Recruitment is definately a sticky wicket. I would selectively recruit those you thought would be a valuable asset to the raid, but I am not sure I would actively recruit from within another raid. If the members of a different raid are actively looking elsewhere tho, I would think they would be fair game. However, I would not advise a mass merger. That tends to work out badly, as you want to assimilate them into YOUR raid or else risk losing the culture of your current raid. Mass merges usually result in clicks and infighting, from what I have seen.
Maybe recruit all the players you want, one at a time so they are assimilated and it doesn't look like you are wholesale raping other guilds? Then start benching your slackers, regulating them to the MC runs that farm gold for the A team! One Million Dollars? /sticks pinky in mouth
Being from the same guild as Fellwraith and seeing many guilds come and sort of go on Mal’ganis; I have to agree with the general sentiment that really it just depends on the player and the guild. If you want loot and world firsts then go for that, if you want friendship and fun, then go for that. I prefer the latter, I like to get loot too as much as the next guy, but if I am not having fun while doing it, then why the hell am I even playing?
Guilds are by their nature pretty transitory, they exist for most people in just the online world. But over time if you actually care about the people you raid with then friendships can form outside the game, you actually come to know who you raid with, and even if they are not the best player in the world, you know how they will act. You start to build loyalty.
I would much prefer if I were an officer a trainable player of average skill to a player who believes he is God’s gift to his class who won’t listen and thinks he is never at fault. Most players that I have met are trainable, not everyone is going to be a tactical genius, but with time most players can learn an encounter.
I guess the morality is flexible because it all depends on the goals of the individuals involved. Either you want to form some elite clique of players and only draw from the best, or you build a foundation of trust and go from their. It is rare to see both I think. I think the bottom line is sticking with what you are comfortable with.
If being the best at all costs works for you, then go for it. I know it does not work for me, because the roots I have in my current guild far outweigh any loot I could receive by moving to another guild of complete strangers that I may or may not like.
Plus when we finally do conquer a new encounter with my friends, it makes the event all the sweeter.
I don't think terrible players (the kind that just never get better, no matter what you try to teach them) is what Tenkawa is talking about. I think he's talking about the people who just aren't willing to die over and over again so that the guild can progress. They show up at the farmable content again and again, but take their nights off when the people putting the real effort in are dying for their efforts. Or the people who do come, but don't really pay attention and try to learn how to do new content.
You can either form a new guild with other people who say they have the same goals and are willing to try just as hard as you are, or you can start taking strict attendance and drop the people who don't put the effort in, or shuffle loot around. In a zero-sum; takes points from those who don't come and spread it to the people who did. Non-zero-sum, start docking. Officer-awarded, take attendance into consideration (but you need something hard, memory just doesn't work so well).
If you form a new guilld, most of the time it's made up of people who say they're going to put as much effort into it as everyone else. But the different sides just see the other bringing just as many slackers as they just ditched and things heat up. If you can actually get those gems all together though, or form a large enough group that you can drop the slacking 30% or so and still be able to raid, then you can end up with a guild like CQ.
Personally, I don't think it's morally unethical, or riding on the backs of those you think lesser than you. How can you be riding on their backs if they never put their back into it in the first place? Leeches are leeches, even if they're nice friendly ones. It comes down to goals, and guilds where everyone has the same goal work better together. It's just rare to actually get that result when you combine what you think is the best of the best.
This is the only thing that keeps me from really respecting EJ. You're a fantastic guild that puts up amazing results, but you, it seems to me, haven't had to play the same game the rest of us have been playing, Recruitcraft. The absolute hardest part of WoW raiding is recruiting, period. If I've read your history correctly it seems you never had to do that. Correct me if I'm wrong but EJ was formed when a HUGE beta guild started raiding and the elitists who wanted to use a DKP system and reward people who actually did their job and showed up broke off from the casuals? How is that different from what has been described here? The difference is you already had all the people you would need and so a merger wasn't neccessary. Most people weren't in the unique position in which you happily found yourselves. It seems EJ took an already great pool of people (I would love to have only people who were in Beta to recruit from), put them through a skill/dedication/attitude colander of sorts, and came out with a huge attrition-immune guild of skilled players. Again, if I'm missing something in that analysis correct me.
The average raiding guild in wow I would say has about 75 "raiders." Maybe 5 of those are "leaders," 15 more are "excellent players," and the remainder are "below-average." Now think about what "below-average" means in a game as widely popular and as easy as wow. Of course there are various combinations in the "below-average" player class of reflex speed, discretion, dedication, intelligence, etc but overall people who fall in this category were sadly just alotted less attributes to spend, so to speak, and your raid suffers for it. You can teach them and tell them over and over what to do, you can find new ways to tell them, you can show them videos and explain things in MINUTE detail, you can explain exactly what UI mods to get (hell we even made a UI package for our raiders to download that had exactly what they would need) and how to use them, but there comes a point in time where no amount of nurturing is going to make someone who is fundamentally a bad player better at the game. And when you get burnout as a result of those bad players causing you to wipe its never your bad players who are barely showing up and relaxing and not trying when they do show up who burn out, its your core, your die hard good players who show up every night and suffer for the lack of skill/dedication shown by the others. And who do you replace them with?
In my raid group and in most raid groups I'd wager, theres Player A and Player B. A says to me after a long night of wiping "I learned this on the second attempt, every time we attempt this boss from now until we kill it, I'll be doing the same thing, because I'm doing it right. I'm here so the boss drops that extra 3% every night so morale doesn't break and we feel like we're making progress while the retards learn how to execute their very simple tasks. I have mongooses and tubers and NDBs and even flasks and I'm a DPS class. If I thought using those things would help us win the fight I'd eat the cost in a heartbeat and you'd never hear a word from me about it. But its not me having 3% less crit, or less HP, or no tubers thats losing the fight for us, I'm ALWAYS one of the last people alive. Its people, the same people, every time, making mistake after mistake, pressing their buttons (or clicking lawl) too slowly, making bad decisions, standing where they know they shouldn't be standing, even having been told and shown and shouted at on vent WHILE THEYRE STANDING THERE AND NOT MOVING, thats killing us."
B says to me after the same night, "Yeah I know I ate quite a few dark glares, I just got so unlucky, every time I couldn't avoid it. Oh, those times you were shouting at me 5 seconds before it landed to move on vent? Sorry I was watching TV it was kind of hard to hear you. Yeah I know I'll download the mod before raid tomorrow, if I log on in time, and if I can figure out how to get the darn thing working! If not I guess I'll just have to come to raid without it, shucks thats too bad. Oh you saw me arrow-key turning and noticed it took me a long time to pummel? Yeah I really should mouselook and have pummel bound to a key, but I just can't be bothered to do those things, sorry. Sorry I never have consumables, I just don't have the time to farm for them. Oh and sorry about linking so many people so often, I just get really unlucky every time, its not my fault. Sorry about missing the last 2 raids, its funny how RL stuff comes up only on wipe nights isn't it? But if you ever notice this phenomenon I'll be sure to get really indignant! Why aren't you laughing? Hey wheres everyone going? Can I join the new guild? Why not?"
Is A not being exploited by B? Is it really so evil for A to try and find some more A's to play with? Players of the latter type deserve to have their raid spots taken, they deserve to have their best players, their MTs, their raid leaders, snatched away by better guilds. Its not A who is being disloyal, he put his heart and soul into the encounter, tried his best every time, came to every raid prepared, showed up every time in every sense of the phrase, he probably put more into the guild than B did, too, helping organize and run it, helping it recruit, buying the vent or the website, or whatever other sundry duties wouldn't get done without him. And B let him down every time, not only did he not perform his job as well as A, because thats too much to ask, he didn't even perform well enough that A's superior playing/consumables could make up for his shortcomings. Well the A's out there deserve better in my opinion, and it is not their responsibility to keep dragging along the leechers simply because they've been dragging them along for a year or more. And as Thep said, when you do find your guild of A's, the bonds are tighter than they are even in a family guild. When you can count on your teammates to show up and give it their all and not let you down, camaraderie and respect and friendship aren't far behind.
This is the only thing that keeps me from really respecting EJ. You're a fantastic guild that puts up amazing results, but you, it seems to me, haven't had to play the same game the rest of us have been playing, Recruitcraft.
The bar has been set, boys and girls. To truly be a respected, uber guild, we have to blindly go out and pick up new members, some of whom we might not know much about!
Originally Posted by Lyta
I've been trying to concentrate on studying for my Proof Methods test tomorrow, and all I can think of is your hotness, radiating out from the pixels on my monitor, seared straight into my neurons.
Isn't it respectable enough that maybe they made the right personel decisions and built an atmosphere that people who have played with them since the beta are still with them to this day?
There is one endgame guild on my server that has been on the server since the beginning, and that guild currently does not have a single member in it who started off there.
I don't think he meant any offence by it, it's not a giant suprise if the majority of raid guilds are envious of the way EJ formed.
Regardless, Bloodterror very accurately describes the excrutiatingly vicious circle that befalls virtually all of your '2nd tier' raid guilds. The guilds that aren't sandblasting Naxx every evening, but are still working on AQ.
The hardest part of survival for guilds that can't offer cutting edge play, is keeping a healthy balance in check. Most raid guilds will start off with a strong core of raiders, and a supplemental base of casual/average players to fill out the numbers and satisfy the eternal manpower requirement of WoW raiding. The issue that arises however, is that over time, your core raiders will lose interest. Whether it's from burnout, frustration at the casuals, or just general commitments, they will leave. And in order to keep a forward momentum, you have to recruit more people to fill those spots. Even if you are amazingly lucky with your recruits, its inevitable that you will pick up more casuals along the way, a lot of times out of class necessity. And as you get more casuals, the core guys that have stuck around, stuck through it from domo to vael to emps, will just get more and more worn out at the new guys coming to emps and getting blown away each attempt, every attempt. Those guys quit, and you're back to recruiting.
The bottom line - for the guilds that arent right at the top of the game, the outlook is pretty damn bleak. It's not a friendship or a community issue; the issue is that people can only enjoy playing the game with retards for so long, but when the option is picking up the retards or not raiding at all, it's pretty damn hard to find the right choice.
This is the only thing that keeps me from really respecting EJ. You're a fantastic guild that puts up amazing results, but you, it seems to me, haven't had to play the same game the rest of us have been playing, Recruitcraft.
The bar has been set, boys and girls. To truly be a respected, uber guild, we have to blindly go out and pick up new members, some of whom we might not know much about!
I'm not saying you're not uber, just that some guilds haven't started at the kind of manifest advantage that you have. Does that mean you're not the best horde guild? Certainly not. Sorry if I hurt your feelings lawl. I also say that because I think it colors your perspective on recruiting very differently, so when you say things like We don't recruit ever and recruiting to progress is stupid, they're not neccessarily applicable to every guild.
jeez I'd take a friendly guild with plenty of banter over progression any day of the week.
To be totally honest I found it very very hard not to flame this comment.
<Fric> I think the only kind of gay buttsex I'd enjoy on any level would be assraping a smug hipster douchebag (also possibly a roid head and/or fratboy/Jersey Shore cast member)
I don't think he meant any offence by it, it's not a giant suprise if the majority of raid guilds are envious of the way EJ formed.
Regardless, Bloodterror very accurately describes the excrutiatingly vicious circle that befalls virtually all of your '2nd tier' raid guilds. The guilds that aren't sandblasting Naxx every evening, but are still working on AQ.
The hardest part of survival for guilds that can't offer cutting edge play, is keeping a healthy balance in check. Most raid guilds will start off with a strong core of raiders, and a supplemental base of casual/average players to fill out the numbers and satisfy the eternal manpower requirement of WoW raiding. The issue that arises however, is that over time, your core raiders will lose interest. Whether it's from burnout, frustration at the casuals, or just general commitments, they will leave. And in order to keep a forward momentum, you have to recruit more people to fill those spots. Even if you are amazingly lucky with your recruits, its inevitable that you will pick up more casuals along the way, a lot of times out of class necessity. And as you get more casuals, the core guys that have stuck around, stuck through it from domo to vael to emps, will just get more and more worn out at the new guys coming to emps and getting blown away each attempt, every attempt. Those guys quit, and you're back to recruiting.
The bottom line - for the guilds that arent right at the top of the game, the outlook is pretty damn bleak. It's not a friendship or a community issue; the issue is that people can only enjoy playing the game with retards for so long, but when the option is picking up the retards or not raiding at all, it's pretty damn hard to find the right choice.
I do agree with this, if you are not the top guild on your server(now with transfers that isn't even enough) basically your member base will have some loss, but there again a good atmosphere and having members that have loyalties to the guild can save you on this some. The problem is that if this experiment doesnt have returns fast you will lose members cause you will have a difficult time getting any loyalty from the members. If you are not one of the famed guilds in this game(EJ, DnT, and so on) you will have issues with loyalty due to delusions of grandeur. It is bound to happen but honestly the best option is not always to just go with the best geared. Someone you gear up from the ground up and train early on on the arts of raiding can be one of your best members.
This is the only thing that keeps me from really respecting EJ. You're a fantastic guild that puts up amazing results, but you, it seems to me, haven't had to play the same game the rest of us have been playing, Recruitcraft.
The bar has been set, boys and girls. To truly be a respected, uber guild, we have to blindly go out and pick up new members, some of whom we might not know much about!
It's just the opposite IMO. Juggling such a large playerbase and holding such a high retention rate (ie never having to recruit) is one of the most impressive things a guild can do.
I'd recommend avoiding saying things like "Sorry if I hurt your feelings, lawl." I'd recommend avoiding saying "lawl," period.
Anyway, you certainly have a valid point, but the flipside of our situation is that we never set out to be a raiding guild to begin with. We had a lot of serious players who enjoyed playing the game, but 40-man raids really were not on our radar at all as we were leveling up. Most of our players had no prior raiding experience, and just started raiding because it was the next thing to do once we'd been 60 for a month and had lots of blues. Hell, I've never been in a real guild until this, and never played an MMO except for a 4-month stint playing Lineage II at release.
A lot of our players are not necessarily the Type A competitive analytical automata that might be the ideal raiders. A lot are fairly casual. A lot of people, frankly, sucked a lot when they started out. Some still do! But we pretty much worked with what we had. And, shockingly, players improve. We were large enough that: a) we could always fill our raids; and b) we had enough backup players of each class that people who needed to take some time off or cut back play time because of work, finals, social life, general burnout, etc., could do so without losing their spot in the guild or feeling like they were letting the guild down. That has been our #1 key to retention, right there. Great, right? But that also meant that we had to train twice as many players, that our loot was diluted across a large pool of raiders most of the time, that we had to handle the administrative hassle of managing two parallel clears of MC and later BWL throughout most of 2005 and early 2006. Plus, because we never recruited to fit a certain schedule, we have wildly varying raiding schedules in our guild. Some people can pretty much only raid on weekends. Some have to go to bed at 11 EST on weeknights. As a result, we could never dream of having the "we're raiding all night long" marathons that some guilds will have. People stuck around until like 2am EST a couple of times when we were going for Ragnaros or C'Thun first kills and were clearly within striking distance, but that's about it.
As someone who has had a central role in much of the above, I'd be lying if I said that there weren't times along the way that I wished we could just recruit some skilled players with tons of available time and a desire to raid. Yeah, we've never had to openly recruit and deal with the hassles that process brings, but our own nature has brought with it all sorts of unique challenges that might not be readily apparent.
On a similar topic? How bad has this summer been on burnout for most of you? How many of the big names and good players have left the game due to attrition or R/L?
I reside on a transfer server where many good guilds from good servers collected in January. Of the 5 best guilds Horde-side (C'thun down) one month ago, 4 merged into 2 seperate guilds due to lack of attendance and general burnout. That leaves 3 guilds that have killed Cthun with good progress into Naxx and 2 guilds wiping on Huhu.
It happens, my guild (currently 5th place and on Huhu) is loosing members just due to summer fun and R/L commitments that cant be pushed back anymore. Recruiting is hard enough when you arent number 1 in progression, but number 5 horde-side and on stuck on Huhu the destroyer of guilds, can really make things difficult.
These new open transfers are quite nice, as we can "steal" our old friends that stayed behind the first time, but there will be a point where the 2nd tier raiding guilds are going to run into alot of problems getting new help if the attrition rate remains as high. I can see the need to merge (I'm completely against merging) coming up prior to the release of BC if a guild wishes to remain competitive. Not for phat loots. But just for the purpose of raiding.
I personally think that EJ must have had to work very hard to get the guild where it is today, but it has to be admitted that there was a certain amount of luck in who you had in your member base. The mixture of good leadership, a loyal memberbase and some luck can make up for alot of stuff that normally would destroy other guilds that wanted to do the same thing EJ did.
I'm not entirely sure how long EJ has been around, but i'm pretty sure it was for a good year or two before the WoW beta was available. Mal'Ganis as a first launch server has a very large playerbase, and as such has quie a number of guilds that raid, from ZG to Nax and all levels imbetween. EJ brought well over a hundred people to Mal'Ganis with them, and that group has stayed together priniciply unbroken or we would not be having this discussion. EJ could, if it really wanted to (but due to the great mentality of the guild, doesn't want to or would ever), approach members from guilds like Goon Squad and take a few choice players. A lot of guilds do this on a lot of servers, but it is a great testament to EJ they have taken a pre-existing organisation into the fractitious atmosphere of WoW and kept it together, and in addition to this seen so much of what the game has to offer. Having charismatic raid leaders and authorities on the WoW based side of the group has undoubtedly helped, but then i bet i could choose any of the guilds that have killed 8 bosses in Nax from wowwalkthrough, and find a jubilant and charismatic raid leader with supporting officers at its centre.
As to poaching players, i cite Vek'Nilash EU, a server launched at the same time as my own current realm, Ravenholdt (roughly four months ago). A lot of players had been waiting for a new server, and when it was launched as the only PvP realm (Ravenholdt is RP-PvP), i think every English server lost at least 100 players to it, regardless of whether at the time they stayed or not. No guild that had been together for the duration of wow or even a part of it rerolled there, only small groups of friends or individuals. A lot of pirating and member loans took place, but now on the 12th July, Vek'Nilash holds the world record for the time to open AQ, has at least one guild that has killed C'thun, and the spider wing cleared by that same guild (a mere coincidence that it is an alliance one :O). Yet on VN, all the players competing at the top moved to VN to do just that. They were either tired of their current toon, or wanted a fresh challenge which their current server couldn't offer. VN gave them thousands of people wanting the same thing, and as such the server has thrived.
On my own guilds forum, we were discussing whether or not to use DKP, and an old EQ player said pointedly "in 5-6 years time, what memories do you want from WoW?" Ideally, if we have all been in an atmosphere that EJ and a few others can offer, those memories will be happy ones no matter how far we have progressed in terms of content, and our lives will be better for it.
EJ could, if it really wanted to (but due to the great mentality of the guild, doesn't want to or would ever), approach members from guilds like Goon Squad and take a few choice players.
Fucking :lol: at this for various reasons. (I used to be in GS for one, and for another, this very issue was a major source of drama roughly 16-17 months ago.)
Anyway, this is a thread about ethics and recruiting, not about EJ's guild history, so apologies for all the derails.
EJ could, if it really wanted to (but due to the great mentality of the guild, doesn't want to or would ever), approach members from guilds like Goon Squad and take a few choice players.
Fucking :lol: at this for various reasons. (I used to be in GS for one, and for another, this very issue was a major source of drama roughly 16-17 months ago.)
Anyway, this is a thread about ethics and recruiting, not about EJ's guild history, so apologies for all the derails.
If I may continue the derail a bit further: Goon Squad has a sizable second wave (call it 30-40) that started around a year ago, and has hit 60 within the last 3 months. We missed out on all this drama :-(
Our guild is on the third set of officers and raid leaders. Of our roughly 60 active accounts, only 22 have been around since the inception of the guild. Surprisingly, this kind of turnover is not uncommon for end-game guilds, in any MMO. What helps a guild survive is a clear set of policies and systems to run it.
We were very careful to outline our DKP, recruitment, attendance, officer duties, and disciplinary policies from day one and made sure that everyone was aware of them. While this may sound needlessly pedantic or bureaucratic, it has a very important effect: it prevents drama and allows the raid leaders and officers to do their assigned jobs without having to worry about other bullshit.
Regarding the problem of "special childrenz" who aren't playing up to the required level of skill and attention, we've had to deal with that as well. (Hi C'thun.) It got so frustrating that one or two people consistently screwed over the raid that we began tracking it so we'd have numbers to back up any action. That takes the personal feelings out of it.
We specifically wrote a policy for our raid invitation process that says if you consistently demonstrate difficulty with an encounter, or are not able to play at the level expected of our members, you may be asked to sit by the raid leader. This policy was posted for all members to read, and when I have numbers to back up the action (Timmy died to Dark Glare on every single attempt, verified by his group) they really can't argue with it or throw a fit. You can remind them that there are 10+ other people sitting out who would love a chance to raid, and that their difficulty with the encounter is negatively affecting 39+ other people. Guilt works wonders.
Anyway, to the original poster, I would advise you to review your guild policies and see if they are clear enough in all areas. I would also recommend creating a performance policy for the problem people you described. Competition for raid spots is healthy.
In my raid group and in most raid groups I'd wager, theres Player A and Player B...
Never was a truer word spoken. You just forgot to mention that typically your "Player A's" are scattered into different raiding guilds on a given server where they perform functions such as guild leader, raid leader, class officer or whatever. Recruitment and trying to develop a stable roster of people who are genuinely skillful is the worst part of this game.
with an encounter, or are not able to play at the level expected of our members, you may be asked to sit by the raid leader. This policy was posted for all members to read, and when I have numbers to back up the action (Timmy died to Dark Glare on every single attempt, verified by his group) they really can't argue with it or throw a fit. You can remind them that there are 10+ other people sitting out who would love a chance to raid, and that their difficulty with the encounter is negatively affecting 39+ other people. Guilt works wonders.
And then there's always the "50 DKP minus" approach. Poke around on Nihilum's DKP site and you'll find some entries such as "Thaddius - wipe. L2p" and "Died 2 red beam AKA noob mode." with hefty negatives attached. :P
Yeah I remember those times. I was a level 30ish or so priest on malganis when all the drama went down and the open call went out in goonhelp for all the people sick of the drama to send Beef a tell. Who would of thought of where that would lead.
Vek'Nilash holds the world record for the time to open AQ, has at least one guild that has killed C'thun, and the spider wing cleared by that same guild.
Just FYI, No guild on Vek'nilash has killed C'thun or cleared Spider Wing yet.
jeez I'd take a friendly guild with plenty of banter over progression any day of the week.
The two go hand-in-hand, though. You can't have friendly banter without progressing. I've never seen a guild stuck on Emps for weeks say that their raids contain a lot of wonderful conversation.
I don't claim to know how EJ works and what problems may come up for them, but for certain, they've never experienced the complete lack of confidence raiders get when they've been unable to kill a non-broken boss for weeks and weeks on end. I imagine our guild atmosphere would be outstanding super wonderful too if we could kill a new boss in only a couple raids. But we don't, and there isn't a whole lot we can do about it. We have the best players on the server by a mile and we still have to fill the raid with 10 people that either flat-out suck or are too new to know what's going on. There's just too many people playing this game and the good players are spread across too many servers.
with an encounter, or are not able to play at the level expected of our members, you may be asked to sit by the raid leader. This policy was posted for all members to read, and when I have numbers to back up the action (Timmy died to Dark Glare on every single attempt, verified by his group) they really can't argue with it or throw a fit. You can remind them that there are 10+ other people sitting out who would love a chance to raid, and that their difficulty with the encounter is negatively affecting 39+ other people. Guilt works wonders.
And then there's always the "50 DKP minus" approach. Poke around on Nihilum's DKP site and you'll find some entries such as "Thaddius - wipe. L2p" and "Died 2 red beam AKA noob mode." with hefty negatives attached. :P
Just out of curiosity, what do you do when you find yourself with a subpar raid group? Our guild isn't the biggest but it certainly is larger than most raid guilds, so on occasion we find ourselves filled with inexperienced or undergeared people for raid days. That's obviously no problem in BWL and most of AQ, but C'thun and onward with inexperienced people is kind of painful.
07/12/06, 3:55 AM
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