We allow one-time switches to a new main. DKP is 100% transferred, but the old character becomes ineligible to receive any DKP or drops bought with DKP. This tends to genuinely discourage frivolous switching, but allows people flexibility when they just can't stand their main. For example, we had a well-geared BWL mage decide that he was completely sick of being a mage, rerolled rogue, did a points transfer, geared himself up both with bought gear and 20-man free-roll stuff, and is currently one of our best rogues.

The fact that new raid content is regularly coming out tends to prevent people from "switching" their main to gear multiple characters.

If a player switches his main because the raid/guild is in need of one more strong player behind the wheels of a different class, how the HELL do you justify your "minimal penalty" Kalman? He shouldn't be penalized at all.

I think I am only one of the 3 people in our guild that switched mains. I switched from a rather low equipped shaman which I didn't enjoy playing at all, to my in blue geared druid. The thing is we had a lot of shamans at that time 6-8 shamans showing up at least every raid. Even up to 10 on farm nights. Druids however have always been very scarce, only having 1 or 2 turn up for a raid was no exception at all.
So in the end my class switch was encouraged and no dkp penalty of any sort was needed.
Strangely enough all the people that have switched mains so far in our guild have been shamans, 2 changed into a druid and one went warrior.

Provided we've only had one who wanted to switch from his Hunter to his Mage, we decided it was time for a trial, so we got 3 trials and let 1 stay. It wasn't the switcher, though he had the best gear, he just did not fit in with the group and got beaten on the 'gear v.s spec v.s reward' part about doing the most relative damage. I think the plan was a 50 % DKP wipe and status to low priority on learning nights. We've had two when we just started raiding, but since DKP was in the double digits back then. (With at that time about 10 DKP/evening.), it wasn't punished in any way.

We don't have anykind of penalty for switching mains, but it can only be done with consent from GMs and the involved class leaders. The player quite obviously loses his gear priority (since that is what we use for instances in progress), but apart from that we only encourage him to play his new main once it has been approved. I think we've had about 2-3 people shifting mains, I suppose we will have some more when BC hits.

man, this thread reminds me how fucking stupid a former guildie of mine was. It was in one of those "middle of the road" shit guilds, on a weak server, before paid transfers. The guy in question was our main hunter, (main puller for MC) and came to the guild with about 6 pieces of T1. once he geared up his hunter in full T1 and a few odds and ends, he decided to bring his shaman alt to raids. this of course, was bullshit since we already were raiding MC with as many as 8-10 shaman per run on some nights, not to mention the shaman was wearing shit greens/blues, and we were low on hunters. He threw a hissyfit when someone called him on it, and /gquit in the middle of our first night of razorgore attempts. this caused lots of drama of course, and his wife (who played the best geared/skilled priest in the guild) also gquit. There was a lot of debate at the time about whether or not he should have been allowed to make the switch, but from reading here it looks like no guild in their right mind would have let that one go through.

They lose all DKP earned under the old main in our guild. There have been exceptions when we have called up their alt a lot so they didn't lose it all or they have not really bid on anything with their old main. We had a rogue who wanted to switch to their warlock. Their rogue had won nothing from BWL so, if I recall we only removed half of his points.

Honestly, from my experience the biggest problem you can have is if you do things on a case by case basis.

Come up with a well-defined policy. Implement it.

Loot standings is less important; I have to side more with Kalman here than some others -- if the main switch is for the good of the guild, the new character will probably acquire loot at a pretty fast pace anyway -- "critically short on class X" usually comes hand-in-hand with "sharding loot for class X".

There's no strict rule about it for us. Guild rules say 50%, but our only reroller didn't lose any I think, and I didnt hear anyone complaining.

For tbc, almost a quarter of the guild is changing mains; I think it doesnt matter at all.

Disclaimer: I rerolled a druid from a rogue, and my raid guild originally was happy to have any idiot who would show up and cast MOTW, anything on top of that was a bonus (not to slight anyone, just saying, when you raid with 0 druids, you've got to be honest about the standard). However, the GM was, like many in thread, against people switching characters (many people interested in it).

The questions, to me, are:

Is the person a constant character switcher? If so, all the loot you get for progressions' sake is rotting sooner then it should, AND loot that would be benefitting someone, somewhere down the road may be "stolen" from them (had that +1 of <class> never existed). Valid reason to say NO.

Are you recruiting characters, or players? If the latter, retaining talent is important. Just to personalize my above example, and to make the small assumption (at least for conversation's sake) that I'm a moderately talented player, I got a warlock to 60, had it been on another server, I might've gone to ZG/AQ20, but I know that I would hate raiding on a warlock. It's just not "me". If, and this sounds terribly New Agey, players "discover themselves" and you've recruited them as talent, then why are you punishing them? Valid reason to say YES.

If they're gaming the system to seem like the latter, but are the former, then how is that a DKP problem, and not an officer problem? "Hi, this player is a detriment to the guild. Bye." What needs to be a policy about that? Valid reason to say GOODBYE.

On the other hand, if you're around optimal raiding size given your average attendance percentage... taking away a rogue to make a druid doesn't solve the problem that you're down on talent. Sometimes, it's just a recruiting issue (as contrasted from the "for the good of the guild" rerolls as above).

The short version is... I'm not really sure the OP isn't a non sequitor. Either you make judgement calls on a case by case basis and explain, "We officers believe this to be for the best of the guild," each and every time (and as a consequence, that's your guild policy - we're trying to do what's best), or... you sort of shunt yourself into an uncomfortable corner. Talent is talent.

My old guild did it on a case per case basis, basically driven by need. It was pretty informal, but you saw characters switch mainly to either a class that fulfilled the capicity they were in now, or a need that is greater. IE we had dps move to dps, or dps to healers. The only time people moved from DPS -> tank, or healer -> DPS, Tank -> dps were if we were doing alright in the class they were leaving, asa guild, and their alt was ready to go.

You need some combination of the two (in terms of case by case and blanket). There should be a factor that says (you need to acknowledge that we recruited your (main class), and now you want to be a (alt class) and are willing to pay the guild for the change given that the guild is willing for you to change. DKP wipe, penalty, loot penalty, back to recruit status, etc. But you can't just have everyone who wants to do it do it under a policy. Basically officers decide if you can change classes, and there is a guild policy as to what will happen if/when you can.

And while i'm here - when we ran alts - Alt's earned no dkp, and had to bid on items, but only after mains. IE You can have free gear, but you can't earn points towards more of it.

Because I view my guildmates as my friends, I can say the former. I'd rather see them quit and move on to something else than continue playing simply because they feel they owe it to me/others.

Because I view my guild as a means to enjoy the best content the game has to offer, I can say the latter. The guild isn't here purely as a social vessel either; we're here to progress, so actions which counteract progression should probably be discouraged.

It's about striking a balance. Mainswitching needs to be allowed for, because sometimes it'll happen. But I don't see why it should be encouraged. It should be discouraged, heavily - it should make the person doing it think about it. If someone really will quit if they can't switch, they aren't going to think twice about a DKP penalty. And if they will, then that suggests other things about them.

I see this being a lot more insteresting come TBC.

The gear available in the early 60s being very solid, means that alts that have never been to BWL/AQ/Naxx can be competitively geared quite quickly, this facilitates an easy change of mains.

But also I think with the new smaller raid sizes, 'faster' instances and lockout timers people will be raiding on 2 (or more) toons a lot more.

My understanding of Blizzard's for TBC is that all the instances will be a lot quicker, only requiring a few hours to complete. If this is true then gone are the days of spending 5-6 hours a night clearing instances, shortly after you have them on farm.
This means that if one toon is locked out people will be keen to run it again on other toons.

Personally I'm swapping off my Shaman to my nearly 60 Rogue, as I feel the Shaman class is gimp come TBC, and I'm jealous of all those nice clean, minimalist UIs. I will however still level my Shaman to 70 so he's still available to healbot stuff should someone throw together a 10 man which will be relatively easy.

I know a few other people in our guild are considering changing mains for something different, and given that there will be a lot of roster changes in the guild, it just means come 70 and the raiding starts we'll just need to evaluate what classes we need to take on or cut back then.

Hopefully we can keep the current ~50 person roster and 2x 25 mans becomes viable, as the more hardcore people run toons in both raids, and the other numbers are made up by people who can't raid every night of the week. I think this scenario is very viable, as long as the instances are clearable quickly, with 5-7 day lockouts.
It'll cause a few DKP debates and headaches, but that'll get sorted eventually.

We've only had a couple of people do this, and we let them do so without any penalty, but in each situation:

1) It was really clear that they really were a lot happier playing the alt than their original main
2) The alts were quite well geared (they'd been running ZG and MC with their alts, for instance, while we were farming BWL and working on AQ40)

and

3) They were solid veteran raiders who had always been there for the guild, and we wanted to keep them happy

Agreed - I'm giving some consideration to taking advantage of the arrival of TBC to switch mains from my rogue (currently solidly tier 2 geared) to my priest (currently in mostly good blues with a couple of ZG/AQ20 epics).

I'd note that there's no reason to do anything restrictive regarding switches with TBC, given that I'm assuming you're resetting DKP anyway and it's basically a whole new ballgame. Although a few guilds are going to get through with minimal turnover (hai EJ), most of us are going to see our guilds change significantly.

Well, allowing FFA main switching for the xpac is likely to leave you with no druids or warlocks, one shadow priest, 15 warriors and 10 lvl 35 shamans (or paladins if you're horde) you can't use for another month.
:p

Not really. Most people like their class. I've been enjoying playing a healer recently on alt runs and in 5 mans, but I'm not planning to switch my main.

Our guild is a zero sum, casual raiding guild. We were working on chrommy. Unfortunately our GM decided to take off in a huge egodrama production. He took all the tanks with him. However, we kept the healing core, and were able to push on, although pushed back to MC while we regroup.

This led to several problems, first and foremost restructuring and recruiting. The other was we had no tanks. As a half tier 2 warlock, and former class lead, I stepped onto my warrior to take over as MT. We also transfered a very good hunter to MT2.

Under these circumstances we are actually only charging 1/3rd dkp to the hunter and myself for gear as we want to concentrate on rebuilding the tanking core.

However, a few other people took the step back into MC to change mains. They were not penalized for changing, but do not recieve cheap dkp.

This is obviously an odd reason to have multiple people change mains, but We've had extreme success with this so far.

Something to be noted though... I think allowing someone to compete in a new class can be helpful to a guild. Had we known how lackluster our tanks were at threatbuilding we probably could have moved much quicker in BWL. With kalabao, and trud as our new MT's, we have had much easier encounters on aggro sensitive fights. I suspect by Vael we'll have completely revamped how much dps people can do during aggro sensitive fights. hehe... until our guild split up I thought maybe Molten destroyers hit so hard you COULDN'T burn off the rage... lol.

Have to wait till we are recruiting for that class.
Char you want to switch to has to meet recruitment criteria for class we are recruiting (needs to be sufficiently geared).
We have an upgrade system... your 'stored points' for upgrade are lost. 50% of your available points are wiped, the other 50% are credited to the new toon.

It's only happened once for us, and occurred as a result of server transfers (druid changed to rogue).

As with so many questions, this can't be answered without deciding another, more fundamental question:


Which is more important to you, the character or the person playing it?

It isn't an either/or question.

We asked a t2 geared priest to main his rogue(had fair gear, desperately needed rogues, very good player) and we gave him all the dkp he'd spent geared his priest back. I specifically went to him and asked him to do it, so "the good of the guild" was invoked, and thats how we played it.

We do main switches on a case by case basis, with policies, but if I ask a player to switch, I treat it much differently than if you ask me to switch, particularly if you are going from a class we need to a class we have. The reason we do them at all, is A) to make our players happy, and B) our server has a miserable pool of raiders to pick from for replacing people.

Personally, I hate my main...hell I hate my faction, too. But I stick with it because its a lot of time invested and switching to a horde main of a different class is hard to justify when your the guild leader. =P