Holy crap, you nailed it dead on right here. Bullseye. Hole in one.

The 3-5 people that wreck encounters combined with a shallow recruiting pool due to the stigma of RP server do a LOT to hinder progress. We're on C'Thun ourselves, and we constantly find that it's a few non-attentive people that end up killing a quarter of the raid...but we don't have replacements, despite having an utterly massive membership base.

On one hand, I love the atmosphere of our raid group. It's laid back and relatively easygoing, considering that we're relatively advanced.

On the other hand, when we're trying to overcome a roadblock and a meager two or three people are holding us back because they can't do their jobs, and we can't find anyone better to replace them with, I long for a decidedly less laid-back atmosphere.

That too. You tend to see more of the "Dammit I rolled a shadow priest! I'm not a healer!" attitude on RP servers (and this is somewhat understandable; people who put a lot of time into thinking about their character get more attached to their notion of what the character is "all about") so that makes it that much harder to find reliable raiders.

I think Horde guilds on RP servers get hit disproportionately hard by these problems due to the small population (though at the moent Zeza's guild is the only one currently on our server that's killed C'thun.)

While I agree with you that raid guilds on RP realms have issues due to a small pool of potential players, there are many PvE guilds on RP realms, who do not focus on RP at all. Their focus is purely PvE and yet they flounder. Why? I realize you are attempting to answer this with your theory, but even still on a realm like Cenarion Circle there are enough good players to field a 40 man raid which would do well. Even though there's a turnover in skilled people leaving, why can't everyone get together in one raid group?

Cliques I suppose, and skilled players not getting along. This leads to multiple guilds filled with not enough good players, meaning you have to fill the void with bad ones. I'd wager a large number of people leaving the game/their guild left in part due to becoming tired of carrying bad players. As mentioned, there's something wrong with critiquing someone's spec, and if, say, a fire mage doesn't have Burning Soul that's OK.

Some of you posting here may know me as Vanick from Cenarion Circle. I left, in part, due to this problem, and Blackpatch and I have a long history together and this has been an ongoing topic not only amongst us but amongst mostly everyone who raids on an RP realm and is truly interested in succeeding.

edit:
This is also a major factor in why it is hard to find good people and a surprising number of people like this end up in raid guilds. They started out on an RP realm and found out about raiding in WoW and now they want to raid. Sadly for them, they are playing the wrong class yet stonewall on the issue.

I played on Mannoroth PvP for well over a year but decided to play on an RP server just to get away from a lot of the immaturity. For the most part its worked out well. You don't find the flaming in general chat or the emo guild members (as much). As for progress, the only thing holding us back is the lack of experienced players. Now, don't get me wrong our progression is not slow by any means but I feel that if we had the same core membership with a larger recruiting base we'd be further than we currently are.

We've really been saved my realm transfers. With 10 bosses down in nax (soon to be 11) its not too bad for us to advertise on the guild recruitment forums or anythign like that. The problem is that the next guild in terms of progression has 3 bosses down in nax (our guild being the only one server-wide to kill c'thun).

RP servers just dont have as many die-hard PvE'rs as found on PvP servers. It's not the "RP" environment that kills progression.

From my experience in some of the top horde-side raiding guilds on Cenarion Circle before transferring to a PvE server, it's purely a numbers game. Less people who are interested in pushing content and less people with the time and dedication to do it successfully. Recruiting new and decently geared members hordeside was next to impossible due to the small player pool who was interested in raiding.

So this one time, on a PvE server, there was I saw like, 3 casters, and they were like, hitting people with their staves.

OMFG PVESERVERSUX LOL L2P PLZ!!!.!!1

I once saw this Priest from a PvE server that used Fade in the battlegrounds to try and stop people hitting him! ... Wait, that was me.

On a more serious note, I don't think the slower progression relatively speaking is related as much to RP servers as the fact that the PvP ruleset attracts more 'hardcore' players, whom are thus also more inclined towards raiding in general. We get a lot of cross-server applications ourselves, despite the fact that we've 'only' killed Maexxna/Noth/Razuvious in Naxx, it's simply the case that that's actually very advanced for a Horde guild on a PvE server.

I think it mostly has to do with 2 things:

a) Faction Balance. The typical rp server in eu atleast is a high pop server with 4:1 alliance to horde. Besides the fact a lot of the most competitive alliance people left because they couldn't handle the 7 hour av/3 hour ab queue before cross server bg's, there are at least in AD EU too many guilds. Really, we have around 14 alliance guilds killing Nefarian today and 0 guilds killing c'thun and only 3 have killed the twin emps (only 1 horde guild has killed c'thun). Some Naxxramas bosses have been downed, best is at Grobbulus at the moment. But even having downed Patchwerk, I still find the fact noone has managed to kill C'thun a bit disappointing and it leads me to believe that all the talent is just spread around in too many guilds/communities. The leading Horde guild has managed to actually do better than the alliance guilds because even if the horde side is much less populated, it can pretty much gather all the good players on that side, both in skill and attendance. While in alliance you can leave your guild and join another one with similar progression next week. What someone said about 10 people being really good, 20-25 being the bulk of your raid and 5 screwing up in every way possible is true more or less as well.


b) More casual players. The 2 most hardcore alliance communities I know are raiding 4 days per week, of which I think members only need to attend 2-3 days. The horde guild is more or less the same I believe. I don't think it's feasible to expect KT kills yet from guilds with such raid schedules, there's just not enough time considering they also clear bwl and AQ40 up to Huhuran at least each week. My guild raids 3 days per week and we barely get 2-3 hours to try a new boss each week for the last few weeks if that. I think raid leaders as well, mostly coming from a relaxed roleplaying background don't really discipline most guilds/communities. Part of the reason is also the player base is also mostly casual, so your hopes of replacing low attendance members with people who always show on time with consumables etc aren't really high. I think that most people in rp servers came here to escape the l33t speak crowd and find more people with similar playtimes to play with, much like I did when I first rolled on AD.

But other than that, I think that if you could measure the time spent/kills in rp servers they would be pretty well off.

Have your team leader join the BG9 irc channel and set up a game with T A O. Brullig is probably the one you'll want to talk to there.

Oh, and whoever asked: My Warlock on Cenarion Circle was named Kalika. I was in <Disciples of Light> (CC had a lot of "Of Light" guilds), <Lost Honor>, <Soul Reckoning> and <Ergo Bibamus>.

Hmmm, where's this BG9 IRC channel ? :)

#battlegroup9 on irc.gamesurge.net. Nurfed hangs out there too because they hate their battlegroup so much :)