Nice that you brought it up. We never really had a policy for that when my guild started the end-game thing and by the time we were starting BWL, several people had alts popping up and asked around if they could play those instead, get some MC epics since it was heavily on farm and most stuff was sharded anyway.

There wasn't that much objection that I switched to warrior back when I did it altho leaving my, back then, awesomely equipped Shaman to rot in favor of a warrior in blues was cause for a little sneering on comms (cue Ice Barbed Spear jokes and so forth ;)). I think I did take a dive in DKP and in general I was held back on some loot distributions, but I got some rare gems in my early days that wouldn't drop again for a LOOONG time such as HDI ring and Wrath legs. The last one is particularly funny because EVERY warrior passed on them (yea, don't ask) and I got them on my first MC run. We stopped MC about 4 months later and not until we did a random MC run a month or so ago did they drop again. Tank stuff is pretty much always getting picked up nowadays, so I think they all learned from it.

Anyway the whole alt thing was starting to become a little problem after my switch so some rules were set in place eventually. We have a pretty loose system for it; they're welcome in the occasional MC run and they can basically freely join in on Onyxia, ZG and AQ20 runs. All those instances are no points gained no points spent runs for us and we generally have a good enough mains/alts ratio that we can breeze through it quickly. Switching however is completely up to GM/Officers depending if we need your class and we can afford the loss of your current main, not to mention you take a complete DKP dump (we have a 200 max system, highest takes first, around 8 pts per instance run gained) as to not offset the loot order too much.
That was refined a bit after another Shaman bought the account of a warrior that was quitting and was allowed to play that instead, with a Protection spec playing it as a tank. The idea was he'd get priority on tank items and just stay protection so we'd have a solid tank for the rest of BWL, but he changed his mind after a month or so and with his saved up DKP he snatched most DPS plate and weapons away from the other warriors, including our first Ashkandi. Extra painful was that when the AQ gather event started he went "AFK" for a month with some burn-out excuse and never came back. Turned out he had secretly rerolled Alliance on another server and had just fucked us over. We kinda slipped the ball on that one and I'm pretty sure we've learned enough from it to so it won't happen again.

I think in the end, our system works for us and that's the most important. We will always need the best-equipped mains for the new high-end stuff and occasionally switching to playing a different class in ZG/AQ20/Ony can take your mind off things. Just a little relaxation therapy I guess. Plus the additional experience you get by seeing things from another perspective has helped with communication and understanding improvements in my opinion. It's fun to go from being a healer to needing a healer as a class, you recognize so many things ;)

Alts are a pretty good way to avoid burnout of certain classess.
I think having a sensible way to include them is a good wqay to promote the longevity of players who might otherwise burn out. Especially if you include them on content that has become trivial such as MC, while keeping your "mains" for the more up to date content.

Edit:
Thank you to whome ever termed me a "fagadin" I thought these boards were ment to be a step up from the official forums.

Yeah. This is a huge part of the workings in what people refer to as an "uber-guild" in any game. General respect and a common goal among players often holds together a lot of things in tough times. (Or occasionally, even things that shouldn't work at all.) I've run with people in past games where the entire guild as a whole generally detested one another almost to the man at a point, but we were great together so we went on out of mutual respect and a common goal.

It's hard to deny when you're part of a good thing and being part of something important can often eclipse or wipe away more petty concerns that would be problems in a lesser-guild.

===

As to the EQ versus WoW mess, anyone who even tries to compare the two games is relatively silly from the start. As to the whole "high-horse" mentality some EQ vets come off with, try to cut them a break. They've generally put in the time and effort to deserve a little pride, I feel. For someone to be able to honestly claim "I raided heavily in EQ", that generally means they did their time in a difficult political and gaming environment (PvE = more like "players versus developers"), and that is where they derive their source of pride. Compare that with SWG or WoW where you frequently see non-bought max level characters asking basic "core ability of my class" sort of questions while sporting MC+ loot and you can perhaps see where they come about that "holier-than-thou" kind of mentality on occasion. As much of an arse as those folks are for being that way, chances are that they did earn the right to the pride they typically wag around.

Also, noting that Delheru completely nailed it with "EQ politics were harder than EQ raiding" and I echo pretty much his entire post on that subject. He summed it up perfectly:

My feelings, exactly. Fencing is a great sport and I can respect a skilled swordsman for what he is, but sport is a far way removed from soldiering and that's where I grew up. Trying to compare EQ to WoW to SWG is such a joke, in general. That's like saying Quake 4 Deathmatch masters are equal to Quake 2 Deathmatch masters of old, simply because both were FPS games. Completely different skillsets and environments involved. I like both styles and both games, just like I enjoyed EQ then and WoW now, but I don't compare them skillwise and I generally think anyone who tries to is a bit silly for even attempting to. I don't care how they compare for the very same reasons I refuse to compare a pro ball player from yesteryear to anyone in the modern era. They may have played the same basic game, but everything else about it was completely different so the matter could never be properly judged.

If I mentioned raiding in EQ days, it would be for the same reason I'd mention a tour of duty in a past war. No matter how much skill you might have at your particular job and no matter how much potential you might hold as an individual, you cannot take from or compare to my past experience when you're still fresh meat on the scene. After WoW has run its course and been taken offline, the people who were around the whole time can properly put themselves on the same plane as those who went before, in my mind. Right of passage. Something the "now" generation will never truely understand, I suppose. :)

Indeed. That's one of the things WoW does so very well. It's easy for someone to play multiple classes in this game and get them maxed or to important enough levels to understand raid-wide dynamics on a more grand scale. Having even a casual alt can often unlock a whole new set of understandings and skills for a player. Great leaders either have to understand those things on their own, through experience, or be willing to listen to the experience from those around them. Good point you brought up, there.

[Chill Pill]

That's the default "I haven't set my profile yet" rank. Yes, it's an immature joke, but it's got some guild history. I just tested, and you can set yourself to a paladin with impunity.

Now an important question for you all :

How do you handle PST/EST players?

We currently went on a big (8 app) recruiting drive, to beef up for Naxxramus (our goal is 5 of each class on a raid + 5 extra), and we are getting flak from our PST players as to their raid viability. We currently have around 65 guild members, including apps, and the EST/PST breakdown is fairly close.

One side of the arguement is start raids later, which screws the EST players.

The other side is keep our current raid schedule (8pm EST - 5 PST) the same.

The only safe, sane solution I can see is to maintain a strict list as to who is in the raid next, and just keep raids going later into the evening so PST'ers have a chance to stack into the raid.

I realize this is also flawed, as players won't see certain bosses due to how we clear zones/etc.

any input/advice?

There, I've fixed your title to match :)

Just to clarify -- Fagadin was a class option on the old forums; it is not an option on the current one. However, I transferred all the old profile settings to the new forum database (this is also why your server is listed as BurningBlade with no space), so if you had your class set to 'Fagadin' it will remain as 'Fagadin' until you take the arduous and long journey into your profile to edit it yourself. I can guarantee you that the only way your profile has 'Fagadin' in it is if you yourself selected it on the old forums.

That is something I didn't think about.. we have a Warrior who misses every tuesday just about, but he is very active every other day, as such he is barely into friendly BoN faction, whereas a good majority are revered/exalted.

Yeah, it was tougher when we were learning AQ and wanted to clear the zone quickly so we could focus on learning new bosses, but even then we'd have some weeks where we'd do BWL on Tuesday night, 20-man zones on Wednesday, and push AQ off until a bit later in the week so that people who had class or something on Tuesday night could see the first half of the zone from time to time.

We start raids at 7 EST and our PST players (and our CST players who have awful commutes *cough*me*cough*) suffer as a result.

That said, we typically lose 50% of our players at midnight EST, so for us the 7-12 EST schedule is probably our best bet to have a solid 5 hour window of raid time.

We typically start forming raids at 4:30 PST when us west coasters are still at work, usually getting started at around 5-530 when people finally get past the login screen. Until the regular raiders can log in we bring in the new guys (or just non-senior members) so they can experience content that they wouldn't normally be ready for. If they get a boss kill, good stuff, otherwise it's mostly killing trash (in AQ), which means that when the main group can finally get on we have a better shot at clearing that extra boss during the night. Our raids end officially at 9pm (ie: midnight EST) but we'll keep subbing in anyone on standby until we just don't have enough to keep going. It's definitely not ideal, but it addresses the issues of having people spread out across the US (and our token masochistic australians who log on at like 8am to raid)

Yeah we've had a Norweigian throughout all of EQ and all of WoW... hes crazier than lutefisk man.

Didn't you have a Russian as well?

Pussy Norwegians are CET anyway so that isn't even hardcore. Raichu(?) though... he might have had even 2 hours on me, that would have made him completely insane.

We have a spaniard that has near 100% attendance and most of our raids end at 7am his time.

We chose 8pm central and it seems to work for most. The only ones that complain are our new zealanders that feel it is too early for them.

This is some really insightful shit. I appreciate everyone's awesome posts, particularly regarding recruiting. :) After reading some of your guys' responses, a few recruiting policies will change in my guild.

You edited your post to add a quip about your title, yet left all the spelling and grammatical errors.

Carry on.

That is assuming everyone is a leet grammar and spelling master like yourself. :P

We have a guy in our guild who is currently in China. When we raid at 8 PM EST here, he's on at 8 AM. And of course he doesn't actually sleep and wake up at 8 AM- He stays up all night and usually ends up delerious by the end of the run (if he makes it). :laugh:

Funny you'd mention that. It only took me 30 years to figure out that grammar doesn't have an "e" in it.

And oh, it's spelled l-3-3-t.

Wow i always thought you guys started earlier than that. That 8 hour thing is BS. I can run on 6 hours easy myself but then again ive grown accustomed to it over the years.

We tend to have a pretty 50/50 mix of east/west coast people so we start our raids at around 9 EST. Pretty much evenly splits the raid time up for most of us, except those of us that can go on 6 hours of sleep or less for the next day. We even have someone in the UK who is on a weird ass schedule and sometimes stays up till 8-9am her time raiding with us. Weekends we start our raids early in the day so that everyone has the opportunity to gear up on our clear instances like BWL and MC. We save the AQ Clears for Tuesday to maximize our time the rest of the week on Cthun.

One of our raiders for a long time was in Japan. He just moved back to EST. God is he happy to, you know, be able to sleep normally.

We also have a Danish dude and a few Aussie/NZ types. Which is fun. Once you figure out which ones are kiwis, you can make sure to call the rest of them "kiwis" and the kiwis "convicts". They love it. Really.

Im dyslexic.
Sorry I cant meet your standards of spelling or grammar, but you understood what I ment, and ultimately language is merely a vehicle for conveying thoughts and ideas. You understood what I wanted to say, whether I spelt it correctly or not is irrelevent to the value of what I said.

Judia

They singled you out personally on the fagadin thing. Trust me.