Great post, except for the misuse of "tenacious(ly)" - and worse, I had no idea what your intended meaning was.

1. Holding or tending to hold persistently to something, such as a point of view.
2. Holding together firmly; cohesive: a tenacious material.
3. Clinging to another object or surface; adhesive: tenacious lint.
4. Tending to retain; retentive: a tenacious memory.

Just a sample of exactly the "leftovers" I think you're talking about: I needed a DM East run to get some mats for my doom guard guy, had a guildy druid healer (lvl60, some MC gear) - our MT died 3x in the first 10 minutes (of what should be a 12 minute run, total) on the first 3 trash pulls. "You try healing with a 3 second heal" was the excuse.

Some people are just seriously bad at this game, and the more I play it, the more I find out just how far a few good players can take you.

My experience has been very different on alliance side of Cenarion Circle. The top progression guild (Juggernaut) has a generally negative reputation, which probably makes a big difference. Below them in progression (alliance side) is group of maybe 4 raids or so that I'd say we're in. I haven't noticed any significant amount of poaching or anything like that. I'd say that Ergo Bibamus definitely has a core group, but I'd also say that if someone shows up to raids/etc and gets along with people, they become part of the core. My social experience in WoW is *very* different than RL, because you don't have the same sort of limitations on how many people you can hang out with at once. I can be in Ventrilo having a good time in a raid and still talk to people outside of the instance with tells/friend channels. It's unique in that sense where you don't have to choose between two groups of friends quite as much as RL.

As far as loot systems that favor veterancy, I think there's something to be said for rewarding loyalty so long as it's possible for people to achieve that status after a while of raiding.

I don't know a lot about the details of why you went through so many guilds, but I have to say this: As a mage leader that deals with recruiting, I'm very leery of any applicant that has gone through a lot of guilds in a short time. What's to say that this time will be different? More importantly - what's to say that the underlying issue with all those guild-person breakups has been resolved?

Has anyone ever heard of or seen a medium guild move into a more hardcore classification? I have been making huge efforts to get us to start doing Razoregore attemps after our first Rag kill last week, but the leaders always fall back on the "casual guild" excuse for not going. Yet they do things like giving priority to people with Flasks and forcing anyone in the raid to set their heartstone to Kargath so we can quickly mobilize after turning in the Ony head so we can go kill Rag before trash respawns. They want us to start doing MC in one night before BWL, yet we do up to Domo in 3-4 hours and save Domo-Rag for the next day because of multiple attempt issues. I would think doing all of MC in about 5-6 hours over 2 days pretty damn well prepared for wahtever BWL can throw at us. I mean, the rest of the week is spent seeing who wants to do ZG.

Maybe someone with more experience regarding guilds can point out where this is going. It seems we are doomed to run MC forever so we can gear out the constant undeeded stream of new recruits who do 1 or 2 raids a month. We have about 20 people who show up to everything and then the other 100 people in the guild who shuffle in and out. Am I forever doomed to having completed BWL attunement for nothing, short of quitting the guild and finding a new one (which is a horrible prospect, the raiding situation on my server is severly polarized. It's either Naxx or Lucifron )?

If your leaders don't want to raid BWL, odds are you won't be raiding BWL. BWL doesn't require a "hardcore" raiding mentality in the slightest, but it does require people dedicated to mastering content(like any difficult content in this game). The situation you describe of 20 regulars and 100 transients doesn't sound particularly predisposed towards progression.

IF you can do so discreetly, talk to members of guilds with more stable rosters. You might have to sit on the bench a bit, but isn't that what you're already doing anyway?

Haha, wow I feel like an idiot. I think trepidation is the word I meant to use.

Some of the things written in this thread seem peverse, but maybe it's my sense of values that is such.

My guild is currently leading progression for our server. When I formed the guild, the loot system I implemented had a stated objective of ingraining seniority. What I wanted was the sort of distribution effect you get from a loot council without the bias. After almost a year now, our loot system has been drama free and has resulted in high retention of players, and excellent attendance at progression raids (we give points per minute spent raiding, and the point value is double on a progression night). What tends to happen is old members get loot from the progression instance we are working on, new members get loot from the last instance which the old members are done with, and then a couple of months after we beat the end of the new instance the new members catch up, putting them in the positiion of old members for the subsquent instance. e.g.: people that joined when we started BWL caught up to the people that joined when we started MC sometime around the end of AQ.

As a guild leader, I'd rather look after the 25-30 people that have been with us for so long, and less about the guys that constantly cycle through guilds. I'd be very wary recruiting someone who had been with 4 different raid guilds over the space of a year. I much prefer to get people who have been with the one guild for a six+ month period, because all guilds have ups and downs, and you want the guys that are gonna stick by you through the downs. They're the ones our system really rewards.

You know what's the most surprising thing about this thread? The values stated are opposite to the majority of people I know. We have a bunch of new people at the moment from server transfers, and the vast majority of them really like the 'core' mentality of our system.

Speaking as one from a 'middle' guild on a longstanding server, there is a long running joke on how the top Horde guild is slowly killing the server.

Joking aside, we have lost a number of quality players due to said guild, as well as from server transfers. It is fairly difficult to recruit stable quality members.

Please dont sign your posts. Moderators in this forum are quite strict about it. :)

Yes.

In fact BWL is where we took our left turn into a more dedicated guild, although it was back when BWL was first released and considered teh final word in difficult instancing.

When we started we were already in second or third place (when when a sever is jsut starting up is well behind). The top guild on the server, Nightwind, leveled faster, had stronger players, and had highly experienced raid/guild leaders. We didn't even attempt to take the wind out of thier sails- there weren't enough 60's to even try it. So we settled on a more casual approach to raiding for our start. 3 hours a raid night was a very strict limit and we only raided 3 nights a week. We lifted a dkp system from a sucessful guild, put it in a pure zero sum and hung our banner out there with a fairly quick Lucifron kill that we were in bussiness.

We didn't even try for server firsts. What was the point? We had a massive amount of turnover, people were hardly even interested in pushing hard to kill Ragnaros. We let him sit for 2 weeks while we decided if we had the gear to even attempt him. While we were sitting on him, BWL went gold and Nightwind popped right on in there and started killing merrily.

It took us WEEKS to get enough people to show up for Razergore. More turnover because it was too hard, more recruitment. The change came in the officer mettings around that time. We decided we still weren't going to push for server firsts or anything that crazy, but we also decided that regardless of anything else- we HAD to keep progressing.... and we changed our recruitment strategy to reflect that change in goal. We added a 4th day on the schedule. Then a 5th quickly after. People bitched and moaned and screamed but we dragged them along through BWL or they could leave. Many did. And oddly enough we were only 3 weeks behind the two top guilds Nefarian kills, and only then due to lack of gear and workable strategy. It was kinda fun to encourage people to try harder and narrow the gap- not to get firsts, because wtfever Nightwind and thier horde equivilant seemed like gods.

Then AQ dropped. In the month+ between the patch drop and the gates opening we suffered the largest losses as a guild we had EVER suffered before over "The Linen Incident." It's still refered to with pretty much capital letters in voice. We had 5 raid days but MC+BWL only took 2-3 of them. World bosses *sometimes* took up a third, but rarely. We had lots of open nights so one night we scheduled organized linen farming to open the gates. We were all going to Org and in teams of 2 we were going to spend 3 hours and farm the hell out of that baby instance there. Not optional- this was an organized raid. If you were online you had to be out farming linen. 60 linen would be required the next day to raid BWL. Sounded like a solid plan. We had it worked out, we thought it would go beautifully. Afterall we ALL wanted a new instance to play in. So we announced it and less than 10 min later 6 people quit the guild- followed by another 2-3 in the few hours afterwards while we tried to figgure out what in the name of god had gone wrong with such a simple idea. We lost a total of 11 people that month when the dust settled (That was about 20% of the total guild) and we thought it was going to cripple us for months after. We organized massive recruitment immediatly and we were HARD on our new recruits, but fair. They were going to have to show up- be willing to do whatever it takes to progress- even if it's something as shitty as farming linen. In exchange we gave full member rights upon entry, you started earning and spending skp during your trials (things the top guilds ahead of us didn't do consistnatly) and you were immediatly under the umbrella of one of the well liked guilds on server. You join Rebirth- you ARE Rebirth. We worked you hard, but no harder than anyone else in guild.

We barely made it back to a normal guild size when the gates opened... and somehow we managed to blow Nightwind out of the water. We kept up and passed them in kills. The got Huhuran first, but we got him less than a day later.... and then thier guild (and thier horde equivilant) just.... exploded. Thier first huhuran kill was barely repeated for months while we zoomed on ahead and started working on Emps we picked up a few of thier disgruntled players... then a few more. We got Emps first... but then no one caught up. Took us 6 weeks to kill C'Thun and in that time no one else had killed Emps. Then we got Ouro. Then Naxx dropped and by this time Nightwind was no more and we were 2-3 bosses ahead (although people started picking up emps kills finally) and "server firsts" lost all meaning. They weren't even a competition. We've got 8 bosses in Naxx and the nearest guild has 3. We're still the only C'Thun or Ouro guild on server. We raid 6 nights a week but... for only 3 hours a night (5 on sunday). We have a bad habit of stretching it if the boss kill is near but otherwise our 3 hour raids are our only guilty "casual" pleasure compared to the other hardcore guilds lol

I think we made the mental change from a medium guild starting BWL, and put it into practice in AQ. If NW had kept themselves solvent we probably would have had solid competetion (especially as we wouldn't have been able to recruit from thier crumbling player pool) But I still think we could have kept up.

We started with very humble roots. We kept our good name on the server despite everything and managed to progress reliably. When people proudly mention that thier guild still has 50-75% of thier origional players I look at the 12 of us who were there for learning Molten Core and shrug. We're not the same guild we were when we started Molten core. It's a loss, yes, but the average months guilded for the history of our guild is right at 8 and that's a nice solid number of months. Our turnover may be high compared to some, but it's not so many that we have to slow down significantly to progress. The hardest part is finding geared recruits =(

I spent a good deal of time thinking about my loot system, back when we really wanted to change it. We used a "Zero-Sum DKP" system, that never worked properly, and had massive DKP inflation. I had 1200 dkp and items generally costed ~80, and new players would need to wait for an entire instance worth of gear before looting anything, unless there were "pity passes" to them.

We weren't getting very good recruits either, based in part on our poor reputation, and in part, I am sure, on our loot system, which basically guaranteed me, and the officers our phat lewts, and shut down everyone else.

So I changed it. We went to a rotation system, where if the mages are A, B, C, D and E, then, in basic, I loot every 5th drop. This means new recruits get loot as often as I do, once they pass initiation, which is typically 2-4 weeks.

Since the change, our applications have improved dramatically, and I think our reputation is getting better on the server, slowly. As Papajan said, we have had a bad reputation, which has hindered us, but it hasnt slowed our progression until lately. Really, for MC and BWL, you only needed 25 people who could play anyway, and 15 warm bodies.

Hopefully, the changes we have made, and word of mouth from our recruits continues to improve our reputation, and our loot system fairness and ease of walking into your T3 set continues to pull in excellent candidates. I think more than anything when recruiting good people, showing them an environment they would be proud to be part of, and where they can find a home, and loot as often as I do, is something that strikes a chord. Personally, I pay special attention to make sure their experience is a positive one.

I think its all a guild, Medium, or Top End, can really hope for. To be fair, progressive, honest, and do its best for its members, while trying to be a benefit to the community at large.

I'd be interested in hearing the answers to these questions, both yours and everyone elses. I'd be especially interested in whether you've identified and good proxies for maturity.

Im always amused reading your posts. Basically we were two similar guilds on the same server at times one with a loot council system and one with a dkp system and both found it hard to deal with. Now you switched to a loot council and we switched to dkp, and in my opinion both systems have a number of advantages over the version 1 systems we used to use.

It was also amusing from my point of view to lose people to your guild that didnt like loot council and wanted dkp and then later on lose people that didnt like dkp and did like loot council. Both of the examples i would use have both left now btw.

Sometimes the type of system is less important than whether it is a good system or not and change can be easier to achieve when moving to a completely new system.

Btw the biggest troubles i began to have with loot rotations is when gear, effort, skill, attendance and expectations deviate too far. When everyone is similar it works well but as soon as attrition begins to bite it becomes too tempting to treat the newer players in a differant manner. I also began to find it harder to deal with as more loot became cross class and the individual balances inside a class came in conflict with eachother.

This post seems like a celebration of opportunism and a criticism of loyalty.

One reason that "medium guilds" suffer is due to guild hoppers who are not interested in establishing a community, but would rather work for personal gain by water-skiing in the wake of a guild that is further in raid progress.

I find it hard to believe that doing this will give you any sense of achievement in the long run - other than showing off epics that you received on easy-mode guild runs from instances that were already on farm status before you joined...

I don't think it's as simple as gear. It's partly about fun.

As an example, we'll take my extremely recent situation. I was in a great guild when the pre-TBC burnout kicked in. I think. It's rather murky but the only important part is that we lost nearly a third of our raid dps with a few of our other best geared players trickling away afterward. The guild I was in (and I'm not using names or anything here) was one I researched prior to a reroll on a new server. They had a bid system I liked, people who seemed mature... it was and is a great guild.

We were hardly cutting edge and were wending our way through BWL at a rate which we were more or less happy with; I'm not the sort of guy who needs to be up top of progression but do need to have a sense of momentum, however small, behind what I'm doing in game. Once we lost all those people it just dried up. From Broodlord almost down to barely Ragnaros (and sometimes not) in a matter of a week.

Given that the guild I played in from opening day until eight months ago was a horrible guild with horrible people and horrible loot (there was no pledge period; everyone could get in) on Lothar never got out of MC in a year and a half and given that I couldn't do another 80% raid attendance for UBRS v2.0 again I transferred.

Now here's the rub: my new guild is a great group of people with a solid core. A couple RL friends have been core members there for awhile so that's how/why I finally pulled the trigger. However, I have an intense sense of loyalty and I feel like a massive douche. I'm probably going to feel like a massive douche for a good long time.; certainly for a longer time than a video game warrants. It was simply a situation where the game was still fun but what I was doing wasn't fun. Loyalty and making what in my case was the agonizing decision to switch aren't mutually exclusive. One can have a sense of loyalty and fair play while still reaching a wall where they feel the need for a change. Epics never entered into the equation; content and not being able to stomach MC (or TBC's version of MC) for another year did.

Having been in a so-called medium guild, this particular response struck a chord with me. Much has been said of the nature of guild merges and their long term effects, and my guild fell prey to a combination of factors. While they seemed catastrophic and unique at the time, I have come to understand that the issues which befell us were in fact endemic to game-wide guild culture at many levels.

The guild was working on Nef when it finally imploded. There were 2 distinct rebuilding phases prior to that implosion, and the third met with failure. Essentially, we started off with a great group of recruits in addition to a merger with another guild on the server. We downed Rag within 6 weeks of formation, and were off to a pretty good start. The GM was very focused on providing a fair atmosphere for people to play in, and I'd like to think he fostered a good sense of community. The problem came, as they usually do, with some interpersonal difficulties. We had our first splinter of players leave over a disagreement with an officer, and we rebuilt. That officer stopped playing, and as he was somewhat abrasive, it was a much more genteel climate in the guild, and we did pretty well in the aftermath.

We started working on BWL, and had the usual Vael cockblock for a few weeks of 1% wipes before we finally downed him. Through it all, our officers were generous with their time and very supportive of our player community, at least as far as I knew. (I never had any problems at all with anybody, so it's subjective to say the least.)

Eventually, what happened was that we got to that point that a lot of mid-tier guilds are familiar with, where the content just won't cede to your efforts, and the playerbase starts to fizzle a little bit. Firemaw was another bastard, and it took us a long time to get him down. During that period, we lost our second chunk of players, and that was the one that really stung, because they were some of the ones that had been the best-geared by the guild, and they all left for the same guild that was further along than we were. So we recruited up again, and eventually made it to nef.

I think we were on nef for about a month, and were having a ton of difficulties getting convincingly into phase 2, when the decision came down from on high that we were going to be a full-on hardcore guild. Coinciding with that decision, one of the officers who had a position of trust (and was a younger guy), let a couple of his RL friends see the contents of the officer forum, and a bunch of people quit in a huff, as there was a forum in there for discussing playstyles and attitudes of individual players. I assume a lot of officer forums have frank discussions of members' abilities, and if they don't, then I guess that was our bad. Add into that some issues with sub-outs of a guy who couldn't make a lot of raids to make room for healers, and that pretty much was that.

Either way, we couldn't recover from that last set of defections, and while there is no one factor that could be isolated as a reason the guild didn't succeed, I think it boiled down to the guild merger always having two isolated groups of people within the guild, younger guys not accepting that occasionally somebody needs to get subbed out, and a sort of guild-wide attrition when the going got tough.

The officers gave it their best shot, in my opinion, but when everything got added up, it spelled the end. What's even more frustrating is to see some of the people I -know- are incredible at their roles completely guildless now.

It seems to me that the endgame experience for a majority of the playerbase in wow will probably be something like what I've experienced, just given what I've read on this forum and others. I believe that the more content that is released, the greater the disparity in between the haves and the have-nots will become, and folks like myself who have a smattering of T2 are going to be too undergeared for consideration in guilds that are doing the same content I'd gotten experience in. Nobody wants to take a step backwards to move forward. Everybody in a raiding guild knows of the mind-numbing experience of running MC every week, and once you've gotten further than that you really don't want to find yourself stuck doing it again, wiping on Baron or Garr, when you've seen Nef. It's demoralizing, and it requires a huge amount of conviction and dedication to throw in with a guild who's still learning the content and try to push through to where you were before.

In retrospect, everything that our GM did, from pushing through MC to BWL, with officer choices and our homegrown loot system, was meant to get us to where he had already been. He put in his time and his talents for 7 months only to have people questioning his motives at the very end. It's pretty goddamned ridiculous.

Do I miss raiding? Sure. Do I miss a bunch of 17 year olds being grumpy lootwhores over some imaginary purple items? Not even a little.

I sincerely hope that TBC makes it easier to experience all that the game has to offer. The 25 man raid cap seems more geared towards the people in my guild's situation. It seems that a lot of other people have gone through very similar stuff to what we did, and I don't know that there are a lot of ways to get past that outside of reducing the requirements for attacking and surpassing content.

In short: TLDR.

I've thrown in with an Alliance guild on staghelm now that appears to be completely made up of people over 25, and the culture is a lot different.

To be honest, I am a little bitter about the way the whole thing went down, and that quoted sentence is some of that bitterness coming through. I met plenty of younger players that I got along famously with, but a part of me wants to throw some blame in that direction, whether it is fully deserved or not.

When the "newer, more hardcore" version of the guild came down, I had to bow out of raiding altogether, as I could no longer meet the restrictions imposed by the new system. I have a one year old daughter, and as she's gotten older, her bedtime has moved beyond our raid start times. So it goes. It doesn't matter now, but I believed in the people in that guild, and it hurt me a great deal to see it fail.

This thread really speaks to me, heh. But it also comes to me at a time, when I'm wondering what I need to do.

First, some backstory.

I'm GM of a medium guild on Moonrunner. I didn't intially want or expect to be a GM. When I joined the guild, we weren't all 60s, but we were working on getting up to start raiding. Eventually, we started ZG and wiped time after time on the bat boss. The original GM declared to the rest of us that we were moving too slow for him, and he wasn't willing to take the time to help us, and was applying to the one of the top-end guilds. He passed leadership and left.

GM#2 had stuck with us through all of this, even tho her brother was in THE top guild on the server, and had been bugging her forever to join them. During this time, I had become an officer because I took charge on an AQ20 raid to get things done. I had become friends with her, and in talking to me, she had finally decided to go with her brother, and passed leadership to me.

I was tempted to leave as well, but I didn't want to let everyone else down, as it would have killed the guild to lose a third GM. I do take comfort in the fact that under my leadership, we downed the bat boss, and went on to clear ZG, AQ20, and MC. Recently downed onyxia with 30-ish people and no dwarf priest. Yes, I have a bit of an ego, but I recognize it's also the work of everyone in the guild.

Now the problem is getting people for BWL. We've had MC on farm for a month, and the "core" wants to move onto BWL and down Razorgore. Our first attempt, we wiped a lot. The second attempt, we could barely get 30 people (we have 80 Lv60s in the guild). We get plenty for MC (having people who have to wait outside), but I'm wondering what to do to get people to show up to raids, to be excited about new content.

I have class leaders for everyone but warriors(which is another issue), and we use an officer loot council system that's focused on guild progression. I'm tempted to try the "recruit everyone and cull the weak" method, as we had been trying to do selective recruiting. That latter approach hasn't been enough to get regular people on to raid. It just seems like MC and Onyxia is the top for us.

As for officers, I've often wondered if I just picked them because they had been there the longest time, or if they were really officer material. It seems to be going well, but the two people who I have as officers for the warrior class don't seem to be what is needed, and I know that demoting them will cause them to whine. I'd hate to lose either, because they're good players at their class, just their attitudes are somewhat lacking.

I'm at my wit's end, and is partially why I never wanted to lead again. It also hurts that I am handling the guild bank, being GM, and being raid leader, too. If I could find someone to take over being any of those, perhaps I'd have less stress. But right now, no one else seems to really have the potential. The few people I've tried to push into a raid leader position, hasn't really worked well. People would rather have me lead raids. And my officers have told me they don't want my position as GM. And sometimes I feel as if I'm the only one holding people together, when drama between individuals would tear it apart.

Sometimes I just feel that if I could get 10+ more regular dependable people that would gladly work to get the guild to progress, we'd be fine.

So yeah, Medium guild. You practically described us, and I want to get out of it.

At this point in time, it's probably not worth it to try to push a guild new to BWL. Expansion is going to be coming out very soon, and when beta starts and items get leaked everywhere, no one will want to come to a wipe-fest for loot that will be outdated in a month.

Interesting thread. I have a slightly different perspective on things I suppose. A little background.. when I started playing this game I worked 9-5, could raid every night, etc. I app'd to the top alliance guild on my server, when they were on domo or rag I believe? and got in, everything was dandy. I was very pleased with the attitude of the majority of their players, they were generally really awesome dudes. Minor shakeups aside, we got server 2nd rag (horde beat us) and 1st nef. But soon after that my work schedule changed, and I started working 12 hour night shifts, 4 a week. Thus I could only raid ~3 days a week and that was if I wanted to have no social life. I talked with the officers and explained my situation, they were very accepting and said it was no problem and I could just show up when able, etc.

But, of course, for the days when I wasn't able to be there someone would have to fill that slot for the raid, so recruitment proceeded appropriately. And naturally, being the top guild on the server, we had no shortage of recruits that could raid every day. So, in essence, I was the odd man out. If I showed up that meant that one of these priests that comes to every single raid may have to sit out for me.. who shows up 2-3 times a week. It didn't really sit well with me, the whole situation. So I took my leave, and fooled around with a horde toon on a pvp server.

After doing the pvp thing for a bit I decided I would find one of these so called "medium" guilds that was just doing MC/ZG to casually run with. So I found one, app'd, and was accepted. I did not last very long though. Being a "casual" guild they had to massively over-recruit in hopes they would have enough bodies show up for raids. This led to lax recruitment standards, and most of my critisism of our apps that weren't up to par was met with "we are just a casual guild, we don't expect people to be perfect all the time, it's just a game" etc. In truth, the vast majority of members were kids just trying to get shiny purples, and as a result the officers felt they needed to treat the members like children.. promoting an environment in which it was impossible to question officers, regularly booting people from raids, yelling on vent, etc.

Just an example, I played a mage.. I was tooling around with my spec, trying to figure out how to maximize my single target dps for Rag, but the officers had decided that damagemeters was causing people to be reckless, so it was banned. I was booted from a raid for running it (officer synched his and I autojoined the channel..) and the subsequent arguement led to me leaving.

So I suppose my dilemma is that I have a mostly hardcore mindset, but a casual playtime. I consider myself reasonably skilled, able to adapt on the fly, love to min/max, contribute to strategy, etc, but the only place I can find likeminded people is in a hardcore guild which I sadly don't have the playtime for. I imagine I have seen both extremes of the quality guild scale, though. And I guess my question is if there is a middle ground out there? Can "medium" guilds exist that have a hardcore and motivated mindset, yet adhere to a more casual schedule? My guess is that it is probably very difficult, because as mentioned before, many of your members will be very tempted to join guilds further along in progression than you, and you'd start getting desperate for recruits. Here's hoping for TBC anyhow..

edit for clarity

This part is probably the most telling. Nothing like some good old fashioned "ignorance is bliss."

I'm not sure I agree that DKP inflation with your core group is necessarily a bad thing. The feeling one gets from people who complain about this is, "I joined recently, this HOT, rare item dropped, and I didn't stand a chance of getting it." Well, okay. But the reality of this matter is that the reason DKP eventually inflates stems from one of two possible sources.

The first, which may be the case with guilds that are not progressing in the simplest of content and therefore have nothing to farm, is that the people that have been there wiping every night to learn said content have not received any compensation for it yet. They show up, wipe for 3+ hours, earn DKP, and walk away empty handed. They have perhaps been doing this for some time. They perhaps lose a few members who either don't have the stamina to stick it out with a guild learning the ropes, or people who get poached by stronger guilds. They bring in new people to fill those spots and a large DKP gap exists. They finally drop that boss and the Big Sword of Massive Ownage drops. Well, who do you think should get that? The new guy, who may quit tomorrow, or the guy who worked on that boss for hours and hours? DKP answers this question. It's not a flaw, that's its *purpose*.

The second situation in which DKP inflation exists is something else entirely. It's in high-end progression guilds where, quite simply, they have LOTS of content on farm already and split their raiding time between learning new content and burning through old content for fun and profit. Here's the deal. They have everything there already. It doesn't matter that they have 3x the DKP a new member does, the new member will get it by default. Without putting the massive amount of effort climbing the learning curve that the original members may have done. But you want first choice on the items that drop on the progression content? It's not going to happen. DKP does many things, but ultimately it only does one thing: It decides WHAT ORDER the newest items go to. It does not decide WHO gets something. If you are going to stick with a guild long-term, you'll get yours. There are many ways to do this, you can /roll for it, you can loot council it, you can use complex or simple token systems, you can award DKP as currency and have bids, you can round robin. They all do the same thing, which is describe what order these rewards are distributed in. What most of them fail to do, however, is reward people who (a) put in the most effort, (b) put the first drops in the hands of people you are confident will stay (VERY important for progression purposes). Ultimately if you make poor decisions with regards to loot distribution, ones that hinder your progression, you will lose members any way. Do you want to lose a few greedy people who are more concerned with getting epics quickly, or your best players who want to beat content and progress? Here's a hint: The people who want free epics will quit anyway for another guild the instant such an opportunity arises; but if you fail to progress, you'll lose your best players.

Other than that one nitpick with regards to loot distribution/dkp "inflation", I agree with pretty much everything in the original post. I've been through a handful of guilds before arriving at my final destination. The original was the most common of them all -- a group of real-life friends/FPS clan friends that discovered they could not raid together and split up. I jumped a couple guilds which I quit for various reasons, either the mentality described in your essay, or the problem I mentioned in above with regards to terrible progression.

I really wouldn't blame anything on DKP. In the end, a member that cares more for getting their shinies before someone else is not going to be a valuable member IMO. The problems all lie in lack of progression or an unfriendly atmosphere. There are many guilds that have one or the other, only the top guilds have both. My experience is that once you combine these two fundamental ingrediants (tempered with officers with strong leadership abilities of course), stuff like loot becomes much less important. People are genuinely happy when their teammates get something cool if they deserved it, and they know it'll (hopefully!) drop again for them.

Edit: Note, I'm not talking, of course, about guilds that have outright fraudulent DKP systems, poorly tracked/updated ones, or who let mains bring in their alts to take loot from recent recruits using their massive pool of DKP. These are all obviously bad things for everyone involved. Just the idea that you can't "get something" because a core raider has much more DKP than you doesn't sit right with me.