I find myself at quite an interesting place at the moment and im just wondering how many guilds are going through the same thing we are. How many guilds have been gutted by higher end guilds that are seeing better progression into Naxx? With the recent advent of Server Transfers and the the release of Naxxramus im finding our guild is basically bleeding and losing many of the players we spent months gearing up for places such as Naxx. Don't get me wrong im a Full Tier 2 priest with Blessed Qiraji Augur and probably could have bolted a long time ago myself when this all started. Having gone from GM of a guild to an officer council then somewhat back to GM of the current guild i find myself dedicated to the people i bring in but for the first time find myself questioning whether or not this is all worth it. Im fiercely dedicated to my guildmates and will see them through anything but when you lose at least one full Tier 2 player a week im at a crossroads of what to do, not only for myself but also for this guild.

Weve done the merger thing already which worked out horribly due to alot of the people from the former guild bolting because our raiding style "wasn't fun" and the ex-GM of the merging guild trying to sell his account with all the guild bank resources to include over 10k in gold, 100s of Fiery and Lava Cores, and at least 20 boe's. Ugh i hate it when what you intend to go right in a world such as MMO's always tends to slap you right back in the face. Its so hard to trust anyone these days and especially in a video game where all of what someone tells you, you can only take at face value. I know EJ is unique in that you guys have been around each other for years going from game to game. I can definitely say i envy you guys in that respect as im sure alot of others do too.

I guess im just reaching out there to see if anyone has been through this before and wondering how you weathered the storm so to speak. How is that Naxxramus has jumped recruiting up in such remarkable fashion across all high end guilds? I thought these were some of the most stable guilds in the game. I guess i was wrong.

there is so much poaching from the top guilds on our server that...

it feels like lower end guilds are gearing up players for the higher more powerful ones, which in turn keeps the progress of the same guilds high and the slower pace of lower end guilds lower.

I believe it has something to do with the game's age as well as the fact that raid instances are only getting harder. Your veteran players may be tired of being in a "second-rate" guild, at least in their viewpoint. Maybe these players feel they're carrying the raid in some ways. Maybe they're just loot-hungry.

There are really only two things to blame people trickling out of a guild on:

Low morale.
Loot problems.

If you're having either of these problems, people will leave. Whether these problems are caused by drama or hardship, if they aren't remedied, guilds are likely to fall apart under the strain.

These high end guilds are actively taking members from your guild (recruiting them specifically)? Or they're simply accepting applicants and you're blaming them for it?

It was like this in EQ a bit, people would "upgrade" guilds to get to where they wanted to be. A mid-tier guild will always be plagued with these problems. Once we started doing really well it felt like other "high end" guild members were just begging to jump ship... applications increased, and members kept trying to get their "friends" in.

A lot of people aren't happy in their current guild, and perhaps these are the ones that are first to leave.

Yeah it is definitely a bad situation that for now will keep getting worse. The gear/consumable farming checks in naxx are awful.

They will slowdown the smaller and fewer raids per week guilds pretty badly. The problem is that the consumable farming is burning out people in the top guilds too, so turnover is relatively high right now. No one wants to gear out new recruits in trash gear so pretty much the only eligible applicants are server transfers and people from the good guilds that are behind in progression. So the poaching begins.

We had effectively all of our resto druids quit in a span of 4 weeks and pretty much passed our problem off to other guilds by recruiting their druids.

Hopefully they are right and 25 man raids hit some sweet spot where guilds on both sides of the fence can thrive without one side just feeding off the other.

Problem is though its like a trickle effect. People just leave in ones and twos. With school starting for alot of our college age kids its only going to get worse. Weve never had much problems with loot in that our players are very well geared, we just have a bitch of a time getting weapons to drop in BWL. AQ has been pretty kind to us in that regard though. Got our first Kalimdor's Revenge last week.

This guild basically merged with the other high end horde guild on the server and then slowly things went downhill as some of the people left that i described in my earlier post. It feels like its an effect that cant be stopped at times. As more and more people slowly transfer guild morale goes down which results in more people considering their options. I just dont know how to stop it. I think it all began with us losing 3 of our top geared warriors in a matter of a couple of weeks. Our MT retired from the game due to some RL obligations, another 8/8 wrath warrior left due to being unhappy with the current state of the guild and our top Fury DPS warrior to go play with RL friends on the same server because he didnt agree with the way we were handling Molten Core loot for recruits (100g or 2 nexus). After that we were dependent on our last 2 full wrath warriors to show up for encounters like Twin Emps and then all of a sudden his account gets banned due to a gay chargeback that hes still trying to fix. Now as of today our last 8/8 Wrath tank transferred and were left without every single warrior we spent the last year working to gear up.

All of our officers are at a loss as to what to do at this point. Im probably ranting and frustrated at the whole situation but i keep hearing "were not the only ones this is happening to". Sometimes i wonder if its in fact true.

there is no point in going hardcore or emo for the next few months in WoW. every single piece of gear you own will get replaced a few weeks after you hit level 70 if not sooner. your guild will shrink as you move from 40 mans to 25 mans. The entire PVP system is being revamped and many people will find the arena system more fun than raiding.

So just chill for now, if you can keep raiding naxx great if you can't dont sweat it. Watch the vids of DnT/EJ/Ret/VM/etc kill bosses, and go back in early next year with 25 people and just own up naxx when your bored. Heck take a WoW break if you want, best time is now before the level and gear grind starts up again.

And yeah this is gonna get worse and worse in the next few weeks and months. Blizzard at some point is going to start Burning Crusade open beta and you are going to see guilds get absolutely destroyed and progression grind to a halt when this happens.

What I wonder is if they are going to meganerf AQ40 and even maybe Naxx fairly soon, just to keep people playing until the expansion. Not to mention what the fallout for the PVP grind is going to be as more people realize rank14 is becoming meaningless (in gear terms, I guess having High Warlord is cool as a title if they let you carry it).

Obviously losing a truckload of tanks is brutal. The one good thing is moving forward is the token nature of the new loot allows you to gear up specific characters very quickly.

For example, we have a couple people that designated to reroll as pallies come expansion time. Once they get to 60 the guild can just plow nax and throw every piece of appropriate loot their way and turn them from scrubs into competant players very quickly.

I think it's a constant occurance really. It's just far more noticable in AQ/Naxx because attendance consistancy is so important, losing a player that has been at almost every raid is felt more.

Nah im not blaming anyone. Its like its a gamewide epidemic. Everyone wants to know if someone else has had the shitty feeling i have right now. Misery loves company. Yes we are losing specific members to some specific guilds but im of the bet that they are applying on their own. I wouldnt call it the singular reason but its a pretty good indicator.

Just for reference we are a Cthun killing guild so its not like were exactly what i would think of as a "mid tier" guild. We killed Cthun before he was nerfed. I guess im trying to figure out where this all started and the shit started rolling downhill.

Tichondrius's horde raiding population took quite a hit right before Naxx was released. I was an Officer in <The Dark Souls> (awful name huh?), which at the time was one of the top three horde guilds on the server. However, due to Tichondrius's age and number of guilds as we lost members due to burnout we really just didn't have anyone to replace them with. Applicants were mostly blue geared because well geared players / experienced players were already in one of those top 3 generally. It reached the point where the top tier of the guild couldn't support the loss of raid strength these applicants brought and eventually morale just collapsed and we decided it was better to disband than die slowly. I had hoped that the guild's members going to other guilds would help reinforce them, but even today it seems like many of the larger horde guilds on Tichondrius have trouble with basic logistics these days. To this end I've seen the higher guilds recruit a good deal out of the lower guilds. I'm curious if this sort of thing is happening on other servers as well.

As for me, I had friends on Tich alliance so I leveled a new mage in about 3 weeks and play on the other side of the fence now (Hi Berg).

I'm not trying to be a jackass but I'm calling C'Thun killing guilds mid-tier. You essentially have a feeder complex, and upper end guilds will often feed on the mid-tier. Maybe its sad, maybe its cruel, but its just gonna happen, almost regardless of the rules in place, due to the decisions made by individuals.

Basically everything but your top end guild will see a lot of trickle up to that top end guild, some players are only there to raid, and want to go as far as possible... they're often not the type you want in your guild anyway.

What you'll notice is if you check your lucifron kill, and your kill from latest C'Thun, you might find half the raid are similar players... the ones who stick around are so good for you - and the real problem are the ones who have only been with you a short time are often the ones who get turned around.

Even a high end guild who has dropped 12 bosses in naxx sees turnaround and MUST replenish ranks. There is simply attrition through burnout, through real life, and other means. They recruit.
Now adays gear actually matters so they accept well geared players. That gear came from another guild's run. Sure most of us require you're not guilded ot be taken seriously, but no guild in their right mind would only take complete neophytes... do you guys?

Its not poaching as much as them recruiting, just like I'm sure you're recruiting now.

As someone already said, its a fact of life thats always ongoing in these games, you just notice it more when you're trying to progress.

Definitely agree that AQ took a HUGE chunk of the realistic raiding crew - maybe naxx is going to do the same. People bitched long and hard for something more difficult, got it, and half the raiding base left. Maybe 25 man has something to do with this, but I doubt it. You would think anyone who might leave from naxx would've done so already in aq40. AQ40 made major mistakes... and most of the burnout was when progression was hosed. Same mistake appears to be being repeated?

Hell were the only Horde guild on Dunemaul to even kill Twin Emps let alone Cthun. The Horde raiding population on Dunemaul has always been pretty thin for a release server. Weve gotten in some great server transfers over the past month or so but damn.

I don't know if this is the same with most of the top guilds like mine, but we seem to be hitting a point where our older members are quiting the game and moving on for what ever reason. We have lost a good deal of members in the past two month and have been recruiting due to it. This is probably the reason most of the mid ranged guilds are losing top geared players.

I think someone may have mentioned it, but it's worth pointing out that in many cases these guilds aren't poaching your players. If one of your members applies to their guild and they deem it a worthwhile app it isn't their fault they find it beneficial. Either that person wasn't right for your guild (progression/loot whore? Disagreements?) or you're not giving them an incentive to stay.

But with server transfers you are no longer on an island.

Im probably just looking at it from a server perspective more than anything but yeah i get your point.

Trust me im not saying anyone is poaching our guild. I think it was another poster that made that reference. I understand the merry-go-round this starts when one high end guild starts recruiting then the whole "friends" thing starts. Its pretty much what were experiencing.

Weve been recruiting our butts off for the past two months or so to shore up our ranks to keep a 5 day raid schedule and yes just like any other guild we dont want people in greens, blues or Tier 1. Its just too much of a setback so i understand that portion of it. It just sucks to see alot of the work ive put into trying to progress then watch it go downhill like this. Its a sinking feeling i hate having.

One thing I notice, is that for every 10 people we recruit, maybe 1 or 2 are the 90%'ers you keep for a "lifetime". Its hard to get the players who really make the "Core" of your guild, and when a core member leaves.. its hard to recover from.

From our original lucifron kill, out of the 56ish actives in our guild today, 26 of them were at or around during that kill. (Back in april or something of 2005).
That might imply we've only recruited a handful since then for the other 30 slots.

But those extra 30 slots probably represent over 200 people. Losing the core people is just such a big deal. Everyone here knows that 1 or 2 people in their guild who quit that meant so much to the guild and the people. Theres some people that are truly painful to lose.

This is massively expanded when we're talking about a warrior.

Yeah if this instability had been in another class other than Warrior i could probably say this situation wouldnt be as bad as it seems.

We went through the exact same thing you describe, only when we were stuck at the Twin Emps months ago. We had a semi merger with another guild (our title, alot of their players), decided to conciously run with a bloated roster, regressed to MC/BWL clears, and just last Wednsday had our first Twin Emps kill after we had spent time in Naxx getting Instructor and Anub down. Your guild seems to have been very successful during that period; if I had to guess, its just this crippling ripple thats working its way through predominantly horde guilds.

I know that this problem is very prevalent on newer servers, where transfers were allowed only a few months after their start date. Scilla suffered greatly when we had an influx of Tier 2, Tier 2.5 BWL and AQ farming guilds join our server. At the time, we had two guilds that had just entered BWL, with everyone else still in the middle or beginning of MC. Unfortunately, this really dissolved the "race" to be the best on the server. This not only affected PVE, but also PVP as well. We saw battlegrounds dominated very easily by the AQ guilds, and I know a lot of people lost morale to continue queueing up. We saw a lot of people either transfer back and forth, try to join the new transfer guilds, or simply just leave. School starting soon will certainly contribute to this problem as well.

I'm glad to see that Blizzard has extended the start date of transfers to new servers to 6 months, but unfortunately it has screwed over those that lived under the old rules. Right now, our guild suffers from constant turn over. While we are able to recruit new people, we continually fall backwards as we need to equip these new recruits. It'd be nice to recruit of the better geared people, but of course as discussed in this thread, those people tend to simply try to join the BWL/AQ guilds. So yes, while I can understand the Naxx predicament, I beleive it can also be applied to new servers with high tiered transfer guilds.

From the perspective of a Naxx guild (post Patchwerk), we simply aren't interested in anyone who is still looking for stuff from BWL. That means that all of our recruits are going to have to come from the guilds that are working their way through AQ40. Now, on Tichondrius, we've had about 4-5 Alliance guilds break up over Twin Emps/C'Thun, so our pool is pretty large.

A portion of that is the nature of AQ40's set drops and the majority of the guild giving up on BWL. It used to be that if we were working on AQ40, our new recruits could run through BWL for a month and get geared up about halfway, then start grabbing stuff from AQ40 and be on their way. Now, if we get a recruit that is in half BWL/half MC gear, they simply have no option available to them to make the jump to Naxx.