privately if they can't continue is a good way to do things. Avoiding drama is always a plus.

Don't forget - this is a GAME. This is what people are doing in their free time after school/work to have fun. Pretty much anyone will want to keep having fun, provided they won't be completely wrecked the next day. How long people are willing to stay up having fun generally depends on their personal discipline. Just make sure people are still having fun, or they're staying up late for nothing.

If we are close to achieving something, and we may achieve it by staying an extra 30 minutes or so, I'll say something like:

"OK we're close to getting this lets vote on staying longer to work on it. If 80% of people vote yes we'll stay and have x more attempts. No more than X, after that we're done for this evening"

Its a lot more productive staying on a bit longer if the majority of people are really up for it.

We rarely extend raids beyond the normal raid time because I know we have people who value their sleep.
However when it is done and there are no spare players waiting outside (Less likely they stay online when the raid is supposed to be over) I usually ask anyone who needs to sleep and cant stay on to whisper me and if anyone does that then we end the raid. That way people can be honest about their decision and they dont have to be pushed into a decision as they know I wont say who had to quit.

It might not be ideal for progression but it is good for keeping raiders happy.

Ciderhelm wrote an article on this subject a few weeks ago, which I felt was relavent to the discussion: Time Management for Raiding Guilds

That's an excellent article, thanks for posting it. I will point some of my guildies to this, it has some great ideas.

And keeping raiders happy is probably key to your progression in the long term.

Sometimes when we are really close to downing a boss and I feel confident he will go down in the next attempt I will ask everyone to stay for 1 more try. So far this has worked fine as people are willing to stay longer as long as there is a set limit of how much longer they have to stay.

Asede from learning new bosses, we've also asked raiders to stay a bit extra on farm content to maximize learning later in the raid week. For example, a few weeks ago when we were still learning vashj, we had all but Morogrim dovertebral artery tuesday with about 15 minutes left on our raid time (~7:30-12). Announced to the raid that clearing the entire instance would set us up beautifully for attempts, and that clearing to and killing Morogrim would likely run us over time. Everyone responded well to it, we had a quick and efficient trash clear, a one-shot, and only ended up only running 5 minutes past midnight.

Our thing with new bosses is calling "Last Try." No matter what happens on that try, we're done. It's worked a lot of late night magic on many bosses, and everyone seems to focus up and give it everything they got. If the boss doesn't die, everyone is jacked to get back in there the next night and kill him/it/her.

I'd say one of the key points is making sure your raiders understand that sometimes it's a good idea to push and at other times it isn't. For example when server is misbehaving (as it has been with Halloween and everyone farming Scarlet Monastery) it's good to be able to call a raid off right when it's evident things aren't going to work. At other times it's good to go on a bit overtime. At times it's good to end with hours to spare after a clean Hyjal run instead of "risking" it by going to Black Temple for a wipefest. It's usually good to end after a first kill on a new boss & with a good mood instead of risking wipes on trash etc. First few times you call a raid early or go overtime you'll have complaints, but as long as you do it with purpose and with good situation awareness (and explain your reasoning) I think it's good to be flexible rather than hold to a too strict doctrine.

Honestly... if the end of the raid comes, no one has to stay longer. If someone has something else to do, no one can force them to stay. There's nothing wrong with asking, just like there's nothing wrong with refusing.