I was about to post is on the RP system discussion thread, but then decided at this isn't exactly about that, although it often leads into related discussion.

Basically, how do various raiding guilds deal with the fundamental problems of raid attendance? Not every player shows up to every raid, so everyone has to address the question of: how do you choose which 40 people to invite?
On one side of the spectrum, you have purely rotatory invitation, which has the problem of not especially rewarding good attendance, and of forcing dedicated/veteran/high-ranking/whatever members to sit out of raids rather often.
On the other extreme end, you have some strict priority (based on guild veterancy, total attendance, what letter your name starts with, or however else you want to do it). So there are 40 people who are guaranteed an invite whenever they show up, and a bunch of other people who are, to varying degrees, lower on the totem pole.

There are a lot of competing factors. You want raids to be full, and with a good class distribution. Fighting against attendance is silly. Also, a nice, full roster prevent people from feeling an obligation to play when they don't really want to, which is nice. On the flip side, you don't want to spread loot too thinly, and of course, you don't want people to spend time sitting outside of raids. I'm just interested to see any specific solutions people use.

Do a lot of major guilds have some second-class citizens who are confined to an essentially backup role in raids? Alternatively, If you try to be as egalitarian as possible, how do you incentivize attendance? If you do incentivize attendance, but have a small permanent barrier to entry, how do you prevent veteran members from easily falling behind enthusiastic new members?

My guild has pretty much has an A team of veteran raiders who are expected to attend new content. These are the people who usually show up anyways so it isn't a problem. When it comes to content we just farm, for the most part the vets either have what they want from the instance, or are just sick of it (god damn the red menace).

In those cases, we use the empty raid spots to start teaching/gearing up those that weren't around for the initial learning of the content. As these people grow in their understanding of the game, the vets are off learning new content. When there are empty spots in the new content, we'll bring in some of the better of the standby players to round out the raid and show them what we're working on at that point.

We don't consider the non-main raiders second class by any means. I like to think of us as the guidance counselor. The student isn't looked down on at all, but still can learn from the counselor. Of course the guidance counselor had to learn things when he was growing up too.

In general there are the occasional players that get jealous of not raiding with the main teams, but those are typically the personalities that we don't want coming to those raids anyways. Conversely we do have some players that look down on those not coming to main raids, but for the most part it works well and provides raiding content for everyone that wants it.

You left out the simplest option, which is to have no official system except for "first come, first serve". Raid leader forms the raid and sets up CTRA auto-invites ten minutes before the scheduled start time. If you're in, you're in. If you ask for the invite too late, "sorry, raid is full". Rewards those who show up on-time with priority over those who show up late.

Then just make any necessary adjustments by hand.

Mmm, so you say a raid starts at 8, and then people who log on and get to the zone at 7:55 find out it's full? Seems like it could cause all kinds of trouble.

Would people just start logging in earlier and earlier?

I highly recommend against first-come-first-serve, it is very stressful on the raiders and causes unneeded drama (my old guild used to do it, ugh -- and ithe guild itself doesn't exist any more if that is any indication of the "system's" success).

Well how do you do the "necessary adjustments" part? What if your MT got caught in traffic on the way home from work? What if you need another mage for Viscidus or a second warlock to tank the Emps? How do you decide whom to remove?

You still need to be subjective, and that raises all the same issues that "first come, first serve" is meant to solve.

I can see how some amount of subjectivity will always be around, especially where new content is concerned. You're going to shuffle around a raid for efficacy, and I think you can be pretty transparent about it.

I'm talking about normal day-to-day operation, though. For your weekly BWL clear (or even, say, AQ20, for guilds small enough that you're not going to have more than one happening per cooldown), who are you bringing along? Pure subjectivity isn't going to take care of everything in a clean manner.

We use sign up sheets. The raid leader of said sign-up then takes the first people to sign up and figures out who's going based on class balance and raid dedication. Only problem is sometimes the raid leader gets biased towards certain individuals or lets early bird sign-ups in who really shouldn't be there due to gear or noobness.

This is not all that different from the "first come, first invite" idea. All you're doing is taking the same problem and moving it even earlier in time.

I know sign-ups have some practical value (someone can see in advance whether a raid is full and not displace RL concerns in order to attend), but this doesn't really answer my question.

I remember the days of FCFS, it was fun scrambling to get in the group :)

PG has never used "core groups." We have gone through many systems and have had 3 guild splits mostly due to the handling of raiding. Currently we have each class as a cohort. Each cohort has a leader or two chosen by the guild leaders. The leader(s) of each cohort handles the invite system for that class. I believe most of the cohorts use a sign up system and a couple rotation. The cohort leaders are also responsible for invites to the actual raid, making sure their class know what they are doing, and finding replacements when people have to leave. We have a decent mix of harcore players and casual. Other than alts taking the place of a main, we haven't really had any problems.

PG has always been a ways behind in raid progression due to the splits and our raiding is open to everyone mentality. That just means there is always something to look forward to though.

It was never truly FCFS. I never just turned on an autoinvite script and let that do the work.

In our early raiding days (say, Feb-Apr 2005), I would say "invites begin at 7:15, raid at 7:30" or whatever. I'd decide how many of each class we wanted. So, say, 6 warriors. I'd ask for all warriors to send me a tell. I'd wait 30 seconds, probably get like 8 tells, then invite 6 of those, and tell the others to wait. We always had full raids with alternates and attendance was high, but the flipside was that people had to plan around being on without any guarantee of being in the group. We moved to formal signups shortly thereafter.

In Spring '05, I used parity as my invite criterion. We split MC up over multiple days (not like there was any need to "free up" our raid schedule for other days) and I would make sure that everyone who signed up for the week got to go on at least one day. People would sign up for three days and rank their preference among the three days 1/2/3 and pretty much everyone got their #1 choice and hardly anyone got their #3.

The problem with this is that we were a large guild with more and more and more 60s who wanted to raid. It worked fine in March when the number of blues-geared 60s didn't too far exceed the size of a raid group. But by May I was trying to fit 90+ people into 120 slots (40 times 3 days). That meant that most people would see a third of MC every week, and that consequently the average player would get one piece of loot every 6 weeks instead of every 2. Plus, people just plain weren't satisfied paying to do endgame raiding in an MMO and getting to raid 2-3 hours a week. But many of us were also competitive bastards, and bemoaned the fact that half of our core raiders had like 4 epics, as we looked at the DKP pages of guilds like Afterlife, Conquest, FoH (well, not DKP, but their loot page), and saw how well-geared they were even though we had been farming MC for just as long as them.

So we split into two teams. At the time, in order to have the manpower to field two teams, one of them had to be a one-day clear. We had like ~100 people who wanted to raid. That won't sustain two multi-day 40-man groups due to attendance issues. You'd need >80% attendance from all 100 people, and that doesn't happen in a guild that hasn't recruited specifically for attendance and playtime. And, at the time, for a one-day clear to be possible, it had to be a vet-heavy group.

So we had one team that cleared MC in one run, and was close to a permagroup, based on highest earned JP at the time. The other group cleared over the course of 3 days. That group WAS able to kill Rag 1.5 from the start, but NOT Rag 2.0 (they didn't have the FR/gear). It did the trick insofar as bringing EJ's level of gear up to par with that of other, smaller guilds. On the other hand, it definitely caused a lot of bitterness and some hard feelings among Team B -- primarily from those people who had started later and/or were just on the cusp for eligibility for Team A, but didn't quite make it. Understandable, and it kind of sucked. From a purely practical perspective, it got the job done, in terms of setting us up with gear. It isn't fondly remembered by a lot of people, but really, it was a necessity at the time. We couldn't have fielded two groups any other way, and continuing to try to fit 100+ people into a single MC clear every week would've been far, far worse.

Anyway, by July, as BWL opened, everyone in the guild had enough experience and gear that two hybrid ~4+ hour clears of MC were possible, so we permanently laid "Team A" and "Team B" to rest and made two mixed groups to clear the zone. That left room for almost everybody. In the meantime, BWL remained largely exclusive to the best-geared people whom we needed to learn the hard, hard encounters.

Over time, our approach to content has evolved into a three-step plan:
1) Bring veterans to learn new content
2) Once it is learned, rotate in nubs week-by-week to give more and more people experience with the zone, and avoid gear rot
3) Once a large enough percentage of the guild knows the zone well, two-group it with hybrid vet/nub groups

Over time, because while we have had attrition, we haven't really invited new raiders, everyone has gained a sense of perspective on the whole system. For 13 months now, I've had people express concern to me about their ability to get in on raids during the learning and early farming stages. Warlock #5 will tell me "Ugh, how am I ever going to get into a raid if Warlocks #1-#4 are around? And they're always around." And then six months later, the former "Warlock #5" is now "Warlock #2." The one sure thing is that if you are an active player who continues to sign up and tries to get in on raids whenever possible, even if at the time you're outside the "top-tier" bubble, you will get your chance. That guy with 99% attendance will burn out. The guy with 90% attendance will start school, or get a new job, and cut back. All of our raiders today have been with the guild for over a year for the most part, but some of the mainstays of our group are entirely new faces. Everyone who complained back in the Team B days about getting excluded, and who stuck it out, is part of our core group of raiders, without exception.

Anyway, this is a huge post and it turned into more of an EJ guild history than a cohesive answer, but hopefully it's at least interesting as a case study.

Our DPK sytem tracks 90, 60, and 30 day attendance. We invite people based on their 90-day attendance percentage. With about 55 active raiders, this works out pretty well. Obviously, we make sure we have enough of ___ class first, and then invite the classes with a surplus based on attendance.

Example: We always try to have 5 warriors, so even our 5th warrior with 50% attendance gets a spot (bastard). On the other hand, we have 9 active rogues, 6 of which have 90%+ attendance. So the other three with between 60-70% attendance are constantly scrabbling to make as many raids as they can and squeeze in on raids. Of course, we only have 2 active warlocks, so more often than not these rogues luck out and we field 8-9 rogues per raid.

Cool thread. I for one am always interested to see how other guilds handle their administration of stuff most players never even consider. I can't actually remember what it felt like to just be a player.

While we are a small guild (~60 accounts), massive attrition has meant that we've had to start growing larger than we originally intended. You start off aiming for that ideal of a tightly knit, small crew of players, and reality catches up with you and tells them to get a job/girlfriend/dose of natural light. But I digress. On our busiest nights we're sometimes overcrowded, and we use a system of multiple criteria for handling attendance :

1) Class
2) Member / Recruit
3) Our discretion

The first is always the most important. You can be the 2nd coming of Sun Tzu, but if you're the 9th mage, and we only have 1 tank, you're getting swapped out. Class balance for certain encounters we've found, just makes life that little bit smoother. Accordingly we always look at that first, and see if there are any classes that are overweight at the expense of another.

Members always have priority over our recruits. The core of our guild, of about 25 odd people, have been playing together for over a year, and have put in the time and dedication that in my mind, warrants them being able to expect a place in the raid even if they get home late from work. Every now and then it proves a bitter pill for the new guys, but the guys that suck it up and sit out generally end up becoming members anyway.

That last one was really for us to simply say : 'sometimes, we don't know.' There's 101 different situations that can arise, and as any of you that lead raids will know, it can be a serious handfull sometimes. Instead of us trying to provide for every eventuality, we simply allowed ourselves some room to maneuver when the situation calls for it.

We used to do invites based on whoever was available around raid time, with officer discretion used to decide who has to sit out. Obviously this turned problematic in the long run, since no one would know who is going to the raid before the actual raid time, and being a fairly large guild where we had both active and less active players, problems arose as there were no clear rules on what basis players were actually invited to raids.

So, we decided to remove the less active players from the equation and limit our raiding team to around 60 active players. Harsh perhaps, but in hindsight the only right decision we could've made without recruiting enough people to run 2 raids at the same time, which would've just brought a different kind of headache altogether.

We have a static amount of raid spots for each class for every raid, the total amount of players in each class usually being 2-3 more than the raid spots. We then have class forums set up for each class where only the players of that class + the class officer have access. Class officers put up the upcoming week's raid schedule 3 days prior to the next raid week. Players then post their availability, and the day before the new raid week class officers make a list of participants from their class for each raid on the upcoming week.

Class officers try to maintain a fair rotation, so that in the long run all players get to do about the same amount of raids. Of course, the regulars who are always around tend to end up with more raids done than those with more limited availability. Also we tend to use as static a line up as possible for learning encounters, with the best players usually getting priority(assuming the encounter is not quite trivial to learn).

The system has worked very well for us, players know in time the raids they are going to participate on and the whole rotation system is more conversational than just a cold sign up list, as the class officers are always 'close', and players can sort any problems with them. There isn't any kind of competition for raid spots, as players know that it's up to the class officers to make sure that the rotation remains fair.

People should have to pay guild dues for raid spots.

I'm not in a raid guild. In fact our raid group has no official leader. We used to do FCFS but it was rubbish. Now for each instance we each class has a certain number of slots available. This is partly based on the challenges we'll encounter in an instance and partly on how many of a class we've historically had in the group. Each class handles rotation amongst themselves. Every class has their own methods depending on what they feel is best for them. Only issues that ever occur come when 1 class cannot fill it's slots at which point class leaders take on someone of a suitable class to not upset the balance too much. If it happens too often we recruit or change class structure for instance. I feel it works because there generally people within classes get on better with each other and it prevents much interclass conflict.

GCR/TnT has class leaders, and they handle the rosters for each week's raids. We think it's easier for one person to worry about the attendence issues of 7-10 people rather than 70-100. Has worked pretty well so far, though we still get the occasional roster drama (he gets to raid too much, i dont get to raid, why can't I go to bwl, blah blah blah.)

We're actually experiencing the pitfalls of having a PG system right now. When we first split from our raid alliance, we decided that we would take our core members and form a permagroup to tackle MC. By and large this was a big success and we downed Rag about a month and a half after splitting. However, in that span, our guild nearly doubled in size and we formed a second permagroup to compensate.

Now as we're attempting new content, we're finding that our 'Team A' is having manpower issues as people hit spring break / finals /whatever. This problem is worsened by the fact that a majority of our guild can only really raid on the weekends.

This is what we have been doing! :P

Our first ever 40 man raid was last night for Razorgore, before that our highest ever was 39 for Ragnaros.

This is essentially what we do once we have an instance on semi-farm status. If 50 people sign up for a raid, the 10 who sit out are typically those pre-chosen by their respective classes, and who also don't need items or are behind in JP. Of course they still get credit for going, hanging around in a separate chat channel in case they're called upon to switch in for one reason or another.

Though lately, we've run into issues regarding attendance in MC because of DKP caps (that's our best guess). As one of the rogue class leaders, our class certainly has no shortage, and I know several of the other classes don't (shaman, warriors). However we've run short on druids and warlocks (hence why I brought my 60 warlock alt out of the mothballs) frequently, and occasionally priests too.

It seems most of our raid roster in MC lately is alts, and we have people switch back to mains to help secure a solid balance in the raid.

I found the 2nd post by Gurg very informative as that is entirely the same situation we've run into, only we haven't been able to field 2 groups for MC yet. We went through a stage where we had a semi-permagroup where we set up veterans, but to prevent the inevitable sniping of team B's players, we had almost fully split within the guild. It turned out that we needed to recruit a lot more people to make a full second team, so we ended up merging back into one group.

Strangely enough, when there were once 60+ people wanting in the 40 slots, now we have trouble filling out the MC raid because it's all alts and none of the mains want to come if they have no dkp/items in sight due to caps.

For new instances, it's pretty much controlled by the class leaders. The individual classes know who are the vets and who have the gear. Each class handles invites differently based on needs. For instance, rogues generally have 5-6 max vet rogues signing up for BWL, so it's almost a no-brainer as we often take 6. Warlocks on the other hand have < 5 sign up for most raids, and we take what we can get on raid day. I know some other classes have pretty strict rotations and such to make sure people get their raid time, and we usually sub people in/out for each boss based on DKP/Item need/wants.