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.

Oh I agree entirely that first come first serve has all sorts of problems and it would be my last choice, just mentioning it since it's it's the baseline for how plenty of guilds are actually run.

Similar to loot council for awarding item drops, any subjective decisions are all made behind the curtains so no one can debate particulars or try to work the system. The pluses are that you can take into account a big mess of details, make ad-hoc decisions as each particular situation arises, and the guild members don't need to worry themselves with anything except showing up.

But the lack of communication is also its drawback - there is a definite risk in placing subjective decisions in the hands of private decisions made by a few people rather than having an open discussion. Drama can easily arise if the impartiality of private decisions is ever questioned. It's much easier to point to a calculation than to an ad-hoc decision when disputes arise.

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.

We use a FCFS system for MC/Onyxia, because the content there is so outdated its mostly alts, with the mains coming for their tier 2 pants, that super rare item, or just to help. But for BWL, and AQ we do priority. And its nice. Personally, it's nice knowing that as long as you're there on time you will be in the raid. I love to raid, and I hate sitting out >_< drives me crazy. The priority system actually makes me raid more, I always go to progress, even if I don't want too, because I feel like I owe it to the guild, because I always get a spot on our other runs.

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.