How do you figure that? Have you read every guild chat? I doubt it. You are basing your assumptions on your own experience. My guild had a notoriously difficult time on razorgore(something like 2 months) due to an ever revolving door when it came to who could come. The leadership finally decided to put a clamp on who could come and killed him but during that time we were still in fairly good spirits. We had our minor dramas and a few people looking at possibly moving on but nothing major and really all it did was push out those that would have most likely left anyways. We have never had a "ringer" and most of my guild has been together since close to the start of the game(and a large portion of those since cif started about 6 years ago) and those that have joined us were people that we have known for a long time. We lose very few people and the rare negetivity we see in guild chat typically involves RL and not in-game issues.

A good atmosphere where you dont push each other too far and you try to keep the burnout factor to a minimum is key if you want longevity. It may not be the best for progression but honestly the difference between killing a boss first in game and getting it a month after the first kill shouldnt be that big of a deal and that tends to rotate alot. Guild atmosphere is very important if you want to see a guild have high retention rates.

How many people are we talking? Half? Ten? You could still most likely handle Instructor Razuvious and Anub'Rekhan. Also, how are you filling your raid spots?

We do invites based on 90-day attendance %, making slight exceptions for needed classes. This means that over time, you will have the most consistent, best-geared players on your raids. This also enforces a measure of competition. It prevents people from skipping out on BWL or AQ, since a newer guy might overtake their 90-day attendance if they don't. We also give DKP and attendance for people that have to sit. They are just expected to be bound close by and able to be in the zone within 5 minutes, preferably sooner.

I think we just have a lot of good players, somehow. Don't ask me how. We've had a few people come back who had quit playing due to school/work/etc. due to free time in the summer, and took them along to C'Thun and Ouro this past weekend without them really knowing anything about the fights except for my 3-minute rundown on Vent ("Look, if you're confused about where to stand, go hide in a corner for 10 minutes and stare at the wall.") and our only death was a nub (experienced with the fight, but still nub) priest cratering because he couldn't sit still while waiting to get ejected from the stomach.

Naxx hasn't been an issue because it's new and awesome -- there are always more people than slots, not the reverse. The only fight that I'd say has been a nuisance when we're missing certain crucial people is the Twin Emps. If we have our handful of experienced warriors/warlocks who've done the fight and the transitions for months now, we'll be fine almost regardless of who else we have with us. If we have first-timers doing the tanking/transitions, it's guaranteed to be messy.

I don't know if this is considered a derail but I would be interested to know what kind of experience each guild's "excellent players" have. As an example our best players are either regular, strong PvPers or come from highly competitive clans in some kind of twitch based online gaming (like first person shooters and so forth). It seems to me that the kind of awareness, reactions, thought processes and so forth that come from those kind of games produce better players in almost any capacity. They pick things up quickly and don't make the same mistake twice.

From what I understand of your background, many/lots/most/all of EJ have a background in gaming. While this may be the first MMO for some they all had basic gaming skills, like being able to hit a key on the keyboard without having to look down. I think people sometimes underestimate how completely new to games some WoW players are, when I see my GF staring at the keyboard trying to find the number key bound to Fear I realise that there is a wide gulf of ability between your average "Gamer" and many people who play WOW.

I think there are many people who do not have 2/3 years of basic gaming backgroun in FPS, or RTS games that trains people to learn how to navigate a keyboard/mouse without looking down, how to react without panicing and getting flustered when things go wrong and so on. These people can often be the "weak links" in execution based encounters.

But enough derailing.
It will probably go well until the first major block to progress.

You can't really apply morality to a game, at least I don't.

Any guild has these people. We have these people, EJ has these people, every guild out there has these people, but some guilds have learned to cope by either over-recruiting, thereby forcing accountability on people who are lacking (ie if you want to raid, you have to perform or we'll just replace you) or by imposing some sort of penalty (that's a fucking 50 DKP minus!). That's why I find EJ's guild model so great is because they can apply that sort of pressure to their members. Most guilds, however, do not have that leverage and may simply recruit to fill space.

I'll reply to the rest of your points, later.

Naxx certainly hasn't been an issue for us either, we usually have 10 people waiting around to get in at the very least, but I certainly am apprehensive walking into C'thun with 8-10 people who haven't done the fight before or simply aren't very good at it. It's certainly not an issue of skill, more the fact that C'thun is a hard fight for people who have never seen it before. I just am concerned about some point where we walk into Thaddius and wipe unnecessarily for hours, I guess.


edit:

As for gaming history we have quite an interesting one, a bunch of our core players are ex-Halo pros, competitive CS players, EQ / EQ1 cutting edge players, or from other MMOs such as Planetside or Lineage 2. So we have a lot of people who have played games together for a long time, which does go a long way.

I personally think WoW doesn't require a huge amount of skill, most of the things people decide are skill is really just awareness. Knowing when to dodge dark glare isn't difficult at all, if you're focusing your attention on the game. I personally am not an amazing player, but I tend to play without distractions and have an attention to detail a lot of people don't care to have when playing games. For the record, I never played MMOs before or played any games very seriously except SC:BW for a couple months years ago.

You need to have a bit of a sense of right and wrong even in a game or you get utter chaos or mistrust. Also if your guild gets a bad name cause there is no enforcement of standards(I.e ninjaing items in pugs, spamming in city channels, griefing your own faction) the guild as a whole tends to get a bad name and then you will only get more people that wish to be in an environment that allows them to do as they please. Those people are typically not good for guild chemistry.

This is an interesting point. Because most of EJ came from the SA forums originally, a site which basically started out a gaming humor site, I think we probably do have people who are lifelong games of one sort or another. We have people who are/were heavily competitive Quake/CS, RTS's, and so forth, and most people grew up with consoles. If I make a lame reference to an old NES game, I can expect that a good number of people will get the reference. And so forth.

I hadn't considered that perviously, but there's definitely something to be said for past gaming experience as a general factor.

Yes, fuck Thaddius. If that fight doesn't get tweaked, there are some people who are never going to be seeing the inside of Thaddius's room -- and often not just because of skill but because of some people's computers or internet connections.

I worry every time I do Thaddius because of my currently very unstable wireless connection (which I can't do anything about for at least 2 months), because I certainly am capable of wiping the raid every time we do it.

So it's basically a choice of sitting me (the best geared rogue) or hoping I don't get a lag spike. Not pretty, either way.

Yeah, this is my situation too. I am a player A who was in an alliance with maybe 10-12 more player A's, 20 or more player Bs and some well not even that. When things imploded, me and a few A's rerolled elsewhere. However we've not been able to find anymore player A's on our new server yet, and since we're like mid 50s already that is sort of depressing. :(

MMOs (or at least this one) aren't designed to be a "skill" type of game, so to speak. You don't need complex micromanagement like a RTS or split second timing like a shooter.

A brain and a willingness to use it pretty much suffices for most classes. Perhaps tanking on a few select fights is a bit more complex, healing on a couple others, but that's it. Granted, I do play a fury warrior, and dpsing as a warrior is perhaps the easiest and most mindless thing in this game. I don't envy healers; their role is generally harder than the rest of us.

How many bosses are there where the role for the majority of the raid is simply to "not suck"?

Quoting the end so you know which post I'm referencing.
From what I've understood while you ran 2 MC's.. you took the best to BWL and then did the same for A'Q. In effect, you've duplicated the practical effect of the move the thread starter was talking about. Especially for earlier instances, gear is a very random thing, and the people who were attending the early BWL clears would definatly end up with more DKP, than people brought in once the instance was on dual-farm mode. You had your masses for clears, and your elite for new content. Don't get me wrong, admining the amount of people necessary to do that is no small accomplishment.
Your other point about not being able to custom tailor invites to certain people is certainly valid. However, due to life, these are issues any guild has to deal with. When your rogue lead has to get a job and can't suddenly play on weekends, you have the same issue, even if you are hard-core. Let's take this a step further. If every rogue in EJ had to quit suddenly... what would your reaction be?

I think it is misleading to put too much attention on the particular structure of a guild. 90% of the time, the particular success and/or failure of guilds can be attributed to the leadership. How good they are, how sensible their structures are, how well they administer them. Great leadership can make a not-so-good system work, and poor-leadership can bring down the best system.

To the original poster, I think that the idea of taking the best from two plus guilds and merging is a highly idealistic one. It's almost too abstract to think about. In particular I would worry because the underlying assumption seems to be that if you take the "best" from both, suddenly everything will be easy and raids will just run smoothly. Obviously you have some idiots who just can't seem to not die.. but for every one of them there is some "elite" player who think he is great who either isn't, or is, but hasn't mastered some particular element of a fight and causes problems. These "elite" players are now in an environment where there is no one else to blame, and quite possibly, new leadership telling them that they have problems. A huge drama possibility.

Fewer and fewer in my opinion. This is requiring more and more people to be on the ball, self-improve, and it also demanding more of raid leaders to work with everyone to make sure they understand their role. In the past if 70% of a raid understood the plan, you could probably pull it off. Now that's closer to 100%. And here's a hint, asking: "Does everyone understand the plan" is the most useless thing... ever.

That's a fair comment, and I agree there must be some sort of standards that players must hold themselves do since they represent the guilds they are in, but I certainly do many things in game that I would not do in real life.

In order to reinforce morality, the community must act as the governing body, serving as a judge and imposing social punishment (blacklisting or whatever) on its members who break whatever rules it established. Many server communities are fairly weak, or high-profile members are less-than-stellar people, so sometimes the process of justice gets undermined, so that's why I don't bother to always make sure I'm not being a dick when I roll on an item that some shitty player would by virtue of his class put to better use or whatever. Just an example though, a vast majority of the posts made on the Arthas realm forums about ninjas get replies from lv 1 alts such as "cry more nub" or "LOLOL PWND", which reinforces the idea that people can do whatever the hell they want, no matter if it's good or bad.

Even then, because this is a game, if there are enough assholes/ninjas on one server they can simply create their own guild. There are some fairly successful guilds out there with bad reps (Banana Boyz comes to mind).

The hardest part of running an end game guild is controlling drama - 99% of the time it is the only thing that will end you. By combining two previous guilds into one you have to overcome a huge clique barrier where two entities that knew nothing of each other come together.

I've never seen it work longer than 2 months... and I've seen about 12 failures between EQ and WoW.

some computer company could quote you saying that gur and make millions off of wow players. "EJ raid leader says buy this mega death 6000 computer or never see high end content!!" think of the potential....

I hadn't thought about this before either, but it's probably huge. The current WoW content will greatly favor people who are just good at videogames. Our guild's current adversary right now is Dark Glare. A guild of people who grew up fighting Zelda bosses will be comfortable with the idea of dodging stuff like that--it's second nature. I have to spend a lot of time coaching people.

I've also learned that it can be taught. Though I've seen countless deaths that just baffle me, all told, our guild has only spent 3 full nights at C'Thun so far, and I've started seeing a number of transitions with no deaths from Dark Glare or Mind Flay. So it's very rewarding in that sense.

But in most cases, what people are gaining is not "RPG skill" (decision making, min/maxing, ability choice, strategy), but something more twitch-y. In a lot of cases, they're learning just that full attention has to be paid to what you're doing, because you need reactions without delay.

When my guild first started attempting C'Thun, I commented on vent after a couple wipes that I was really glad I grew up playing games like Gradius, Contra and Zelda because I felt they really prepared me for an encounter like C'Thun. To this day, after quite a few kills, the same people still have the same problems: Giant Eye looking at you, becoming cloudy and giving other noticeable indications of a change in behavior? Let's stand there and see what happens. Dark Glare started 3 yards to the right of you and starts rotating counter-clockwise? Might as well turn on auto-run and head counter-clockwise.

Our current issue is with Grand Widow Faerlina, specifically the Rain of Fire. People flat out aren't moving out of it. I have countless fraps of the same raid members standing in the Rain of Fire. They continue their casts, they walk out backwards, they head right then switch directions and head left back through the rain. The reason? They were unlucky. That's the "honest" reason I get around 75% of the time. Some of our druids feel that abolishing the poison volley from three people gives them free reign to stand there and do absolutely nothing until the next poison volley comes.

I could be wrong in my assessment but I think a few of our problems stem from the use of any number of mods. Some people will download mods for the boss ahead of time and think they can beat the encounter outright, that they have all the abilities learned. That's kind of what I like about Naxxramas. The boss abilities aren't on set timers so they can be easily scripted by a mod. There's a bit of variance to them that requires people to be on their toes. More people of the raid have to pay attention. Scrolling Combat Text is nice but I think that's probably where a couple of our issues with the Rain of Fire comes. SCT doesn't seem to pick up on the Rain until after it has hit you for a couple ticks. Rather than watching for giant orange, fiery balls or listening for the audio cue that it's casting, they're watching SCT and as soon as they see a tick, then they start running. You can take a bath in Gehennas' RoF because Tier 2 and AQ gear can sort of make up for it but not with Faerlina. Being unable to deal with a basic skill learned on the third boss of Molten Core has baffled me. FR gear and FR pots don't make up for a lack of awareness, I feel.

It has gone so far as someone suggesting we take the raid to the Dire Maul Arena and have our locks randomly cast Rain of Fire and see if we can teach people to move out of it quicker.

A little background on my guild:

We had two guilds, Void and Limitless, both have been around for over a year, and have been on the same server the entire time (We started on Archimonde, transferred to Mug'Thol with the 22 other guilds that did). Both guilds have been "power house" guilds (Top 50 Horde C'Thun kills etc). Recently with AQ, attrition has been kicking in for both guilds. My guild (Void) lost its three Mt's right about the same time, and all four Askandi’s. One would think that the recruiting pool on a server of our size would be large, but it seemed that there was just too many high-end guilds, and not enough geared/good players to go around. Attrition was killing our progression, and we had to take people (especially tanks) on Bwl runs just to get them out of the T1 they were wearing, and to gear them adequately for Naxx. Naxx was a roadblock for both of our struggling guilds, with Noth and Faerlina (being the first two fights in Naxx that gear matters slightly and more than 3 people have to pay attention) being out of our reach. So, in the end, after other options were explored, we merged together. Both sides brought 30-40 active raiders, the "cream of the crop" so to speak. Progression wise, we saw an immediate jump in our raiding capability. We killed Noth, Faerlina, and Maexxna all on the first week (being last week), and now are working on Patchwerk. With raiding and only raiding in mind, it seems like we made the right decision. I will not lie and say that it didn’t hurt some people. Some were left out of the merger, or for some who were brought, there is often not a slot open (We have an average attendance of 67 or something silly).

However, it was for the greater good of the guild. I only hope that in the rush towards progress, we don’t lose the few tatters of identity that we still clutch onto. It is easy to draw lines of comparison between guilds in MMORPG’s and the corporate world. The giant commercialist conglomerations are the most successful, but they lose personal identity and often destroy “the little man†in a march towards success.

Was it the right choice for the guild? Only time will tell, but there is some first-hand evidence on our server to show that not all mergers fail when progression is the focus: Two Burning Hollow guilds (much in the same position as ours) merged about a month before we did, and are still going strong and leading the server in Naxx. Do cliques exist in both of these guilds? Sure. But cliques are present in all guilds (or at least every one that I have been a part of). I don’t spend time with every person in the guild; hell I rarely even talk with many of them. I spend time with my 10 or so friends doing things that we do, and I expect that’s how many guilds operate. In my somewhat limited experience, guilds fail when their officers form cliques, play favorites, and ostracize large, irreplaceable parts of the guild. If the ruling body stays aloof of petty politics, moderates fairly, retains the respect of the guild, and doesn’t become victims of infighting themselves, then the guild can weather even the darkest storm.

I could be wrong on all accounts however. As I said before, only time will tell.

Just about a month or two ago the leading Horde guild on my server imploded ... sort of ... just because they were apparently unable to beat the top Alliance guild at killing C'Thun first. Well that is one of the reasons always give for that and I heard they had some of the problems with (hard)core raiders / not-so-hardcore raiders already described in this thread as well. The hardcore players rerolled on alliance side and are now high in the ranks of the top alliance guild on my server ... and apparently well equipped.
Did some "shady dealing" happen? Most likely.
Do I like the result? Most certainly not because I kinda value loyalty a lot.
Would I ever vote yes if one of those people who left for "greener pastures" wanted to apply to my guild? Most certainly not.
This has made life on the server much more boring because frankly there is not much competition for the Emerald Dream Dragons (which the Horde guild usually won ...) for example. As a result of this guild disintegration my guild got a few good people though, which have enabled us to succeed a little more in AQ. Sadly though ...

We have made similar experiences. We have downed Faerlina last sunday yet we haven't yet mastered C Thun (due to several reasons). The endgame encounters I know (AQ 40, early Naxx) demand a lot more from players than BWL, where it was merely tank and spank with some aggroissues and damagespikes on the tanks (well there is more, but not that much).
In AQ you have to stay mobile and aware of the situation. We still have a lot of people standing right there getting hit by Sartura, TW' blizzard, Dark Glare, people running wildly around, connecting eyebeams at C Thun etc, people getting killed or at least hit by bug explodes and so on.
Compounding to this is the fact that our server produces pretty strong amounts of server lag. For instance I have to run about 20-30 yards till I leave the rain of fire of faerlina. I learned the hard way not to trust the graphical animation but rather SCT to judge whether I have cleared the rain.
And while I certainly don't have a real gaming background (at least on any kind of competetition level - i am still a mouseklicker despite all efforts to teach me differently), I can see many people performing much worse than I do for reasons I can only attribute to a lack of mental agility and reaction.