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.

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.

Summer in, and summer out are the biggest changes a stable guild will generally see throughout the year, definitely.

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.

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).

You're not the only ones it's happening to. Kilrogg horde basically fell apart when the top guilds leadership either defected to alliance or straight up quit. In CQ's absence, they had been the top dogs in both PvE and PvP - and now they're left with Razu and Anub down, and I'm not sure they're killing C'Thun anymore. Alliance has two dominant guilds - and maybe 1-2 others that are 'good', but probably don't have more than 5-6 Naxx bosses down. Those 2-4 guilds have been getting a lot of the better members from basically everyone below them.

The only thing I can keep thinking is how lame my server is, and how it basically lost all its' "middle class" per se. AQ contributed to the tide, but Naxx was pretty much the straw that broke the camels back for a -lot- of casual raiders, myself included. Though, a lot of my frustrations stemmed from the knowledge of what needs to be done and being able to perform on an individual level, but watching entire raid fail repeatedly at the simplest of things. When stuff like that is going on week after week after week, it becomes hard for me to blame anyone for jumping ship with the sole purpose of getting back to having fun w/ the game.

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.