I would think that a vent conversation with a class leader-type figure - someone who is capable of getting into class/role specific details with the applicant, asking some detailed questions with the knowledge to follow up to get an idea of the thought process behind them, would be a decent skill measure. I suppose there's always the possibility of someone being a master theorycrafter while being an absolute klutz in game, but in practice cluefulness is hard to fake.

It's certainly an understandable policy. Cutting edge Alliance guilds have had the luxury of picking up people in full BWL gear for their push on C'thun and now Naxx, and I guess Horde guilds now want the same luxury. Recruiting someone in anything less really means they need a week or two minimum in BWL to make a big impact.

A lot of servers are pretty much dead end zones as far as horde raiding is concerned. There are many where not even a single guild has killed Nefarian. I think this is only going to increase, as cutting edge serverwide Horde guilds pull players from top guilds on individual servers, which really puts a dent in their progression, and eventually cause servers to collapse.

Being the top guild on your server probably won't be enough to retain your playerbase.

I guess a good question is do you think that a guild starting from scratch on one of the existing servers (not one of the new ones where transfers aren't permitted from/to) has a chance in the current transfer happy climate to go from starting MC to Naxx? I'm sure it is still possible, but I think it would be much harder now with the transfers.

I still don't know why a week or two spent in BWL is such a horrible thing to gear up a good app. A good player who will stay and commit is imo what's important, not that it will take a week or two to get him 4-5 bwl epics.

Because there's hundreds of good players out there who will stay, so why would you bother spending time gearing one up.

Between a T1-geared player whom I know to be skilful, and a T2-geared player whom I know to be mediocre, I would take the skilful T1-geared player everytime. However, when receiving apps from total strangers, theres only so much you can do to try and gauge the skill and attitude of the applicant. Even the best of interviewers can be fooled - whereas gear generally doesnt lie, as much or as often.

Offhand, I can think of only 3 'good' reasons to not have T2 gear (some may still not be acceptable)
1) Your time-zone/work schedules prevents you from raiding at US times but you can make Oceanic times
2) You are exceptionally loyal (idealistic, impractical?) and tried for 1-1.5 years to build up/support a guild that never made it past MC.
3) You bought the game less than 6 months ago.

All other possibilities would make you a non-optimal investment anyway
a) You have an unstable schedule that prevents you from making more than 50% of raids
b) You don't like raiding (maybe you are anti-social, only PvP, hate guild 'politics' etc etc millions of possibilities)
c) You are a drama queen and got removed from serious guilds.
d) You took a 6 month+ break from the game (high risk for taking another break)
e) You are a poor performer in raids and got removed from serious guilds. (includes having crappy computer/internet connection which you are unwilling/unable to upgrade)
f) You are a frequent reroller or have altitis.

This is from the perspective of a guild officer doing recruitment. Being short-handed would change things a lot, though.

jesus, I mean how many raids have you ever run simultaneously?

Heh, I guess I fall partially into 2 and 3. Only played since October, raided since mid january and never got out of MC before things fell apart. But like I said before, who knows what I'll do with my mage. Not playing him atm. Still must be nice to be able to be one of the big guilds with a strong enough rep that you can always bring in people. Our raid group was never in such a situation.

Well ruro, I can think of a few, and they're pretty much the same why anyone switches raiding groups, whether it is in server or not. This just gives you more options now.

1. Guild they are in might be pretty shitty but because of perhaps limited raiding groups there wasn't any option than to stay around.
2. Raiding guild they were in collapsed.
3. They know some people in the other raiding guild who they wanted to run with.

If they're leaving a good guild just for one further up the progression chart that isn't worth it to me, although it always happens. As well top guilds will always munch on the members of those down the food chain to replace attrition losses. The second reason is well the reason I stopped raiding. My group collapsed. After ours went down the only one I'd be even willing to join on my old server wasn't recruiting. The other ones I just wasn't interested in, didn't know anyone there or plain had issues with how they ran things.

I think the easiest way to answer that question is "three". We've had 4 raiding groups, but the first two combined awhile back due to attrition, and if I recall correctly we've never had more than 3 at one time. Group #3 is on Nef, group #4 killed Rag a couple months ago.

We'll be pretty happy when we can get people to transfer to our server. Aside from the standard pop imbalance (2.6k Alliance 60's vs 800 Horde 60's last time I checked and the census site is down for me atm) we're also really short on tanks and hunters. Most have sold up, are just plain idiots, or don't want to ditch their own guild (while noble in itself, that still does pose problems for us). Since we're not taking any of the Ebayers and our gear requirements are pretty steep, filling needed spots is hard right now. We cleared Spiderwing, Noth and Raz and are currently working on Patchy when the server will allow us. In the meantime, the guild below us is on Twin Emps and it just spirals down to Nef and below after that.

We hope server transfers will be the answer to our recruitment issues. We don't want to move ourselves just yet, both because of the price tag attached to it and the fact we could just make it worse for ourselves, and we will rely on our decent Naxx progress to attract transfers from interested players. Their recruitment will have to be done a little more thorough including a longer background check, but at least we won't have to downgrade to Tier 1 players anymore.

Or maybe a certain piece didn't drop?