I posted a lot in a thread on RnD a long while back (How to fix a Mediocre Guild thread) about the problem of limited populations. It's not just a horde problem- although Horde tend to have it worse overall.

How do you balance a desire to raid and progress against the server populations- especially when you may not have the "appropriate" population to cull from. At the moment my guilds ideal candidates would come from a guild farming C'Thun and just learning Nax. On my server there are 3 questionably "tops" guilds. Us with 7 bosses in Naxx. One with Twin Emps and one boss in Naxx. One at Huhuran and with 2 bosses in Naxx. Horde side only one guild has killed the Twin emps- and they only got that kill this month. To make things worse (recruitment wise) those two guilds are pretty much rock stable at the moment. We've already cannibalized one "top" guild and have been recently picking through the remains of one of the runner-ups that imploded. We only take 56 active raiders total (7 for each class) and we're currently recruiting 7ths in almost every class. (Priests should be closed but we can't find solid druids for love or money so we're recruiting an 8th priest and a 6th druid)

We get a lot of apps. We have to cull out the folks who we simply cannot gear- We're not running MC and even BWL gearing is tight because once we get a little further in Naxx we may have to drop BWL for more progress. Healers especially (since we can't use 2.5 as a healing set) have to come in with a good chunk of T2 or equiviliant. We cull out the folks with terrible reputations- we have a very solid reputation on server for not engaging in asshattery and we try to maintain that. We cull further for people who can/cannot play nice with the guild members we've already got. There has to be a working enviroment that's not tained by people trying to suck eachothers blood and maim eachother. We don't vote on players, but we do take the guilds general impressions in hand and if a guildmember simply doesn't see a way to play with a player- the feelings are that strong- we let them go. (This happens surprisingly rarely)

After that point the 6 people interested in your one spot have been whittled down to 1, maybe 2. If you're really amazingly lucky you've got 3 solid apps. Then we have to cull the people who can't make that learning leap- We don't have the time anymore to teach our new players to keep up in BWL- they have to immediatly be able to jump into farming C'Thun and preform in Naxx. We can't spend more than the 5 hours we have allocated to AQ40 in there- or we fall behind in Naxx.

You can afford to be generous or evil if you're on a server with 4+ guilds at your level in progression. You can afford to offend skilled players by just kicking them for stupid attitudes- You can afford to take a chance on someone who might not be all that great, but comes with excellent attitutde and gear. The level of your applicants is likely to be higher in terms of skill and gearing. At that point it's not elitiest to pick and choose the nice folks... but they're all on a similar level of gear or skill.

Horde side or in general on servers with skewed progression- being anything less than elitiest can push your raiding to a grinding halt. Technically we could zerg recruit- but the moment we opened zerg recruits and just took folks who could learn and could gear and who have nice attitudes- we'd lose entire portions of Naxx that we barely have on farm status anyways. We'd have those heart attacks on C'Thun when we realized that there were too many unskilled players and the encounter was backsliding off farm status (there's nothing more terrifying to me to be truthful). We watched the guild that had been ahead of us prior to AQ40 recruit nice folks in bulk and dissolve in a horrible screaming agony infested drama mess after downing Huhuran. We learned from thier mistakes (and took several of thier best players).

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Is it possible? Perhaps. Our guild has a pretty good reputation on server and one of the goals we hang on to for dear life is to keep that reputation while still managing to recruit the kind of players we need to progress... keeping that balance ocassionally makes raiding hard. We had 2 weeks where we came to patchwerk with 14 healers and realized we simply couldn't do him with the 16 healers (total guilded) we had on our roster. We had to kick healer recruitment into overdrive.

I wouldn't call us super duper nice guys who love everyone- although our players know to keep thier grievances and attitudes private. As a general rule we've gone from a mess of in-guild drama "I hate him he hates me!" to only a few drama llamas- and those are being smoothed out as the months fly by.... it's taken a lot of work, a shared vision among the longest-term officers, and very very careful recruiting.

Is it something possible for a guild starting 40 man raiding now.... months behind the top guilds? I'm not really sure it is. I know we get a chunk of our applicants because we're the top guild on server. We have a large amount of choice. A guild just starting molten core just doesn't have applicant pools deep enough to organize a "perfect" raid.

I think it's too early to start trying to form up a "perfect" TBC guild. There's still several months of thumb twiddling to go before it launches and the best of the best folks won't be satisified with farming ZG/AQ20 until december. The best bet would probably be to start a massive recruitment campaign when TBC drops and hope to cannibilize the castoffs and discontents from the top guilds that decide that cutting to 25 is the way to go... and to be relitivly picky about who you pick up.

I feel for you. It's better on alliance side, where the glut of players means that there are multiple guilds comprised of decent people and decent players. Thanks to the nature of the game, I can join chat channels or use guild chat, turn off general, and enjoy it without being hindered by the 'jerks.' (Then again, when word gets out, there's a massive influx of applications...)

oh ho ho, that's so cute! they think they're Elitist Jerks too *smirks*

thank you for following the last line of the "credo of an elitist jerk" when making that post chocula

I don't know about a Rangers, but I guarantee you most servers have a Neifi Perez.

Its common for many people to develop a hardened attitude towards those not in their "clique" as time progresses. Family, work, team sports, friendships, guilds, etc its more or less the same.

For anyone who has rolled on a new server, you see this behaviour frequently. A guild starts out with nice people, a few jerks, as people tend to raid more with the same people week after week they view people outside the guild as clueless noobs.

Application forums are always a strong tracking system, you'll see after a few months whenever someone with underpar gear applies a few people will chime in with "gtfo noob your gear sucks" or similar comments, all of whom were previously very nice and were in fact in that same noob gear condition themselves.

Its just a (sad?) fact of human psychology, we have strong imperatives to form mental groupings of people and rate ourselves as better or worse. Works great in politics and religion too.

Heh... typical newbie attitude I guess huh Chocula?

Bingo. Couldn't have put it better myself.

In the context of the guild that I run (the result of a twin raid guild merge), this is the single most critical thing I have used to mould the new guild into shape.

Taking two groups of players, who are both interested in raiding and progress, but in very different styles, can be an absolute nightmare to manage, both ego and logistic wise. So far, the people that have quit or that we have cut have been the ones who's attitude quite simply didn't fit the character of the guild or the people in it. Whether it was kicking up a fuss about RPP or loot, or someone saying something out of line, we have unconditionally been better off without the people that quit the guild over something that petty. When your guildmembers are fiercely loyal and dedicated to the collective soul of a guild, that is something you cannot buy, and you fuck with it at your peril.

When it comes to players, in my mind nothing is more important than attitude. He can be the second coming of Sun Tzu, be part of the Blizzard design team, and wear shit that doesn't even exist yet, but if the guy is a cock and everyone in your guild hates him, cut the fucker quickly because he will kill your guild.

True story, in my previous guild when I caused wipes, there was one time I didn't immediately own up to it - because I had taken off my headset and was cursing myself out (You know that habit a lot of people have of jumping around like idiots? Yeah, I'm sure you know how this one ends, but the punchline is C'thun). Funny that most people seem to remember my calling them out on their wipes/deaths (after a moment of silence for them to have the opportunity to own up - in hindsight, I was unique in the owning up). Weird how the guild has subsequently exploded.

Gurgthock's Law, imo.

Obviously, there are guilds out there that do well in raid progression while being nice people, but it is the harder route. If you have split priorities (progression and ethics), you're not going to do as well as someone with only 1 all-consuming goal. Since it is a self-selecting process, you will find that most of the 'top' guilds on your server/faction have progression as their over-riding goal.

Most replies on this thread talk about how you should never allow drama queens, assholes, jerks etc into your guild - that's a no brainer, any smart guild focusing on progression will do that. However, if these same individuals are only assholes to people outside the guild, thats normally tolerated, if not exactly encouraged (though some guilds actually do seem to encourage it). Towards their own guild members, these 'jerks' are sincere, helpful, committed, skilful players - and in most cases, they aren't acting.

What about the elitist aspect? Any successful raiding guild will have tons of applications to go through. Reading/trialing/accepting only the best is simple common sense - I wouldn't call that elitist. The real test is whether the guild culls players who no longer make the cut. I'm not talking about players with poor attendance or poor attitudes. I'm talking about faithful players who are trying, but simply don't have the reflexes or intelligence to learn the late AQ40/Naxx encounters in a timely manner. You know they're trying because they farm pots, and do well on Damage/Healing on trash pulls, but somehow they're also the ones who die more than others on fights like Sartura, Twin Emps, Anub'Rekhan. And they do get better on these fights over time, it just takes longer. An 'elitist' guild would gkick these people no matter how long they've raided with the guild, as soon as a trialee proved himself over them.

So how would you go about building a successful guild that wasn't comprised of elitist jerks?:) Its a chicken and egg problem. You don't get enough good applicants to choose from until you have progression, and you won't have progression until you mass recruit and cull. To get to the point where you can start being more choosy about your applicants, it is necessary to take in some people who are jerks but controllable enough to still be an asset and others who are too casual and uncommitted to go far but better than nothing for now. Basically, you need enough bodies to start up. Once you start doing better, you can slowly weed these people out. Of course, to choose this path, you yourself have to be a 'jerk'.

That said, my current guild is pretty close to the ideal of success without compromising principles (I'm pretty sure we have a very good server rep), but it took a long time, a ton of effort, and quite some luck to get there. It would have been much easier to follow the cut-throat method.

Ignorance is curable, stupidity is terminal.

Harsh as it sounds, it's dead accurate. The good thing is, as said, WoW is not challenging, so the bar for stupidity is set pretty low.

As far as good players who loathe each other - they will work for a while, but inevitably they will explode. I was a sort-of casualty of this, I joined a guild that appeared to be strong and going places, but decided to merge 'our best' with 'their best' (where 'their best' was talking of another guild on the server who were almost universally disliked, to the point other raiding guilds nominally in competition with each other would work together on world spawns against this loathed guild). Needless to say, this new guild lasted about six weeks and exploded.