My guild is one of the leading guilds on a newer server, and we're having a large problem. Last reset we raided 6 nights, for server firsts on Vael and Broodlord. We considered this a decent accomplishment at the time, having only entered MC 3 weeks ago.

However, this week, all of the sudden, 4 straight scheduled raids we've only had 20 people online. Had 45 for MC, noone for BWL. Even though we're killing 3 bosses in BWL.

How do other guilds deal with it when suddenly raid attendance drops massively? What's even more interesting, is that these drops come after a successful week learning new content.

That actually is not too surprising, maybe you are raiding too much? Maybe you need to recruit more people? Even with progress many people are still going to show up for the raids that they feel are sure things to get them loot, more so then encounters that you are only now starting win.

Attendance is an odd thing, it is really hard to gauge why it is happening, and fixing it is never fun. It usually comes down to recruiting more people, which sucks. Especially if you are smaller guild, I think the first thing is to find out why people are not showing up, which is not easy in and of itself.

Attendance is a bitch for raids, especially when you are a small guild making new forays into a new dungeon. People may be hesitant to go, they don’t like repair bills, or I hate to see it, they want the guaranteed loot of an easier instance.

I guess that didn’t help too much.

Nah, that helps more than you think Mokoto. That pretty much describes our week.

We're a 55 account guild, we had 47 for MC tuesday, our server was down wednesday, 37 for domo/ragnaros Thursday, then 25 Friday/Saturday/Sunday, and 30 tonight for BWL.

Unfortunately, I'm not a leader in the guild, so recruiting isn't something I can do. I'm just a concerned member.:)

Same thing happens with my guild every time a new dungeon comes out. We go in there and do well for the first couple of weeks, then people say to themselves, "Hey, I'm losing a lot of cash on repairs and my chance of winning gear in this place is almost nil. I'm not coming here anymore until the situation is better for me." They don't directly avoid it, but if the chance to go out to a movie with friends comes up, they'll do that rather than raid if it's when we have the new instance scheduled; if they have a report due the next week, they'll make sure to take care of it on the night of the new instance; etc. It happened to my guild and a lot of other guilds on the server when we went into BWL, when we went into AQ, and now as we're going into Nax. Like Mokoto said, it's really fucking annoying. If you're striving to be the best you can, then you need to make it clear that you don't want players who don't share that goal. And really, you don't. They're not going to do you any good in the long-run.

Make a list of the players who are showing up to the new stuff consistently and reward them. If your guild bank is rich (which it probably isn't at this stage in your guild) them help them with repair costs. Give them first priority on invites to MC. If your DKP system supports it, give them bonus points.

At the same time, you should confront the people who are only showing up to MC but rarely to BWL. Have your officers question them individually about their attendance: find out why they aren't showing up, tell them why it's important to show up, and come up with a plan for them to show up more often. Most people think they can just not raid and they won't be noticed, but when you get onto people individually they realize they aren't slipping by anyone and usually improve their habits. Perhaps you could make a Casual rank with certain restrictions on loot for the people who don't show up to BWL.

I guess it's a little early for this for you guys, but give it another week or two and you'll be able to see more clearly defined patterns in people's attendance. A lot of this may seem kind of drastic, but if you truly are getting 45 people for MC and only 20 for BWL then the problem is unmistakable. Take it from me: this is something you want to handle before it gets out of control.

EDIT: If you aren't your guild's leader, you should definitely voice your concern to whoever is.

My old guild went so far at one point to schedule a raid, but not announce where until the hour came to move out. Worse case scenario, you'll see who is there to put things on farm, and not just collect loot. That being said, with only 3 weeks in MC, seems like you could be a tad less ambitious about going into BWL.

I'll go into detail a bit, despite that it might get me into trouble.

Our guild leader has been totally silent on this issue over the time where there's been trouble, and has admitted to running Naxx with his previous guild. Our other 2 officers haven't been online over the weekend. So in a large part, this is a leadership issue. Which brings me to the problem, which is what can the rest of us, as guild members, do to try to improve BWL attendance?

We have a solid base of ~25-30 extremely good players, but unfortunately you can't do BWL with 25-30.(at least not in our gear)

Short of rebuilding the guild, which we aren't interested in for a number of reasons, we are looking for solutions to this. Our DKP system is a true zero-sum system, so it doesn't reward attendance for raids that don't happen.

I realise this is starting to sound like a bad guild, except that we've had a large degree of success(like I said, broodlord down 2.5 weeks after starting MC). We do have a lot of people who enjoy raiding together and are good players. This is the frustration for a lot of us. 10 hours logged on waiting for raids that didn't happen over a weekend, as sad as that is.

If your Guild Leader isn't showing up for raids, your problems stem deeper than anything repairable, I think. IMO, your guild is still young... talk to the officers about it and if it doesn't shape up, just take those 25-30 devoted raiders, get 20 more raiders and enjoy your progress.

You don't sound like a bad guild, just going through growing pains, these phases affect just about every guild, its normal. The best things it to address the issues and find ways to alleviate the problem, even the threat of recruting more people can often get people focused because they would hate to have to fight for a spot in a raid. In the end its an issue that will probably go away, but the faster you deal with it, the faster it will be less of a problem.

On the flip side, making progress that quickly is commendable, and I don't see this as too crippling, just a minor setback to making progress in BWL because people don't want to show up for "harder" encounters with less chance of reward.

Yeah, really. As much as you guys don't want to make another guild, it'll come down that eventually. Well, either that or your good players will /gquit one by one over the weeks to join a guild that actually raids.

Don't announce your raids. When you have 40 people online, go do your new content, whatever that may be.

This may piss people off, but they can't really say anything. On my older server/guild there was actually a person who said, "Well, I would have logged in if I knew we were doing MC and not BWL." Needless to say, he wasn't in the guild very long.

Yeah, we had this happen tonight. Had someone online who refused to join the raid because 'we didn't have 40 in BWL and he wasn't interested in repair bills'. We didn't end our week as well as would've liked, only razor down vs. broodlord last week, but learned a few things about some people.

We tried this briefly and ran into the problem that we have several members who only come to non-farm content due to limited play time, and this kinda screwed them. I'd much rather have people who actually want to be learning content be able to make it to non-farm raids than trick loot whores into coming.

We have this very problem currently. We have only done Anub'Rekhan this week because of it. All our Grand Widow attempts fall into shambles because we can only get raids of 30. As if the Summer wasn't a problem (and I enjoy the beacon of light shining down on me as much as anyone else), we have members that don't like the ratio of Epix:Repairs and instead "go out with their family" or "go out to get drunk". It is frustrating but all attempts to fix this problem have either resulted in drama, guild collapse (In other guilds, our guild has lasted almost a year now, and we have seen the rise and fall of many horde mc/bwl guilds).

My advice is to systematically find out which members which do this, and replace them in a similar fashion. If you want to be best in BWL (as you've shown) then it has to be done. We slack so much because 50% of our member base have a party on the nights of Naxxramas but nothing during BWL. Don't be like us.

It's summer... ? :)

Tricking your guild is in no way any kind of solution to your problem.

If people do not want to join for raids you have 2 options as far as I can see.
1) Raid less.
2) Get people who want to raid.

There's nothing bad about raiding less if that is what your guild as a whole would like to do. Not every guild can be a superduper raiding machine.
Figure out what your guild wants it to be, and adjust acording to that. This includes the entire guild, not just its leaders.

Not announcing raids will be a big problem come naxx/aq40, if you are horde atleast, because consumables will be vital for just about anyone in your raid.
In a learning phase you want everyone to go all out to keep themselves alive. Having 10% of your raid say they didn't bring nature pots because they thought you were doing MC that day is going to be a problem.

We're kinda similar, can get about 45-50 for the farm instances and then 30-35 for the learning encounters.... heh infact some of our first kills have been with only 35 people (MC/BWL/AQ40) and we've done fairly well on the harder AQ40 bosses with just that.

Its still fairly obvious that some members are part of the "when we're learning i'll have more of a rl" kinda people, but the issue is its so damned hard to find replacements.

And again if we did replace them, the new people would have alot worse gear which effects the raid by needing to gear up more 'gimped' players... wait for them to get experienced etc... I think about half of our boss kills have included atleast 5 of these type of players without gear or experience, however once they become farm-status these people had a harder time getting in as the rl-members suddenly start coming online more....

Gosh if only we could replace them all.. :)

But saying that, we've done several recruiting sprees and we usually get a bunch of really good players in each batch, along with the bunch of clueless newbies who just want to be in a top end raiding guild, its just sad to watch your 'old playerbase' being replaced so much, from about 30 core down to 25, then 20... etc

Do yourself a favor now and subscribe to my old program.


Do *two* MC bosses, then BWL.

Every. Single. Day. They either stop logging in, or suck it up and stay on. You can switch up the order too - kill Vael -> Broodlord do some MC, etc.

Keep 'em guessing :D

A lot of guilds have had this problem when starting BWL, which has a pretty steep learning curve for new guilds. My advice would be to do something about it now, otherwise the same problem will keep cropping up time and time again.

Here are a few things we did that had pretty good results:

1/ Don’t award dkp per run. Do your zero sum calculations based on the whole week. So if the total spending for the week was:
Mon MC: 467
Tue MC: 725
Thur BWL: 100
Sun BWL: 0
Then divide the total by 4, and that is the dkp earned per raid (over the whole raidgroup). So attended 'learning encounters' is as profitable as farmable content.

2/ Make class leaders: Each class leader will ask everyone's availability for the week, then post who will be raiding each day. You can decide which instances you will attempt, based on the sign-ups. If you are repeatedly short of a particular class, make it known you will recruit move of that class if it doesn't improve. This makes people feel more accountable for their attendance, and will be less inclined to skip learning encounters as they run the risk of missing more 'farmable content' due to more competition for places.

3/ Reduce the bidding rights of people with poor attendance (or people who just miss learning encounters all the time). We never kick people from the guild, but if they are too slack they get set to 'honorary member' which means they can not bid against full time raiding members (irrespective of the relative dkp). This isn't used often, and is usually only used for people who go inactive for a period of time … but just having the possibility of this happening ensure people don't pick and choose which raids to attended. If their performance improves, they are moved back to full raiding member. It helps two fold, in that your regular raiders get better eq'ed, but you don't loose the flexibility that having a large playerbase.

These are the things I think helped the most

The bigger problem we seem to have is the people who start making vague accusations that 'some people' are avoiding the progression encounters, yet when put to it, can't seem to name anyone specifically. It just gets everyone on edge & in this heightened sense of paranoia. Usally telling them to put up or shut up is enough to squash it.

If people are avoiding your progression encounters, either consciously or subconsciously, you just need to make them more attractive for them. Even if we don't have enough people show up, the people that were online & ready to go still get attendance points, that way those that are missing are slowly filtered out of raids (raid spots are given in order of rank which is mostly determined by attendance). To keep people actually working towards winning, we only award attempt points for specific milestones (50%, 20%, Phase2, etc), once we're confident we can hit a milestone, only the next one gives attempt points, and so on.

Do *two* MC bosses, then BWL. Every day you raid.


It'll work trust me!!!!!!!

Back when I was playing horde, we were having trouble downing ebonroc. We began to have pretty much the same attendance situation that you are describing. The officers got together and said ok, we aren't going to do mc anymore until we are making nef attempts. Next reset, we one-shot ebonroc and flamegor and go on to down chromaggus that same night... All this with a full raid.

You shouldn't really have to do this though. We simply award a retarded amount of DKP for learning encounters, so much that killing a new boss has at times equaled the amount of points earned from an entire week of raiding (extreme example, but it happened). We are blessed with very few people that simply won't log on when they know we're dedicating an entire night of attempts to some boss. The only time iirc that we did not have enough people to do Naxx was when we had raided 6 days prior and I guess people were burnt out.